by Gore Vidal
“I see those.” Wilson smiled. “But then I must always listen to him and Taft. They are my predecessors, my ancestral voices …”
“… prophesying war,” Blaise completed the quotation.
“Exactly, Mr. Sanford. Mr. Lansing, do you mind if we put the problem to someone as knowledgeable as our mutual friend here?”
Although Lansing looked as if he minded very much, he nodded. “By all means, Mr. President.”
“I have decided to go to Paris next month. Mr. Lansing would rather I not go. That is,” Wilson anticipated Lansing’s demur, “he sees nothing wrong with my making an appearance but he believes that I should not take part in the Peace Conference on the ground that I am on a higher plane—constitutionally, that is—than the premiers. They are chiefs of government, I am chief of state. Now, Mr. Sanford, you know the French far better than I. You know the issues as well as anyone. Should I take part or not?”
Blaise was not prepared for so weighty an after-dinner dialogue. He saw, as did the President, the dramatic possibilities of the legendary leader from across the seas whose never-ending supplies of men, weapons, food had more than any specific battle caused Germany to stop the war and replace the Kaiser with a republic. “If you could do it quickly, I’d say go.”
“Why quickly?” asked Lansing.
“Because they will do their best to involve the President in details, in the secret treaties, in old quarrels like Alsace-Lorraine. He should not be wasted on such things. Let him go. Sweep public opinion behind the Fourteen Points. Get them accepted once and for all and then go home, leaving the conference in your hands.” Without warning or preparation, Blaise thought that he had done very nicely. The President appeared pleased. Lansing was less sombre than he had been when Blaise had walked into the room. Perhaps there was—perhaps this was—a middle course.
“I see what you mean.” Wilson rocked back and forth from toe to heel as he often did while making a speech. “Certainly I can’t be away too long for political—even constitutional—reasons.”
“No president has ever left the United States to attend a conference of any kind.” Lansing was dry. “The president should be like the pope, mysterious, separate, an awesome personage to whom others come.”
“What does Colonel House think?” Deliberately Blaise asked the wrong question, which was, of course, the right one.
Wilson frowned; and stopped rocking. “I assume he will go on as before. He hasn’t said he would not. Until now, he has spoken for me. When I’m there he knows that I will speak for myself. Naturally, when it comes to detail, he and his scholars will make sure that I know what I’m talking about. Also, Mr. Lansing and his staff will be with me, too. The point, I think,” and Wilson was now entirely off the subject, without answering Blaise, “will be Article Ten, the league, the covenant of nations. Otherwise, the whole enterprise is meaningless. We didn’t go into the war to annex coal mines or gain seaports. We went in to stop the intolerable business of military force being used to gain ends that might be achieved peacefully by a league of all interested parties. I think I can put the general case better than the Allied leaders, who don’t truly accept the Fourteen Points—articles—but go along because the peoples of their countries are with me—for now. That’s why speed is so important. Things change.”
“To make the peace, yes,” said Lansing. “But to tie it in with the establishment of a league might be too much for one conference.”
“But not to tie it in is to admit that we are just another belligerent out for loot, like the French and the British and the Italians.”
“What is wrong with that?” asked Blaise.
The President’s face was now as rigid as unpolished granite: the Presbyterian elder was in the room. “Everything is wrong with that. We are not like other people. We must not be like other people. We will not, in this, be like other people.”
“But we are only people, Mr. President.” Blaise spoke gently, fearful of God’s wrath.
“That is why we must at least try to be better than we are. Don’t you see how little time I have? Lodge controls the Senate, and chairs the Foreign Relations Committee. Roosevelt,” each syllable of the name was spoken like an ancient prophet’s curse, “has already said that no one need listen to me at the Peace Conference because I was rejected by my own people two weeks ago. He also said,” a smile hardened rather than softened the stone face, “that America’s contribution to the victory was only two percent—he means the dead—of the Allied total, so England may ask for anything, having suffered more! Well, that will come back to haunt him in the next election.” Abruptly, Wilson stopped. He had broken his own moratorium—no politics until peace.
“Perhaps,” said Blaise, “you should ask your two predecessors to come to France with you. Then there would be a totally united front at home.”
“I should not mind Mr. Taft. But …” Wilson shook his head.
Blaise rose. “I’ve intruded on great affairs too long.”
“You’ll say nothing?” Wilson extended his hand.
“Of course not. But when will you say something?”
“When I address Congress next week. Then Mr. Lansing and I will take to the high seas.”
Blaise left the two men to what he suspected was a most edgy conversation. It was lucky for Wilson that Lansing was essentially a lawyer who would do whatever his chief wanted him to do. Also, being human, Lansing was no doubt delighted that he might be given a chance to supplant Colonel House in Paris. Yet Blaise shuddered at the notion of this particular president, all stiff brittle backbone, accompanied by two warring sets of advisers, face to face with old Europe’s most unscrupulous political street-fighters. Clemenceau and Lloyd George would devour this simple Christian. Blaise joined the ladies; and soothed Mrs. Lansing. “I will keep silent.”
“You are kind,” she said. “It’s a worry, isn’t it?”
Blaise assumed that she was referring to the President’s decision, and he agreed that it was indeed a worry. Later, as he was putting on his mask to go outside—a ludicrous business, since he was more apt to catch the flu at a crowded dinner party than in the frosty November air—he realized that she could not have known the President’s errand. What, then, was her worry?
Frederika—maskless as befitted one to whom the plague had done its worst—partly answered. “Mrs. Lansing thinks the President is losing his grip.”
They drove through the empty streets of northwest Washington. “He seems very much in control.” Blaise would not tell Frederika of the encounter. “On top of the world.”
“She thinks otherwise. He’s forgetful. Bad-tempered …”
“Wouldn’t you be after losing control of Congress?”
“She thinks, which means that Lansing thinks, he’s got arteriosclerosis.”
“Everyone past sixty has that, more or less.” Blaise was now middle-aged. Forty-two had seemed very old to him in the year that the century shifted from nineteenth to twentieth. Now that he had reached so great an age, he found it no different from twenty-two. He still maintained what Caroline referred to as his stable-boy physique, with its thick, slightly bowed legs. Recently he had become interested in sexual adventures of the sort that he had enjoyed in youth; plainly, a final flowering before—arteriosclerosis. He found it amusing that at practically the same age, Caroline was also having a similar revival with her photo-play director, a physical type Blaise found repugnant, somewhat to his surprise since in the past they had often been attracted to the same types.
4
Caroline waited at the back of the sound-stage while Tim set up the scene. The interior of a railroad warehouse had been re-created, faithfully, Caroline assumed, as she had never been inside of one. Presumably, such a warehouse resembled more than not the sound-stage itself in what had once been the Harlem River Park Casino, converted by Hearst into a movie studio. Here he made Cosmopolitan Pictures, which were then released by Paramount, a distribution company owned by Famous Players–L
asky. To Caroline’s surprise, Hearst had refused to move his company to Hollywood, because, he said, of Marion Davies’s stage career. Actually, the Chief was, yet again, like some obsessed figure of legend, proposing to run either for governor of New York in 1920, or for the presidency if Wilson faltered. He dared not leave his Riverside Drive base in easily the largest apartment in the world, whose endless succession of rooms were crowded with works of art, some genuine.
Caroline had started her own production company, Traxler Productions, and despite Blaise’s cheerful derision she had made three in six months; and each was making money. But then, unless one spent too much, it had not been possible to lose money on any movie until the flu epidemic. Before the epidemic, the entire country had taken to movie-going and those producers who were able—and willing—to deal with the movie magnates could become wealthy.
But the great wealth was not so much in the actual making of movies as in their distribution. Adolph Zukor, a Hungarian Jew, had become one of the first movie-makers when he persuaded famous players like Bernhardt to appear in not-so-famous photo-plays. In the last seven years not only had Zukor’s company absorbed a dozen other movie companies but he was now in the process of buying, through Paramount, hundreds of motion-picture theaters across the country. Wall Street was also interested in movie houses, if only as real estate, and First National was their vehicle and Zukor’s principal rival. Currently, Zukor was the largest player of them all and both Caroline and Hearst wooed him, as he wooed them. Publicity was all-important to Hollywood and Hearst could be counted on to praise relentlessly his own films in his own newspapers. For Hearst’s millions of readers, Marion Davies was queen of Hollywood even though she lived in New York and made her money-losing photo-plays at 127th Street.
Although Tim could make movies anywhere, Caroline did her best to keep him at work on the East Coast. She had taken to counting on her fingers the number of years that she had left as a woman still able to compete in the Lists of Love, as the English writer Elinor Glyn might put it, and though Caroline used both hands when she counted, she wondered if she was not being unduly optimistic ever to go beyond the fingers of a single hand, which meant five years with Tim, and then—no more fingers, love, whatever. She was exactly opposite to what she had been with Burden. Then she had relied on absence to maintain their interest in one another. Now it was presence that she wanted daily, nightly, until the last finger had been counted. What, she suddenly wondered, did the thumb mean? Should it be counted as a half-year, an aberrant year? She looked down at her hands and saw two white-knuckled fists.
“All right. José, you’re scared. The union man’s a Red and you know it but he doesn’t know you know. You pretend to go along with him. But you’re really scared, only you’re trying not to look scared.” The star, a former dancer from the Follies, was of regulation dwarf proportions, with a handsome Latin face at the front of a huge head that looked larger than it was because of masses of black curls. The union organizer was of normal size and proportions, which meant that he would photograph sinister on the screen. He had a somewhat ascetic face, which Caroline had thought all wrong, but Tim assured her that it was always interesting to cast against type. The photo-play had been written by one of the best Hollywood writers, a woman as most of them, curiously, were. In fact, the most successful photo-play writer of all was Frances Marion, who was being paid two thousand dollars a week by Hearst to do for Marion Davies what she had once done for Mary Pickford. Tim’s lady writer was less expensive but somewhat temperamental. She and Tim were always arguing over “the theme,” which mystified Caroline, since the story was a very simple one, inspired by George Creel, who now wanted the Bolsheviks to replace as quickly as possible the Huns as the on-going enemy of Americanism.
Currently, a dozen anti-Red photo-plays were in production. To Caroline’s surprise, Tim had been eager to make one. They had then acquired the rights to a magazine story about the infiltration of a railroad union by American Communists, directed from Moscow. One worker, José, at first refuses to go along with the Red bosses of the union until he is persuaded by the daughter of the director of the railroad to become a double agent. There was, thought Caroline, rather too much plot. In the end, the workers see the light, which is not red but red-white-and-blue, and the strike is called off, but it is too late to save José, who, stabbed mortally in the back by the leading Red, played by a Georgian prince, walks along the tracks toward the director’s daughter, who, unaware that he has been mortally wounded, waits for him with arms outstretched.
Caroline had thought that, perhaps, there were far too many scenes involving railroad tracks. But then, thanks to a life of privilege, she herself had never had a meeting much less a love scene of any kind, anywhere near a railroad. But Tim assured her that the effect would be overwhelming.
As José reaches the girl, he throws his arms wide—the crucifixion yet again—and drops dead. Then, from nowhere, happy workers appear and lift high his body and carry him back down the tracks, away from the girl, the camera, life.
Caroline deeply hated the entire project but George Creel was delighted. Despite Tim’s preference for the down-trodden, he seemed quite pleased to be a tool of capitalism.
“Interlock!” Tim shouted, and the scene began. Caroline slipped out of the sound-stage and into a corridor that led to the office of the president of Traxler Productions, herself. Everything was suitably shabby, as befitted a onetime Harlem casino gone to slow ruin. But within the casino’s shell, Hearst had built a number of modern studios while not improving, as the bankers liked to say, the property.
Caroline’s secretary presided in the small outer office, answering the telephone, which rang constantly. Everyone wanted to act or write or do anything that would bring him into the magical world of giant images and somewhat diminished salaries: movie grosses for 1918 were a fraction of what they had been the previous year, and if the influenza epidemic kept the theaters empty much longer, 1919 would be a disaster for everyone except the bankers and their real estate. European production was also becoming competitive and Hollywood was in danger of losing its world market. Fortunately, Caroline, who had devoted years to making an unlikely success of the Washington Tribune, was used to drudgery and the deferral of pleasure. Also, this particular “business” was actually more pleasurable in its drudgery than the Tribune was in its glory, because at the paper she had been quite alone in her private life while now private life and work had combined in a way that she had never thought possible. She counted her blessings on one finger.
The secretary gave her a list of telephone messages; and a long cablegram from Blaise in Paris. He had been to Saint-Cloud-le-Duc. The wing that had been used as a hospital was now empty; in need of repair. Wilson was the messiah. Colonel House was not. That was cryptic, she thought. Blaise had been invited by the President to be an observer at the conference and, presumably, he was busy observing but not reporting to their readers.
In December, Blaise had sailed with the President and Mrs. Wilson on the George Washington. There were over a thousand Americans in the presidential entourage, and Blaise had reported that Wilson was in high spirits. No senators of either party had been chosen for the official delegation, a fatal move, Burden told her, but then since his near-death from flu, everything smacked of mortality. Except for old Henry White, there was no elder statesman in the delegation, only Wilsonian spear-carriers, and Lansing, who was on hand to act as the President’s deputy, dedicated to eliminating Colonel House. George Creel was also present in order to make propaganda. But for once Creel was not needed.
On December 14, Wilson arrived in Paris as Europe’s savior. From the news-reels, Caroline could see that the French crowds were unlike anything that anyone had ever witnessed before, even those aged members of the Jockey who liked to claim that from a mother’s arms they had seen Bonaparte ride in triumph through the streets, kings chained to his golden car. Actually it was the mothers, held in other arms, who remembered the im
perial glory. Plon’s mother-in-law recalled vividly the day at Fontainebleau when Napoleon stood on the outside staircase and said farewell to the Guard. Caroline could visualize that moment perfectly on film.
Photo-play scripts were piled high on Caroline’s desk. They read like a combination of plays and feature journalism. But the most engaging thing about the form was that there was no way to tell a good one from a bad one. What seemed the worst writing on the page often came startlingly alive on the screen; and the reverse. There were two photo-plays about Napoleon by writers who had not bothered to read anything about him. Idly, Caroline wondered if she herself might be able to construct a story about the Emperor, relying not so much on expensive battles as on drawing-room skirmishes to save production costs: tears in the boudoir, history in bed. The secretary rang. “Mr. Hearst,” she said, with quiet reverence: their Napoleon. Caroline picked up the receiver. Before she could speak the thin, high voice commenced. “This is the Chief.”
“This,” said Caroline, “is the squaw.”
There was a pause. “I’m sorry,” said Hearst at last, “I guess it’s a habit.”
“Mine, too.”
Impervious to irony, Hearst was a slave to jokes, particularly very old ones. “I’m at the Beaux Arts. You want to have breakfast with us? I’ve got news.”
Caroline was delighted, she said, to have a second breakfast; news, too.
The morning was cold and cloudy and the streets empty. The troops had not come home, and the flu still kept people indoors. Caroline had become fatalistic and no longer wore a mask.
The Beaux Arts in Sixth Avenue catered to New York’s High Bohemia. Actors and actresses favored its high rooms, tall mullioned windows, Italian plaster-work. Here Marion Davies lived in quiet splendor at Hearst’s expense. A Japanese butler showed Caroline into the living room, where Hearst was standing beneath a portrait of himself that looked more like Hearst than he did. All natural pink and gold, Marion sprang like a cat from a sofa and threw her arms about Caroline and kissed her, wine upon her breath. The Chief did not like to drink himself and did his best to discourage others. Marion was not easily discouraged. “My movie …” The first “m” gave no trouble, the second did. But she went on, stammering breathlessly. “… doesn’t start for another week. So Pops and I are having a real holiday here in town …”