by Gore Vidal
“Well, I’m just Mister Sanford.”
“Monsieur is more like it.” Cissy was on her feet. “There’s a newspaper in Baltimore—”
“Don’t,” said Caroline. “Blaise bought it and sold it years ago.”
“There is a curse on that paper,” Blaise agreed. “No one reads it, and it always burns down.”
“How lucky I am to have such experienced friends. Tell Millicent I’ll ring her,” she added, and left.
“Millicent?” Blaise turned to Caroline.
“Smith. Inverness. She’s coming back to Washington to live. She’s staying with me till she finds a place.” Caroline stared down the street at the theater marquee, where she could just make out the “xler” of her other name. “Tim is buying a house in Los Angeles.”
“To be close to the Mexican border?”
“I don’t think the Justice Department would dare arrest him.”
“I would,” said Blaise, staring thoughtfully at the Daily News, which he held in one hand and the Tribune in the other.
“I suppose,” said Caroline, “it will get worse. George Creel thinks it will. He says Palmer is running for president …”
“Why not? Everyone else is.” Of the two of them, Blaise was the most susceptible to the anti-Red propaganda that was now sweeping the country, Hun now exchanged for Bolshevik as the new Satan.
That spring Tim had been caught in the middle when his strike-breakers movie was released and, to Caroline’s horror, it not only favored the strikers, organized labor and the eight-hour week but made fun of the Bolshevik menace. The movie had been immediately withdrawn while Tim had been indicted under the Espionage Act, a singularly capacious bit of legislation which could be used to suppress almost anyone that the zealous Attorney General chose to punish. Caroline had used influence. Since the courts were busy, the case might be allowed to become moot if the Attorney General proved less than zealous. It was Caroline’s impression that Palmer did not want to offend the Tribune; on the other hand, the Tribune dared not offend Palmer, whose house in R Street had been dynamited two months earlier, making him, almost, a martyr to capitalism while his neighbors, the Franklin Roosevelts, enjoyed miles of newsprint. The gallant Franklin had rung for the police while Eleanor, soon joined by her delighted cousin Alice, gave solace to the Palmer family, who had been sleeping in the back. No one knew who had done the deed but Communists were suspected. The actual perpetrator had blown himself up, leaving behind, most mysteriously, two left legs. The Tribune had revelled in the anatomical details, and a great nation shuddered at the thought of all its public men being, one by one, blown up in the night. Radicals were everywhere arrested while the Labor Department was now taking advantage of the war-time Sedition Act, which gave the secretary of labor the power to deport those foreign-born citizens whose looks and speech he found disturbing.
“Why did Tim do it?” Tactfully, Blaise had not asked her before; even so, she had still not thought of an answer.
“Well, he is … radical, I suppose.”
“Boston? Irish? Catholic?”
“They can turn. He turned. I think it started when they sent that producer to jail for doing an anti-war film. But I don’t know. I’ve never really talked about it.”
“Do you think he’s a Red?”
“I doubt it. He’s too independent to be anything. He wants,” Caroline took the plunge, “me to move to California.” She looked at Blaise, who seemed genuinely startled … pleased?
“You won’t.”
“I might. I think I may have had enough of this,” she indicated, vaguely, the portrait of the three publishers of the Tribune, “for a while. I like the movies …”
“And the climate. People always say that.”
“Actually I don’t like the climate. It’s rather moldy. But the movies are still so … fluid, and you can get a grip on them still.”
“You’d better work fast. The Jews have taken it all over.”
“That’s the challenge. Anyway, Hearst is there, or will be soon, he says, once 1920’s out of the way …”
“And he moves to the White House …”
“San Simeon is more like it. He’s richer than ever now Phoebe’s dead … a lot madder, too.”
Mr. Trimble was announced. Caroline could not believe that this frail old man who could not stand up straight had ever been the handsome red-haired young man of 1900. Was she as changed for him?
“The meeting’s over,” said Trimble, settling slowly into his customary chair beside Caroline’s desk. The electric fan was directly upon him, stirring the heavy air. “I’ve had the first call, from a senator who was there, who will be nameless.” Trimble still delighted in privileged information, not to mention those stories that the Tribune had been able to run before anyone else. “The President lost control, it would seem. The whole Foreign Relations Committee was on hand—Lodge, Knox, Borah.” Which, Caroline wondered, had rung Trimble?—who liked Lodge more than either Sanford did.
“How—lost control?” Blaise sat on top of Caroline’s desk, which he knew annoyed her.
“They gave him a hard time on Shantung. Why had he made a deal with the Japanese? which he then said he himself wasn’t very pleased with either, which sounded weak. Then Borah started cross-examining him about all the secret treaties the Allies had made, and Wilson couldn’t remember when he had first known about them and then when Borah asked him if he had known about them when he issued the Fourteen Points, he said no, which was madness—or a breakdown—since the Bolsheviks had already published them and everyone knew. The senators were kind of amazed.”
“That is what they came there to be,” said Caroline, suddenly sympathetic to Wilson.
“How did it end?” asked Blaise.
“They all had lunch after three and a half hours of grilling.” Trimble removed a sheet of paper from his pocket. “He was right embarrassed when he was told that Lansing had said that the Japanese would’ve joined the League even without the Shantung agreement.”
“You’ve written the editorial?” Trimble nodded. Caroline took the paper from his hand. She read quickly and gave it to Blaise, who began to rewrite as he read.
Trimble sighed. “I think the League pointless—for us, anyway.”
Caroline experienced a small surge of anger. “Because you Americans want to have the freedom to annex the Mexican oil fields …”
“It’s we Americans, chérie.” Blaise was mild. “We also want Siberia, but if we can’t get it we don’t want the Japanese to have it, so we’ll all join the League and debate.”
“Might be too late. We’re both in Siberia,” said Trimble, “and they’ve got more troops than we have. So when Russia falls apart …”
“Here.” Blaise gave the page to Caroline, who read and agreed: the League was the hope of the world. Without the League, there would be another war with Germany within thirty years because of the Carthaginian peace being imposed by the Allies, who not only had broken the terms of the Wilsonian armistice but now meant to bankrupt Germany with reparations. Caroline and Blaise were always in agreement about savage old Europe’s propensity to play king-of-the-castle games. But where Europe had a murderous tendency to sink into barbarism, the United States had not yet achieved a civilization from which to fall. Caroline prayed that the prim schoolteacher would be able to hold in line what was still, essentially, a peasant nation, ignorant, superstitious and inordinately proud of its easy pre-eminence.
Trimble took the revised editorial, and limped from the room. “I think they need a different system of government here,” said Blaise, getting off the desk.
“So does Wilson. He still wants a parliamentary form of government—after he’s gone, of course. What news from Saint-Cloud?”
“The hospital’s moved out. It’ll be ready for us by spring.”
“I’ll spend Easter there. You, too?”
“I probably will.” Blaise smiled. “But you won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Imbecile.”
Millicent Smith, Countess Inverness, looked like a galleon with pale pink and yellow crepe-de-chine sails, filled now with hot August air. Two French windows opened onto the small garden at the back of Caroline’s Georgetown house. Here every known form of ivy rioted, and no flower ever grew because of the dense shade of a huge magnolia tree. Amidst the ivy, armies of rats were dedicated, like Europeans, to war. “Caroline! I have messages for you. Somewhere. Héloise went to the doctor. Are we dining in? I’ve forgotten.”
“Yes. Just us.” Caroline poured herself a glass of wine. Millicent drank neat gin in great quantities and showed no ill effect. “Did you find a house?”
Millicent described what she had seen, and complained of prices as did everyone else, including most of the country’s workers, who were on strike, inspired, according to the Attorney General, by Moscow. Millicent had had lunch with Alice Longworth, her White House rival. “She’s in a very bad mood.” Millicent’s own mood lightened considerably at the thought. “Nick is never home. She complained of his drinking …”
“Then she’s lucky he’s out of the house.” Caroline wondered if she would stay in Hollywood.
“But who is he with when he’s not home? That’s the question. Naturally, I pretended not to know the rumors, and naturally she said nothing about them. She’s so political, isn’t she?”
“We all are. This is Washington.”
“Now. But not in my day. When we were in the White House, it was considered bad form to talk about politics in mixed company. Like money, you know. But I suppose he changed all that.”
“Colonel Roosevelt?”
Millicent nodded. “Bully,” she said; and laughed. “Douglas Fairbanks does that all the time. I think he thinks he is Teddy Roosevelt. He’s awfully attractive, you know.”
“All the women in the world agree on that.” Caroline had found it difficult to take seriously any of the great lovers of the screen. Aside from their doll-like proportions, she could never relate in any personal way to a face that everyone knew and that the owner himself could never forget that they knew in the unlikely event that he had ever tried. Although political faces were often as familiar as those of actors, the owners were, essentially, still-lifes, unlike the actor, whose face in life and in motion was always more interesting than a photograph forever fixed on the front page of a newspaper.
“I never go to photo-plays,” said Millicent, “I simply like the rawness of the life out there in the West. The excess. The formality. So like London in the season.”
Caroline could never, easily, follow Millicent’s train of thought and so did not try. “Anyway, Mr. Fairbanks is involved with Miss Pickford.”
“He gave me a rose.” Millicent smiled secretly into her gin.
“That,” said Caroline, with supreme fairness, “is something.”
“You must act with him.” Millicent knew Caroline’s secret. In fact, by now most of her friends did. But thanks to her position as a publisher, the press had amiably left her alone: dog don’t eat dog, in Mr. Trimble’s phrase.
“I’m too old for him,” said Caroline precisely. “While he is too old to be my son.”
“Is it too late for me to act?”
“Yes.” Caroline was cruel.
The nonfictitious Emma appeared, face ruddy from the heat. “We’ve made it. In time for dinner, if that’s all right.”
“Of course.” Caroline kissed her daughter’s cheek. “Who’s we?”
“Didn’t I tell you? Giles.” And Giles entered the room. An assistant professor of history at Bryn Mawr, Giles Decker was ten years older than Emma. He was blond and stout and eunuchoid, a type that had never not appealed to her daughter, who was put off by attractive men, none of whom, in turn, had ever presented her with a rose. Introductions were made. Millicent pulled herself together most regally; and smiled in a kindly way at the young. The kindly smile turned rapturous when Professor Decker said that he had written his dissertation on Millicent’s uncle. “His foreign policy mainly.”
“Did he have one?” asked Caroline. The uncle had been president in the lazy days before empire had seized the sleepy republic by the nape of the neck.
“Don’t be rude!” Millicent sounded like Alice Roosevelt when anyone suggested that her father was not of god-like marble but human clay. “We had quantities of foreign policy. There was Nicaragua. Always. Festering, my uncle would say. And China, we opened up China, didn’t we, Professor Decker?”
“Actually, Lady Inverness, no, the President didn’t really. Actually, he …”
“See?” Millicent poured herself more gin and this time added angostura bitters. Like a pink dawn, thought Caroline, who realized that she would not have time for a bath before the early dinner, dictated by the absence of her regular cook, whose replacement feared going home in the dark.
“So nice to see that some of the young remember our heritage. But even the immigrants are interested in us, a few of them, anyway. When I suggested to Mr. Zukor that Uncle’s life would make a marvelous photo-play for Mr. Fairbanks, Mr. Zukor was very interested.”
“I am sure he would be now that Mr. Fairbanks has started his own studio with Mr. Zukor’s golden goose, Mary Pickford. Mr. Zukor would do anything to get back his stars. As he says, the inmates are running the asylum.”
All three said, “What?” and Caroline explained that when Fairbanks, Pickford and Chaplin, with D. W. Griffith, had founded their own production company, United Artists, Zukor had made his famous, by no means in-jest remark. After all, Zukor’s Famous Players–Lasky was the supreme studio, thanks to its ownership of hundreds of movie houses where he could show, if he chose, only his own pictures, a policy known bleakly as block-booking. First National, Fox and Loew’s were lesser competition, while United Artists, with help from McAdoo, who had got to know the stars through his Liberty Bond appeals, was now so profitable that Caroline had opened negotiations to use it for the release of Traxler Productions photo-plays.
“Giles was very upset about Mr. Farrell’s movie, The Strike-Breakers.”
“What—or who—is a strike-breaker?” asked Millicent; but no one answered her.
“Why upset?” Caroline gave Giles her special three-quarter Madonna smile, which had an astonishing effect, a knowledgeable publicist had told her, on adolescent boys from thirteen to sixteen and sapphic women of any age, two groups unnaturally dedicated to movie-going.
Giles, as it proved, was neither adolescent nor sapphic. “I saw it in New York before it was withdrawn and I was very disturbed by the Communist message, which surprised me, knowing that you were the producer …”
“And Mr. Farrell a Catholic,” added Emma.
“One doesn’t see them in London, thank God.” Millicent made her contribution. “The Duke of Norfolk, yes. But even he has to mind his p’s and q’s, not like here where they don’t even make good maids like they used to because they are always, if you’ll forgive me,” she smiled compassionately at the young, “pregnant.”
“Well, Mr. Farrell is not pregnant.” Caroline was demure. “I thought the film was simply against violence. In this case, on the part of the management.”
“But that is a Communist theme, Mrs. Sanford. One must be wary when dealing with them. I know.”
“How?” Caroline’s tone was more blunt than she intended.
“Giles is very active with the National Civic Federation, and he writes for their review …”
“You must know their editor, Ralph Easley?” Giles now held a pipe in one hand but did not light it. Ralph Easley was a professional publicist who had been pursuing Communists all over the United States. He had caused a furor with an article called “If Bolshevism Came to America.” Apparently, everyone would have to get up before dawn to take an icy shower and then, their cars taken away from them, trudge to work, where they would break rocks for a dozen hours. Easley had found Communists everywhere in
American life, particularly in the press, the churches and the schools. He had attacked the Tribune for its editorial on the necessity of bringing American troops home from Russia. Needless to say, the conservative American labor movement admired him and wished him well in rooting out those Communists hidden in their ranks. Hearst also loved him. Caroline thought him a joke in bad taste, while Blaise thought that there might be something to his charges.
Caroline said that she had not had the pleasure of meeting Easley but she was aware of his busy-ness.
“We take him very seriously, Mrs. Sanford. I’m on the academic committee for freedom from anarchy, which works closely with Mr. Easley …”
“Giles has written an exposé of all the history departments, showing how they are controlled by Marxists.”
“I thought,” said Caroline, gazing upon her daughter’s ruddy features with mild dislike, “that your discipline is mathematics.”
“Emma is also a concerned citizen …”
“This concerned citizen,” said the Countess of Inverness, “is about to change for dinner.”
“So, I think, will I.” Caroline would have her bath after all. She rose. “You two come as you are. It’s only us—and at eight.”
But Caroline was denied her bath. Just as Héloise was helping her out of her dress, Emma knocked on the door. “Come in, darling.” Caroline was already feeling guilty about the sudden spasm of disaffection that she had felt for her only child. The late-afternoon light through the thick dark magnolia leaves was an intense deep hot gold.
Emma stretched out on a chaise-longue. Emma sat beneath a painting of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc. Caroline thought of her, fondly, as a little girl, playing in the grounds of the chateau as Caroline herself had once played in the last years of the old century that seemed, in this age of telephones and automobiles and heavier-than-air craft, a millennium ago.