by Gore Vidal
The previous year, Mary had presented herself at Caroline’s hotel in Los Angeles, and they fell upon one another as long-lost friends, largely because Caroline delighted in the mystery of a relationship that had never been a secret to anyone, including the first Mrs. Wilson, who, complaisantly, would invite Mary to the White House to entertain the President, unlike the second Mrs. Wilson, who was quite pleased that Mary had chosen to pursue her destiny in California as—variously and unsuccessfully—a rancher, a writer, an interior decorator and an actress. Caroline had got her acting work. She had also commissioned Mary to write a photo-play about Mary Queen of Scots.
Caroline enjoyed the luxury of driving herself in a black, open Graham-Paige—no more chauffeurs. As they drove through the Argyle gate, the fans shouted, “Emma! Emma!” and Emma smiled her haunting Madonna smile; and thought grimly of her dentist’s threat to remove a left incisor, which would, a dozen actresses had blithely told her, cause the flesh beside the nostril to fall in, which meant an asymmetrical face for the screen unless the other incisor was also removed, in which case one might have a whole new and quite unwanted face.
There was little traffic in what was still, for Caroline, a village. She turned left on Vine into Hollywood Boulevard, a most suburban sort of street, with large houses set far back from the sidewalk. Above and parallel to Hollywood Boulevard was rustic Franklin Avenue, where many of the stars lived among wooded hills that were still wild: owls and coyotes and mockingbirds made clamorous the nights.
At Cahuenga and Hollywood there was a small cluster of shops, including the inevitable United Drug Company store, a bank, and a hardware shop. Behind the low shop fronts, on a ridge, was the de Longpre mansion, a twin-turretted Victorian house much admired by the locals. Caroline had been offered it by the owner, a painter, but she had said that she was far too shy to live in so conspicuous a house. As she was in her role as Emma Traxler, this was undoubtedly true. Other castles, usually the work of Chicago dentists or lawyers, had been equally unsuitable. She was now comfortably installed on the top floor of the Garden Court Apartments on Hollywood Boulevard just east of La Brea, from the Spanish word for “tar,” a reminder of the famous La Brea tar pits where earlier residents of the planet could still be observed, embedded in life-enhancing oil.
Caroline parked on the Highland Avenue side of the Hollywood Hotel and thought, as she so often did, that Hollywood with its thirty thousand people had all the charms of village life and none of the drawbacks. Despite the constant attention of the world’s press, it was possible to vanish into one’s own house in the hills and be a part of dull wilderness, or one could step triumphantly onto the world’s stage at the Hollywood or Alexandria Hotels. Fortunately, in the late afternoon, the world’s stage, as represented by the hotel’s south verandah, was not crowded and the solitary waiter brought them tea.
The automobiles that drove along Hollywood Boulevard usually slowed down to see who was going in or coming out or taking tea on the verandah. On good days, Caroline quite enjoyed being recognized. Today was good, were it not for the left incisor, which was now never far from her thoughts as she brooded on the nightmarish depression beside her nostril which could well sicken audiences as they gazed in horror at the terrible asymmetry of a once-perfect face. I am not really vain, she thought, eating a cucumber sandwich. I am simply mad, like everyone else here.
“What must it be like,” asked Mary, “to be two people?”
“Isn’t everyone? At least two, I’d say.”
“Not so publicly, anyway. There you are one person on the screen, a woman of mystery …”
“A secret without a sphinx?” Brightly Caroline contributed to her legend.
“And then you’re the Mrs. Sanford, everyone knows.”
“Only everyone in the District of Columbia, which is a long way away. I really love it here.”
“I can see you do.” Mary lit a cigarette. The hand, Caroline noted, was unsteady. “If I didn’t have so much trouble …” She stopped.
“Mary Stuart will solve that.” Caroline had already given her an advance for the photo-play.
“You’ve been very good.” Mary suddenly laughed, and Caroline had a glimpse of what charm she must have had in better times. “I’ve been very good, too. I haven’t written a book.”
“Perhaps,” said Caroline Sanford, shoving the haunting Emma Traxler to one side, “you should. The Tribune would serialize.”
“I will. One day. But I can’t now. I must wait till he’s … off the scene.”
“But no one will care by then.”
“Oh, but he’s permanently historic, don’t you think?” A slender handsome young man with astonishingly even features greeted Caroline, who said, “How would you like to be Bothwell to my Mary Queen of Scots?”
“I hate horses,” he said, simply. “Have you seen Mr. Griffith?”
Caroline said she had not.
“He’s probably hiding out inside. We’re having our premiere at last, Clune’s Auditorium.”
“I can never remember the title.”
“Busted Posies.” The young man laughed. “I play a Chink.” He went inside.
“He would be a wonderful Bothwell,” said Mary.
“Indeed he would, if I were twenty years younger.” Caroline, who had never much minded the process of aging, now hated it on the ground that as she was doing it so well, why did she have to do it at all? A red electrical car passed by. A woman waved at Emma Traxler, who waved back. “Have you met Mrs. Wilson?”
Mary shook her head. “I am told she’s jealous. I can’t think why. After all, she married him.”
“Would you … have married him?”
Mary’s laugh was most attractive. “Oh, yes. But he never really asked me. I thought he would. In fact, I still have the lace I bought for the dress I expected to be married in.”
Caroline looked at her with new interest. Photo-play plots were seldom so unexpected. “Then you must have had very good reason to think that he would want to marry you.”
“I did. After all, I was the choice of his first wife. She knew she was dying for quite a long time, and she liked to have me at the White House to … distract him. I did, or tried to. When I wasn’t there, he wrote me every Sunday for years and years.”
“The famous love letters?”
“Infamous, I’d say, and hardly love letters. More loving than love, and anyway more political than anything else. I think that’s why he got so nervous when Mr. McAdoo said that I was showing the letters to people. He was always very candid about other politicians, and that was an election year.”
Caroline was now certain that the President and Mary Peck Hulbert had had an affair. The brilliant openness of their friendship was a proof. Of course, the President was a very odd man indeed, like an intricate piece of machinery carefully coiled in upon itself. Yet he was more than susceptible to physical passion; hence, the unseemly swiftness of the second marriage over the strong objections of his advisers, particularly Colonel House and McAdoo. “How did McAdoo know you were showing the letters to people?”
Mary put a lump of sugar in her tea and then, heroically, removed it. “He didn’t. Because I wasn’t showing them. There was some sort of White House plot. Everyone was worried that if the President married Mrs. Galt, he might lose the election. Poor Ellen had been dead only a year. And then there was me. The fall and winter after Ellen died, he begged me to come stay in the White House. But I couldn’t. My son had lost a great deal of money, and I was trying to get work as an interior decorator in Boston, not the best of cities for that sort of thing.…”
Caroline murmured no, and wondered at the diversity of Mary’s interests. In her poverty, she had tried every profession except the obvious, marriage. “Why didn’t you just move into the White House and marry him?”
“I should have.” The response was quick. “But I was worried about my son, and money, and I was writing articles for the Ladies’ Home Journal They said they had lost so
me of my articles, which I knew was untrue, so I got—oh, this is terrible!—but I got the President to write the editor, who promptly found the articles, and printed them.”
Caroline had now decided that Mary Peck Hulbert was a fool of astonishing dimension. To worry a president in time of war with something so trivial suggested true megalomania; to worry in such a way a grief-stricken man in love with her was monstrous. Caroline gazed upon Mary with absolute delight. “Tell me more. Of Mr. McAdoo, that is.”
“Well, it appears—I don’t know for certain—that he told the President that someone had written him anonymously, from California, saying that I was showing people his letters, so this—plus the fact that he had given me the seventy-five hundred dollars—would make it look like …”
Fled from the tea-table was luminous Madonna-like Emma Traxler; seated now in her place like an avenging angel was Caroline Sanford, yellow journalist. “He had made you a loan?”
“Oh, yes. You see, we were so broke. So I came to the White House in—well, it was just after the Lusitania was sunk, I remember—and I asked him to take over two mortgages for me for seventy-five hundred dollars, which he did, though he didn’t tell me that he was about to marry Edith. But I suppose I must’ve known, I mean one can always tell that sort of thing, don’t you think?”
“Yes. Yes. Yes. Always.”
“I must go.”
“Oh, no. No!”
“You’ve been so good to me, Caroline.…”
The two women were on their feet. “Let me drive you …”
“No. I’m only twenty minutes by electric car.”
“Will you go hear him speak?” The President was due to speak the next night at the Shriners Auditorium.
“I can’t,” said Mary. “But I’m to have lunch with him and Edith the next day. Sunday. I’m dreading it, really.”
“Shall I come with you?” Caroline reminded herself of a shark she had seen off Catalina Island as, like a torpedo, it struck and nearly wrecked a small boat.
“Would you?” Mary’s response was so charming and so spontaneous that Caroline almost missed the other’s calculation. “I know you know them so well …”
“Not that well. But the Tribune supports him, and so they are both amiable.”
“Meet me in the lobby of the Alexandria Hotel at twelve-thirty. I’ll warn them.” Mary then hurried to the corner of Highland and Hollywood, where a red car waited. Caroline waved brightly at her, as the electrical car glided east. Three men walked up the steps to the verandah. She recognized one of them. He bowed low; she bowed even lower. “Mr. Griffith.” She spoke the name reverently.
“Madame Traxler.” He had a stagey melodramatic voice and looked, suitably, like an American bald eagle. “You should be on a stage, working. I see you standing in a window. It’s dawn. There are sheer white curtains behind you, billowing in a wind …”
“From outside or inside?” Caroline could not resist.
The great man laughed. “You know so much! Half the directors keep the wind indoors. I must talk to you soon. After the opening …”
“Mr. Barthelmess is waiting for you inside.”
“Madame.” A lower bow, and then he went inside; as he passed, she could smell whisky on his breath.
At the Garden Court, Héloise lived what she took to be a rugged western life in a Hollywood renaissance apartment. Tim’s flat adjoined Caroline’s and the management had made no fuss when a door between the two had been unlocked. But the Garden Court had only just opened, and Emma Traxler was the first star to take up residence. Héloise condescended to cook occasionally for the two of them; and then it was early to separate beds. Caroline found making movies very much like being in school again. One was up at dawn; one spent the day learning lines and trying to please others; and then one went to sleep, as they said hereabouts, with the chickens.
Caroline lay on a sofa, a pile of photo-plays on the floor beside her. At an escritoire, Tim made notes for the next day’s work. In the small kitchen Héloise rattled pans.
This was domesticity, Caroline decided comfortably; also, simplicity. She had never lived in a flat before; she had never lived without many servants; she was truly free at last, all thanks to California and a new invention that had brought together some of the most extraordinary people in the world.
“Shall I die with my eyes open or shut?”
“Shut.” Tim went on writing.
“Open, I think. I’ve been practicing. All you have to do is let them go slowly out of focus.”
“You’ll blink.”
“I won’t. I’m having lunch with your new star, Mr. Wilson.”
This got Tim’s attention. He put down his notebook. “When?”
“Sunday. The day after the speech.”
“I’m photographing inside the Shriners.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I can always use that footage of him in Seattle in any labor story. Anti-labor, of course.”
“Of course. But why photograph him at the Shriners?”
“Something might happen.”
“You think they’ll shoot him?”
“Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” Tim’s blue eyes were ablaze with pleasure. “But I’ve never had that kind of luck.”
“Thank heaven. I quite like Mr. Wilson.”
“No one has ever taken scenes from real life—you know, a president on a swing around the circle and then intercut it with a made-up story.”
Caroline saw the possibilities; and the dangers. “What, then, is the made-up story?”
“Oh, something political. Maybe to do with the League of Nations even, but it’s also got to be a personal story.”
Caroline thought of Mary Hulbert, a story so wonderfully inconsequential yet odd that fiction could not properly account for it while lovers of the real world would reject it. She tried to visualize the President’s letter to the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Then she looked at Tim and beheld the red flag behind him or, worse, the cross. “The possibilities for trouble are endless, my darling,” she said, shifting to Emma Traxler, warm and understanding yet, gently, chiding. “A. Mitchell Palmer is longing to put you in jail for treason and only the Tribune has stopped him.”
“Keep on stopping him.” Tim was blithe.
“Why bother with politics?”
Tim looked inspired. “Because I have to.”
“Are you a Communist?”
“I might be. One day. Why not?”
Caroline sighed. “You will ruin yourself.”
“I thought it was a free country.”
“Did you? Then don’t think, my darling, ever again. Because your mind is not your most … formidable asset. It is your heart that does you—and me—so much credit. I am talking exactly like a title card so that you won’t.”
“What have I created?” Tim was delighted with Emma Traxler, less pleased with Caroline Sanford. “I’m sure you never talked like that before I met you.”
“No one,” said Caroline, “talks like that outside photo-plays. The only freedom that an American has is to conform, as you’ve discovered.” Caroline did not in the least mind the disparity between the country’s shining image of itself and the crude reality. She was entirely on the side of the rulers, ridiculous and unpleasant as so many of them were. She felt a certain generalized pity for the people at large, but there was nothing she could do for them except report murders in the press, and commit suicide on the screen—with her eyes wide open, she decided; and though smelling salts be broken under her nose, she would not blink, she vowed. “Leave politics alone.”
“The Warners are doing all right with that ambassador’s book …”
“That’s leftover anti-Hun material.” A mockingbird started its song outside the window, and Caroline got up and looked out over Hollywood. In the distance, the huge remains of the Babylon set beautifully, insistently, filled the eastern sky with prancing plaster elephants. Hollywood, she decided, could be anywhere—
except on earth and in time.
The Alexandria Hotel was very much in the United States and in present time. The lobby was crowded with Secret Service men, state troopers, police, political delegations, all waiting for a signal from on high that the President would receive them. The intermediary was the President’s Secret Service man, Mr. Starling, who sat at a gilded desk near the elevators. He had a list of names in front of him, a telephone, and the abstracted look of someone who had chosen invisibility. As it was, only those who had business with the President were presented to Starling by a tense assistant manager.
To Caroline’s surprise, Mary was late. As she came across the famous million-dollar rug that covered the floor of the lobby, Caroline noted that she had a slight limp.
“I missed the red car. They only run on the hour where I live.” Mary started toward the main desk but Caroline led her to Mr. Starling, who rose when he saw her. “Nice to see you again, Mrs. Sanford.”
“Mr. Starling.” Caroline smiled a Sanford smile. “This is Mrs. Hulbert. We’re expected for lunch.”
Starling frowned at the list on his desk. “I thought it was Mrs. Peck.”
“I am Mrs. Peck, too.” Mary was suddenly the First Lady of the Land. Starling gave her a long curious look: then he led them to an elevator. “This goes directly to their floor. The policeman will take you on in.” Starling went to his telephone, and the ladies ascended.
“Mr. Griffith lives here.” Caroline made conversation. “Or used to. Actors like hotels better than houses.”
“Poor things.” Mary was compassionate.
A policeman met them at the door to the elevator and escorted them into the drawing room of a large suite, where Edith Wilson stood. At close to six feet tall, she could appear quite menacing in the fullness of her flesh. She greeted Caroline warmly. Then, with perfect courtesy, she extended her arm to its full length and took Mary’s hand in hers. “I am so happy to meet you, Mrs. Peck.”
“And I you, Mrs. Wilson. You know, I’ve gone back to my old name, Hulbert.”
“I am sorry,” was the ambiguous response. Brooks, the Negro valet, opened the door to the bedroom, and the President entered, smartly turned out in a blue blazer and white trousers. He looked somewhat sunburned, and yet not at all healthy. The eyes behind the pince-nez were dull. But the smile was genuine. “Mary,” he said, and he shook her hand for a long moment. “You don’t change,” he added.