Hollywood

by Gore Vidal

  At the far end of the room, Brooks helped a hotel waiter prepare a lunch table for five. The President gestured for the ladies to sit. “Mrs. Sanford, I still remember how we watched your photo-play with you, and never guessed that it was you we were watching.”

  “I guessed, Woodrow.” Edith was serenely knowing.

  “You suspected,” he corrected her. “But neither of us was certain. Now you act in everything!”

  “It just seems like everything.”

  “How do you weep so easily?” asked Edith. “I mean, never having acted before.”

  “But we’ve all of us been acting all the time all our lives …”

  “I have,” agreed the President. “But I thought I was unique.”

  “You were a born actor,” said Mary, fondly. “I’ll never forget the King Lear you did on the beach at Bermuda, just for Mark Twain and me.”

  Very good, thought Caroline, glancing at Edith, whose smile looked as if it had been carved in the firm butter of her round full face.

  “I wasn’t there last night at the Shriners.” Caroline decided on an intervention. “But the Times is delighted, and Mr. Farrell, you remember, my director, said it was thrilling.”

  Wilson nodded vaguely, eyes on Mary, who was lighting a cigarette. Edith continued to smile. “But aren’t you speaking too often? I mean for your …” Caroline substituted the word “voice” for “health.”

  “Of course he is.” Edith was firm. “But once he’s made up his mind …”

  “I must match the opposition. Hiram Johnson is all over the state, attacking the League. The worst is the … the …” Wilson paused; and frowned. Edith’s smile was impenetrable. Caroline suspected aphasia, something she herself suffered from when tired: the needed word, no matter how simple, was suddenly not there.

  “… the acoustics,” said Mary, accurately, to Edith’s great displeasure. “Those sounding-boards are never in the right place.”

  “But San Diego was even worse,” said Wilson, pleased to be on course again. “They have something new called a voice-phone. You must remain absolutely still and speak into it and somehow it connects with loudspeakers—like radio, I suppose. I’ve never had such a difficult time. I like to move about, you know, but there I was, under sentence of death, if I moved.”

  “It was terrible for Woodrow. But thirty thousand people heard him as if he was talking into each one’s ear.”

  “No. No.” Wilson frowned. “That’s not true. Just opposite me there was a section that could hear absolutely nothing, nothing.” The face was red. He shook his head and coughed. “Asthma,” he murmured into his handkerchief. “Imagine! Now.”

  Suddenly, Admiral Grayson was in the room. He greeted Mary and Caroline, and took the President’s pulse and smiled and said, “Lunch is ready. This was to have been our Sunday of rest.”

  Caroline thought that this was directed at Mary, but as the President led them to the table, he described their midadventures that morning. “I wanted to see an old friend of my wife’s—my late wife’s—who lives here but has no telephone. So, first thing, we went down the back way, and escaped the press and the crowds, and drove to her house only to find she wasn’t there. Then the Secret Service discovered that she had gone to the train station to get a look at me, so off we rush to the station, and there she is …”

  “You can imagine,” said Edith, “the sight of the two of us tearing about Los Angeles, with the Secret Service either too far behind or ahead …”

  “Like Mack Sennett,” said Wilson. “Do you know him?” He turned to Caroline, who radiated an Emma Traxler silent affirmation.

  “Tell him I can’t get enough of Ben Turpin. He reminds me of the Senate …”

  “He reminds me of you, this morning, so undignified.” Edith was placid. “Anyway, there was Ellen’s old friend on the train in the station, so we did have an intimate talk, surrounded by a thousand curious voters. Then I hurried back here to arrange for lunch, and Woodrow followed me.”

  Caroline could see why Edith was less than pleased to divide the Biblical day of rest between a lady-friend of the first wife’s and her husband’s former mistress. Mary didn’t add to Edith’s joy when she said to Wilson, “Do you remember this dress?”

  It helped even less when Wilson nodded and said, “You wore it in May of 1915, at the White House.”

  Edith raised her menu. “What,” asked Edith in a voice of muted thunder, “is—or are—abalone?”

  Fortunately, the President’s passion for movies now surpassed that of his ancient passion for Mary, so Caroline gained innumerable points in Edith’s eyes by telling as many Hollywood stories as she could think of. The President was particularly interested in what his son-in-law, McAdoo, had accomplished with United Artists.

  During lunch, Tumulty would look in from the next room, and say, “Converts, sir,” and Wilson would be obliged to go into the next room and shake hands with visiting delegations. Mary and Edith would then discuss the merits and demerits of California, a state that they had, finally, rejected for retirement as being too far away. Edith did not specify from what.

  Finally, converts and lunch done with, they sat in the sitting room of the suite, and Mary described how persons unknown but suspected had ransacked her house and stolen letters from Wilson. “Which darling Caroline was offered and rejected, which is why I invited her here.”

  “Who offered them to you?” Edith turned to Caroline but her eyes never left the President’s weary face.

  “A journalist that we know. He wouldn’t say how he’d got them. Journalists never do. I turned them down, of course.”

  “To think, poor Mary, you’ve had to go through all this for me.” Wilson sighed.

  “Well,” said Edith, with an attempt at lightness, “where there’s so much smoke there must be some fire.”

  “But surely you were not von Bernstorff’s mistress.” Mary’s sudden savage riposte made it quite clear why Wilson had once delighted in her company. Before Edith had married Wilson, she had indeed known—how well?—the notorious German ambassador.

  Edith handled the assault with a liquid Southern charm that involved a simulated Negroid chuckle of delight followed by, “I declare, the stories that they invent about us are a lot more interesting than the movies.”

  Fortunately, Wilson had not noticed—or taken in—this exchange. “I’ve considered resigning,” he suddenly said; and put his finger to his lips, as a not entirely mock warning that all this was secret.

  “But you look so well.” Mary was interested now in her own problems, and Caroline could see that a letter from the President to, perhaps, her landlord might be required.

  “Not on grounds of health. On the League of Nations. If I have difficulties with the Senate, and I pray after this tour I won’t but if I do I, shall propose that we all resign, the Vice President and I and the senators opposed, and that we then hold a national election to determine whether or not the League be accepted.”

  Caroline could not believe that the President was serious; but when she saw Edith’s Buddha-like bobbing of the head, she realized that Wilson had entered a new and dangerous phase. “The governors are willing, we hear,” said Edith. “They are the ones who must call the election, state by state.”

  “Then you’ll have that parliamentary government you’ve always wanted.” Mary allowed herself to be distracted, for the moment, by history.

  Wilson smiled. “I hadn’t thought of that. But I suppose that is what we’d be doing, going to the country, as the English say, and on a great issue rather than the usual politics. It would be such a pleasure to concentrate those bungalow-minds in the Senate on something that matters.” Then Mary returned with gentle persistence to the financial problems of her son; and of the high cost of living in Los Angeles. Edith smiled and glowered at the same time.

  Caroline was embarrassed by the monotony of Mary’s self-absorption. On the other hand, the President gazed at her raptly, as if she were still enchanting a
nd he enchanted. Then Grayson entered. It was the end of the audience.

  Edith rose. “You were so good to come see us,” she said to Mary, who had just begun to describe the possibility of going into partnership with the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe, as a Los Angeles associate.

  Edith left the room, to get Mary’s coat. Caroline moved—no, glided—to the window, to put as much distance as she could between the star-crossed couple. She tried not to listen, as she gazed toward Culver City set amongst so many aggressive onion fields whose flatness was abruptly broken by the colonnaded Southern-mansion-style studio of Thomas H. Ince, her first producer, whose callers were received not by the usual studio policeman but by a gracious Negro butler in full livery.

  “What can I do?” Wilson’s voice was low but not low enough for Caroline’s sharp ears.

  “You could help my son. In New York. Here. I’ve written his name and address.”

  “But what about you?”

  “Such a pretty coat,” said Edith; and Caroline turned to face the curious triangle. Farewells were made. But Wilson insisted on accompanying the ladies to the elevator. Edith remained behind, in all her bland immensity.

  As the policeman held the lift door open, Mary suddenly recited, “ ‘With all my will, but much against my heart, we two now part.’ ” There were tears in Wilson’s eyes as the two women entered the elevator; and the doors shut. In silence, Caroline and Mary rode down to the lobby. Next to the cashier’s grille, Mary paused. “Do they know you here, dear?”

  “I suppose so,” said Emma Traxler, known to all.

  “Could you help me cash just the tiniest check? I’ve been so busy working on your picture, and now, of course, it’s Sunday.…”

  Emma Traxler obliged a reluctant cashier to cash the check. At least, the President had been spared the indignity of endorsing Mary Hulbert’s check.

  2

  The Vice President of the United States stared into Cicero’s blank marble eyes while Burden sat back in his leather swivel chair, feet on his desk. “That,” said Marshall, finally, “is about as good a likeness of old Bryan as I’ve ever seen.”

  Burden nodded gravely. It was an on-going source of joy to him that no one had ever recognized the life-size bust as being of Cicero. One and all thought it Bryan, Burden’s political progenitor.

  After one of the hottest summers in memory, autumn had been hot, too; and now, in October, the leaves had not turned but simply burned and fallen and the Capitol looked chalky and bare on its brown hill.

  Marshall sat beside the fire and lit a cigar that had cost rather more than the “good five-cent cigar” which he had once so memorably said the country needed. “You been to the other end lately?”

  Thus they referred to the White House at the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Burden shook his head. “Tumulty won’t even let me speak to Mrs. Wilson.”

  “It’s been bad,” said Marshall. “Now it’s worse. The President’s dying.”

  “Who told you?” Burden’s amazement was not so much at the startling news as at the fact that anyone had been able to learn anything about what was going on behind the padlocked White House gates.

  “I can’t say. Tumulty says he’ll get word to me. But doesn’t. Grayson is a doctor, and they don’t talk—except when they do. Mrs. Wilson is presidentess.… And all they do is feed us the official line about how there was the nervous breakdown, whatever that is, on the train, and so they had to come whipping back to Washington. It sounds like he had some sort of stroke, which is why he can’t appear in public. Now this morning they found him flat on the bathroom floor. It seems he’s paralyzed and his kidneys don’t work, and the sons-of-bitches refuse to tell the country or me, the vice president, anything at all. What news I get is through the grape vine.”

  Although Burden personally liked Wilson, the matter was now beyond personality. It was not a man that was sick, but a political system that was paralyzed. “Have you talked to Lansing?”

  “Not today. He’s been running the Cabinet in an ad hoc way, and they all go on looking after their departments like they do anyway, but dear God, we’ve got a steel strike on our hands and a coal strike—and winter coming on—and there’s martial law in Omaha, thanks to that nigger-lynching, and there’s Lodge—”

  “There’s Lodge. If I were you, I’d collect Lansing and go to the White House and ask to see the President and if they say no, invoke the Constitution and remove him from office until such time as he is able to exercise his duties.” Burden’s line was hard; and precise. The American government could not function without an executive despite the pretensions of peacock-like senators.

  “I just don’t dare.” Marshall looked forlorn. “Lansing mentioned the subject to Mrs. Wilson and she about bit his head off.”

  Burden thought how different things would be if he, and not Marshall, had been vice president. “How long can they string everybody along?”

  “Who’s to stop them? Do you realize,” Marshall’s cigar had gone out, “that he could die, and Grayson and Tumulty and the lady could go right on pretending he was just fine?”

  “He still has to sign bills. Hitchcock has got four of them right now, on his desk, including prohibition, and if he doesn’t sign or veto them, they’ll be the law in ten days.”

  “Christ, Burden. You know and I know that any one of our secretaries can sign our names just as good as we can.”

  The two men lapsed into silence. The first American regency had begun and there was nothing to be done about it as long as the President’s wife and doctor said that he was competent. Meanwhile, the League, for which Wilson had given if not his life his health and probably sanity, could still be salvaged. Lodge had agreed to the principle of two leagues. One in the eastern hemisphere and one in the western, where the Monroe Doctrine roamed. In concert, the two would be stronger and less dangerous than one. Finally, as much as Lodge hated Wilson and all his works—the anti-League forces that he led proudly called themselves the Battalion of Death—Lodge was also an internationalist New England senator and he saw the folly of letting go so potential an instrument as a world league to be led by the United States; hence, his invention of an Augustus of the west and one of the east. But now there was no president to deal with, and his lawful successor sat helplessly staring into Burden’s fireplace, a dollar cigar between his teeth.

  It was not until November 17 that Burden and Hitchcock were summoned to the White House. Hitchcock had been once before and he warned Burden not to show surprise at what he saw.

  “What about what I hear?”

  Hitchcock did not answer, as the White House gates were unpadlocked, and their long Packard drew up to the north portico. The day was cold and dry and there were, everywhere, dirty drifts of old snow, left over from the recent coastal blizzard which always coincided so neatly with coal miners’ strikes. Currently, nearly four hundred thousand miners had refused to go back to work and their leader, John L. Lewis, publicly doubted if General Wood’s men could dig enough coal with their bayonets to warm the nation.

  Mrs. Wilson and Admiral Grayson were waiting for them in the upstairs hall. Each wore an incongruous smile; each looked as if he had not slept for a week. Otherwise, the usually busy corridor was like a hospital’s terminal ward. No secretary sat at Miss Benson’s desk, on which, Burden noted, Mrs. Wilson’s handbag and knitting rested. Plainly, she spent a good deal of time at the desk, guarding the door. “We have wonderful news, gentlemen,” said Mrs. Wilson. “He’s in a wheelchair, and this afternoon we’re going outside for the first time.”

  “The recovery has been astonishing, really astonishing,” said Admiral Grayson.

  “From what?” Burden was not feeling in the least like a courtier. Hitchcock gave him a hard look but the conspirators were prepared for the questions.

  “First, exhaustion from the tour. Then what we feared might be uremia. Then a prostate condition which has come and, with medication, gone.”


  “We wanted no operation, Woodrow and I, though some doctors did. Thank God, we didn’t. Now he’s on the mend.” With a bright laugh, Mrs. Wilson led them into the bedroom.

  The President was carefully arranged in a wheelchair in front of a window whose light put him in silhouette so that it was difficult to make out the features of the right side of his face, while the left was turned to the window. He wore a shawl from which he extended his right hand and, firmly, shook hands with each senator.

  The President was completely unrecognizable. For one thing, he wore a long white beard that looked like a vaudevillian’s prop. The normally lean face was now cadaverous; and the speech slightly slurred. The rumor was true, after all. Wilson’s left side was paralyzed. Whatever his other problems, he had had a severe stroke. “I am not the picture of rude health,” he said, with half a smile. The left side of the mouth, though turned away, could be seen to fall as the right went up. “But compared to what I was a few weeks ago, I am a boy again.” He gestured with his right hand at Grayson, who, reluctantly, withdrew. To Burden’s surprise, Edith sat nearby, taking notes on their conversation. What were the regents up to?

  “We have had quite a few royal visitors.” The President was deliberately chatty. “The Prince of Wales wanted to know which room his grandfather had slept in, that was back in Buchanan’s time. I told him how his grandfather had escaped one night, through a window, to go to a party. He wanted to know which window.” Wilson raised his right hand, almost airily, then let it fall into his lap. “Then the King and Queen of the Belgians returned our visit to them. I wore a sweater, thinking it less compromising than a dressing gown. The Queen told the press that a sweater was worn, which came out as ‘torn,’ depicting me as some sort of derelict, and a hundred good ladies have sent my wife balls of wool to repair me.” The head swivelled toward the senators. “I want the revised preamble to the treaty deleted. If it isn’t, I’ll pocket-veto the treaty, reservations and all.”