by Peter Finn
As Gertie realized that her separation from Sidney was likely to last a very long time, her unhappiness grew. “I never realized anything could be so hard and frightful as this separation,” she wrote. “It is really torture.” Sidney’s blasé descriptions of his days only fueled her sense of grievance. “When I hung up the telephone last night I burst into a flood of tears. I realized you are having a wonderful time, you are terribly happy, you do not really care whether I get out there or not. You do not miss me the way I do. You are content. It all came over me like a flood…never in any of your sixty letters have you told me you missed me, maybe you really don’t.”
Sidney did tell her he missed her and loved her, and to little avail he invoked the sacrifice of others to help her cope with the distance between them. “Many women’s husbands will never come back,” he wrote. “They are buried on some foreign island, or drowned at sea. Others will find themselves married to a man without legs or eyes.” He reminded her that for the twelve years after their wedding they had “a life that was almost mythical,” full of “travel, shooting, tennis in Palm Beach, swimming on the Riviera etc. and there must be a certain amount of bad with the good.”
There was also, occasionally, an undercurrent of suspicion in Gertie’s letters, a discreet probing of whether Sidney was being faithful. Recalling an old conversation, she said to her husband, “You said I did not understand men’s point of view about liking to go with women just for an affair and no other reason. I am afraid I still don’t when one loves as we love, but I suppose some still do and always will. How does Morris fair in such a celibate life?” She said the temptation must be terrific to take up with an attractive woman. “I am afraid I selfishly hope there is none,” she added.
Sidney professed his devotion repeatedly. “Every night I kiss your lovely eyes and lips and hold you in my arms. Then I put my head on your shoulder and with a last good night drop off to sleep hoping that in the morning I will find you by my side, so that your kisses will not only be dream ones.” But while Sidney’s letters gave Gertie no reason to doubt him, family lore suggests he wasn’t a faithful husband in Hawaii.
Gertie’s unhappiness began to bleed into the rest of her life. Washington, once exciting, became unbearable—“purgatory pure and simple. The crowds, the noise, the grey grim atmosphere.” She also bristled at the glass ceiling for women. Gertie earned half the salary of her male supervisor and noted, “I do all the work and he does all the talk.”
“What burns me up the most is the unbelievable lack of confidence in a woman’s ability,” she said. “Men cannot bear to have their world encroached on by more efficient women. They hate to give way, they hate to admit they are good, they hate to give them power. It fairly drives me nuts. Gee, I would love to speak my mind on that subject every now and again.”
The vast majority of women who worked at the OSS held clerical positions in Washington. Only a small number went overseas, and smaller still was the number who operated behind enemy lines. Donovan, in a remark that would have raised Gertie’s hackles, described OSS women at home as the “invisible apron strings of an organization which touched every theater of war.”
Gertie continued to do an excellent job, according to her supervisors, despite her growing disenchantment. One of her bosses said she “has energy and initiative as well as a pretty good knowledge of the workings of this organization.” And by February she had been promoted to head of the cable desk with a monthly salary of $210, a $60 bump from where she had started.
Terribly allergic to the word “no,” Gertie continued to seek a way out to Hawaii. In February, she wrote to the head of the OSS on the islands asking for a job. She noted that she had traveled extensively in Japan, China, Malaya, and Indochina and said she was “entrusted with the responsibility of handling most secret material.” She also asked Donovan for his help, but another OSS official, while sympathetic to the request, told the director, “I should also add a doubt as to just how easy it is for wives of officers to go into theaters of command.” Gertie, in the end, could not inveigle her way to the Pacific theater.
With Hawaii closed off, she turned her attention to getting another posting. In late March 1943, Donovan came to her house for dinner and told her that if she stayed with the OSS, he would see to it that she got a foreign assignment, possibly to London or Cairo. “I told Col. D that London was OK and I would like to go,” Gertie wrote to her husband. “I was really thrilled because my darling if I can’t get to you I would rather be ‘in the war’ close to things than stay here in this dreary town for the duration.” Her patron Bruce was already in London as the new head of the OSS branch there, and the United States was rapidly building up its forces in anticipation of an invasion of the Continent. Bruce agreed to request Gertie’s transfer to run his communications office—essentially the same job as she held in Washington. But Bruce was not above having some fun at Gertie’s expense, cabling Donovan, “Would like Legendre to handle crèche we have started for Polish babies during the day and teach English to the unmarried mothers in the evening.”
Sidney was generally supportive of Gertie going to London but asked her to consider what it would mean for their children, particularly the two-year-old, Bokara, who was growing up to be an amusing fireplug, Gertie reported. Both Sidney and Gertie were unhappy with the development of their older daughter, Landine, thinking that she lacked an independent spirit and “craves affection.”
“I do believe that the lonely hotel life of nurses, boarding houses, and never seeing her parents had a profound influence on [Landine’s] life,” Sidney wrote. “You may not think that BoBo is affected by what you say and do, but I am certain that she is, and the fact that she has a mother with her makes an enormous difference…Please do not feel that this is a suggestion that you stay with the children, because it is not. It is simply an idea that may be based on an entirely wrong premise and as a result worthless.”
Gertie noted in letters back that the girls would summer in Rhode Island without her in any case and she was signing up for only six months; the separation might be short-lived. She said she would arrange for her daughters, accompanied by their nanny, to stay in New Orleans with her sister-in-law in the fall. Gertie was intent on leaving Washington, and parental responsibilities would not hold her back. As her daughter Bokara said, she “didn’t much like children around.” Later in life, she asked Gertie about it. “Mummy,” she said, “I would like to get one thing straight. When I was a little girl and later growing up, was there some reason you didn’t—well—include me in your life?”
“I wasn’t around,” Gertie replied.
That was partially true. But even when Gertie was at home, she didn’t want to live with her children. Depending on their age, they lived separately in rented cottages and apartments with their nanny or at boarding school, visiting their parents on holidays and occasional weekends.
Gertie told her husband that mothering was not her priority. She had “worlds to conquer type of thing always appeals to me, change, motion, new possibilities, new heights…it’s my restlessness, my wander lust, my desire not to stay put forever in the same spot with the same scene, the same people and the same everything.”
7
London
On August 16, 1943, after months of delays, Gertie boarded a Portuguese liner in Philadelphia for the trip across the Atlantic. Portugal was a neutral country, and Gertie reassured her husband, “NO Portuguese boat has been sunk—so far so you don’t have to worry a bit. It’s very safe.” Even without the protection of a neutral flag, conditions in the Atlantic had changed significantly from the treacherous crossings in the first years of the war, when German U-boats hunted the merchant shipping that kept Britain alive. By mid-1943, the United States and Britain had effectively won the Battle of the Atlantic through technological advances in decryption, radar, longer-range aircraft, and the ability of the United States to produce more an
d stronger escort craft as well as cargo ships.
Gertie’s crossing was smooth. The forty to fifty passengers passed the time playing gin rummy over whiskey and beer. They watched flying fish and schools of whales off the side of the ship, and Gertie read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince, which had just been published. “It’s full of charm [and] imagination.” She slept on the deck some nights, waking one morning to the sound of an airplane overhead, probably from a nearby U.S. carrier. The ship stopped in the Azores to take on coal and more passengers, but those already on board were not allowed ashore. Boats glided out from São Miguel Island to sell them fruit. “War seems so far away,” Gertie thought.
On September 4, she cabled Sidney from Lisbon. “Fine trip. Love Gertrude Legendre.” Gertie spent the next week in and around the Portuguese capital, visiting the beach and “stuffing myself on the good food and making the most of unrationed things for it will be a different picture when we get to” London.
Sidney, reflecting on her arrival in Lisbon, said he felt “certain it is impoverished and a rather unhappy city filled with the refugees from neighboring countries. It is extraordinary to think that tomorrow the refugee of today may be the conqueror and the conqueror in turn may be [fleeing] for his life as a refugee. From out here the ultimate war in Europe appears to be following the plan. The Russians will press from one side and we from one or two sides towards Berlin. Both of us know whoever arrives there first will take the situation in hand and any peace terms that follow will be at the dictation of the winner in the race.”
On September 15, Gertie boarded a blacked-out British flying boat, which flew in a wide arc over the Bay of Biscay to avoid attack from German fighter planes based on the west coast of France. The plane lost power in one of its engines over the channel and was forced to make an emergency landing in the port of Southampton. A Royal Navy motor launch took the passengers ashore.
Gertie, with her usual measure of drama, had arrived in England.
Two years after the Blitz, London’s scars were camouflaged, with bombed-out sections of the city hidden behind walls and fences, and Gertie remarked on how little destruction was readily visible. The people struck her as quietly determined but wan from the poor diet and shabby in their frayed clothes. She initially took a room at Claridge’s hotel before chancing on a town house a couple of blocks from her office near the U.S. embassy on Grosvenor Square—nicknamed Eisenhower Platz because numerous buildings in the immediate area had been taken over by Eisenhower’s command as well as by the army and the navy.
Gertie’s job was similar to the one she held in Washington, but she now handled cables for all OSS sections in London—the agency’s largest overseas station with more than twelve hundred staffers. Clerical help was promised but slow to arrive, and Gertie sat for several months at the end of an otherwise empty room behind an expansive desk beside large French windows; she was more potentate in pose than civil servant. Her colleagues took to calling her Mussolini.
As each afternoon waned, a bell rang to draw the curtains when a nightly blackout descended on the city; London was still being bombed with air raid sirens blaring. Negotiating her way home with the help of a small faint torch in the pitch black was a challenge. She marveled at the cats’ eyes of London taxi drivers. Bruce, her boss, broke his nose when he walked into a lamppost after leaving the office without any light to guide him. “I am about to flounder out into the night with my torch and wend my way home,” Gertie told her husband. “It’s black in the morning, black at night, and we live like moles all week.” She also carried a blackjack in her purse amid reports—much exaggerated—of rampant violent assaults in the darkness.
London still entertained behind its closed doors and heavy curtains. Gertie enjoyed the city’s nightlife. Her wealth and society connections from the States allowed her to socialize with senior officials and other celebrities who would ordinarily have been beyond the station of someone who ran the cable office. She dined out most evenings at the flats of friends or at restaurants—the OSS provided a list of three dozen decent places—or her surly Swiss cook prepared dinner for small parties. “Mademoiselle Renaud was…sixtyish, stocky, extremely neat, primly spinsterish and all-work-and-no-play,” Gertie said. “If the latter attribute can be considered a prized trait in servants, it can also serve as a warning that disapproval of all manner of light-hearted fun is lurking in the kitchen.”
Gertie explained that “one cannot entertain more than about three people twice a week,” because of the food coupon system. There was a meager weekly allowance of meat, bread, margarine, sugar, milk, coffee, and tea. Fish, chicken, fresh vegetables, and fresh fruit were next to impossible to find. “I remember the delight occasioned when Admiral Glassford ceremoniously presented me with two lemons,” Gertie recalled. “No one had seen fresh oranges and lemons for over two years. We fell on those two lemons like hungry wolves—we smelled them, carved them, squeezed them, sucked them and what rind was not slivered for cocktails was used to make a pitiful dash of marmalade.”
As an American, Gertie was provided a weekly allowance of treats from the PX, or military post exchange, including seven packs of cigarettes and chocolate, and she also received care packages from home. “We made provident use of the angel food cake mix, orange and lemon crystals, dried prunes and figs, Klim milk and chocolate pudding powder,” she said of the parcels from her relatives and friends. For ordinary Britons, wine and liquor had all but disappeared, but for the wealthy and well connected the alcohol was still being poured—sometimes Algerian wine, instead of French, but wine nonetheless.
Gertie had a somewhat Churchillian capacity to consume alcohol while maintaining her poise. Her daughter noted that “Mummy was able to have a daiquiri before dinner, wine with dinner, and liqueurs afterward. By the end of the evening she was not only upright but not at all drunk.” She also smoked incessantly and was frequently photographed with a cigarette hanging from her lips.
Weekends Gertie spent playing golf or shooting, sometimes at some of the most exclusive homes in England, including Ditchley, which Winston Churchill had used early in the war instead of Chequers. At Ditchley, she went bird hunting with Edward Murrow, the CBS correspondent, and brought home two partridges to cook. “Life here is very exciting and as you can imagine I eat it up with a spoon,” she told Sidney, all the lassitude of Washington having dissolved. “It is very stimulating and I am ashamed to say I enjoy it.”
When Sidney suggested some months later that Gertie end her tour and return to the United States to be with the children, she rejected the idea. The limited six-month tour she had first spoken about was forgotten. Gertie was in for the long haul. “Why don’t I go back to Virginia and be with the kids? No doubt that is what I should do, and maybe that is my duty—but I just couldn’t go back and live in the country alone without you. It would be frightful…I far prefer Europe to Washington (which is my idea of the worst place on earth).”
There were regular trips to packed movie houses, dance clubs, theaters, and a drafty Albert Hall, where she saw the African American singer Roland Hayes with “a choir of 200 Negro soldiers.” The singing reminded her of Medway when the plantation workers would serenade her and her guests with spirituals at Christmastime.
The black soldiers in and around London were a challenge to American racial mores. The British, for the most part, refused to accept the segregation their U.S. allies wished to impose in bars, restaurants, and other public places, and British women freely dated black servicemen. The British military issued a note advising “white women not to go out with black soldiers and, in general, suggested that people should watch how white Americans treated their compatriots.” It was advice British civilians took pleasure in defying, much to the consternation of some Americans in Britain, including Gertie. “The Colored Troops are much argued about as you can imagine,” she told Sidney. “We are going to have a time with them when they get
home, as they go over big here in the worst way. It’s quite something.”
The war seemed much closer to Gertie—the streets packed with soldiers and the skies full of planes. “You can sit in the Ritz and eat a big lunch and hear the planes going over to bomb the hell out of the continent.” But for all her exhilaration, she hadn’t lost her acid tongue: “The streets are full of [British] girls in uniform [and] I must say they are a grim looking lot—cotton stockings, low shoes, toting brief cases and looking terribly masculine. The U.S. gals don’t look too chic either. Think they picked a poor looking bunch to send over as I haven’t seen any beauties.”
Conversation was dominated by the expected invasion of the Continent, when and where it would happen, how quickly Eisenhower’s forces would reach Berlin, and whether the Red Army would already be there. “The Russians are going to be the first to make them realize just how it feels to be the conquered. I’m all for Stalin going right into Berlin and carving them up a bit. We might be too soft-hearted to do a good job of it—but THEY WON’T,” Gertie told Sidney. The ultimate defeat of Germany was widely assumed, and in the fall of 1943—with the Allies largely dominating the skies—the threat to London seemed to have receded despite persistent rumors that Hitler was about to unleash a secret weapon.
In January 1944, however, in a shock to Londoners, the Luftwaffe returned in numbers to the skies above the city in what became known as the little Blitz. “It’s quite like old times again,” said Winston Churchill, in a quip that the tired population resented. Many of the bombs were incendiary devices, sparking fires across the city, and hundreds more Londoners died in their homes.
Gertie wrote to reassure her husband: “I suppose you read in the papers about the air raids—but don’t give it a thought. They are noisy sometimes but that’s all. I generally sleep right through them.” In reality, it was hard to sleep because nearby explosions were followed by tremors that shook the house and the flak barrages “fell like stones” on her roof. But Gertie mostly stayed at home rather than seek shelter underground. “I preferred, if I must, to die in bed, tucked in my blankets. The thought of being trapped in a gloomy cellar was by far the grimmer worry.” When the all clear was sounded, she sometimes went up to her roof and watched the glow of the flames as sections of the city burned.