There was no ignoring Charles Marsh, and Johnson was careful to always humor his loyal friend, seeking his counsel and deferring to his opinions, so that Marsh felt like a member of his team. If in private Johnson often dismissed Marsh’s proposals as impractical or far-fetched, he never refused his calls or forgot the debt he owed the man who had helped launch his career. Recalling Marsh as “one of the most interesting human beings” she had ever met, Lady Bird, who was prim and painfully shy but a dedicated political spouse, wrote that “Charles had what I truly believe was an affectionate interest in enlarging Lyndon’s life:
He exuded what I can only describe as a life force—and even that is insufficient. He did a lot to educate Lyndon, and quite coincidentally me, about the breadth and strength of the rest of the world…. This was when the war clouds were gathering in Europe and we did not know how to appraise Hitler—what it meant in the long term to the American people.
When it came to Alice, whose Marlin, Texas, family she had known since childhood, Lady Bird held her tongue, as usual, subordinating her interests to her husband’s. Her objective, she once confided to a journalist, was to make herself the “perfect wife.” She spent many hours at Longlea in silent study of Alice, listening to her talk of music, literature, and politics, and was awed by her intellect, strong opinions, taste, and sense of style. It was a feminine confidence as foreign to her as her hostess’s glittering emeralds and satin gowns. Alice was intimidating—“She’s so tall and blonde she looks like a Valkyrie,” she once observed—but if she ever sensed that Alice was also a threat, Lady Bird was too gracious to let on, acknowledging only that “she, too, helped ‘educate’ Lyndon and me, particularly about music and a more elegant lifestyle than he and I spent our early days enjoying.”
Alice’s illicit affair with Lyndon Johnson continued for years. While her marriage to Marsh seemed halfhearted at best and encompassed many partners, her passion for Lyndon was something deeper. Alice took a keen interest in politics dating back to her days in the Texas legislature, and even Marsh’s political cronies acknowledged her instincts. Wallace liked to use her as a sounding board because she had the same kind of idealistic streak he did, and, as he put it, “seems to be the only person with enough imagination to know what I’m talking about.” She recognized Johnson’s potential early on and encouraged Marsh to use his newspapers to support his candidacy. When Johnson ran afoul of George Brown’s hard-driving brother, Herman, during his first run for Congress, it was Alice who proposed the compromise that put an end to the hostilities. Instead of knocking heads over a condemned piece of land, she suggested divvying it up, “give Herman the dam and let Lyndon have the land,” neatly avoiding a fight that could have prematurely ended Johnson’s career. As Brown later conceded, she had “quite a bit of horse sense—for a girl.”
Johnson may have won Alice’s heart when he came to the rescue of Erich Leinsdorf, her young Jewish musician from Vienna, whom she had invited to stay with her when he had finished his engagement at the Met in the spring of 1938. Leinsdorf had been at Longlea only a short time when it suddenly came to him “with a terrific shock” that he had never received a reply to his application to extend his visa, and the temporary one he had been issued was due to expire in a week. He confided his problem to his hosts, and the next morning, even though it was a Sunday, Marsh drove him directly to Washington and took him to the suite he maintained at the Mayflower Hotel. Marsh had phoned Johnson, who met them at the hotel and listened “impassively” to the musician’s problem. The young congressman, Leinsdorf observed, “treated Charles with the informal courtesy behooving a youngster toward an older man to whom he is in debt.”
Johnson was happy to be of help, not only because of what he felt he owed Marsh but because he relished the opportunity to use his influence to save the talented young man from Nazi persecution. He also knew Alice held Leinsdorf in high regard and was worried that the numbers of Jewish refugees seeking asylum from Nazism would make it difficult for him to remain in the United States. “You have a great art and genius to console, uplift and support,” Johnson told Leinsdorf, assuring him that he would do everything he could on his behalf. The next day Johnson called to say he was on the job and had made some progress: while the Immigration Department had rejected Leinsdorf’s application, it seemed that as a result of a clerical oversight the paperwork had never been put through, and Johnson was able to use his influence to have the authorities change the customary seven-day grace period to six months.
Johnson, at Alice’s urging, then set to work having Leinsdorf’s status changed to that of a permanent resident. This took some doing, as it would require Leinsdorf to make a brief foray to Cuba to obtain the proper documentation. Johnson made all the necessary arrangements and pulled all the necessary strings, including having a staffer write an impassioned letter to the consul in Havana arguing something to the effect that “the United States had a holy mission to provide a peaceful haven for musical geniuses nervously exhausted from persecution and racial bias.” Johnson, unaccompanied by Lady Bird, went to Longlea to personally deliver the young Austrian’s letter and documents. As Leinsdorf wrote in his memoir, that evening they all gathered on the terrace, and while sipping their fourth martini before dinner, listened as Johnson read aloud “his masterpiece of a letter.”
Both Alice and Johnson took great pride in rescuing such a talented young musician. Leinsdorf had opened Johnson’s eyes to the plight of refugees, and like Alice, who had been providing money to Jews fleeing Hitler, he began doing more on their behalf, eventually helping hundreds of Jewish refugees to reach safety in Texas through Cuba, Mexico, and other South American countries. Johnson also began making more solo visits to Longlea to see Alice, and not long after that they became lovers. They went to great lengths to keep their affair secret, sometimes even arranging to meet at her apartment in New York. They were almost found out one weekend when Johnson left the New York phone number with John Connolly, one of his aides, telling him not to give it out unless it was an emergency. Later, when Marsh called looking for Lyndon and insisted on speaking to him, Connolly, who was ignorant of the romantic triangle, relented and gave him the number. That Monday when Johnson saw Connolly, he reportedly told him of the narrow escape, saying, “Man, you almost ruined me.”
Marsh was bound to find out eventually. Alice had confided in her sister Mary Louise, as well as her cousin Alice, who was married to Welly Hopkins. Various members of Marsh’s staff, including the Kolingers and Claudia Haines, had observed them together one too many times and drawn their own conclusions. Although Marsh had finally extracted his divorce in 1938, he had not succeeded in getting Alice to the altar, though it was not for want of trying. “He was asking her and asking her and asking her to marry him,” her sister Mary Louise recalled. If Alice was holding out hope that Lyndon would leave his wife for her, she underestimated his ambition. A divorce would have killed any chance he ever had for high office and was out of the question. In 1939–40 Johnson was eyeing a Senate seat, and his hopes of advancing his political career already looked doubtful in light of his close identification with Roosevelt, who by the seventh year of his presidency was facing an erosion in popularity and opposition to his running for an unprecedented third term.
Alice also misunderstood one of the most fundamental tenets of Johnson’s worldview—loyalty. It was one thing to fool around with another man’s mistress, quite another to wreck his home and carry off the mother of his children. The political society they moved in regarded adultery as no one’s business—the lure of flesh was one of the things men sometimes succumbed to, along with liquor and cards. Divorce was something altogether different. It was a public affront to the rules of the church and conventions of society. Divorce was dishonor. According to Johnson’s code, that would be an unforgivable transgression. “Everything was subordinate to loyalty,” said Luther Jones, who worked for Johnson in his first term. “You must be loyal. That dominated Johnson’s thinking.” F
or Johnson, the shame was not in the affair, it was in being foolishly indiscreet. He had behaved like a cad and had gotten caught.
Marsh knew Alice had been unfaithful in the past, but to the extent that he was a possessive man, with an outsize ego, her involvement with Johnson infuriated him. He never revealed what tipped him off, but Antoinette recalled Claudia telling her about an angry confrontation between Marsh and Johnson late one night at Longlea. After loudly berating Johnson, Marsh threw him out. The next morning the chastened congressman returned to apologize and vowed to keep his hands off the lady of the house. The two men picked up their friendship where they had left off, and nothing more was ever said on the subject. “They didn’t let her come between them,” said Antoinette, noting that her father and Johnson, despite some memorable ups and downs, remained very close. “Men in power like that don’t give a damn about women,” she added. “They were not that important in the end. They treated women like toys. That’s just the way it was.”
Marsh chose to overlook Alice’s lapse and married her in early 1940. He then adopted little Diana, endowing his natural child with the name that was rightfully hers. The exchange of vows did nothing for their relationship, which soured almost immediately. Marsh made no bones about his troubled marriage. He had few secrets from his close male friends and talked obsessively about women and sex, often in shockingly crude terms. “At a formal dinner, he was as apt to discuss his erections as he was to expound on Einstein’s theory,” recalled Ingersoll. “His non-stop conversation varied from the profane to the profound, and there is no evidence that he ever considered anything about himself secret.”
For a long time, Marsh truly loved Alice and tried to make her happy, showering her with gifts and jewels, including a quarter-of-a-million-dollar necklace of emeralds fit for royalty. But in the end, Alice did not want to be kept. The age difference was too great, and no amount of expensive finery could prevent her from straying.* Complicating matters no end, her sister, Mary Louise, had some notion that she had become indispensable to Marsh and might succeed her libidinous sibling. Charles had other ideas. Not one to waste time on regret, he was already making plans to exit his second marriage much the same way as he had his first, with a fait accompli. He would free himself from both Glass sisters, he told Ingersoll, confiding his design for domestic tranquillity, and in their stead promote his pretty typist. “I will make that little Claudia my secretary and my mistress,” he declared triumphantly.
By the time Dahl became a regular at Longlea in the summer of 1943, Charles and Alice barely made any pretense of being a couple. She lived in the country and had her apartment in New York. Marsh was spending weeks on his own at the R Street house and ventured only occasionally to Virginia, and then only armed with a battery of friends. On his first few visits to Longlea, Dahl was treated as a welcome distraction, and Alice enjoyed engaging him in her teasing badinage. He was Charles’ pet, but he and Alice had rubbed along just fine until he incurred her wrath. According to Antoinette, Dahl made the mistake of rejecting Alice’s advances late one night and was subsequently banned from Longlea: “He turned her down, and that was it.”
As it turned out, that was the least of his housing problems that summer. Finding decent lodging in wartime Washington was a perpetual nightmare and required constant perseverance and ingenuity. Dahl had spent weeks searching for a new place, when in mid-July he heard through the rumor mill of a house in Georgetown that was unexpectedly available following a grisly murder and suicide. What made it all rather awkward was that the house on 35th Street was occupied by several young female researchers at the OSS, some of whom he knew in passing, including the murder victim, a Chicago debutante by the name of Rosemary Sidley, who had inherited part of the Horlick malted milk fortune. Her roommate, a beauty from the north shore of Boston named Barbara Wendell Soule, had told friends that she could never set foot there again. Dahl was determined to have the place for himself, but he was a bit too keen for some people’s taste, and in the end his eagerness backfired and became the source of macabre amusement around town. “It is an incredible story,” Mary Louise Patten wrote Joe Alsop, explaining that Sidley had been murdered by “an ardent suitor” named William Chandler, who was her boss as well as the married father of two:
It was a dreadful thing, as they both worked in the O.S.S. and she was very attractive and much liked, and he had been pursuing her for months and she would have none of him. Finally one night he came to see her and her tactful girl friends left her alone with her beau and he proceeded to shoot her and then kill himself. I didn’t know either of them, but everyone else in Washington seems to have and you can imagine the excitement caused locally…. To show you how desperate the real estate situation has become, the day after the murder there were a line of people waiting to see if the house was going to be in the market for rent, including several of our friends who shall be nameless. Anyway, the first person to get there was one Dahl.
By all accounts, he was in such a hurry to rent the house that he failed to notice that there were still bloodstains on the carpet, not to mention a bullet hole in the ceiling and one in the floor. When Dahl went back later to take a closer look, he was horrified. “This was too much for his Nordic sensitive temperament,” wrote Patten. “He told me the other day that he gets up at six every day to think over the problems of the postwar world for two hours before breakfast without even a twinkle in his eye so you can [see] the type he is.” It just so happened that Isaiah Berlin and his friend Ed Prichard, a brilliant New Deal attorney, were hunting for a new bachelor pad and suffered from none of Dahl’s misgivings. Apparently Dahl confessed to Berlin that he had returned to the house and “sat in the twilight to see if ghosts would occur—which as a creative writer he would find disturbing to cope with.” The ghosts duly appeared. “So he hastily rented the house to the unfeeling Berlin, who is calmly moving in,” Patten reported, “and has asked me to find a good cheap plasterer for him and where he can buy an inexpensive rug of some darkish color!”
Dahl spent the last weeks of August getting his life back in order and renewing his attention to his work. He had received some disappointing news from Disney. In July, Walt wrote that they would no longer be proceeding with the Gremlins as a feature and were instead planning to put it out as an animated short, “because of its timely nature and the fact that it should be out now.” The truth, however, was that the studio had run into too many complications with the copyright and the RAF restrictions and was getting cold feet. Walt admitted to feeling “a little apprehensive” about Clause 12 of the contract, which stated that the air attaché could make suggestions and that the British Air Ministry had final approval over the picture: “With the amount of money that is required to spend on a feature of this type we cannot be subjected to the whims of certain people, including yourself.” With so much risk involved, he concluded, “it simply is not good business.”
Dahl had gone to considerable pains to arrange a tour for a Disney film crew of the Royal Canadian Air Force stations in Ottawa, Dartmouth, and Nova Scotia, including having Spitfires flown in for a demonstration, but the reduced budget meant the trip would have to be scrapped. After a year of story conferences and bicoastal meetings, Dahl could tell the project was stalling. Walt ended on an upbeat note, reassuring Dahl that he would try to make a trip to Canada himself “to look things over,” adding that they should “get together for a cocktail” when he was in New York the following month. A few weeks later, when he heard that Lord Stansgate of the Air Ministry had paid Walt a visit in Burbank, Dahl felt every reason to be optimistic. A fat packet of gremlin material had arrived from Stansgate, who asked Dahl to forward it to Disney. Dahl dashed off a quick note advising Walt to ignore the Air Ministry’s research, as it would only confuse him, but adding that he was sending it along anyway as “I must comply with orders.”
In August another of his short stories, “The Sword,” was published in the Atlantic. He was beginning to earn a reputation as
a skilled raconteur. “The Sword” was autobiographical in tone and was set in Dar es Salaam in the autumn of 1939, “when the German armies were already mustering on the Polish frontier and when the whole of Europe was boiling and heaving under the threat of war.” It was a poignant tale of a young African houseboy who, in his excitement at the news that England was at war with Germany, took his master’s silver scabbard off the sitting room wall and ran over to a rich German merchant’s home and chopped off his head. It was also good Nazi-bashing propaganda, which was more in demand than ever. Once again, the author’s note gave the grisly tale a thrilling and romantic overlay of verisimilitude, explaining that Dahl had in fact been in East Africa with the Shell Oil Company when war broke out.
He also managed to sell another fictional story, called “Katina,” to Ladies’ Home Journal. Evoking the chaotic last days of the RAF fighters in Greece in 1941, it tells the story of a little blond girl who is wounded during a German bombing attack on the village of Paramythia. Two off-duty RAF pilots, who had spent hours digging around the ruins for the wounded, find her and take her back to the doctor at their fighter squadron, located in a muddy field on the outskirts of the village. After learning that her family is buried beneath the rubble, they make her the camp mascot, and in a few days’ time she knows the nickname of every pilot there. When they are told to move to Argos, in a futile attempt to give cover to the retreating ground forces, she comes with them. And when the German Messerschmitts spot their makeshift aerodrome and move in with guns blazing, she runs out onto the airfield “raising her fists at the planes,” and is mowed down. The story is simply told, almost crudely executed in places, but is nonetheless effective. Dahl’s anger at the waste of human life is palpable when he describes how the pilot turned away from her body to the burning wreckage of his plane and “stood staring hopelessly into the flames as they danced around the engine and licked the metal of the wings.”
The Irregulars Page 18