Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life

by Ann Beattie

  He’d done the right thing in finding Pat, finessed the outcome by being patient. He was a man who could be patient. He was being patient now. Bebe down there with the fish, and some half-assed Secret Service man drowning with him, well, that was the price you paid in the job, and there wasn’t a job you could get without paying a price. Let any of those Secret Service fellows go on television and tell the whole world how much he made, how much he spent on gold cross necklaces for his Catholic girlfriend, from the looks of it, him with his Irish face, he’d be Catholic, and so would the girlfriend, and they could say, Thanks, Pope, and breed into eternity.

  Next agent into the pool, and where was the other one, who’d disappeared with the mermaid? Probably having quite a time with her, wiggling their tails. Well, that was understandable. Dress yourself in that kind of bathing suit, you’re asking for trouble. Of course, you can’t always get involved in giving people what they want, because they ask for one thing, then, once they’ve got you involved, it can turn out they want another. Then another and another, and so on, until you can’t give them any more and you have to get rid of them.

  There was another agent replacing the one who’d torn off his shirt and jumped in the tank . . . this was getting funny. Something to tell Haldeman about, show him how his plan turned out: Bebe dead, all the Secret Service fellows dead, a whole tank of drowned people, well, what could you expect, a harebrained plan like that? Good to have free enterprise, but a dolphin tank was going too far, better that people do an honest day’s work. Or send ’em to Hanoi. Let the intellectuals figure their way out of that.

  Everyone was expendable. Let ’em drown in a tank of sharks, that’s what they deserved, on their way to audition for another goddamn rainbow poster with its Commie hippie peace and love propaganda that numbed young folks like another one of their drugs, and kept them from becoming contributing members of society. Mrs. Nixon would agree that a good day was a day that involved hard work, and so would the girls. They’d married young but completed their studies, that was the right thing to do, and Tricia even read and liked The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

  He went to the rim of the tank and shook his fist at the water until the bubbles disappeared. Oh, in some storybook you could find magic and whatnot, but in real life there were known dangers and unknown dangers, and this one hadn’t made a fool of Nixon. Let the impulsive ones jump in and drown, and those who went after them, all in the pursuit of what? Pleasure. Well, now they saw what happened.

  The presidential helicopter would lift him out of this sorry place, and he’d look down on all of it from the distance from which it deserved to be seen: high in the air, as high as the pilot could fly—and of course someone would have checked the pilot’s credentials, and so forth, making sure he was a good Republican.

  My Anticipated Mail

  Dear Ms. Beattie,

  You reveal yourself to be a smug fact bender. Why don’t you leave President Nixon to history? If you’re writing scurrilous things it must be fashionable right now because what have you ever done that’s original? History will decree that he is a different person than the one you present so simplistically, but I suspect you are looking for book sales, not truth.

  Dear Anne Beattie,

  Your book seems to slander a man who has been criticized enough. You obviously do not know the real Mrs. Nixon. I notice that your thoughts on her were not printed in The New Yorker.

  Hi, Professor Beattie!

  I was in your short story class in 2005 when we read the Frederick Barthelme story about doing that dance step you got up and showed us, saying you felt old because we’d never heard of it. I have continued to read Mr. Barthelme’s stories.

  I would like to know if you could write a letter of recommendation for me for a Fulbright. You can download the instructions directly from the website. I have attached the link. In case you don’t remember me, I’m enclosing a picture of me taken with Professor Blair (printed in UVA Magazine), who suggested I take your course. My sister just finished reading Janus in high school. Vanessa Prince (she has a different last name from me) also may be coming to U.Va. I’m telling her to take your class!

  In advance, thank you, Professor Beattie. I know many people must make requests on your time.

  Dear Mrs. Beattie:

  As a fighter pilot in the Air Force, I led several strikes against Rabaul in New Britain. We flew P-39s out of Bougainville and refueled at Green Island coming and going. We were also there on D-Day. How much we appreciated Lt. Nixon’s hamburger stand on Green! As rushed as we were, I would never leave without those refreshments.

  It meant so much—just a few minutes’ relaxation, good sandwiches, and the coldest pineapple juice in the islands. I didn’t know then who our benefactor was. I’d like to thank him now on behalf of the 347th Fighter Group.

  The final letter is real, and was written by Chandler P. Worley of Indianola, Mississippi. It was sent to Life, where it was published as a letter to the editor. The real salutation is “Sirs.”

  Merely Players

  Mrs. Nixon thought about being in the movies, as many attractive young women living in California did, and still do. The first Mrs. Reagan was in the movies. So was Mrs. Nixon, but her tiny part in Becky Sharp, a lackluster 1935 movie based on Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, was cut. You can understand what she’d like about being an actress: acting was something like travel—moving into another identity; moving to another place—and Mrs. Nixon’s love of travel was part and parcel with her love of freedom. Even going away to visit her aunt who was a nun seemed to her like freedom. Julie Nixon Eisenhower reports that her mother liked the glamorous costumes an actress got to wear, though she did not like waiting around while the director did retakes. Standing around a movie set wouldn’t appeal to most people, but you can imagine that Mrs. Nixon found it frustrating in part because it was a demystification of the art of moviemaking. If she ever thought the people involved in the process were in some way special, that illusion disappeared when one of the directors of Becky Sharp, who fancied her, got drunk and went to her apartment and carried on. Her brothers were there, so that was that. Still: not exactly a magic moment.

  How much did Mrs. Nixon know, years later, about her husband’s attempts at fictionalization? He’d been an actor, too, briefly. But he went on to write his own scripts, so to speak. Others enacted them, but he was like a movie director on a national scale. He even tried his hand at costume design, putting the White House guards in outfits out of a Marx Brothers comedy. RN was also the scriptwriter (old joke in Hollywood: “She was so stupid, she slept with the writer”). During his administration, a telegram was phonied up to give the impression President Kennedy had ordered the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem. In The Time of Illusion, Jonathan Schell writes: “By the spring of 1972, President Nixon was setting himself up as the scriptwriter of the whole of American political life. He looked upon America as his predecessors in the White House had looked upon Vietnam: as a great theatre for a sweeping dramatic production, in which a real nation was used as the stage, real public figures were used as unwilling actors, and the history of the nation was used as the plot.” He was actor, producer, director, screenwriter, costume designer, outdoing Orson Welles. More protesters, more pesky extras than had been called for, mobs of them, showed up on the set, but he hoped to mitigate their power by instigating a campaign of letter writing sympathetic to the President. It was so extensive that publications and television stations assumed it must be a real reaction. This was a bit like flashing the “applause” sign for the studio audience. The audience, of course, was his own staff and those to whom they delegated the task of mass mailings. Nothing suggests Mrs. Nixon knew about this at the time, though if she later came to read about it and believed what she read—what could Mrs. Nixon believe?—she must have been quite surprised. She was a patriot. She was a loyal wife who believed her husband was acting for the good of the country, but “acting” had connotations she would have been shock
ed to consider. No matter: she’d become just a member of the audience, along with everyone else.

  The marginalized person’s point of view is always informative, as is that of the unsophisticated person, who perceives with limited awareness (Faulkner’s child narrator), or that of the minor character. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was a big hit: the two men who accompany Hamlet on his voyage—their POV, instead of the main character’s. (Also John Gardner’s Grendel; Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.) It’s a common problem that can turn into an advantage, when a writer creates a minor character who won’t stay in his limited role and insists on dominating the scene. Sometimes this can be the voice of the Sirens, trying to throw the writer off course, but more often it’s an indication of some sort of shift within the material that is causing it to escape the writer’s grasp. Stoppard didn’t stumble into writing a play about the two messengers, but many writers will tell you that in revising, to their surprise, they realized who the real subject of the piece was—whose story it was. And if the writer sticks with the original plan, it’s nonetheless possible that another writer will come along and sort out the initial story differently, so that characters on the periphery of the action are recycled and re-presented, with different emphasis, through a different writer’s sensibility.

  For me, Mrs. Nixon became a minor character who would not keep quiet. She was so often silent (the Checkers speech; her final exit from the White House) that it’s tempting to think she had little to say. Writers tend to love people who volunteer very little, for their silence frees the writers to project onto them, though such characters are also confusing. Why are they so quiet? We now know Mrs. Nixon was too pained, leaving the White House, to speak; that she was given no lines to say in the highly orchestrated Checkers speech. But was she acting? It seems likely that she was, during the Checkers speech (she felt the accusations against them were unfair and didn’t want to make a response), though it was a different matter, and she was just trying to keep it together, as she said her good-byes to the White House staff. Acting shouldn’t be thought of negatively; everything could be known from her gestures, from her silently grasping the staff’s hands. But a penny for her thoughts, years earlier, as she sat ramrod-straight in a chair while her husband explained their finances to the nation, on TV, and his insistence upon keeping their gift dog. Those thoughts could have been pretty much anything, but if they appeared in fiction, the reader would, justifiably, have certain expectations that had to be met. Interpolating with a unique approach (perhaps Mrs. Nixon was thinking: I should be a Buddhist) would seem to suggest that the writer was obtuse, or worse, that the writer was revealing something about himself/herself but nothing, really, about Mrs. Nixon, who would have to have the thoughts anybody might have in the moment.

  Yet how can writers be sure about what anybody might think? Especially when writers think as little as possible about anybody and almost constantly about the exception? Err in the direction of giving an account of that generalized “anybody” and Mrs. Nixon’s interior life would be so predictable, it would be as unconvincing as it would be boring. More interesting would be to imagine something within the realm of Mrs. Nixon’s imagination. A role she acted in, for example. Maybe Becky Sharp. Contrast her role in that with her presence as a minor character in the Checkers speech. It would also be credible because both moments were public performances, though diametrically opposed, for in Becky Sharp the title character is rebellious, flirtatious, manipulative, and gets away with wild misbehavior.

  Mrs. Nixon is a fictional character only to the extent we all are, having both public and private selves. Journalism may be more effective than fiction in offering a new perspective on a public figure because when facts are informative or telling, they automatically redefine. A list of ten things we wouldn’t expect of Mrs. Nixon immediately tells us that she isn’t a stereotype (for example: Mrs. Nixon knew how to change a tire). How to come up with a fictional equivalent—to surprise and inform us about Mrs. Nixon without merely being facile and fabricating? (To be avoided: Mrs. Nixon’s dreams, a conventional easy shot.) Since the public persona is what we can see, albeit distantly, we have to import such information into her private sphere. Onstage, Mrs. Nixon stood where she was told to stand and delivered her lines, but the writer follows her backstage to her makeup table, where she daubs at her greasepaint, looking intently in the mirror, surrounded by a mandorla marquee of lights. That is where the fiction writer—like any other member of an admiring audience—wants to follow, or intrude.

  Mrs. Nixon Lies, and Plays Hostess

  The news of President Eisenhower’s heart attack on September 24, 1955, sent camera crews and reporters to the Nixon home. Vice President RN was there—shocked by the news, but at home—though a plan was quickly concocted to have Bill Rogers, Acting Attorney General, spirit him away, so that he would not have to come up with reassurances. Eisenhower’s heart attack is one of RN’s “six crises”: crises in his life and how he triumphed, basically. If one could generalize, one could say that any “crisis” was a red flag and that RN was a bull. There was no “running away.” However, if he could spend the night elsewhere and temporarily evade the questions, that was acceptable. He writes: “As I hung up the receiver, I suddenly realized that Pat was unaware of what had happened and I went upstairs and told her the news. I then telephoned my secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who was still at the wedding reception, and asked her to go to her apartment so that she could handle the incoming telephone calls on an extension of my house phone located there. Pat in the meantime had tried to break the news, as quietly as possible, to the children.”

  My interest here is not merely in the narrative (“Pat in the meantime”), but in giving the reader a sense of how people reacted, what it felt like on a scale of 1 to 10 for both Mr. and Mrs. Nixon to hear that the President was out of commission. Certainly we can believe that Mrs. Nixon was composed, but her husband’s tendency to rush the narrative gives the reader no breathing room in which to form any assessment of people’s real states—the thing I’m most interested in. It would have been uncharacteristic of RN to digress into Mrs. Nixon’s response, to her real emotional state, because he saw only the important integers in a story (Nixon and Eisenhower). He never stopped to consider anyone but the primary players.

  So: Mrs. Nixon got the news about President Eisenhower and probably said, what? “Oh, Dick!” and immediately ran off to the rooms of her two daughters? Even if she did, the fiction writer would be alert to a general awareness of mortality, of conventional dialogue that would have to be presented truthfully (truthful to the character), but, since it would indicate almost nothing, and could seem to be a conventional contrivance of the writer, and therefore a liability, something else would have to be offered immediately, so that this would be not a generic story about a traumatic moment but something that revealed to the reader these people in this traumatic moment.

  In the chapter called “The Heart Attack” in Six Crises, RN hurries to get to the point. To instruct us. He feels that the essential narrative has very little, if anything, to do with how people felt. He would not have noticed, and therefore would not report, whether Mrs. Nixon might have stumbled on her way to see Julie and Tricia, or whether the family pet perked up its ears. No, what mattered was that, because something was happening to the President, something was happening to RN. This is the narcissism of mediocre storytelling. The narrator is going to provide us with only the important players in sharp focus and let us assume what we want about extraneous figures, like Mrs. Nixon. (It is interesting that one of the daughters gets quoted, blurting out: “The President isn’t going to die, is he, Daddy?” while Mrs. Nixon is only wordlessly animated.)

  More things happen: the Acting Attorney General, summoned, arrives at the Nixon home—and, in a skit from a comedy routine, Mrs. Rogers, waiting on a side street in their Pontiac for her husband to leave the house, finds that both her husband and RN jump into the car, having left by t
he back door when one of RN’s daughters inadvertently got the attention of the newsmen outside by going to investigate, so the reporters didn’t see RN or the Attorney General quickly cutting across the neighbors’ lawn to the waiting car.

  Did RN say good-bye to his wife? (Not reported.) They had arrived in Bethesda in approximately fifteen minutes, we learn, and his hosts for the night gave Mr. Nixon a pair of pajamas, a toothbrush, and a bed to sleep in. Did RN call Mrs. Nixon? He does not say he made a call to her. He says he slept badly—in fact, not at all—but there is some glee in having escaped the press.

  Mrs. Nixon, however, is stuck with them. Maybe she isn’t if she doesn’t open the door, but their job is to show up and wait, and Mrs. Nixon is herself, so at some point she has them in and offers refreshments downstairs—not in the main house, but in the finished downstairs. Previously, she has lied to them, telling them that her husband was not home, that she does not know when he can be expected, and—offering a bit of good advice—telling them they’d do better to call his office in order to keep posted.

  As a fiction writer, I want to know: What do the daughters do when RN disappears? Does Mrs. Nixon have an easy time reassuring them, or is it difficult? At what moment does Mrs. Nixon decide to be nice, and to have the members of the press in (even though it’s only to the basement) and serve them something? Is she on autopilot, or does she sense something that makes this a more genuine gesture? What is it like for this woman to be with people it would be unwise to communicate with? Does a water bug scuttle across the floor? Has one of the bulbs in the overhead light fixture burned out?