by Unknown
My coming out in Manhattan took place three months later at the Junior Assemblies in the Grand Ballroom at the Plaza Hotel. My escort this time was my older brother, Josh, whose smashing appearance in white tie and tails seemed to ensure that he would dance with every girl but me. I consoled myself with the memory of another dance where Josh, in full brotherly prank mode, danced with me but dangled a five-dollar bill behind my back to entice other dance partners to cut in and take me off his hands. This time, at least Josh had the good manners to spare me from that embarrassment.
It’s a wonder I didn’t rebel against the whole humiliating experience—or by extension, against my mother, for putting me through it. But it wasn’t in me to question or protest. I was the dutiful daughter, yielding to my family’s prerogatives and expectations.
There are many reasons why I had so much trouble with boys during this time in my life. For one thing, at 5′9″, I was taller than many potential male suitors. I was also skinny. There’s this awkward dead zone in many a tall girl’s development, before she has filled out, when she is trapped between being coltish and being just plain goofy. That was me at fifteen. (It’s also why I picked up the nickname “Monkey”—all arms and legs.)
For another thing, I was sent off to Miss Porter’s when I was fifteen. Attending an all-girls school, to be sure, makes it difficult to get to know boys. The 220
girls at the school were as cloistered as you could get without taking vows.
When I was a student there, in the dark ages of 1958 to 1961, no boy could come near the school except on Saturday afternoons—and even then, only if a girl had signed him up as her “caller” a week before. The arrangements had to be made by mail because we were not allowed to receive or make phone calls.
(The only allowable phone conversations were with our parents, no more than once a week.) If callers were willing to clear that hurdle, they then had to deal with a series of protocols seemingly designed to strip all the romance out of a date. When the callers arrived, they were met by Miller, the school’s longtime uniformed guard, who checked their names against a list. If it all checked out, the girls and their callers were then restricted to walking around the mile-long Gundy Loop and forbidden to stop, lest sinister behavior such as hand-holding ensue. You could measure the intensity of a couple’s relationship by how long they walked: the most ardent couples took as many as four or five loops. When the walking was over, the girls would escort their callers to the headmaster and headmistress’s house for the obligatory cup of tea. After that the boys departed, back to their rooms at Groton and Deerfield and Taft.
With all the daunting, labor-intensive planning required to gain entry onto our campus and the limited scope of activities during the actual visit, it’s amazing that any boys were willing to make the trek to our school at all. It’s not as if they arrived to find us at our prettified best. Our wardrobe did nothing to distinguish us: We heeded the unofficial uniform of cardigan sweaters over boys’ button-down shirts and wool kilts over knee socks. Our shoes had to be Abercrombies, sturdy brown lace-up leather shoes with fringed leather tongues.* We accessorized with a standard kit—a barrette to hold our hair in place, a gold circle pin, a string of pearls—and we weren’t interested in makeup, not even lipstick, which caused the townspeople who saw our pale faces at church on Sundays to fear that we had influenza.
I didn’t take to Miss Porter’s immediately. The first six months there, I was so homesick I spent much of my free time looking out my window at the cars going by and praying that one of them would be my father coming to take me home. It didn’t help that we lived in big houses, not dormitories, which reminded me of what I’d left behind in New Jersey and made my homesickness worse. I was intimidated by my classmates, especially those from New York City, who seemed so smart and worldly and grown-up. My classmates were trained to be kind and decent to everyone, including new girls like me. If there was any intimidation, it was all in my insecure mind. I’d been something of an athletic star at Rumson Country Day, but at Farmington I had to start all over again from the back of the pack. I didn’t have the good sense, at that point in my life, to know that things would get better. I knew only that during my first six months there, I felt anxious and lonely and unsure of myself. For the first time in my life, I felt like I didn’t belong.
I dealt with my budding self-esteem issues in a peculiar but not unusual way: I stopped eating. For some reason, I was haunted by the image of a girl I’d known in New Jersey who, after three months at boarding school, had returned for Christmas vacation thirty pounds heavier. I didn’t want to be that girl. The more anxious I became, the more fixated on that girl I became. I spent a lot of time in front of the mirror, wondering if I was getting fat. When I wasn’t ignoring food or shunting it aside, I lived on the whites of hard-boiled eggs because I had read that the yolks contained all the calories. As a result, I came home at spring break nearly thirty pounds lighter than I had been at Christmas.
My mother was horrified—I had been slender all my life, but now I was downright skeletal—and immediately took me to a doctor in New York, who was a close friend of our family’s. He talked to me in wise, soothing tones, without a hint of condescension, about loneliness and my lack of close friends, and my feelings of inadequacy. I don’t remember the word anorexia ever coming up. He explained that I wasn’t powerless to deal with these issues; they were within my control. As lost as I was, that made sense to me.
I returned to finish the year emotionally revived. I started eating, I started regarding my classmates as friends rather than competition, and I started feeling like I could hold my own. I found comfort in all the conformity. For my remaining two years there, I focused on my studies and put my energy into extracurricular activities such as the drama club known as Players, a reading club called the Myopians, and the Salmagundy, where I managed the small staff and was responsible for making sure the paper got out on time. When I graduated in 1961, it made a certain sense to me that our class poll hailed me as “Changed Most Since Sophomore Year.” But it was a big surprise to be designated along with two classmates as “First Woman President.” If there was a gap in our otherwise first-class education, it may have been that few of us seriously considered a career at the time of graduation; instead, we looked forward to marriage and raising a family. I don’t blame the school; it was purely a function of the times. When I started the next phase of my education as a freshman at Wheaton College, an all-girls liberal arts school in Norton, Massachusetts, I didn’t feel like I was being prepared for life with a steady paycheck. I was looking forward, like my friends, to getting married to a suitable young man with a pedigree not much different than mine. True, I’d had a bad run with boys, but I’d blossomed out of my coltish phase. And I was hopeful.
When I look at snapshots of myself from that time, I see a tall, slim, athletic girl who had finally gained some social confidence. I wasn’t shy with boys. I could talk and flirt and parry with them easily. I just needed to find someone who understood me.
That was the girl I was in 1962, staring out the train window on my way to Washington, D.C. I was educated and poised but also innocent, naïve, with no sexual experience, and (like all but the most worldly of nineteen-year-olds) oblivious to anything that didn’t immediately affect me. As the steamy, overcrowded train car clattered along through Philadelphia and Baltimore, my biggest worry was that I had already sweated through my favorite cotton madras shirtdress and would have to find something else to wear for my first day of work. I felt better knowing that my mother had also packed me two drip-dry shirtdresses from the Johnny Appleseed catalogue. They would be perfect work clothes in the swampy climate of a Washington, D.C., summer.
In other words, my only worry in the world was about what to wear.
When the train arrived in Washington’s Union Station, I carried my one suitcase to the curb and hailed a taxi to the house I would share with a family friend named Wendy Gilmore, who was working at the State Departm
ent. The house was more like a bungalow, but it was in the heart of Georgetown on O Street.
Wendy was twenty-five and instantly welcomed me as if I were a younger sister.
That first night, we cooked supper together and then went over a map of the best bus routes to the White House. I tried not to show my nervousness about the job. I wasn’t thinking of the glamour or the prestige of working at the White House or how much luster the internship would add to my résumé, if indeed I was ever to have a résumé. I was just anxious about showing up on time and doing a good job. I called my parents to let them know I’d arrived safely, and went to bed early.
The next morning, as I skipped down the front steps of the house in my Pappagallo flats and my freshly ironed madras dress, I considered hailing a taxi just so I could savor the thrill of telling the driver, “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, please.” But that foolishness passed quickly. I kept my money in my pocket, walked to the corner, and caught a bus to the White House.
*I made the mistake of enrolling at Miss Porter’s sporting saddle shoes—which caused me a ridiculous amount of psychic pain. My mother, ever observant, must have seen this, because she was responsible for one of my signature moments of joy as a teenager when she gave me a pair of Abercrombies for Christmas my junior year. Shoes, then as now, were obsessive totems of happiness for many women. I wasn’t immune.
Chapter Three
“Mimi Beardsley,” I told the guard when I arrived at the West Gate. I was trying very hard to seem professional.
He checked his list.
“Would that be … Marion Beardsley?” he asked.
“Yes, that’s me,” I said.
“Okay, you can go through,” he said, and once I was past him, I let out a sigh of relief. On the bus ride over, I had worked myself into a frenzy, convincing myself that my internship was a mistake or a cruel joke—and that I would be barred from entering the White House. Such are the insecurities of a teenage girl; sometimes you feel like a fraud or an interloper, that you don’t belong.
My relief at being let through didn’t last long, however. My next challenge was finding the press office without getting lost. I walked up the path to the main door of the West Wing and entered the White House. I crossed the reception hall where reporters liked to loiter on the off chance they could grab an interview with high-profile people exiting the Oval Office, and stopped. I had no idea where I was going, so I asked a guard for help. He smiled and directed me down a short hall to the left.
I was hoping that Fiddle would be there to greet me, but she was nowhere in sight. In fact, the first person I encountered was Pierre Salinger, the President’s press secretary, who brusquely waved me into his office. Although he was only thirty-six years old, Salinger was already a larger-than-life figure in the nation’s capital, as well as a media darling.* He had been Kennedy’s press secretary during the presidential campaign and had been the obvious choice for the same role in the White House. He was short, slightly paunchy, and a bit of a clotheshorse, although the net effect was often more rumpled than elegant. He was rarely seen without a cigar in one hand and a clutch of papers in the other.
He didn’t have the Ivy League panache or patrician reserve that defined the Kennedy inner circle, but he was both cultured (he had been a child prodigy at the piano in his native San Francisco) and street smart. It was Salinger who had been so impressed by Kennedy’s quick-witted seduction of the media that he prodded the President to conduct his news conferences live on television—something that no president had dared before. His main job then, as it is now for press secretaries, was to control and occasionally pacify a restive White House press corps that never got as much access to the President as it wanted.
He had a glorious, rich baritone that could not be contained by office doors or walls, which is precisely what I heard in his office as he paced back and forth, punching the air with his arms, barking out orders to two men who stood at the side of his desk. They were dressed just like him—sharp gray suits, crisp white shirts, thin ties. They turned out to be his assistant press secretaries, Malcolm Kilduff and Andrew Hatcher. Mr. Salinger introduced me to them as the new summer intern, and then sent them on their way.
He turned to me and spelled out my immediate duties.
“See those teletype machines?” he said, making a show of opening the bathroom door and steering me inside. I’d never seen a teletype machine before, and I was confused about why four of them were in the bathroom, two against a wall and two in a bathtub. They were clattering away, spitting out steady streams of paper from the Associated Press, United Press International, Agence France Presse, and Reuters.
“It’s the noise,” he said, intuiting my confusion about why they were in the bathroom.
Then he pointed to a set of clipboards hanging on a wall in his office. My job, he explained, was to cut the streams of teletype paper into foot-long sheaves and clip them onto the boards, one for each news agency, before they overflowed onto the floor.
His final instruction was to call him Pierre.
Then he dismissed me, saying, “The girls will show you the rest.” The “girls” he was referring to were the secretaries in the open room outside his office—serious, determined women, most in their thirties, who had no problem being referred to as “girls.” I didn’t have a problem with it, either, to be honest. The word feminism had not yet entered my vocabulary. This kind of dynamic seemed to me to be the natural order. The men were in charge. The women assisted them.
Christine Camp, Pierre’s executive secretary and the de facto leader of the office’s female staff, continued my White House initiation. I spent the next half-hour filling out employment forms in order to collect my sixty-seven-dollar-a-week salary—before taxes. Then she ushered me to a standard gray desk just inside the press office door. This desk would be mine, she told me, and so would the clunky gray Remington typewriter alongside it. There was a telephone, the standard black rotary model with a half-dozen flashing buttons at its base, for me to use. For someone who had never worked in an office before—the only jobs I’d ever had were as a babysitter and a mother’s helper—it felt like a whole new world of possibilities was opening up. The idea of having my own desk, and my own typewriter, in the White House press office, made me suddenly feel like I’d arrived. I tried my best to act normal, but this wasn’t normal. It was all so incredibly exciting.
I had a feeling I wasn’t alone in this. Everyone around me seemed to be executing the nifty trick of appearing simultaneously hyperactive and relaxed.
They seemed to glow with delight at being part of something special. That feeling quickly washed over me as well, and for perhaps the first time in my life I, too, began to feel special. I began to feel a sense of purpose.
Chris Camp explained that one of my jobs was to answer the press office phone—and she made it clear that there was an art to dealing with these calls.
If it was a routine question from a reporter—for example, what time Pierre Salinger would be holding a press briefing in his office—I was free to provide the information. But if it was remotely substantive—ranging from a reporter wanting clarification on an Administration policy or merely checking a quote—I was to immediately transfer it to someone more senior. I would have to learn to juggle six blinking lights—six different lines, ringing constantly—without disconnecting anyone. It wasn’t rocket science, but I didn’t sleep so well those first few nights, until I’d mastered the system.
In all, there were nine people in the press office, seven of us jammed into the tight open space, and Pierre, who luxuriated in a roomy office with two doors, one of which opened into our room, and another of which opened into a hallway that led to the Oval Office. (I later learned from Pierre’s memoir, With Kennedy, that some evenings the President would venture into our quarters from the Oval Office to snoop around our desks. The President had a habit of borrowing books and documents, which Pierre would then have to retrieve from his night table.) The atmosphere was
remarkably open and casual; in such tight quarters, it had to be for anything to get done. Pierre himself, despite the sensitive nature of his job, rarely worked behind closed doors, which allowed me to hear the telex bells ringing away in the bathroom. Wire services such as UPI had bells to signal important incoming messages: four bells meant an urgent message; five bells was a “Bulletin”; ten bells, a “Flash,” was reserved for the most important news. A ringing bell was my cue to jump up and collect the wire copy for Pierre.
You could figure out the “girls’ ” seniority by our proximity to Pierre’s office.
Because I was newest, my desk was farthest away, by the door. Jill Cowan, Fiddle’s close friend, had a desk facing mine. Jill had the title of secretary, but it was never clear to whom she directly reported. Helen Ganss, a permanent fixture on the press office staff dating back to the Truman Administration, sat just outside Pierre’s office. Chris Camp, my boss, sat literally inside Pierre’s office. There were small file cabinets and a bookcase crammed along the wall.
Off to the left was the doorway to another room, which Andy Hatcher and Mac Kilduff shared, along with their secretaries, Barbara Gamarekian and Sue Mortensen Vogelsinger.
Pierre conducted twice-daily news briefings in his office, where the reporters would crowd in, simulating the crush, as Pierre liked to say, of a jam-packed New York subway car at rush hour. There was a tremendous sense of energy in that room, of always being in a hurry, of trying to stay on top of the dozens of things that were happening at once. Everyone pitched in. It was an incredibly invigorating place to work, a buzzing hive filled with smart, bright people.