ALTHOUGH ALICE GLASS resembled a Southern belle—an exceptionally tall and lovely Southern belle—her friends knew that appearances were deceiving.
“She was a free spirit—very independent—in an era when women weren’t that way,” says her sister, Mary Louise. She didn’t believe in marriage, and she had refused to marry Marsh, even though she had borne him two children. (Her sole concession to convention was made to spare the feelings of her parents in Marlin. She wrote them that she had married an English nobleman named Manners. Visitors from Texas would be told that “Lord Manners” was “away” in England on business; she would finally announce that he had been killed fighting for the Loyalists in Spain, and would thereby become a respectable “widow.”) And, possessed of brains as well as beauty, she did not, like many Southern girls, try to hide the fact that she was as intelligent as the men she was talking to. She expected them to listen to her opinions as she listened to theirs—and if one was reluctant to do so, she could make him regret that reluctance. A concert pianist from New York, who had monopolized the dinner conversation one evening at Longlea, was gratified, after dinner, to hear one of his recordings playing on the terrace phonograph. As he and the other guests sat there listening, however, Alice suddenly walked over and switched off the machine. “That’s the nice thing about having someone on a record,” she said. “You can turn him off.” Men who listened to her opinions found them worth listening to; Wallace liked to try out his more visionary proposals on Alice, because, he said, “She seems to be the only person with enough imagination to know what I’m talking about.” And men with a more political turn of mind found Alice worth talking politics with (Herman Brown was moved to say she had “quite a bit of horse sense—for a girl”), except that her politics contained what to practical men was a rather unfortunate streak of idealism.
“Above everything else,” says her sister, “Alice was an idealist.” She admired politicians who, in her view, tried to “help people,” and detested those who were interested solely in their own advancement, or, worse, in using public office to make money. She herself wanted very badly to help people. “She had a very particular view of the kind of place the world should be,” her sister says, “and she was willing to do anything she had to do to make things come out right for people who were in trouble. She was the kind of person who understood very well that she couldn’t do much to help—Alice could be very realistic—but she was also the kind of person who wasn’t willing not to do anything because she couldn’t do it all. She felt you had to try.”
IT WAS ALICE’S “IDEALISM”—her desire to “help people”—that first drew her to Lyndon Johnson. In 1937, people in trouble included European Jews. Attending the Salzburg music festival that year, she and Charles made a side trip to hear a speech by Adolf Hitler, and thereafter they understood, earlier than most Americans, how serious a threat he was. When she returned home, she began making money available to help Jews who were fleeing Hitler, and she made Longlea a way station for these refugees when they arrived in the United States; guests sat entranced on the long terrace listening to the stories of their escapes. Max Graf, who at the time of his escape had been one of Vienna’s leading music critics and a professor at the Vienna Conservatory, told one evening how he had been afraid to make his true feelings known until his last day in Vienna. On that day, however, when he was leaving his office for the last time, his visa and other necessary papers safely in his breast pocket, a colleague had given him the Nazi salute and said, “Heil, Hitler!” “Heil, Beethoven!” Graf had replied.
One of these refugees was a promising young conductor from Vienna, twenty-five-year-old Erich Leinsdorf, whom Charles and Alice had met in Europe; Leinsdorf was to recall vividly his first meeting with the towering, “immensely rich” couple—the “impressive man” and his consort, “she too quite tall and very handsome.” After he had completed an engagement with the Metropolitan Opera in 1938, they invited him to “spend as much time as I wanted” at Longlea, “a large farm, dominated by a magnificent house … a great house with eighteen servants, over whom a German butler and his wife, a superlative cook, held sway.” Leinsdorf was relaxing there (“There was a constant stream of guests. … The accents were new, the lavish and easy life with martinis served at eleven in the morning was new … the eighteen black servants were new—I just sat goggle-eyed”) when, he recalls, he suddenly remembered, “with a terrific shock,” that he had received no reply to his application, submitted months before, for an extension of his temporary visa—and that the visa would expire in just eight days.
When he told his hosts his problem, Alice, who had met Johnson only a few times, suggested that Charles have the young Congressman from Austin try to help.
The next day—a Sunday—Marsh drove Leinsdorf to Washington, and they went to Marsh’s suite at the Mayflower, to which Johnson had been summoned (“A lanky young man appeared. He treated Charles with the informal courtesy behooving a youngster toward an older man to whom he is in debt”). He listened “impassively” to Leinsdorf’s problem, but on Monday telephoned to say he had begun solving it. The Immigration Department had in fact rejected Leinsdorf’s application, but, he told the conductor, due to some clerical oversight the rejection had not been mailed—and this oversight had allowed him to obtain what Leinsdorf describes as “a welcome breathing space.” Leinsdorf recalls Johnson saying that he had “exerted his pressure to have the customary phrase ‘You have seven days to leave the United States’ changed to ‘You have six months.’”
The next step, Johnson explained, was to have Leinsdorf’s status changed to “permanent resident”—a change which could be accomplished only if he went abroad and returned as a regular immigrant. Johnson arranged for him to go to Cuba, and provided all the necessary documents for his return to the United States. To ensure that there would be no slip-up, he telephoned the United States Consul in Havana to make certain that his quota of Austrian immigrants had not yet been exhausted, and that Leinsdorf would be included in it. “It all went like clockwork,” Leinsdorf says.
Marsh was impressed by Johnson’s efficiency. Alice was impressed by something else. The young Congressman had brought Leinsdorf’s documents to Longlea personally, and had brought with him also a letter to the Consul in Havana. The letter said, Leinsdorf recalls (no copy has been found), “that the United States had a holy mission to provide a peaceful haven for musical geniuses nervously exhausted from persecution and racial bias”; it was, he says, a “moving piece.” It had been written by a member of Johnson’s staff (probably the gifted Latimer), but it was Johnson who, without mentioning that fact, read it—in a quiet, eloquent voice—that evening on the terrace. The listeners, including Alice, were moved.
As Johnson began coming to Longlea more frequently, she was moved by further manifestations of what she considered the same spirit.
Those stories about the poverty of the people from whom he came—the people of the Texas Hill Country—those stories, told so eloquently, that could bring a hush even to a Washington dinner party, were dramatic indeed told in the stillness of a Longlea evening, and so was his determination to help his people, to bring them the dams and federal programs that would change their lives. Alice Glass, who wanted to help people, believed that Lyndon Johnson shared the same desire. She believed that he was unlike the other politicians who came to Longlea, and whose conversation revealed, before a weekend was over, that their only interest was personal advancement. She believed that she had finally met a politician who was not constantly scheming on behalf of his ambition, a politician whose dreams were for others rather than for himself. Listening to his stories of how he was getting the dams built and the programs implemented, she came to believe, moreover, that he possessed not only the desire but the ability to help people. She told her sister that she felt the young Congressman had limitless potential; recalls Mary Louise: “She thought he was a young man who was going to save the world.” And she admired also what she considered his
indifference not only to political but to financial advancement. The talk surrounding the immensely wealthy man with whom she lived dealt largely with money, particularly when their guests were close friends like Herman and George Brown. “She was just sick of money, money, money,” her sister says. Johnson, with his seeming total lack of interest in the subject, was a refreshing change.
AT FIRST, her relationship to Johnson was that of patroness to protégé. Although he was three years older than she—at the time of the Leinsdorf episode, he was twenty-nine, Alice twenty-six—she, so widely traveled and read, so sophisticated in dress and taste, seemed much more worldly than this man from Texas. He fostered this impression. “He was always asking her for advice,” her sister says. She had such perfect taste in clothes, he said; he wanted to ask her what to do about the way his long, skinny wrists stuck out of his sleeves. (She told him that he should have his shirts custom-made, and should wear French cuffs so that if attention was drawn to his wrists, they would look elegant rather than awkward; it was at this time that his lifelong fascination with cufflinks began.) He told her he didn’t like the way he looked in photographs; she noticed that one side of his face—the left—photographed much better than the right; for the rest of his life, he would try to allow only the left side to be seen in photographs. He said he realized he didn’t know anything about literature and wanted to learn; she read him poetry. “Her favorite was Edna St. Vincent Millay,” her sister says; “when she read Millay, you could see Alice in the poetry.” She tried to improve his table manners—for a while, he even stopped gulping down his food. She proved his patroness—a very useful patroness—even in politics; when Johnson and Herman Brown seemed on the “collision course” over the condemnation of Brown’s real estate, it was she who said to Marsh one night: “Why don’t you fix things up between them? Why don’t you suggest that they compromise—give Herman the dam and let Lyndon have the land?”—thereby suggesting the compromise that ended the threat to Johnson’s political career.
But the relationship changed. Her cousin, Alice, with whom she had grown up in Marlin, now married to Welly Hopkins and living in Washington, was her closest friend. Sometime late in 1938 or early in 1939, Alice Glass told her cousin that she and Lyndon were lovers, and had been for some months. When her sister, Mary Louise Glass, arrived in Washington later in 1939 to become one of Marsh’s secretaries, Alice told her, too, and Mary Louise would have known anyway; her offices—first in the Mayflower Hotel and then in the Allies Inn—were right down the hall from the apartments Marsh maintained in those hotels, and she could not help being aware that during Marsh’s frequent absences from Washington, Lyndon and Alice spent many afternoons alone together in those apartments. And, more and more, Lyndon and Alice were together at Longlea. On some of his visits to Longlea, Johnson came with Lady Bird, but frequently he would come alone; “he would leave her on weekends, weekend after weekend …,” Mary Louise says. “Sometimes Charles would be there—and sometimes Charles wouldn’t be there.” Johnson had become very much at home at the estate; alone among the guests, he would take off his shirt in the sun on the terrace—“He had this very white skin, but he was always sunning,” Mary Louise says—would lead the horseplay at the swimming pool with boundless enthusiasm, and when, on the long terrace in the evenings, the far-off mountains vanishing in the purple mist, Alice put records on the phonograph, he was always the first to jump up and dance.
ATTEMPTING TO ANALYZE why Alice was attracted to Lyndon Johnson, the best friend and the sister who were her two confidantes say that part of the attraction was “idealism”—the beliefs and selflessness which he expressed to her—and that part of the attraction was sexual. Marsh, Mary Louise says, was “much older” than Alice—he had turned fifty in 1937, when Alice was twenty-six—and, she says, “that was part of the problem. My sister liked men.” Moreover, they felt that Johnson, for all his physical awkwardness and social gaucheries, his outsized ears and nose, was a very attractive man, because of what Alice Hopkins calls that “very beautiful” white skin, because of his eyes, which were, she says, “very expressive,” because of his hands—demonstrating with her own hands how Johnson was always touching, hugging, patting, she says, “His hands were very loving”—and, most of all, because of the fierce, dynamic energy he exuded. “It was,” she concludes, “his animation that made him good-looking.” Whatever the combination of reasons, the attraction, they say, was deep. “Lyndon was the love of Alice’s life,” Mrs. Hopkins says. “My sister was mad for Lyndon—absolutely mad for him,” Mary Louise says.
Alice Glass believed that her passion was reciprocated. According to her intimates, she told them that Johnson and she had discussed marriage. In that era, a divorced man would be effectively barred from a political career, but, she said, he had told her that he would get a divorce anyway. He had several job offers as a corporate lobbyist in Washington, and he had, she said, promised to accept one of these. Whether or not this was true, the handful of men and women who were aware of her relationship with Lyndon Johnson—including men and women who were to know Johnson over a long period of time—agree that this relationship was different from other extramarital affairs in which he was to be a participant. His conduct at Longlea was striking. One of them, seeing Lyndon and Alice together for the first time, says he could hardly believe his eyes. As Alice sat reading Millay in her quiet, throaty voice, he recalls, Johnson sat silent, not saying a word, just drinking in the beautiful woman with the book in her hands. “I don’t believe that Lyndon ever held still for listening to poetry from anyone else,” he says. And although Johnson generally ate, even at Washington dinner parties, as he had always eaten—scooping up heaping forkfuls of food and cramming them into his wide-open mouth—at Longlea he made an effort, the first such effort these men and women had ever seen him make, to eat in a more normal manner.
There were, in addition, other telling indications of the strength of Lyndon Johnson’s passion for Alice Glass. One is the fact that his love affair with her juts out of the landscape of his life as one of the few episodes in it and perhaps the only one that ran counter to his personal ambition. Charles Marsh, as owner of the only district-wide organ of public opinion, was perhaps the individual in Johnson’s congressional district most important to his continuation in office. His love affair with Marsh’s lover was, in the words of a man familiar with the relationship, “taking one hell of a chance.” And, this man adds, “Knowing Lyndon, I could hardly believe he was taking a chance like that. It just didn’t fit in with the Lyndon Johnson I knew. In my opinion, that was the only time—the only time—in Lyndon Johnson’s whole life that he was pulled off the course he had set for himself.”
Johnson, moreover, was silent about the physical side of their relationship.
In later years, such delicacy would not be one of his more striking characteristics. Displaying the same coarseness that, at college, had led him to exhibit his penis and call it “Jumbo,” he would show no reticence whatever about the most intimate details of extramarital relationships. His descriptions of his amours were not only exhibitionistic but boastful; particularly with cronies, he would seem almost to need to make other men acknowledge his sexual prowess. There was, seemingly, no aspect of an afternoon in bed—not even the most intimate details of a partner’s anatomy—that he did not consider grist for his vivid storytelling ability.
About the physical aspect of his relationship with Alice Glass, he spoke not at all. About her, he was as reticent as a young man in love.
BUT IF HIS RELATIONSHIP with Alice Glass in some respects “didn’t fit in” with the rest of Lyndon Johnson’s life, in other respects it fit in snugly—emphasizing familiar traits.
His gift for secrecy, for example, had never been more strikingly displayed.
Charles Marsh did not learn of the affair; the lord of Longlea was deeply in love with the woman for whom he had built it, and was more anxious than ever to marry her. “He was asking her and asking her and
asking her to marry him,” her sister says. But whereas her resistance to the proposal had seemed once to be weakening, now she was adamant. “She wouldn’t marry Marsh after she met Lyndon,” Mary Louise says. “She wanted to marry Lyndon.” Those of the regulars at Longlea who did know dreaded the day when Marsh would find out. His temper was so monumental, his pride so intense, that these younger people, who were somewhat in awe of him, couldn’t imagine what his reaction would be when he discovered the truth. And they felt that discovery was inevitable. “They went to great lengths to deceive him,” Mary Louise says. “It was all so undercover. But sometimes I would be sitting there when the three of them [Charles, Alice and Lyndon] were together, and I would just be”—and here Mary Louise covers her ears with her hands to demonstrate, figuratively, the way she was inwardly bracing herself for the explosion she was sure must come.
But it didn’t come. So guardedly did the two lovers act that even Alice’s best friend had not known the truth until Alice told her. “They were unbelievably discreet,” Mrs. Hopkins notes. “They were never seen together” in public, and when they were together at Longlea, “they were so discreet” that, she says, no one could have guessed that they were lovers. Until Alice told her, she says, “I had seen them both many times at Longlea, and I never knew.” Says Mary Louise: “Nothing showed. Nothing at all.”
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