When the curtain rose and the lights went down, she had seen his hand meet hers in the darkness and link for a few seconds before breaking apart. These emissaries of love had quickly been withdrawn to be laid discreetly on the armrests of their chairs.
But theirs had been a wartime affair, when life was different. Now all but the blind could see that a political career for Eisenhower was on the horizon across the Atlantic. The press were full of it. How could Kay possibly be part of that world?
She had gently tried to discuss this with Kay, who did not seem to doubt that Eisenhower intended to make her his wife. He had apparently told her he was worried about the eighteen-year age gap between them. She was thirty-six. He was fifty-four. Kay said that never mattered to those in love.
She told her mother that he had said, over and over again, that he would never let her go. This did not make Mrs MacCarthy-Morrogh any happier. Men in love did not need to say such things. They did so to convince themselves not others.
“I want you to be careful,” she said to her daughter “think about what you are getting into.”
“Mother, I know you worry about me and I am very grateful, believe me, but I m a big girl now and I know what I am doing.”
“But that’s just the point, darling! You may know what you’re doing but do you know what he’s doing?”
The conversation was circular, exasperating, and to Kay’s irritation it took place in similar form every time she met her mother alone that summer.
The highlight of the London celebrations was to be Ike’s speech to the Guildhall, where the great and the good of the business and political worlds gathered to listen to wise words from distinguished speakers. Eisenhower was not a natural speaker, but he knew he had to make the speech of his lifetime. He had worked on it for weeks. Kay had typed every draft, listened as he rehearsed it, made suggestions and timed him speaking every new version.
“No one else could do this for me, Kay,” he told her. “I have to get this just right for the audience here and you have an Irish way with words.”
The reception, both on the night at the Guildhall and in the press the following morning, bordered on sycophancy. Eisenhower was compared to Lincoln and hailed as a great orator and thinker. Even Churchill was impressed with his friend’s powers of oratory.
The previous stream of requests for Eisenhower to give interviews, make speeches, open schools or hospitals and lend his name to everything from breakfast cereals (“Take the fight to the day Ike’s way”) to a new model of car (“Get there fast and get there first with Ike”) now became a torrent.
It was time to move on. He would visit the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace and then return to Frankfurt, where he had established his new headquarters in the former offices of the I.G. Farben chemical company. There he would wrestle with the intractable problems of occupation.
Kay no longer had to be told that she would accompany him. It was simply understood between them that where he went she went too. He told her to put all the dates for travel, lunches, dinners and parties in her large leather-bound appointments diary and to make sure she was included in every one. His plans now included her for every hour of every day; with one exception.
“I’ve been invited to do a tour stateside – coast to coast, every major city, big receptions, ticker-tape, the works,” he said one morning. He was holding up an itinerary that had come in on the teleprinter overnight.
“Congratulations! Home is the conquering hero,” she said. “When is it?”
“Too damn soon, three weeks’ time”
They looked at the diary and Kay began a list of appointments to be cancelled. Ike was excited; Hollywood was going to turn out its film stars for him; there would be ticker-tape parades, speeches to be made and honorary degrees to be accepted. Kay fell silent as he recited the roll-call of honours he would receive. He looked at her and stopped.
“What is it?”
“I’m not coming, am I?”
He lit a cigarette. She could see he hadn’t even thought about including her.
“Not on this trip,” he said.
“Oh,” she said.
“What?” he asked.
“Well, you’re going to be gone weeks and you’ll be there with ...”
“With who? Mamie my wife? Of course I will. This is an official tour, Kay. It’s something I have to do. I’ve told you – you’ve just got to trust me.”
Kay said nothing and looked down at her shoes.
“We can’t possibly be there together – don’t you understand?” he went on.
“Yes, sir”.
“What would it look like if I was riding around America with an unknown Brit woman at my side?”
“I understand, sir.”
“Do you? I sometimes think you think only of yourself.”
“That’s not fair, sir.”
“Well, don’t look at me like that. This is a great honour I am being given.”
“I know, sir. I am pleased for you – and for Mamie.”
“Yes, it’s been a long time.”
“Ike, has she ever ...?”
“What?”
“Well ... mentioned me in her letters?”
“Kay!”
“I’m sorry. I just wondered.”
Ike put a hand on her arm and squeezed it gently.
“Don’t wonder – and don’t worry, it will be all right.”
She stiffened to salute him.
“And don’t salute me,” he barked.
She saluted.
It was strange, she thought, that her famous lover did not seem to care how many photographs the cameramen took of the two of them in London, where they publicly danced and dined as a couple, yet once back home the photographers would be taking rather different pictures – Ike would once again be with Mamie.
Charlotte Montagu thought it was rather more than strange.
“Forgive me for repeating myself, doll, but you’re being taken for a ride. A long ride, an enjoyable ride, but at the end you’re going to come off the horse.”
Kay lost her temper. “Stop saying that! You’re like a bloody parrot.”
“Calm down, doll, I’m just trying to help.”
“Well, you’re not helping. And I don’t need lectures from someone who’s had sex with a complete stranger against the railings of Eaton Square!”
“Wartime quickie, doll, you should try it sometime.”
Nothing phased Charlotte. They were having tea in Fortnum and Mason’s emporium in Piccadilly, where Charlotte had shamelessly invoked her mother’s position at Buckingham Palace to secure a table.
“It’s harder to get in here than any restaurant in London,” Charlotte said. “The famous English tea has returned after its wartime absence – look.”
Kay allowed her irritation to cool. She admired the way Charlotte would change the subject to avoid a row. She surveyed the crowded room with starched white linen laid on tables mounted with tiered cake-stands full of toasted crumpets, cucumber sandwiches and a variety of cakes and tarts.
“Charlotte, do you really think that?” she said.
“You can’t get whisky for love or money, but the flour ration has been raised – wonderful, isn’t it?” said Charlotte, loading her plate. “Come on, doll, eat up.”
Whatever Charlotte did she did without pause, be it eating, drinking or talking, and sometimes she managed to do all three at the same time. Kay enjoyed their meetings for the simple reason that Charlotte reminded her what is was like to laugh. Her friend was selfish, outrageous and set no limit on life’s pleasures, especially when it came to cakes at Fortnum’s, or a stranger pushed against the railings of Eaton Square during the blackout.
“Charlotte, did you hear me?”
“Yes, yes. Shall I pour?”
“Well?”
“Well what, doll?”
“You think I’m being taken for a ride?”
“I think you see too many unicorns and rainbows. Ok you’re having fun but it has to end sometime. Rainbows are an illusion aren’t they? And you don’t see many unicorns around these days.”
There was a pause. Kay sipped her tea and took a cucumber sandwich.
“You think I’m a fool, don’t you?”
“Not at all. I think you’re in love, and ...”
“And what?”
Charlotte had just lifted a crumpet from the cake-stand and was about to take a bite, but she put it in on her plate and looked at Kay in a way that suggested she was about to say something important.
“And good for you. It’s lovely being in love, I imagine. I wouldn’t know. And I don’t think I’m ever going to know.”
“Of course you are – don’t be silly. Anyway, who said I’m in love?”
“I did, and don’t deny it. It’s just that I think the man you love is going to leave you sooner than you think. They all do. Trust me, I’m an expert. There, I’ve said it.” Her eyes turned back to her plate. “Here, have one. Carpe crumpet!”
She offered Kay a crumpet smeared with jam on a small plate. Kay shook her head and Charlotte lifted the pastry off the plate and devoured it in two bites.
Maybe it was the sugar rush from all the cakes, or perhaps it was just being in such exuberant company, but Kay felt elated as she walked past the anti-aircraft batteries in Green Park towards Victoria Station. Charlotte was just plain wrong. Her warning was predictable and possibly motivated by jealousy. What filled her with a glow of happiness was the thought that she was in love. And he was in love with her, so why would he choose to throw away such happiness? It didn’t make sense.
She wasn’t sure she knew what love felt like. If it was the pulse and flicker of heightened emotion that refuses doubt and deals only in certainty, or the feverish state of mind that conjures up unicorns and rainbows, then it had certainly never affected her. As she often told herself, love was a mystery and long may it remain so.
She had hardly been in love with dear Gordon Summersby, had she? That was just lust, and very welcome too. As for her fiancé Patrick – well he was gone and there was little point in thinking of him. She loved her family, of course, but that was different. If love was supposed to be the passionate, romantic sort that had inspired poets and musicians for millennia, the kind which is supposed to lift you off your feet and make your heart turn somersaults, it had passed her by.
Until now. She thought of him from the moment she woke until last thing at night; there was hardly a moment in the day when she was not with him – working for him, listening to him, answering his questions and thinking of what he needed to do next.
The moment she entered a room and saw him she felt a pang of pleasure. These feelings had not just arrived, they had crept up on her, unannounced and unasked for. Was that love? She didn’t know. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he felt the same way. She saw it in his eyes when she entered his office in the mornings or joined him at a meeting amid a crowd of other people.
It was always the same look, a nod and a brief smile that told their own story. They were never alone but always together. That was all that mattered. It was easy for Charlotte to say he was taking her for a ride. She didn’t know him.
During his tour across America that summer of 1945, Eisenhower drew audiences of millions in Washington and across the nation, at concert halls, sports stadia and city parks. Mamie Eisenhower was at his side every step of the way, cheerfully wearing a succession of smart hats in the open motorcades. She looked radiant, if, as the fashion writers said snippily, in need of a little more avoirdupois on such a slender frame.
Tracking the photographs and TV newsreel film from Frankfurt, Kay at first felt proud of the way this man she had served so long, now the man in her life, had assumed the mantle of national hero. As the tour stretched into the second week doubts raised themselves. She could not shake them off. She began to wonder whether the ongoing gossip held a seed of truth – was Eisenhower unable to make up his mind between the two women in his life? Or had he simply subjugated his emotions to the media demands made upon such a popular hero to act out the role of the loyal and loving husband?
Perhaps Charlotte was right, she thought; perhaps she was being used as a wartime fling like so many others. But if so, why then had he promised to organise her American citizenship? Why had he given her rank in the US Army? It didn’t make any sense. She shouldn’t listen to any of it. She was the one. He’d said so.
On return to his Frankfurt headquarters after a hero’s welcome in the US, Ike appeared to those around him to be moody, morose and depressed. He paid little attention to the praise, the press interviews and the hints of a political career that were circulating in Washington.
“Come on, tell me – why so gloomy?” Kay asked as they waited for guests to arrive and join them for an early dinner and a game of bridge.
“I’ll tell you why,” said Ike. “Someone once sat at the desk in my office and signed off production of the Zyklon B gas, knowing that it was to be used to commit mass murder in the concentration camps. Some person or persons had eaten a good breakfast in a smart suburban house one morning, kissed his wife and children goodbye, come to the office and called a meeting to discuss the production timetable for a toxic gas that could only have had one application.”
“You’ll go mad if you think like that,” she said. “Look around you, there are guilty men everywhere. Be positive, think of the future.”
“I am being positive. I positively want to see the bastard who sat at this desk in the hot end of hell.”
Behind that comment lay the real reason for the angst that had descended on the Allied commander. As the horrors of the concentration camps and the numbers of those murdered became clear, a haunting question posed itself. Could the Allies have brought the war to an end more swiftly, should they have bombed the death camps even if by killing the prisoners they saved so many more?
Eisenhower’s job as Allied commander in charge of a defeated Germany was in many ways more complex than his wartime leadership role. At a humanitarian level, the country was on the verge of starvation, industry was at a standstill, and power supplies were infrequent.
Every morning, Kay typed out new statistics that had arrived on the teleprinter overnight, a steady stream of impersonal numbers that threatened to overwhelm the newly created Allied Control Centre and its beleaguered, chain-smoking boss. Eight million foreigners had been found working as slave labourers in factories and farms across Germany.
These displaced people were now struggling to return to their homes in countries across Europe and especially to the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war, mostly British and American, many suffering from maltreatment, had been liberated and now clamoured to be repatriated.
Somehow Germany had to be rebuilt to allow war reparations to begin, and to avoid, as Churchill remarked to Eisenhower, “Europe being shackled to a corpse.”
The problems of administering a defeated nation were as nothing compared to the complex diplomacy required when Eisenhower dealt with his Russian allies. Stalin had demanded immediate Allied withdrawal from the Soviet zone of occupation throughout Germany, while the British and Americans had countered by asking for guaranteed access to Berlin.
The name of the city burnt into every teleprinter message received at the Farben headquarters. “Berlin” became a code word for the rapidly deteriorating relations between the allies of East and West.
Kay sifted the reports when they had arrived and placed them in one of two in-trays on Ike’s desk, one marked Urgent, the other Very Urgent. It was his little joke. Everything was very urgent.
It was while doing that one morning that she saw the letter. It lay open on Eisenhower’s desk. A
silver ivory-handled letter-opener lay beside it, partially concealed by an envelope which had been carefully slit open. He had clearly been called away while reading it. The address on the envelope was written in a neat curling script she had seen so often in his in-tray. She picked up the letter and placed on top of the other mail. As she did so she saw the words at the top.
My Darling Ike
Kay paused for a second, then read the rest of the letter.
My Darling Ike
The war is over and your tour of duty is almost at an end. I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to seeing you again. We had such fun in the summer, didn’t we? As long as we remain apart even if briefly keep writing your warm and loving letters. You have told me how much you missed me and that is a blessing and a comfort.
It is wonderful and very moving to know our love is still strong and has survived the flames of war. That makes me very happy.
Someone slapped Kay hard in the face. That’s how it felt. She let the letter drop and put a hand on the desk to steady herself. She felt faint and could feel her heart thumping. She sat down on a padded chair in front of the desk. The door opened behind her. She turned to look at him.
“Kay, are you OK?” said Eisenhower.
“I’m sorry, so sorry,” she said.
“About what? What’s the matter?”
“I shouldn’t have.”
She waved a hand at the letter on the desk. Eisenhower picked it up and scanned it briefly.
“Oh, Kay,” he said. “Why did you open it?”
“I didn’t, you did. And don’t ‘Oh, Kay’ me.”
She got up smoothed her skirt. She always did this to stay calm.
“You’ve been writing love letters to your wife. You told her you loved her when you were in the states this summer.”
Eisenhower picked up the letter and waved it at her.
“I write my wife letters, not love letters. I’m married to her, for God’s sake! She’s the mother of my children. What do you want me to say to her? How’s the weather in DC and by the way I’m having a lovely time with my personal assistant here in bombed-out Germany?”
Ike and Kay Page 21