American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167)

by De Margerie, Caroline; Fitzgerald, Frances (INT)

  In those days Joe was in top form. He was pleased with the progressive shift in Washington on domestic issues, particularly civil rights, and he was uncharacteristically optimistic about U.S. prospects in the Cold War. Even while writing his weekly columns he managed to finish a book on one of his other great interests, the archaeology of the Greek Bronze Age. His mood, however, changed with the growing disaster in Vietnam. He had always been a hawk on Vietnam—once taking credit for having invented the “domino theory” and always pounding on in his column about the need for an expansion of the war. Some, only partly in jest, said that Lyndon Johnson had committed regular troops to the war because he was afraid of Alsop. Having served with General Claire Chenault in the China-Burma theater during World War II, Joe saw Vietnam through the lenses of the war with Japan. Throughout the sixties he made one or two trips to Vietnam every year, meeting only with the ranking generals, flying in their aircraft and reporting that the United States was winning the war. He refused to hear any evidence to the contrary, even when it came from well-informed old friends. As time went on, he grew more and more adamant. At dinner at the Alsop house in the mid-sixties, I and a friend of mine had the temerity (and the stupidity) of youth to challenge one of his sweeping pronouncements. He roared so that his ancestral portraits shook on the walls. It got worse. As American casualties mounted and there was still no light at the end of the tunnel, he accused fellow journalists and antiwar congressmen of seeking an American defeat. (Privately he even accused one of them of working for the KGB.) His years of reporting on Vietnam were nothing but ashes, and somewhere he knew it. The Alsop dinner parties became nightmares, with Joe drinking too much and Susan Mary sitting in anguished silence at her end of the table.

  Susan Mary bore the brunt of Joe’s anger and frustration. She never said a word about it except to Marietta and perhaps to one or two other intimate friends. In company she defended Joe and even seemed to endorse his untenable positions about the war. I thought of her as a victim of the Stockholm syndrome. How cruel he was to her I find out only now, but I saw the consequences. Her hard-won self-confidence disappeared, and she put up a brittle front where it used to be: anything but appear pathetic or less than a great conversationalist. She tried so hard that even her voice sounded unnatural. The marriage lasted until 1973—far too long—but clearly she loved Joe, for she continued to see him frequently afterwards. Both of them were much better off as friends.

  Susan Mary moved into a Watergate apartment and in its anonymous surroundings began to make a new life for herself. In 1975 she published an edited version of her letters to Marietta from Paris 1945–1960. The book showed off her wit and style, and now that the world she wrote about has disappeared, Atlantis-like, into the distant past, it reads even better than it did at the time. There’s a nugget for historians on almost every page. The book was well received, and encouraged, Susan Mary took up writing in earnest and published three books of history within a decade. When her sight failed to the point where she could no longer do extensive research, she became a contributing editor of Architectural Digest and wrote about architecture, gardens and interior design. She worked hard and loved it.

  Susan Mary’s mother died in 1977 at the age of ninety-eight and, as de Margerie writes, unlamented. Even in her last years as an invalid the old lady never stopped talking—or making it clear to everyone that she was the center of the universe and that only her wishes counted. By then Susan Mary was actually able to say that she found her mother “tiresome.” (She told me her mother was 103, and I believed her, not realizing the number was a metaphor.) In any case, Susan Mary finally inherited the house she loved in Northeast Harbor, Maine. Bought by her mother sometime after the 1947 fire devastated Bar Harbor, the house had been built by Charles William Eliot, the famous late-nineteenth-century president of Harvard. A white shingled house on the top of a bluff overlooking the sea, it had well-proportioned rooms full of light and air. Susan Mary painted it in pale colors and furnished the living room with comfortable chintz-covered sofas and reading chairs. A wide window opened onto a view of islands and sailboats tacking across the Western Way. She also inherited a house in Georgetown—well described by de Margerie—and resumed a hectic social life. In the early 1990s I stayed with her often there on reporting trips. She’d grill me about the person I’d just interviewed or tell me what she’d learned about a famous house before rushing off to a dinner party on Embassy Row. She had more time in Maine, where life was relatively simple. My husband, a newspaper man, amused her, and when we went for a walk or dined with her, she would tell us wonderful stories about figures like Sumner Welles or about Bar Harbor when she and Marietta were young. (If only I had written them down!)

  In her last summer in Maine I read to her. As the summer drew to a close, we were finishing Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin when I came across a paragraph quoting her description of the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, in what Isaacson said was her “delightful portrayal of the period” in Yankees at the Court.* I know she was thrilled, but she wouldn’t say so. Similarly, were she alive today, I think she would be thrilled by An American Lady. She would have to admire the depth of de Margerie’s research and the clarity of her style—and perhaps she would even have to admit to the acuity of de Margerie’s insights into the main character. Still, because she was trained not to take center stage, she would never say so.

  * To Marietta from Paris 1945–1960, pp. 42–43.

  * To Marietta from Paris, 1945–1960, p. 93.

  † Ibid., p. 307.

  ‡ Ibid., p. 310.

  * To Marietta from Paris, 1945–1960, p. 183.

  * As quoted in Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. r337.

  I

  The Jays

  John Jay

  Benjamin Franklin and John Jay made a good team. Wearing fur hats and cotton hose, Franklin wooed Parisian salons that delighted in his rustic appearance and the tremendous eloquence he displayed in the cause of the American colonies’ independence. John Jay was less of a charmer and did not much like the French despite his French ancestry (his grandfather Pierre-Auguste Jay, a Huguenot, had fled religious persecution and settled in America around the end of the seventeenth century). But he was an experienced diplomat who sheltered behind his government’s instructions when he needed to and calmly disregarded them when he felt he knew best. He successfully negotiated the Treaty of Independence, which was signed by him, Franklin, and John Adams in Paris on September 3, 1783. This diplomatic feat won him the distinction of being one of the Founding Fathers of the young American Republic, and made him the first chief justice of the United States.

  No other member of the Jay family would match John Jay’s prestige and national importance; nevertheless, thanks to him, the Jays found themselves at the summit of America’s aristocracy of merit, a position they would maintain throughout the nineteenth century and that their twentieth-century descendant Susan Mary would view with pride and a sense of obligation. The men of the family studied law at Columbia, Yale, or Harvard before becoming bankers or lawyers distinguished by restraint and lack of greed. They were occasionally sent on diplomatic missions and they all had a sense of civic responsibility, often serving on hospital or university boards or taking part in local assemblies. Several of these quiet, law-abiding citizens became known as outspoken abolitionists. A number of them chose to live in New York City or in the Hudson River Valley, where the most respectable and affluent families owned estates as vast as those of Virginia planters.

  Wealth, necessary for leading a comfortable life in public service, came through marriage to powerful clans such as the Bayards, the Van Cortlandts, the Livingstons, and the Astors. In 1876, Augustus Jay, John Jay’s great-grandson, married Emily Kane, the great-granddaughter of John Jacob Astor, who had once owned entire swaths of the island of Manhattan. Attractive Emily, rumored to put rouge on her nipples like a saloon girl, made
a hit in Paris, where her husband took a position as a diplomat soon after their marriage. Two sons were born: Peter Augustus in 1877 and Delancey in 1881.

  Diplomatic Wanderings

  Peter followed in his father’s footsteps, attending Harvard and choosing to become a diplomat. President Theodore Roosevelt, a friend of his parents, appointed him to his first post in October 1902, recommending that the young man take his job seriously.

  The young man obeyed, although he never forgot to have a pleasant time. He served in Paris, Constantinople—where he played polo on the shores of the Bosporus—Tokyo, and Cairo. A few months before war broke out in Europe, he was sent to Rome with his wife and daughter.

  It would be unseemly to speculate whether Peter’s marriage to Susan Alexander McCook, which took place in 1909 in New York, had been a love match. Susan came from a family famous for having sent seventeen men to fight on the Union side in the Civil War. Unlike her forebears, she had little taste for adventure or affection for daredevils and hotheads. She was a sensible and composed woman who soon became her husband’s best adviser. Two years after the wedding, their first daughter, Emily, was born. Seven years later, on June 19, 1918, in Rome, they had their second daughter, Susan Mary.

  After six years in Rome, the world tour picked up again: El Salvador for a couple of insipid months, then Bucharest. Peter’s job was to defend the interests of American companies exploiting Romanian petroleum, a resource whose production had taken off after a difficult period during the war. In his free time, he escorted the Romanian queen, Marie, a granddaughter of both Czar Alexander II and Queen Victoria, who was often photographed as a Byzantine icon dripping with jewels or as an operetta peasant girl in an embroidered blouse and head scarf. They spoke French together and rode at dawn in the woods of the queen’s country estate at Sinaia or along the tree-lined paths of Cismigiu Gardens in Bucharest.

  Meanwhile, Peter Jay’s family kept to their residence, a massive and graceless house saved only by a fountain-ornamented garden in which Susan Mary toddled about, a sturdy little girl dressed in white cambric, holding on tightly to the hand of her older sister. Emily looked every inch the perfect child with her blue tunic and ringlets.

  In 1926, Peter Jay was sent to Argentina as ambassador. The entire family liked Buenos Aires. At fifteen, Emily was finally free of her governess and not yet of marriageable age. She took guitar lessons and invited her friends to parties at the embassy. Susan Mary was still too little to join in, and had to be satisfied by stolen glimpses of the pink and gold fetes where young girls, voluptuous and innocent, danced with one another.

  One evening in December, not long before Christmas, Emily complained of a stomachache. She was taken to the hospital, where she underwent an appendectomy. When Emily returned home, the two sisters were kept apart. Susan Mary was shut up in her bedroom as if she had been naughty. Unhappy and bored, she could hear sounds, doors opening and closing, whispering in the corridors. Her nanny stopped scolding her. Her mother did not come to supervise her evening prayers. On December 20, silence gripped the house as night fell. The following day, the noises began again. It seemed as though the house were full of people moving the furniture around. Were they getting the place ready for a ball, Susan Mary wondered, or perhaps packing up? Only Emily could tell and Emily could not be asked.

  Shortly thereafter, on December 30, the Pan America set sail for New York. On board were a coffin, two devastated parents, and a miserable little girl.

  Alone

  Immediately after Emily’s death, Peter retired from diplomatic service and did not seek another occupation. He and his wife concentrated on their loss rather than on their remaining daughter. They lived in Washington and often spent time in Maine, where they had a house in Bar Harbor on Mount Desert Island. They rarely went out. Peter had his books and a worsening cough; Susan had a household to run and orders to give. They pretended to be busy, hiding their unutterable grief from each other.

  Susan Mary knew that her parents, her father especially, made a sincere effort to take an interest in her work and play. But they always seemed distracted, and their gaze would drift away. She tried not to dwell on this, and did her best to fill up the space left vacant by Emily’s absence. Because docility seemed to be the key to the adult universe, she gave up whims and tantrums as though they were toys she had outgrown. Formerly a headstrong child, she became yielding and considerate. The love of the young and humble can assume heroic proportions. In dedicating herself to her parents’ consolation, Susan Mary was proffering tenderness that she knew would have no effect. Emily’s name was never spoken, and Susan Mary learned to keep silent.

  The lonely little girl took solace in books. She also liked playing on the shores of the icy-cold ocean, which she could see from her bedroom window in Maine. In 1932, at age fourteen, she was sent to Foxcroft, a girls’ boarding school in Virginia with a vague but admirable program of sport (riding especially), etiquette, and academic studies. She applied herself as she always had, and graduated with honors in June 1935. She had made a few friends, acquired a measure of confidence, and perfected her sense of discipline. She was ready to make her entrance into the world and do what was expected of her. Almost.

  II

  On the Edge of Life

  Night and Day

  So the season started. A seemingly innocent notion, the season concealed a strictly regulated machine that dictated social interaction among upper-class children, ensuring that when the time came, they would be paired off according to the combined laws of attraction and the maintenance of wealth and tradition. The Great Depression had done little to reduce the expense or simplify the complexity of the rites, which remained nearly identical to those practiced in England, apart from the presentation at court.

  Still, it was not an entirely disagreeable system. The mothers kept a watchful eye, the fathers paid the bills, and the children danced the night away. It was a charmed moment in life: pleasure was the only duty, and choosing among dozens of engraved invitations the only task. There were parties in blue and white tents on the sweeping lawns of Long Island, teas in Boston, dinner dances in Philadelphia, and long evenings in New York that lasted until the pale light of dawn beckoned to bed. Night was no longer the opposite of day but the very stuff of existence. Flung into a whirlwind of pleasure, pretty debutantes flew from one city to another, floating from the first peppery sip at cocktail hour to the last drink in a nightclub. Clad in satin, cigarette in hand, they waited for love, listening to songs by Cole Porter and the heart-rending wail of Benny Goodman’s clarinet. The music seemed made for them, as did the summer nights, when champagne-tinted moonlight cast shadows into which they could stray with foolish young men.

  The carousel whirled faster, then shuddered to a stop. Girls had at most three seasons to find a companion for the rest of their days. The stakes were high. Marriage was the passport to independence, the only serious career available. Beneath many debutantes’ cool exteriors flowed intense undercurrents of anxiety.

  Susan Mary knew the game and accepted the rules. She was not quite sure what she wanted and did not have a plan, just a few dreams. She was not as ambitious as Marietta Peabody, though she admired her friend’s blond sex appeal, patrician allure, and the bold declaration that she was looking for a man with fortune and power. Less pleasure-bent as well, Susan Mary hoped to find some use for her quick mind and intelligence. Although her character and ideas had not pushed her to rebel or to relinquish the privilege and security of her upbringing, she could not imagine a future limited to a husband, a nursery full of children, a nice garden, and bridge parties, even if the china was from Sèvres and the dresses came from Paris. It may have been her genes, or the result of her childhood abroad: she was fascinated by the outside world. She had a strong interest in history and a taste for current events.

  Her entry onto the scene went smoothly. Life had dealt her several winning cards, including her name and her position, and she had improved the state of her h
and by acquiring a social ease that was entirely her own creation. She had fought down timidity, although the death of her father in October 1933, leaving her with a mother who showed little affection, had not helped. Spurred on by a romantic desire to see and conquer the world, she had forced herself to be outgoing, to gain poise and composure. Her beauty developed, hesitantly at first, but as she lost weight, her features grew more refined. She wore her smooth, dark hair parted on the side or in the middle, in gentle, shoulder-length waves; with a lock on her forehead, prettiness eluded her. She was always carefully dressed, and although she rarely laughed, her serious and inquisitive gaze added to her charm.

  Unlike some girls who were interested only in chasing men, Susan Mary also cultivated friendships with other women. There was Marietta, whose grandfather, the Reverend Endicott Peabody, had founded the famous Groton School, thus involuntarily contributing to his granddaughter’s popularity and assuring her an unending flow of young men from girlhood onward; Pauline Louise du Pont, the amusing heiress of the fabulously wealthy family that would commercialize the first nylon stockings in 1939; gentle, sweet Elise Duggan, who wrote short stories in secret and attracted men without even trying; and Dottie Robinson, who kept her homes open to guests both in New York and at Henderson House, a crenellated white mansion built in homage to her family’s Scottish origins. In the company of these young women, Soozle (as Susan Mary was known to her friends) played bridge, golf, and tennis, went shopping, and had her hair and nails done. In 1938, she spent more time in New York than in Washington, volunteering at the YWCA and taking classes at Barnard, nothing too demanding. Serious business began at the end of the afternoon. The young men Susan Mary knew worked hard during the day—times were tough, even for Ivy League graduates—but in the evening, they went about their social pursuits with as much energy as they had put into work. Her friends were Jimmy Byrne and William Breese, who were both studying diplomacy in Washington; Curtis Prout, a medical student; and the extremely handsome Stewart Rauch, an assistant to a Democratic senator from Virginia.