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

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

  Bill expressed only joy and Susan Mary convinced herself it was all for the best.

  The following months went by very quietly. The noise of the city barely penetrated the peace of the Patten household. Susan Mary took a break from the embassies and cocktail parties and no longer felt responsible for the international situation, dire though it was. At the end of February, a coup in Prague, approved of by the French Communist Party, raised the fear of a Soviet invasion, with tanks rolling all the way to Paris. Nancy Mitford admitted her panic in a letter to her favorite correspondent, Evelyn Waugh. “I wake up in the night sometimes in a cold sweat. Thank goodness for having no children, I can take a pill & say goodbye. Oh dear, I’m in a state. You should see the states of all my friends here—bags packed and sandwiches cut.”3 Serious and intellectual Susan Mary spent her time going over the layette her mother had sent from Washington. Wearing pretty hand-me-down maternity clothes given by Babe Paley (French shops sold only shapeless smocks), she took walks in the Bois de Boulogne with her boxer, Charlus, before going home and lying on the sofa to dream about her baby. She already had a fairly precise idea of who it would look like.

  William Samuel Patten Jr. was born in the maternity ward of the American Hospital in Neuilly on July 4, 1948. Bill was at his wife’s side, as well as Mrs. Jay, who, unable to find a taxi, had convinced a car passing on the Champs-Élysées to take her to Neuilly for a pack of American cigarettes. The next day, Susan Mary, who had given birth under anesthesia, felt sufficiently clear-headed to receive a visit from Diana Cooper, who brought her flowers, and to write to Marietta Tree. She also wrote a long letter in answer to the one she had received from Duff. “I am glad that Diana did not have time to see Billy as although in a week or so he will look like any other baby, newborn ones are often a ludicrous caricature of what they will look like when they are much older. If Diana had happened to catch him feeling bored, as when he is woken up to be checked at by his grandmother, the only possible remark she could have made would have been that he was sitting between Mme Bidault and Mme Moch and looked it. I do wish I could draw to show you. At first I was frightened but it is OK.”4 “A lovely, very indiscreet letter,” noted Duff in his diary.5 He in turn went to the hospital on July 13 and found the young mother “very pretty and in high spirits. I also saw the baby, who looked to me very much like any other baby.”6

  Mother and child were surrounded by too much love and affection for Susan Mary to feel hurt by her lover’s cool attitude. She did not let herself criticize him, nor did she reproach him for his absence from the baptism ceremony a few months later. “Come if you can, my love, but I shall well understand if you can’t.”7 Perhaps she chose not to heed Duff’s indifference in the hope that he would change with time, that an older child would command more attention than a baby. She never failed to write about Billy in the letters she sent Duff, challenging his attention with a cheerfulness that sometimes felt slightly forced. She would pretend the baby had opinions and judgments of his own, and describe how he mastered tears and smiles, how he was taciturn but perceptive, impatient to grow and leave the restricted state of babyhood behind him. After all, didn’t his godfather, Joe Alsop, call him a wunderkind? It was quite certain that he would have an exceptional future. She told Duff that Billy would become “an emperor of the Western Empire. Pax Pattenia. Civis Americanus sum. I love you.”8

  Because mere descriptions were not enough, Susan Mary sent photographs, handprints, and footprints. The resemblance between Duff and the baby that so pleased the young mother had not gone unnoticed. After telling Evelyn Waugh that Dolly Radziwill thought the baby was “a real little Noailles,” and that Gaston Palewski thought it was the spitting image of Duff himself, Nancy Mitford continued, “I was rather bored by them, as I’m sure S-M is very virtuous, so I said ‘Well but Duff is the image of all babies.’”9 Susan Mary would have been deeply hurt by these rumors of which she remained unaware. She had told her secret only to Marina Sulzberger, the wife of the prominent journalist, and to her dear friend Marietta Tree, who was Billy’s godmother.

  Susan Mary, little Billy, and Billy’s English nanny, Miss Clark, went to Biarritz on August 11. An English sense of climate is useful to appreciate the weather of the Basque country in southwest France, with its rainy summers and green valleys. Still, the rain stops often enough, and on one of these occasions, Susan Mary, an experienced swimmer, pedaled down to the beach and flung herself into the water. Immediately, a large man in a yellow beret blew his whistle and ordered her out of the ocean, telling her that it was not safe.

  Nothing, not even the rain or the swimming ban, could cloud Susan Mary’s calm happiness. She, Billy, and the nurse were comfortably settled in a little villa surrounded by pine trees. Her friends Marie de Maud’huy and Miguel de Yturbe had welcomed her and left her to rest with the baby. Billy slept out on the wooden balcony when it was not too cold. Life was simple. The house was sparely furnished, there were few visitors, and she spent her time reading G. M. Trevelyan’s English Social History and a book by Henry Adams. Susan Mary confessed to Duff, to whom she wrote every other day, that Bill and Mrs. Jay were far from her thoughts, as was the Politburo. It had been two months since the Soviets had cut overland connections to Berlin, and the sky over the German capital was filled with planes for the airlift. A group landed every ninety minutes. Coming on the heels of the coup in Prague, this event quickened the formation of alliances and the creation of the Federal Republic in West Germany the following spring.

  Bill arrived at the beginning of September with a friend from London, effectively bringing an end to Susan Mary’s blissful solitude. Wrapped up in a pea coat, she braved the rain to go out and buy gin for the men. To be a more available hostess she decided to wean her son. “I shall miss having someone so pleased to see me five times a day,”10 she wrote. Although Bill often annoyed her, she was moved to see him take the baby to the beach on a sunny morning and was heartbroken when he told her sadly, after a visit to a doctor in Bordeaux, that he was practically an invalid and would never be able to teach Billy outdoor games. Although every breath was a trial, he almost never complained.

  Back in Paris on September 21, the Pattens spent the weekend with the Coopers at Saint-Firmin. Duff recited Keats’s ode “To Autumn” to Susan Mary in the forest of Chantilly, where the leaves were turning rusty red. It was the beginning of their favorite season and they were together again.

  From One Continent to Another

  Mrs. Jay was getting older, but she continued to cross the Atlantic every summer to visit her daughter and son-in-law, verifying for herself, like the formidable Mrs. Newsome in Henry James’s The Ambassadors, whether Parisian life had succeeded in corrupting the American innocents. She noted with bitter pleasure the considerable consumption of bourbon and the merry-go-round of marital infidelity among her daughter’s French and English friends, approving of nearly none of them. Even Marietta Tree, whom Mrs. Jay had known as a child, was criticized for having divorced. Susan Mary had to remind herself of everything she owed her mother—the financial support, the summer house in Senlis—to keep from openly expressing exasperation. The birth of Billy, to whom Mrs. Jay showed a great deal of affection, had improved things, but relations remained strained, which Susan Mary tried to make up for by being overly attentive and smiling too much. She was sure, she told Duff, that her own birth was merely due to a last-minute afterthought of her mother’s, and not to a real desire to have a second child. At heart, she felt she had been unwanted.

  In spite of having tremendous energy for a woman of seventy, Mrs. Jay no longer felt like managing money matters on her own. At the beginning of 1949, she asked Susan Mary to help her sell the Georgetown house that she had bought at the beginning of the war for her newlywed daughter. Susan Mary was reluctant to leave Paris, and she spent the entire voyage on the Queen Mary imagining Billy sick with a severe case of laryngitis and Duff in the arms of the lovely Maxime de la Falaise, his latest dalliance. Still, she was
thrilled to be going home; she had not been back in America for four years.

  In the spring of 1949, President Truman, who, to widespread astonishment, had just been elected over the Republican candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, was concluding negotiations among the United States, Canada, and ten Western European countries to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It was the first time that the United States had taken part in a peacetime military alliance beyond the American continent. Unlike most of her friends, Susan Mary had hoped that Truman would win the election. She was not dismissive of the politician who many wrote off as an impudent little man with a nasal voice. She knew better than many Washington insiders how much Europe, fearing another war, wanted protection; although she was wary of America’s tendency to fill, as she put it, the fountains of Baghdad with Coca-Cola, she supported the new administration’s diplomatic muscle flexing. America had now embraced its new status as a superpower.

  Wandering through the quiet streets of Georgetown, Susan Mary rediscovered places she had known since childhood, the unpretentious houses, and the maids sweeping doorsteps and waving hello as though she had never left. However, the little town on the banks of the Potomac was different: it had become the capital of the world. Optimism was perceptible, she wrote to Marietta. “Everyone is busy planning ahead and, unlike France, there isn’t time to look back.”11 She was also surprised that people wanted to hear about France and asked for her opinions.

  When Susan Mary had come back to Washington in 1942 after her marriage, people had soon noticed that she knew how to liven up a room without making a fuss. Since then, her skills had obviously expanded. Washington society was aware that she had made a name for herself in Paris. They knew of her connection to the Coopers and of Ambassador Caffery’s dependence on her services as a hostess. They had often seen photographs of her in Harper’s Bazaar and Life. In truth, they found her a changed woman. Her beauty was more polished. She had the kind of face that the fashion of the day preferred: black and white with a red mouth, carefully drawn eyebrows, and disciplined hair. Besides, she had become more outgoing, positively glowing. Was it Parisian dresses, motherhood, or something else that gave her such an air of contentment?

  Susan Mary was very much sought after. Her mother, always dismissive, said it was only because she was new. When asked about life in Europe, she told stories about high society. There was Donald Bloomingdale’s marriage to Bethsabée de Rothschild, the Bal des Oiseaux in Boni de Castellane’s pink palace, weekends at Ditchley, and tea with the queen at Lady Salisbury’s. She knew which couturiers European women preferred (Dior, Balmain, Balenciaga, Jacques Fath) and what people were reading (Sartre and Camus, authors she herself had discovered with interest). She had seen Genet’s Les Bonnes and the premiere of Les Fourberies de Scapin, featuring Christian Bérard’s black and gray sets (he died almost immediately afterward, practically onstage).

  For those who preferred politics, Susan Mary could talk about friends such as Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail; Walter Lippman; Raymond Aron; Cy Sulzberger of the New York Times; and Frank Giles, who was a correspondent for the Times of London. Based on conversations with political leaders, she told the Washington elite that civil peace and political stability had nearly returned in France with Vincent Auriol and Henri Queuille, and that although General de Gaulle’s supporters numbered nearly a million, Colonel Passy had assured her that his chief had no desire to become a military dictator. Things were starting to get better in France, she said. Bread was no longer rationed and the same would soon be true for gasoline. Still more astonishing, the French, who were the primary beneficiaries of American aid after the British, knew what they owed America. Maurice Petsche, the French finance minister, would soon recognize this publicly.

  She spoke so well that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wanted more and asked her to lunch at the Senate, an invitation she playfully mentioned in a letter to Duff. “I thought that would give you a laugh, and I know it will give Bill a sleepless night. I will be prudent and precise and only exaggerate when necessary.”12 In fact, she was quite proud of the stir she was causing. One evening at Ditchley the previous year, her friend Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. had observed, “You and Marietta have certainly got around plenty since I was cutting in on you in Northeast Harbor.”13 It was true. Both had really come a long way. Marietta, however, had had the help of a wealthy husband, whereas Susan Mary had relied only on herself—her intelligence, curiosity, and energy. She was not displeased with the person she had become, and rightly so. If she had kept something of the candid excitement of a Jamesian heroine, she had also, unlike Isabel Archer or Daisy Miller, survived Old Europe. She had even, modestly but undeniably, been a success.

  “Write to us all, Nanny and Duff and me, we love you in that order.”14 Bill’s appeal worried his wife. Had Duff made an incautious remark? On her return to France at the end of March, she was relieved to find that nothing had changed. Duff and Bill had seen each other regularly during her absence, as they always had. In April she set off for England, where she made a round of visits to the dukes: Portland, Rutland, and Devonshire. The latter gave her a tour of his garden, sparing not a single daffodil, showing Henry VII’s prayer book, and quivering with mock rage when two nuns (“Papists!” he shouted) wandered onto one of the park’s tree-lined paths. Derbyshire, green and gray with grazing sheep and Friesian cows, reminded her of Jane Austen. Bill had just finished treatment in a London clinic. He joined her, and together they went on a tour of Ireland that took them to Dublin, County Limerick, and Derrynane, a town on the southwest coast; surrounded by camellias and magnolias, they spent three days there, during which Susan Mary did not write to Duff.

  She stayed in Senlis all summer and did nothing much the following autumn because she had been expecting a child since spring and suffered from anemia and back problems. Anne was born at the American Hospital on January 20, 1950, smiling and lovely from the start. This time, the gossips had nothing to say.

  Pretty Mrs. Jungfleisch

  Pretty Mrs. Jungfleisch was deeply concerned about the present state of the world.15

  —Nancy Mitford, The Blessing

  One March evening in 1950, Bill and Susan Mary were having a martini before their guests’ arrival. Susan Mary waited for Bill to start reading the paper. She lit a cigarette, and her heart began pounding.

  “I had lunch with Duff and a friend of his today at the Tour d’Argent.”

  “What friend?”

  “Oh, one of Duff’s partners.”

  “What was he called? Annersley?”

  “Probably. You know how Duff mumbles names.”

  “Was he amusing?”

  “No, rather deadly, we talked about the movie business.”16

  The bustle in the front hall brought the conversation to an end. It had not gone too badly.

  Although Susan Mary was an expert at the polite kind of lying through omission that is part of good manners, she was clumsier when it came to outright lies. Duff was indeed chairman of the French branch of Alexander Korda’s film production company; however, he would have never mixed business and lunch with a beautiful woman. Susan Mary and Duff had been at Lapérouse in a private room, where courtesans, testing their diamonds, had scratched their names on the mirrors like schoolchildren etching theirs on a desk with a pocketknife. Duff had a taste for the Belle Époque and loved the formality of grand restaurants and the atmosphere of the maisons closes, which, much to his regret, really had been closed. The combination of delights permitted by establishments like Larue, the Café de Paris, or Lapérouse suited him perfectly. “We were very happy,” he noted in his diary that day, using one of his favorite euphemisms.17 Unfortunately, on the way out, Susan Mary ran into a friend who was coming to dinner that very evening. She preferred to mention her lunch outing rather than chance an embarrassing remark in front of Bill. “I fear that I shall never be a skilled mistress, having lunch with you is still to me a desperate adventure.”18 Nevertheless, she took
similar risks several times a month, meeting her lover in restaurants or in his apartment on the rue de Lille. A passionate letter followed every encounter, while Duff calmly noted that she was far more smitten than he was, and that he didn’t deserve her. “I love her too, very deeply and tenderly. I am not ‘in love’ with her, although there is nothing I wouldn’t do for her. I owe her so much.”19 Being in his sixties (“I hate my age”) had not slowed his appetite for seduction or his desire for women. Durably attached to his mistresses, he cheated on all of them with a complete absence of scruple and tact. His only concern seemed to be a constant search for pleasure.

  Susan Mary was wise enough not to probe her lover’s true feelings too deeply or overanalyze their relationship. She knew she was loved, but she did not want to know where exactly she figured on Duff’s list. When she heard rumors about supposed mistresses that she thought were untrue, she would tease him, purposefully getting it wrong. As to other, more dangerous women, she kept silent. She was convinced of being far less glamorous than his English girlfriends, whom she imagined splendid and sophisticated. Blaming herself for having “the bourgeois mentality of the Rangoon governor’s wife,”20 she felt fortunate to have ensnared a god. Did she realize passion was on her side only? If she did, she would have deemed it fair. Beside their secret bond, she was grateful to Duff for what he brought to her life: laughter, tenderness, and, above all, privileged access to his intimate knowledge of history and literature, two spheres he belonged to. In a moment of poor judgment she even claimed, “You are a better writer than old Balzac.”21 Duff guided her reading choices and they talked about them together. She may have exaggerated her ignorance, but she never feigned the joy she felt upon making it through difficult texts or discovering forgotten swaths of history.