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

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

  But nothing shocked Susan Mary quite as much as the Suez Crisis. In the fall of 1956, the French, British, and Israelis bombed and invaded Egypt to retaliate against General Nasser for nationalizing the canal. They finally had to back down when the United States refused support and a Soviet ultimatum threatened missile attacks. Without much consideration for his British ally, Eisenhower put financial pressure on the British pound and considered stopping oil shipments. The crisis was felt less intensely in France, where the public’s attention was diverted by the Red Army’s crushing of the revolt in Budapest. In Britain, however, the government was split over the issue, and there was an uproar in the House of Commons, furious at having been excluded from the process. An ill and humiliated Anthony Eden went to Jamaica to recuperate, only to resign and leave the post of prime minister to Harold Macmillan on his return. During the entire month of November, Macmillan, who was then chancellor of the exchequer, repeatedly met with Winthrop Aldrich, the American ambassador to Britain, in an attempt to patch up relations with the United States.

  As it happened, Susan Mary was also at the American Embassy in London, bed-ridden but alert to the situation. She had gone to London as she often did and dined with the Salisburys on the night of her arrival. Bobbety Salisbury, a member of Eden’s cabinet, told her about the dramatic week; shaken by what she heard, she took a false step, fell down the stairs, and broke her elbow and collarbone. After a minor operation, she went to stay with her aunt, Harriet Aldrich, at the embassy.

  Susan Mary’s friends came to see her during her convalescence. Like them, she was appalled by the United States’ lack of support. More clearly than the British, she drew conclusions from the affair. “The history books will write that this was Britain’s last hurrah as an independent great power,” she wrote to Marietta on November 26.15 This was a perceptive view. A new age was beginning, during which the United Kingdom would see its boundaries limited to the shores of its small island. Mary Quant would give it color, blue jeans would trump tweeds, and “Rock Around the Clock” would drown out the strains of “Rule, Britannia.”

  May 1958

  The French political crisis of May 1958 was pure adrenaline. Susan Mary and her friends Marina Sulzberger and Elise Bordeaux-Groult set up headquarters at the restaurant Chez Marius on the place du Palais-Bourbon. Excited like a trio of marquises during the Fronde, they ordered Charente melons and watched the skies, expecting General Massu’s red beret paratroopers, who had already landed on Corsica on May 24, to drop out of them at any moment.

  Paris too was waiting with bated breath. Policemen patrolled the streets. The French wondered what exactly was happening in Algiers; Americans, unsure whether there would be a civil war, spent their days between the radio and the telephone. On the evening of May 27, Susan Mary received a man sent by Joe Alsop, who had hastily come to Paris, and exchanged some of her francs for dollars, just in case. Cy Sulzberger recommended they keep the bathtubs full. At midnight, Susan Mary went downstairs and asked the cook to stock up on food.

  On May 29, President René Coty addressed the French legislature, calling upon General de Gaulle, “the most illustrious of Frenchmen,” to take the reins of the nation. That evening, the Pattens and Joe Alsop dined with friends who lived on the avenue Gabriel. It was hot and the windows were open. Suddenly, a rumbling noise was heard outside and the dogs began to bark. The butler ordered the shutters closed. Susan Mary took off her jewelry and, leaving Bill behind, hurried into the street, pulling Joe along so insistently that he did not have time to put on his glasses. They headed toward the Elysée Palace, the official residence of French presidents. From a distance they could see the police barricades, and as they got closer, trucks full of soldiers armed with machine guns began to pull up. Joe could not hold Susan Mary back, and she ran, trying to get past the barriers. At moments like this, political drama seemed more erotic than love itself. A rumor spread through the crowd: General de Gaulle’s supporters were parading nearby on the Champs-Élysées. Joe and Susan Mary found themselves caught up in the atmosphere of a Bastille Day celebration. A hearty blond woman took Joe in her arms, singing songs from the Liberation at the top of her lungs. Car horns blared and the crowd shouted “De Gaulle au pouvoir.” On June 1, the Chamber of Deputies invested General de Gaulle with executive power. The Fifth Republic would soon be formed.

  Although Bill was as interested as Joe and Susan Mary were in the events of May 1958 and expected a positive outcome from the shift in power, his health kept him from following them into the streets to watch the coup d’état in action. The quality of his work and the fondness his supervisors felt for him (combined, perhaps, with Susan Mary’s meddling) had kept him at the embassy until the end of 1954, after which he took a job at the World Bank. At the beginning of 1958, he had to retire. Emphysema, which alternated between violent attacks and periods of remission during which he convinced himself he might recover, dictated his entire existence. With the children he was always cheerful, a wonderful father full of jokes and amusing stories. He knew how to quiet a crying baby by swinging his gold pocket watch on its chain, how to teach a little girl to waltz and a little boy to play baseball. As often as he could, he visited Billy at his new boarding school in Beachborough, England (where he and Susan Mary had sent the boy in January 1958), even attending a cricket tournament on the school’s famous pitch. When Anne came home from school, he used to welcome her by whistling the theme song from The Bridge on the River Kwai and supervise her homework. To help her learn multiplication tables he had crates of oranges delivered. “Nine times nine?” he would ask her, and Anne would gather up piles of fruit that had rolled all over the floor.

  But Bill’s charming dimples, humor, and courage could not hide his wheezing and the excess weight that began to pull at his suit jackets. Too often, his mouth twisted up in agony, his face changed color, and he would hurry, cane in hand, to his bedroom, where the indispensable oxygen tanks were stored.

  In the apartment at 54, avenue d’Iéna, where the Pattens had lived since the spring of 1956, Anne’s bedroom faced the courtyard and Billy’s room looked out over the chestnut trees on the place des États-Unis across the avenue. His room was separated from his father’s by a bathroom. A well-brought-up child never enters his parents’ bedroom without a sense of dangerous transgression, even when invited to do so. For Billy, his father’s room, with its perpetually drawn curtains, was a scary, dreadful place. The familiar clutter on the dresser and the pervasive smell of Old Spice was not enough to stave off the threatening shadows looming over the bed.

  Susan Mary also tended to pause before entering Bill’s bedroom. It seemed to her that she would rather find him dead than clutching in torture at the tubes of his rubber breathing mask. One July evening in 1958, she thought the end had come. Bill fell unconscious and was taken to Necker Hospital, where Susan Mary, Elise Bordeaux-Groult, and two nurses practiced artificial respiration on him for the entire night. When a second team came to take over their shift, Susan Mary and Elise, soaked with sweat, went to smoke a cigarette in the moonlit courtyard.

  “Elise, we’ve lost the fight. Do you think I could ask these French doctors to give Bill a strong dose of morphine?”

  “The hell you can. Just you wait.”16

  Later, as the Algerian families of wounded nationalist fighters could be heard wailing and singing in the halls, Elise, swearing like a sergeant major, dripping and determined, slowly brought Bill back to life.

  It was only a deferral. Modeling herself on her stoic husband, Susan Mary accompanied him into a slower rhythm of life. Close friends came to visit: Diane de Castellane, who had married Philippe de Noailles; Dottie Kidder, whose husband worked at the embassy; Fred Warner, a young English diplomat; and of course Joe Alsop, who crossed the ocean to see his old friend Bill. Little Anne made a wonderful nurse, and in June 1959, she accompanied her father to the United States while Susan Mary escaped to England to visit her son. Bill’s boarding of the ocean liner SS Flandre
did not go without incident, and the other passengers had to make way for the “gallant buffoon,” as he self-deprecatingly called himself. “Everyone I passed will, I feel sure, benefit from the sad brave smile I bestowed upon them and resolve to lead better, cleaner and more honourable lives.”17 He wrote playfully to his wife, “I have found nobody of either intellectual or sexual interest to arouse me from the state of lethargy I always fall into when we are separated.”18 Still in love, he reminded her that he was waiting for her letters and especially for her arrival. At the beginning of August, she joined him in Maine.

  The English Lover

  “My dear Susan Mary,” began old Sumner Welles (who had served in the State Department under Roosevelt and helped Bill get his first job with the government), “I didn’t put you beside me tonight to talk about my grandchildren, who interest neither of us. There are several things I want to find out from you, let’s begin with this, what exactly do you think of Gladwyn Jebb?”

  She remained silent.

  “Come, come, you must know about Gladwyn Jebb, I’m told that he is the Foreign Office today. What would he feel about the Khrushchev conversation?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “This is very unlike you, my dear child, you always have ideas about everything.”19

  Sumner Welles was right. Susan Mary’s silence was not due to her ignorance, but rather to the extreme caution that her host’s keen perception required. It was out of the question that the good people of Maine should start whispering behind her back the way Boston society had done a few years before. And whisper they would have had they discovered, with horrified delight, that Bill Patten’s virtuous wife, Susan Jay’s devoted daughter, Billy and Anne’s loving mother, was yet again leading a dissipated and sinful existence, and, far from being tormented, thoroughly enjoying it.

  The object of her affection was a certain Gladwyn Jebb. Born in 1900, he was appointed Britain’s ambassador to France in 1954. Those who disliked him found him tactless, pompous, and cold. Nancy Mitford adored Jebb and praised his kindness to the heavens. Nobody questioned his rectitude and great intelligence, nor did they deny him courage, lined though it was with vanity. Jebb had made a reputation for himself as British ambassador to the United Nations during the Korean War when he faced down his Soviet opponent in a televised debate that turned him into an overnight celebrity. At the time, the always envious Evelyn Waugh remarked that Jebb thought of himself as Sir Galahad and lived like the Great Gatsby. Susan Mary didn’t think much of him in those days either. “I remember Gladwyn as a cold poached egg type in Paris, and doubt if I will change my opinion,” she wrote to Duff on September 20, 1950.

  What brought about such a radical change of heart? Susan Mary must have found a certain professional and intellectual similarity between Gladwyn and Duff, even though Gladwyn was ten years younger and the two men had not been friends. Like Duff, Gladwyn loved books; Balzac and Chateaubriand were among his favorite authors. Like Duff, he thought that Britain would not be betraying its values if it turned toward Europe. Physically speaking, the two men were unalike, but they had similar careers, the same friends, the same beliefs, and the same clubs. Duff, it seemed, had branded Susan Mary’s taste in men. When it came to love, she was an Anglophile and walked on Pall Mall.

  Like Duff, Gladwyn was sentimentally stingy. He and Susan Mary had to be careful because Gladwyn’s wife, Cynthia, did not practice the same open arrangements that Duff and Diana Cooper had. To even shake the foundation of the Jebb marriage would be inadmissible. Susan Mary understood these rules and adhered to them in principle. With Duff, she had learned to make do on meager rations, to be content with crying in her pillow after merrily parting ways with her lover on a street corner.

  Even though Susan Mary’s feelings were painfully hemmed in, they provided a welcome diversion from the sad, shrunken existence caused by Bill’s illness. Before getting involved with Gladwyn, she had overcome, in part, the emotional widowhood caused by Duff’s death by leading an amusing social life with intelligent people. That time had come to an end. Susan Mary needed more.

  She took up letter writing again. Although her husband’s imminent death did not drive her to despair, her days remained full of anxiety and torment. She had been raised to show nothing of this, and maintained a calm exterior out of pride and respect for Bill, so successfully that some described her as cold. Good manners, in her book, demanded permanent cheerfulness; however, she had grown weary of lies and polite smiles and was ready for something sweeter.

  Beyond the desire to escape from daily life and the temptation to relive the joys she had experienced with Duff, there was real chemistry between Susan Mary and Gladwyn that, happily, cannot be explained. In July 1958, she felt, for no particular reason, filled with a sunny feeling and an indefinable tension every time a chance encounter caused her to cross paths with Gladwyn. A year later she would write, “I miss someone in Europe day and night.”20 She also quoted Benjamin Constant in French: “To love is to suffer, but it is also to live, and I hadn’t lived for such a long time.”21

  A Release and a Sorrow

  The summer of 1959 was a difficult time for poor Susan Mary in spite of the comfort she found in her lover’s letters. It was tiresome to navigate the demands of her quarreling husband and mother and to take part in the tightly organized social life of Northeast Harbor, which felt at times like a summer camp for rich adults.

  “We have sailing groups and rowing groups and mountain climbing groups and tennis groups, divided into different age groups. After two days here I awoke to the sound of pouring rain, the music of archangels couldn’t have sounded sweeter to me, but the pursuit of pleasure is inexorable, it appeared that on rainy days group activities continue indoors, one learns to tie knots and so on.”22

  Above all, it was painful to watch Bill suffer. He could not go long without breathing from an oxygen tank, but he had given up very little of his usual occupations. As often as possible, he invited his friends to the house, went on picnics, and loitered along the ocean’s edge to admire his wife and children swimming with baby seals. He even made a trip to Groton to show Billy the school he had so loved as a boy. (Billy was scheduled to begin studying there in the fall of 1961.) The variations of Bill’s condition annoyed Mrs. Jay, who grumbled, “One moment Bill is dying and the next he is ordering up champagne.”23 Susan Mary preferred to toast his courage and made sure her ministrations were never too visible, trying to avoid treating her husband like an invalid in front of their friends. Still, discouragement sometimes got the better of her admiration. When a famous Boston physician told her that her husband was slowly suffocating to death, she wrote, “I bitterly asked the doctor if it was worth prolonging this discomfort, stupid of me, of course one must, but it’s hard to begin again.”24 Usually quick to feel guilt, Susan Mary did not blame herself for this particular disloyalty. Still, she never fell prey to the temptation to give up the fight, and ordered a new and improved respirator, “ruinous as usual and hard to get but surely worth it?”25

  When they returned to Paris, Bill seemed to be doing better. They celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary with a dinner for twenty-four during which he made a toast to Susan Mary that brought tears to her eyes. Not long thereafter, Dr. Varay, who had become a friend, confirmed the American doctors’ diagnosis. He gave Bill three months to live. He was wrong, but by very little.

  Long expected, played and replayed in gruesome rehearsals, the end came quietly. Spring had just begun, and on March 25, 1960, Bill was having a relatively comfortable day. Susan Mary took a walk and happened to see Khrushchev, who was visiting Paris. She went upstairs to tell her husband. Anne came home from school with good grades to show her parents. All three watched their new television together. That night, Bill fell into a coma. Susan Mary called a doctor who lived in the building, but it was too late. Bill’s heart had given out and he died early on the morning of March 26, 1960.

  In the days and wee
ks that followed, the children were a great comfort to Susan Mary. Anne and Billy kept themselves from crying, putting aside their own grief to take care of their mother. During the service at the American Cathedral in Paris, everybody noticed how tenderly they looked after her. For the first time in her life, Anne wrote a letter in English: “Dear Mummy, try to bee raisonnable. Everyone Love’s vous and me the most of all.”26 When they went to bed, the children would set their alarm clock for eleven in the evening to wake up, go into their mother’s room, and make her close her desk. One of them put out the lights, and the other opened the window. Susan Mary could not sleep (Gladwyn had forbade her from taking sleeping pills), but she did not dare get out of bed and contradict the orders of her guardian angels.

  Her mother, on the other hand, was driving her crazy. Mrs. Jay never stopped making remarks in a stage whisper, taking the houseguests as witnesses, “Did you ever see anything so pitiful—so white—so fragile—so young?” Angrily, Susan Mary repeated her mother’s words to Gladwyn, noting, “None of which is true. Young, hélas I’m not—pitiful—I won’t be. Sad I am, not for Bill’s dying but for his living so unhappily these last years. I tried and failed to make him share the fear and loneliness I saw so often in his eyes. A cleverer, more tactful woman could have helped him.”27 This secret torment, largely unjustified, never left her mind at peace.

  Susan Mary was surrounded by well-wishers. Letters and flowers arrived every day from friends and relations in Paris, England, and the United States. To her great joy, Frank Giles and Bobetty Salisbury sang Bill’s praises in obituaries for the Times of London. At Easter, the Sulzbergers took her with them to the south of France for ten days, though the holiday did little for her extreme state of apathy and fatigue. Friends came up with ideas, usually advising her to live where they happened to be. Isaiah and Aline Berlin imagined she would be happy in Oxford, Gaston Palewski suggested Rome, Fred Warner recommended London (“you would grow plump and placid”28), while the Lippmans leaned toward Washington and the Bostonians lobbied for Boston. Susan Mary only felt like playing with Anne and Anne’s Labrador, or seeing Gladwyn, which was difficult. The ambassador took the time, at Susan Mary’s request, to write the children affectionate letters. In May, Joe Alsop came to see her. The following month she went to the United States for Bill’s burial in a cemetery near Boston at the top of a small hill planted with pine and birch trees.