by Gail Sheehy
Yet Kissinger had his own dark anxieties, tinged with paranoia and insecurity. I picked up the signal when his hand reached into the bowl of potato chips. Clay had turned up his nose when I’d set out this pedestrian dish, but I’d read that Kissinger fancied such comfort food when he was tense. He asked Kay, “What’s the matter, don’t you think we’re going to be reelected?”
Kay assured him that she was reading the same polls that he was reading. “I haven’t the slightest doubt that Nixon will be reelected,” she said without inflection.
It was Kay’s turn to pry information out of her dear Henry. “We all know Nixon loathes the press. If he is elected . . .”
“When,” Kissinger interjected.
“. . . will he try to get even with the Post for running the Pentagon Papers?”
“Wouldn’t you?” Kissinger exclaimed, followed by a gravelly chuckle to indicate he was only needling her. He wanted to make it clear that he was never part of any actual discussions with the president that related to threats (this statement by Kissinger was later revealed as false), but that he knew Nixon wanted to get even with a lot of people following the election.
Clay asked the direct question that Kay could not. “The president already threatened the Times with criminal prosecution. How far would he be willing to go to muzzle the Post?”
That gave Kissinger an opening to warn his friend Kay. “As you might imagine, he is most antagonistic toward the Post. Whether true or not, he believes the paper has it in for him.”
It wasn’t hard to read the tension in Kay Graham’s face. She smiled to cover it and lightly put a lid on the topic with a quip. “I know I can count on you, Henry, to appease his paranoia.”
This was when I first began to understand that power brokers like these are symbiotic. They cling to each other like lichen to a rock. They feed off each other. They cannot do without each other. For Kay and Henry to meet and talk over a small private dinner party in Manhattan, beyond the eavesdroppers lurking behind every column in the Capitol, was an opportunity not to be missed. That night I saw how Clay set the stage to gain context for a story that he suspected would eventually shake the country.
Joe Kraft bounded down the stairs and immediately began tracking Kissinger like a bloodhound. He brought up a little-noticed story that had appeared in the Post about a month before. “Tell us, Henry, why would a gang of Cubans wear surgical gloves to visit the Democratic National Committee Headquarters?” With a sly smile, Joe asked, “Were they planning to perform an operation?”
He was referring to the first Watergate story, given a giant eighty-three inches of copy in the Post on June 18, 1972. Readers scarcely paid attention. But it had awakened suspicions in Joe and Clay.
Kissinger froze on hearing Joe’s question and muzzled himself with another fistful of chips. “Bungled burglars,” he mumbled finally. “Cuban exiles, you know, crazies.”
I thought I caught Kay’s eyes shoot Joe a warning look. Joe backed off. Unbeknownst to me, but not to Clay and Joe, two “kids” on the Post, as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were called around the newsroom, had begun digging up evidence against the president. They were just beginning to burrow into the cracks behind the bizarre account of a break-in at the Watergate by a motley crew carrying a stack of sequential one-hundred-dollar bills, forty rolls of unexposed film, and bugging devices that they were attempting to plant behind ceiling panels in the office of the head of the Democratic Party election campaign. Cops had interrupted them at gunpoint. The revered Times had been out in front on the Pentagon Papers story. On the Watergate story, the scrappy Post was way ahead, but dangerously alone.
Kissinger, who looked like a scared rabbit, suddenly underwent a change of political coloration worthy of a prize chameleon. The superhawk began to drop clues about Nixon’s obsession with enemies, which Nixon suspected surrounded him on all sides. Even he, Kissinger said, was kept at arm’s length because of his liberal leanings.
“Liberal leanings!” It escaped my mouth before I could call the words back. Kissinger gave a forgiving chuckle. He reminded us that he had been an adviser to “Nelson” (Rockefeller, the liberal Republican former governor of New York), as if that was where his heart of hearts resided. But things being the way they were now, his best efforts went toward restraining Richard Nixon’s more exaggerated personal—well, he didn’t say neuroses but managed to imply it by emphasizing the word personal—suspicions of hostility.
(Sweet irony: In June 1973 we would learn that Kissinger himself masterminded the bugging of many of the hundreds of reporters and others on the president’s enemies lists, which included none other than Joseph Kraft.)
David Frost was late. Oozing charm and apologies, he soon had us roaring with laughter at his subtle British parodies of guests on his show who were full of themselves while quite unaware of how foolish they appeared. His date was Diahann Carroll. She was ravishingly beautiful, the first African American female star of a popular TV series, Julia.
Kissinger couldn’t take his eyes off Diahann. He fancied himself a “secret swinger” who famously boasted, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Diahann disported herself on the fender in front of the fireplace, confident of her allure. She had left a marriage and cast off an affair with Sidney Poitier, leaving a vacancy that was about to be filled by Frost.
Clay gave me the nod; time to sit down to dinner. I headed for the kitchen. The swinging door was blocked. “Angeles?” Again, she protested that all was under control. “I’m coming in—to help.” I leaned on the door and stumbled in, immediately chagrined to see that she had the twenty precious Texas tenderloins all spread out on baking dishes and ready for heating up. I took a fork to test their fabled tenderness. The tines trembled but did not penetrate. I tried puncturing another chop from the top. No give. I picked up a serving fork and stabbed the damn thing. It flipped off the table onto the floor where it landed like a brick.
Ohmygod, these babies are still frozen! “Angeles, didn’t you take them out five hours ago?”
“You tell me five minutes.”
“Five hours.”
“Minutes.”
The absence of remorse in her face gave it away. Angeles was a kitchen saboteur. She would now have the pleasure of gloating while I seated ten hungry people around the table and tried to make small talk as we snacked on leftover pâté. I would have to tell Clay. Fight-or-flee reactions collided in my stomach. I felt overcome by the fever of failure. It was as bad as when a cover story comes in a holy mess at the last moment before deadline. “Get me rewrite!” is the classic panic call. I beckoned for Clay to come into the kitchen.
“There’s been a communications problem . . . we need a total redo on dinner.” Huddling in the kitchen, we ran through one miserable alternative after another. Then I hit on a solution.
“Peking duck!”
“Peking duck?” Clay repeated dumbly.
“I can call Mr. Chow’s downstairs. They’ll deliver chop chop.”
“Perfect!”
Clay was already working out the new scenario. It would be a tribute to Henry, as if we’d planned it all along. “He can replay his trip to China—he’ll love it.”
As it turned out, the duck was a great hit. Kissinger was euphoric as he traced his triumph in China straight through to dessert. Kay Graham appeared charmed. But before she left, she confided to Clay that from the subtext of Kissinger’s remarks, she had the feeling that a High Noon situation was developing. Could the White House be planting false leads intending to draw her reporters down a road to discredit the paper? Clay promised her he would keep his eyes and ears open.
David Frost was elated by the evening. He had ingratiated himself with Kissinger by hanging on his every word, angling for a future interview with the president. He and Diahann let me know they were about to be engaged. Gushing on, they said they couldn’t think of a more perfect place to have an engagement dinner party than in our apartment. If only they had known about the beef on
the floor and the emergency duck.
Upstairs, alone together at last, I moaned, “Oh, God, Clay, can you forgive me?”
“Forgive you?” He threw his arms around me and lifted me off my feet. “You pulled a rabbit out of the hat!”
“You mean, a duck.”
“You made the evening look as easy as duck soup. I’m crazy for you!” He led me to our bed and moved a hand up the slit of the Hepburn dress. I’ll never forget how quickly he changed from the big game hunter into a most tender lover.
THE REVERBERATIONS FROM THAT DINNER PARTY continued for years. Clay suspected all along that Kissinger had been behind the campaign to smear the Post. The ultimate personalized threat was voiced by Attorney General John Mitchell to a Post reporter: “Katie Graham is going to get her tit caught in a big fat wringer.” Clay assigned Aaron Latham to write the cover piece for New York. Latham followed Woodward and Bernstein as they tracked down the story of their generation: “How ‘The Washington Post’ Gave Nixon Hell.”
On the morning of October 10, 1972, the lead story in the Post established that the Watergate bugging incident was part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage directed by top officials of the Nixon government and, by implication, the president himself. It took two more years for the American public to catch up and for Nixon to be impeached.
Frost finally got his audience with Nixon five years later, in 1977. Twelve sessions over four weeks. He asked Clay to be one of his advisers. After the session on the Vietnam War, Frost was downcast. Nixon’s early paranoia and mistakes had not been revealed. Approaching the final interview, Frost was desperate to get “the confession.” He asked Clay to fly out to give him some insights for the follow-up interview. Late into the night at the Beverly Hilton, Clay and I sat with David and his vivacious new girlfriend, Caroline Cushing Graham, my colleague from the Trib, until finally Clay urged David to be “less British, less polite.”
“Ask him straight out if he’s ready to admit he made a mistake.”
Frost asked Nixon if he believed the president could decide to do something illegal if he thought it was in the best interests of the nation.
“Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal” was Nixon’s stunning reply. Having struck gold at last, Frost was keen to extend the conversation. He sat forward: “You mean as a matter of course?”
Nixon nailed it: “Exactly.”
Later in the interview, Nixon confessed that he regretted that he had resigned. By doing so, said the man who could not admit a mistake, “I impeached myself.”
Frost had scored one of the “Greatest Interviews of the 20th Century,” according to the Guardian newspaper. I came to realize that Clay was a master catalyst, able to influence culture in ways that were not obvious.
David would die prematurely in 2013. Two thousand people were invited to his memorial service, held with full pageantry in Westminster Abbey as the bells pealed out across London. The royals came to pay their respects to a working-class man who was honored like a king. David would have loved (and laughed) to see that the man who elevated television to a respected repository for history had his flagstone set in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner, close to Shakespeare’s.
Clay and Gail toasting David Frost’s triumphant Nixon interviews, 1977.
CHAPTER 18
Stepping off the Pedestal
WITH THE COMING OF SUMMER in my thirty-sixth year, I felt a surge of impetuous energy to contend with the battering of time. If even earth and sea are subject to death, as Shakespeare tells us, then bring on the waves! I had always envied how effortlessly Clay bodysurfed. As the sweet honeyed days of summer came, I felt able to dive into the sprawling explosive surf on the day after a storm and let my body be tossed about like a toothpick.
My turbulent love affair with Clay had begun five years before. Five years since the silent kiss as he pulled pages of my Bobby Kennedy story out of the typewriter. Three years of living together. And where were we? Can love hold back “the swift foot of time”? That summer of 1973, Clay rented a larger summer cottage for us in East Hampton. It was a gift to me. I could stay out there with my daughter and write. Maura was now nine. Clay would join us for weekends. I will never forget the splash of earliest morning sun on the tile floor of the large funky living room. It lit the inside windows in both Maura’s and my bedrooms at either end of the big room. Together, we would emerge and throw open the glass doors and run barefoot over the dewy grass to stick our toes in a warm inlet of Georgica Pond.
After breakfast we would walk down to the ocean beach early enough to pick out some flounder and maybe even blowfish from the squirming, honking, battling catch in the huge nets dragged ashore by the last of the seine haulers. We might go to one of the local farms reddening with strawberries—pick all you can eat—then go home to make shortcake. I would write while Maura read books until it was Friday and time to drive to the airport and wait for “Big Daddy,” as we jokingly called Clay, to emerge from an improbably small commuter plane. On Saturday mornings Clay always drove with Maura to pick up the papers. He took the New York Times. She appreciated that he showed equal respect for her choice of reading material, that is, comic books.
She and I planted a vegetable garden and raced the rabbits to the lettuce every day. Joe Kraft might drop by in late morning to kibitz about politics. Clay would drive over to Truman Capote’s house, dreading to find the once-beautiful boy genius, now paunchy and bald, in a boozy haze and mumbling excuses for why he couldn’t finish a cover story. Shana Alexander, one of the first female journalists to become a big name on television, would often invite us for lunch with an eclectic cast of writers, musicians, and politicians. We would all laugh over the running sketch on Saturday Night Live where Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd would parody Shana, as the feisty liberal on CBS’s 60 Minutes, going head-to-head with James J. Kilpatrick, as the sexist conservative. Aykroyd, in the Kilpatrick role, would begin his crude rebuttal with “Jane, you ignorant slut.”
Given these manifold delights, why did my feelings of unease persist?
We were a “let’s pretend” family. The ’60s had spawned so many options, marriage was seen as unnecessary and definitely unhip. A lot of people we knew were experimenting with “open marriage.” I saw that as a dispensation for adultery, and those couples usually erupted in savage jealousies. Divorce was as popular as a new sitcom; it seemed everyone was trying it. Having been through the hell of divorce, Clay and I were both wary about being burned again. We were deeply attached emotionally and professionally and drawn to each other sexually as if by magnetic force. Yet marriage was too big a leap. So we just made it up as we went along.
Not by coincidence, the piece I was working on for New York’s Valentine issue was called “Can Couples Survive?” For the story I interviewed Dr. Ray L. Birdwhistell, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s famous Annenberg School. Birdwhistell was aptly named for a happily divorced pioneer in the study of nonverbal communication between men and women. He had left the nest of his conventional wife, he told me, when women’s liberation made him a “free bird.” His theory was that “the closed dyad”—couples who expected all their emotional needs to be met through the spouse contract—was lethal to prolonged love and good sex. Both partners should accept the need to make valid social contracts with other people.
It made me look at Clay dispassionately. Here was a handsome, magnetic, heterosexual bachelor-about-town in his midforties. At the office he was surrounded by comely young staffers. After dark he was in demand to fill the single-man quota at uptown dinner parties given by “social x-rays,” as Tom Wolfe memorably labeled the spare-ribbed ladies of a certain age who hungered for the attentiveness no longer paid them by their bored philandering husbands.
For my part, I had three lives, which only occasionally overlapped: Maura’s mother; Clay’s partner and hostess; and Gail the writer and breadwinner. Every day I felt as if I were running a minimarathon
, dashing past Clay’s office with my story unfinished in time to pick up my daughter from school or have dinner-bath-and-books with her before I had to be dressed to the nines as Clay’s partner for the evening’s events. Clay often said, “I can’t get enough of you.” There wasn’t enough of me to go around.
And I wasn’t crazy about the prospect of a closed dyad either. I felt eager to stretch. As a single woman who attracted flirtations from other smart and sexy men, what was I missing?
Maura’s father and I had worked out a civilized, even cordial, relationship as coparents. We agreed not to argue about possessions or custody or holiday calendars. We realized that we had a responsibility that superseded all those issues and it would last for our lifetimes. I assumed full custody but shared our daughter with Albert every other weekend and alternate holidays and for two weeks in the summer. It didn’t occur to me to ask for compensation for working as his PHT (Putting Hubby Through) partner. Only fifteen years later did courts consider restitution for PHT services through expanded alimony or a division of property rights in the wife’s favor.
Pride kept me from asking for alimony, and Albert contributed only child support. I made a conscious effort to sideline the hurt and anger and to put on a happy face whenever our paths crossed. Those repressed feelings would later erupt during Maura’s adolescence. But for now, we concentrated on smoothing the jolt of transitions and sharing the daily decisions that would nurture a child we both cherished.