by Garry Wills
The next morning we overslept and ran for the train. We were running for it as it started to move. Younger and nimbler, I jumped on board, only to learn it was the wrong train, one that was being shunted to a siding. Murray had to have the station-master pull it back. This gave me just enough time to catch a plane for Washington. Sam Jones, the first Washington editor for National Review, gave me lunch at the Press Club, caught me up on the state of the Senate hearing, and got me into the press gallery, where I watched the Kennedy brothers grill Hoffa—John as a committee member, Robert as the staff investigator. Robert said Hoffa had the opportunity to be a great benefit or a great burden for society. Hoffa said he would try to live up to both responsibilities. The hearings were unexpectedly suspended at the end of the afternoon. I called Bill and asked what I should do. He told me to fly back to New York and take the train for Stamford, since he was throwing a party for the magazine’s editors.
On the Eastern Airlines plane, a flight attendant (then called stewardess) offered to hang up my heavy suit jacket—I had only one suit, the winter weight the seminary gives to any person who leaves. I said it had my pens and notes, and hung on to it. The flight’s landing was delayed for a long time as we were stacked up over LaGuardia. There was an empty seat beside me. The stewardess sat down and told me I was too young to be reading Bergson. She had read (as had I) Walter Kaufmann’s description of Bergson in Existentialism. Later, when we met Kaufmann in Acapulco at a Young Presidents’ Organization conference, we told him he had been our Galahalt. The stewardess had a pretty Italian face of the mandorla (almond-shaped) sort Modigliani liked to paint. And mischievous chocolate eyes.
We shared, as it turned out in our talk, things other than an interest in Walter Kaufmann—especially a love of opera. Since our landing was so delayed, I told her I was missing a party in Connecticut. Where? she asked. Stamford. “I drive by there on my way home to Wallingford—I’ll drop you off.” She told me where to wait while she checked in and picked up her car. She said the car was a convertible blue Alfa Romeo Spider, a thing I had never heard of. On the drive to Stamford, we had more talk. She was a Catholic and we differed on some Church teachings. She was Italian-American, and we talked of Italian art. She had been a sociology major at Sweet Briar (which is why she read Kaufmann), and I told her about my seminary studies. Her mother owned a bridal shop, and she knew clothes. She said she had wondered at my blue serge suit in summer when she asked for the jacket.
I thought she would come into the party, and our talk had continued to the arrival at Bill’s house. She said she was still in her stewardess uniform and did not want to go in. From my recent-seminary ineptness, I let her drive off without getting her phone number. When she got home and told Lydia, her mother, that she had met an interesting guy on the plane, Lydia asked if she would see him again. No, Natalie said, and Lydia went “Ha-ha.”
At the end of Bill’s party, one of the editors drove me back to 80 Park. In the morning I called Eastern Airlines and said I wanted the phone number for a stewardess called Natalie, with an Italian last name beginning C (I had already forgotten her family name, Cavallo, though we had joked about its meaning “horse”). I reported that she had been on flight number (whatever it was) from Washington, as if that would give me the key to her identity. I was too naive to realize that airlines do not give out such information. I was informed of official policy, emphatically. Despite this hard rebuff the first time, I got up nerve to call back and say that I had left in her car a marked-up advance copy of a book I was reviewing, which I had to get back immediately. “Don’t give me her number,” I said. “Give her mine, and tell her to call me only if she finds the book in her car.” She got a sardonic morning call: “Did you give some guy a ride last night?” I did not realize what trouble I could have got her into.
She went out to the Alfa, searched it thoroughly, found there was no book, smiled, and dialed my number. “Did you really leave a book in my car?” she asked. “No.” “Then why did you say you did?” “Because I want to see you again.” “When?” “How about today?” She went to her mother’s shop, got a new dress, told her “Ha-ha,” and caught the train for Manhattan. I said on the phone I would wait for her at the clock desk in the middle of Grand Central Station (one of the iconic spots of our history). We went to the big 1957 Picasso exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, and I put her up at a hotel around the corner from 80 Park so we could spend the rest of the weekend together. Throughout that summer she was with me whenever she was not flying.
She told me she could not figure me out at first—I was clearly a rube from the Midwest, newly arrived in New York with only one out-of-season suit to my name, yet I was living in a luxurious Park Avenue suite. The suite was so large that it had an entire wing I had not discovered till I went into the kitchen one morning and found a beautiful young woman there—she was the wife of Reid Buckley, Bill’s brother. She and Reid had come in while I slept, and settled for a brief stay in the other wing of the suite. Natalie said she wondered why I knew and took her to some “in” restaurants of the time (Mercurio, Charles à la Pomme Souffle, Paone, the Black Angus)—they were all places where Bill had taken me. She thought it odd I rode cabs everywhere and never the subway—I did not yet know how to take the subway. I had tickets to the best plays in town. I explained, step by step, how I knew these things, and said she must meet Bill.
She did meet him, in the best of circumstances—on a day sail in his boat. (Sailing with Bill was one of life’s great experiences.) She was charmed by Bill, of course. But after we left the boat, she said, “Be careful.” Why? “He’s dangerous.” Why? “He absorbs people.” I knew then what a wise person I was dealing with in Natalie. Her quick judgment was confirmed, over and over, as I got to know Bill and his effect on others, his matchmaking, his religious proselytizing, his favors done and lives arranged. When I was writing my book on Bill, I met with the woman who had been the Buckley family’s music teacher in his childhood, Marjorie Gifford. Though she was a young performer and scholar in her twenties when she went to the Buckley home in Sharon, commissioned to teach all the younger children, Bill and his siblings called her “Old Lady” and grew very fond of her. Bill was her best pupil (though she said he never got the harmonies straight).
I had arranged to meet Old Lady at Bill’s Stamford home when he and his wife were in Manhattan. She sat at Bill’s piano as she remembered the years she spent with the Buckley family. It was the happiest time of her life, in one way, and the most destructive. I asked why. She said she gave up her own musical ambitions and began living entirely wrapped up in the Buckley family’s fun and games. She developed a young girl’s crush on Bill’s father and lost much of her own future life. She told me what this did to her was not the family’s fault. “They could not help it that they were so charming.”
When I gave up the idea of writing Bill’s biography, he turned the project over to a young man who had done the cover story about him for Time magazine. Bill asked me to give him the tapes I had recorded. I withheld and destroyed some of the most intimate, including Old Lady’s—I felt that she had been so open with me that I would not trust her memories to another. Let the new scribe elicit them if she cared to tell another person of her sorrow.
Hers was a tale I heard or observed in various registers over the years. Once, when I visited Willmoore Kendall, Bill’s teacher at Yale who was teaching then at Dallas University, he claimed that Brent Bozell, his other Yale student, would have been a fine and productive senator from Nebraska if he had not been sucked into the Buckley family in Connecticut. Brent first became dependent on the Buckleys, then rebellious against them, then more Catholic than Bill in a fierce rejection of America’s separation of church and state. “Buckleys,” Willmoore said, “swallow people.” I suppose I would have been swallowed if Maureen and I had married, as Bill was prompting us.
I continued to see Natalie after our summer in New York ended. I had to finish my bridge year at Xavier before acce
pting the next year’s fellowship at Yale. I got back to New York on weekends when I could afford to. She “deadheaded” free flights to the town nearest Cincinnati where Eastern Airlines flew—Louisville, as it turned out, where we stayed at my Irish grandmother’s house. The first time Natalie came in at the Louisville airport, it was late at night. She called my grandmother’s number and a woman answered. When Natalie asked for me, the woman made an angry response—“Decent ladies do not call on men at night”—and slammed the phone down. Natalie had no other way to reach me but that number, so she had to try it again (as I’d had to call Eastern Airlines again when I got rebuffed). Fortunately, this time I got to the phone first. “What was that?” she asked. “Oh, that was just Cornelia. I forgot to tell you about her.” Cornelia was my epileptic aunt, whose brain was affected by seizures when she was growing up, before modern drugs and treatments for epilepsy could have helped her. Cornelia’s mental age was about twelve, and my sister and I had loved her as a playmate in our childhood.
It was a lot easier to see Natalie when I went to Yale. New Haven was just thirteen miles from her home in Wallingford. In a battered old car my father had given me, I made record time back and forth to her house, where I watched football games on TV with her father and got to know and love the extended network of Italian families that filled her neighborhood, where the men played boccie in the street on Sundays and grew grapes in their backyard and made homemade wine. Natalie quit flying and took a job in New Haven so we could have more time together. We talked about marrying, but I had little money beyond my fellowship, which was barely supporting me through graduate school. She said she could work, and she would sell her Alfa. I was making something extra by writing children’s Bible pamphlets for Neil McCaffrey at Doubleday. But it did not seem enough.
One night we went to Yale’s law school to hear a talk by the controversial congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who did not show up. As we were walking back to my room in the Hall of Graduate Studies, she stopped on the sidewalk by the New Haven cemetery and started stamping her foot with Italian fieriness: “We’re never getting married.” The spot is a revered one for me. I said let’s go to my room and call our parents with the news that we are getting married. Years later I was on Tavis Smiley’s TV show, and I found that he has a practice, after the broadcast ends, of asking his guest of the day what is the best advice he or she ever received. When I said my best advice was Natalie’s telling me we had to get married (not the best way of putting it), he collapsed with laughter.
Bill Buckley, Frank Meyer, and Neil McCaffrey were ushers at our wedding, and we left immediately after for England. I would spend our honeymoon studying the papers of G. K. Chesterton. We had a letter of introduction from my friend Wilfrid Sheed to his mother, Maisie Ward, Chesterton’s first biographer. We went to the London headquarters of her publishing house, Sheed and Ward, and she came out of her office to a waiting room, carrying a big book of glossy photos. As part of her do-good activities, she found cheap lodgings for penurious young couples. She thought that was what we had come for. Actually, we wanted her to intervene with Chesterton’s executor, the keeper of his papers, his former secretary Dorothy Collins. Ms. Collins had first answered my letter asking to see the papers with a kind permission, but then had followed up with a letter saying she could not allow it. We seemed to have made the expensive trip for nothing. But with the help of Maisie Ward, the first permission was reinstated, and we went off to Beaconsfield, to Chesterton’s house (a converted theater) that Ms. Collins had inherited.
She greeted us at the door and said that she and her woman companion were just tuning in to their favorite show on the telly; would we sit and watch with them? It was I Love Lucy (a show I could never stand, for all its frenetic screaming). After the show was over, she served an elaborate English tea. After that, I asked about looking into the papers. She said they were up in the attic. She pointed the way for me while Natalie stayed behind to talk with the ladies. (Though I am terrible at small talk with strangers, Natalie can find things to speak about with anyone, which has rescued me in many situations.) Up in the attic, I saw why her friends had advised Ms. Collins against letting more people look at the papers. They were strewn about, in trunks, on tables, on the floor, not kept in any order. I would learn that others had marked them up, taken them off, treated them with no regard—even though the collection contained letters from T. S. Eliot, G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, and others, as well as many drawings and sketches by Chesterton himself (who started out as an art student at the Slade School).
I tried to separate out the anguished drawings and poems he had written in his depressed adolescence—the object of my first enquiry. Then I went downstairs and asked how I could study the papers without disturbing Ms. Collins in her home. She answered that she had a big suitcase I could fill with what I wanted and take to London for leisurely perusal. When I finished with one load of the papers, I could bring them back and get more. No wonder she had been taken advantage of.
Back in our London flat, I sorted out the things I wanted to have copies of (this was before Xerox), and Natalie typed them for me. I had asked her to learn typing before we married, and she promised that she would do so for this trip and then would never use the skill again—a promise she kept. Her typing, unlike mine, was immaculate, indeed flawless, and she regretted, years later when she got her first computer, that she had not kept up her practice.
At the end of my trips back and forth to Beaconsfield, I asked Ms. Collins if I could buy one of the Chesterton drawings from the attic. She had told me how Hilaire Belloc, wanting to sell a novel to his publisher, would come to Beaconsfield and describe the plot, while Chesterton deftly illustrated the story in a series of pencil sketches. There were often more drawings than the publisher could use, and these would be returned to Chesterton. I had spotted an unused one from Belloc’s The Postmaster General. When I asked to buy it, Dorothy gave it to me. It now hangs in our house next to the David Low portrait of Chesterton that Bill gave me.
When I was not working in London on the papers from Beaconsfield, or in the Chesterton collections at the British Museum, Natalie and I had a great summer in that heyday of British theater. England was still suffering from World War II—the swinging sixties of Mary Quant and the Beatles had not yet arrived—and tickets for plays were as cheap as those for movies. We had so little money that Natalie, who hated the English food of that day, lived for long stretches on anchovy sandwiches from the Italian delis near our flat. We proved that summer that a famous book of the time, Europe on Five Dollars a Day, could be vindicated. Toward the end of the summer, Natalie had a near miscarriage from her pregnancy with our first child (we had celebrated the news of him with our sole London splurge on the famous prime ribs at Simpson’s). The doctor ordered her to go to bed and remain immobile for a while. I found an old four-foot-tall floor radio in a used-goods store and staggered back carrying it for her to listen to. There was no air-conditioning in the flat, so we could hear Italian neighbors playing opera records in the building across the street. One Sunday when they put on an aria by Beniamino Gigli, I went across and asked them to play it again, louder.
Though she was now in bed, we continued to work on the Chesterton papers together, establishing an intellectual partnership that would continue through the next half century. Everything I wrote in the coming years she went over, for accuracy, clarity, repetitions, and tact. I had many occasions to be grateful for her interventions—as when I wrote some sharp things about Richard Nixon’s wife, Pat, and she rightly insisted that I remove them. For years I wrote everything in longhand, and had to read the copy to her, since my handwriting is so awful she could not decipher it. After I started using a computer, she read from the printouts of the first draft.
She not only collaborated with the writing. She has been diplomat and intermediary on our many travels. In Scotland, I could not understand the Glaswegian accent of a worker for us, but she had the ear for it. In Italy, though I rea
d the newspapers to her in the morning, since she has forgotten the Italian she learned as a child before speaking English, her ear for the language of her relatives is still good enough to catch the spoken Italian word that I miss. In Israel, her Mediterranean looks make people talk to her when my Irish face looks unpromising.
Only in Greece and Japan did the language barrier baffle us. In Athens, when she left me studying grave sites in the cemetery (Kerameikos) to walk back to our hotel, she was pelted by women with olive pits as an intruder in their neighborhood, and had no words to respond. In Japan, when we took a trip without the interpreter that the Japan Society had given us, an earthquake made the trains all shut down automatically, so that the schedules were scrambled. We were in a provincial city where few spoke English (and that un-understandable) and we could not read the newly posted times—we had to stand by each train as it came in, gesturing like Clark Gable trying to hitchhike in It Happened One Night, saying “Tokyo?”
On the other hand, her gift for talking to anyone about anything struck me with new respect when we were given a concert of private recordings by the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, including one he had written on a visit to America, his Long Island Suite. Natalie went over to him after the performance and said, “I love your suite.” He answered, “I’m so glad,” gesturing down to his lapels. “I designed it myself.” Natalie did not miss a beat. She said, “Oh, do you design all your clothes?”
As our children went off to college, Natalie added another to her many gifts by taking up photography. She got press credentials to the political conventions I attended, and her shots from the floor and from peripheral events gave me new material to write about. Her pictures in Venice became illustrations for the book I wrote about that city (and for its cover, designed by our son). We collaborated on a syndicated newspaper series about Israel, my words, her pictures. One day, when she was shooting scenes in Jerusalem’s Old City on the Sabbath, some Orthodox young men in black hats and side-curls came at her menacingly, determined to take the camera away from her. I, who had retired from the heat to sit in a shady arcade, came running over to her, and they beat a hasty retreat. It reminded me of a time in Milan when we were walking to the Castello and young boys approached her crying that birds had shat on the back of her coat—in fact the boys had thrown some slime there as an excuse to get near enough to grab her impressive-looking camera. Again, I was in the background, but I came up yelling “Ladri,” and they scurried off.