The next day, the phone rang again. I don’t know if it was the same child or a different one, but the conversation was exactly, eerily, the same. Ben offered a series of reasons for why he had chosen the particular path he had chosen, the same reasons he had offered the day before. Whoever was calling appeared to be trying to wear him down.
The call ended, and as the receiver hit the cradle I heard Ben cry out. It was almost a howl—primal, pained, frustrated. I had a flash of a desire to go into his office and hug him—that’s how rough his voice sounded in that moment—but at that point I barely knew him. The little I did know suggested that he wasn’t big on expressing vulnerability. I stayed in my chair.
Ben can seem to be so impenetrable at times, always on a different, distant level, at an ironic or irreverent remove. He’s bigger than you are, than everybody is, and he knows just how to work it—the right joke, the right phrase, the right stuff to keep you charmed and yet deny you any purchase.
In that one instant, though, the distance collapsed. He was just a regular hurting man sitting twenty feet away from me. It shouldn’t have shocked me, I guess, but it did: for all of his success, his wealth, his charm and good cheer, sometimes Ben was as alone as anybody.
I don’t want to harp on Ben’s family troubles, because most of them are relatively recent and they don’t have much bearing on history. The world won’t know him for what his sons by previous marriages think about his third wife. But to fail to acknowledge the fallout that a life lived at Ben’s velocity leaves in its wake is to commit a lie of omission, and that doesn’t feel right, either. Of Ben’s three children from his previous marriages—Ben Jr., with Jean, and Dino and Marina, with Tony—only Marina still has a working relationship with Ben and Sally. Dino doesn’t talk to either of them anymore, and Ben Jr. talks only to his dad. The problems revolve superficially around money but obviously point toward far deeper issues, too.
It is tempting to blame Sally for much of this. She’s a tough woman with strong opinions, and she certainly comes in for her share of it. But even the most cursory reading of Ben’s memoir, with its particular disdain for “shrinks,” suggests that when it comes time to actually work on emotional issues Ben has never been overly inclined to take things head-on. Long before he began to struggle with his short-term memory, he was capable of hearing about a very difficult problem and then forgetting about it five minutes later. “In my next life, I want to come back as Ben,” Sally wishes, because he can say “Je ne regrette rien” and mean it.
Dear Kay:
Thank you for that letter that was so full of feeling.
Things seem to be better for me now—and Dino who was very angry & upset when you saw him at the game is still somewhat so but I don’t think he is really too deeply wounded, at least his spirits—and Marina’s too—are surprisingly good.
It’s been one hell of a summer but I feel as though the time has come to put life back together again.
The note is handwritten, from Tony to Kay, undated but obviously from 1973, the year that Ben left Tony for Sally. I found it in Kay Graham’s files, not in Ben’s. He’s never seen it before, and neither had I—a tangible, real-time expression of what it felt like once the train of Ben Bradlee had left the station.
Whenever I ask Ben about his other marriages and his other children, his pat response is to say that he was “so busy climbing the ladder” of his career that he didn’t spend as much time with his kids as he might have liked. This is a true statement, but it’s also the sum total of what Ben has to say about it, at least to me. The detachment is real. In fairness to Ben, all his children except for Quinn were born in a very different era, when men worked and women stayed home and men didn’t judge other men, or themselves, by how much time they spent with their kids. The definition of a good life has changed. Ben is a loving person, so I have very little doubt that he was good to his kids when he was around. He just wasn’t around all that much. For most of his adult life, his ambition didn’t allow it.
But even if Ben had been around all the time, still it would have been tough to be his kid. David Ignatius told me about an experience he’d had playing tennis in Ben’s backyard in Georgetown during the eighties. “Ben Junior came down from Boston and he was serving, and he double-faulted, and then he double-faulted the next time,” Ignatius said. “He was very tight. And Ben said [imitating Ben] ‘Suck it up!’ And I felt so bad for Ben Junior, you know? Because he’s a wonderful guy. And I was thinking, man, I love [Ben], but I’m really happy he’s not my father.”
In Ben’s files I came across a couple of letters to his children, tough letters that indicate how deep the gulf was. “You and I are in pretty sorry shape, to put it mildly, aren’t we?” Ben began a letter to one of his children in 1979. “Your mind was seething with ‘fuck yous,’ while mine was seething with frustration.” Later: “Maybe my hang-up about being first and foremost a source of money stems from the feeling I have that the only problems you have that I can solve are money problems.…
This has been a tough letter, but an honest one. One that I should have written you before, because not writing it was somehow not honest of me, because I was feeling all of this.
But I was also feeling great, great love for you. I have felt that from the first minutes of your life when I held you in my arms, and watched you in Mom’s arms. And I have felt it through thick and thin, even during those moments when I could have gladly kicked you in the rear end, as I felt last night. Love means help, and a whole lot more, but I want to help realistically. I don’t want to help you pull the wool over your own eyes or over anyone else’s eyes. I want to help you see the truth, and face the truth … about yourself and about others. And I’m ready when you are.
It’s not as if “Mom” was perfect, either. In Tony’s case, she was the woman who went on a summer-long tour through Europe without her four children, all aged six and under, in 1954. That was how she had met Ben, which blew up her previous marriage. By many accounts, Tony was an absentminded and self-centered mom who had little interest in mothering, sending kids off to school woefully underdressed and underfed on a fairly regular basis. Ben’s children, except for Quinn, grew up in tough emotional circumstances after the divorces, despite the privilege.
Much of this predated Sally. Ben alone made the decision to leave Jean for Tony, and to leave Tony for Sally. But Sally is a lightning rod, and she brings controversy with her wherever she goes. She has become the villain among Ben’s kids from his former marriages, which is a view one can understand but not entirely countenance. Ben has to sign off on things, too.
“Sally is Ben’s secret weapon,” one close friend told me, an idea that it took me a long time to understand. “She takes the blame for everything.”
When I first set out to interview people about Ben, they would say uniformly flattering things about Sally into my tape recorder—how she kept Ben young and vibrant, how all of the restored houses and parties and social plans were only possible because of her. And then, once I’d switched the tape recorder off, these very same people would launch headlong into whatever the latest family drama was, wondering what I knew, often slipping in a dig or two about Sally in the process. There is always some kind of drama going on with Sally—with a maid, with a child from one of Ben’s previous marriages, in her social circle, or with editors at the Post who are irritating her. She lives in a roiling universe and everybody who talks to her on a regular basis knows exactly whom she’s pissed at.
Publicly, whenever Sally gets into one of her dustups, Ben defends her without fail. In 1986, Sally was angry at Tina Brown because Vanity Fair, which Brown ran, had printed a review by Christopher Buckley of Sally’s first novel, which Buckley referred to disdainfully as “cliterature.” Sally promptly disinvited Brown and her husband, Harold Evans, the esteemed former editor of The Sunday Times of London, from Ben’s birthday party at Grey Gardens that year. After a couple of additional salvos from both sides, Evans wrote Ben a tough note.
They had known each other long before they’d married their wives, and both Tina and Sally certainly ran their own lives. “But hasn’t it all become very unclassy?” Evans wrote.
Ben wrote back that he wanted to answer Evans’s note in a “spirit of détente.” He defended Sally against Evans’s most recent accusations, and then he deployed the insouciant Bradlee charm to try to defuse things:
But as you say, we married strong women, who run their own lives. Maybe you and I could agree on a resolution and leave it at that. I think disinvitation was counterproductive—to say the bloody least. I think “cliterature,” and even Buckley, were unfriendly if not cheap shots.
I find hardening of the arteries enormously useful in these matters. It gets harder and harder to remember what feuds are about. It took me two days to remember “cliterature.”
Anyway, I’m ready when you are. I’ll buy you lunch next time you’re in town.
In other contexts, he would make much less effort to be conciliatory. In October of 2001, “The Reliable Source,” the Post’s gossip column, noted that Sally had been among a group of “concerned citizens” who had congregated at a restaurant in Georgetown to talk about what to do in the event of a biological attack. (A few days before, Sally had written a piece in the Post asking for more information about the government’s preparedness.) Though the piece, written by Lloyd Grove, was relatively straight for a gossip column, it ended by noting somewhat patronizingly that one participant had asked if she might be able to find gas masks for her pets.
To: Len, Steve, Gene
Cc: Grove
From: Bradlee
I would like you all to know that I have taken exactly enough of that sleazy, smarmy sarcastic shit from Grove & his column about Sally & what she does.
Next time, I’m going to get his ass! Fair warning.
What I don’t understand is how it gets in the paper? Time after time. You don’t ever write about anything positive Sally does, and she does so much. You wouldn’t let any of this shit in the paper if it involved your wives. And never mind all the help she has given STYLE (and Grove), even though only 1 out of 10 of her ideas are even considered.…
Anyway, I am serious.
Ben.
Gene (Eugene Robinson) wrote to Ben to tell him that it wouldn’t happen again; Lloyd Grove didn’t apologize, but he did note that he would try to focus on some of Sally’s other contributions when he had a chance.
What everybody wonders is what happens privately, when nobody is looking. Doesn’t Ben ever get pissed off? Sally herself leaves some hints in that regard. In her first novel, Regrets Only, there is a character named Des Shaw, the swashbuckling editor of a weekly newsmagazine who is transparently Ben. When Des falls in love with Allison Sterling,5 the rising young star reporter at the Washington Daily—and, incidentally, one of the three lead female characters who are all transparently Sally—it doesn’t take a whole lot of extrapolation to detect traces of autobiography.
I read the book eagerly, looking for clues about Ben and Sally’s relationship that I wouldn’t be able to glean from direct questioning. On page 188, I found what I was looking for: Allison and Des are having an argument, which Des ends by turning on the news. “He had to spend a lot of time defending her, which he did willingly and with some ferocity,” Sally wrote of Des. “But once they were alone together, his frustrations got the better of him and he lashed out.” When I asked Sally later if there were any real-life correlation she demurred, but to me it rings with truth.
In Ben’s files, as with Howard Simons and other people with whom Ben had communication problems at times, I discovered a series of unsent letters to Sally, too. In the early eighties, Sally had written Ben a note about needing money for renovations for the N Street house, which she closed by saying that she didn’t want to live in a “joyless marriage” and wondered what he was going to do about it. Sally plays hardball.
Tucked into the envelope that Sally had sent to Ben was his response, written by hand, with “not sent” at the top. “Serious talks about money have not been very satisfactory for me,” he wrote. “We have them. I give you my feeling that we are spending recklessly, without the slightest evidence that you are listening. And then you do what you always wanted to do.” It closed: “I guess I’m having trouble understanding what you want from me beyond total acquiescence and endless cash.”
Elsewhere in the files I found a handwritten letter of Ben’s on yellow lined paper that had been torn in half from top to bottom, right down the middle. There is no address on it, and no addressee, but it’s obviously to Sally from sometime in 1978:
I have the feeling that you are always pushing for public recognition as my owner;
that you feel this makes you a better person, though it changes you nil.
that you want to be married to be recognized, not to be any closer to me.
that you want to be cited in Yearbooks, to be recognized, not to be any better.
you want people to know you buy the suits, the shirts
you’d rather not get married, than get married quietly & tell no one
you never fail to say together for 5 years. Must’ve said it 50 times in Boston.
Want the world to know your position
Want to go with me to Marina’s school to be seen—not to be step-parented.
From the very first time you went to the Buchwald Easter Party
Money, position
BCB Commitment:
(1) I’m yours, publicly, privately, faithfully
(2) I’ve dealt you in to my life completely, equally, will, social, professional
(3) I’ve taken risks for you
These are things Ben never says.
In the intervening years, the issues between Sally and Ben’s kids have festered, leaving Ben more and more exposed. In February of 2010, Sally wrote an unfortunate column in the Post describing the circumstances by which Quinn’s wedding to his fiancée, Pary Williamson, had been scheduled for the very same day as the wedding of Greta Bradlee, Ben Jr.’s daughter and Ben’s granddaughter. The column made a series of misjudgments about what would be believable to an average reader, including the statement that Sally had received the invitation to Greta’s wedding but had given it to Ben to “put the date on his calendar, and he did not.” Suffice it to say that at eighty-eight years of age, Ben was not running the Bradlee/Quinn household schedule. That Sally would throw him under the bus in an article about his own children was tough for the people who know them well to stomach. The column immediately caused an uproar, and the comments on the Post’s website were so many and so vicious that the paper decided to close them down.
Ben Jr. was outraged. He called the Post to complain, and then he composed a vituperative letter to the editor a few days later. He didn’t believe for one second that the scheduling of the two weddings on the same date had been an “inadvertent mistake,” as Sally had claimed. As he wrote in his letter, he thought it was simply Sally’s calculated way of trying to hurt him, both by preventing his father from attending Greta’s wedding and by creating a convenient excuse to avoid having to invite him and Dino to Quinn’s wedding.
The situation was a mess. Ben Jr. was deterred from submitting his letter for publication only after Ben reached him by phone from St. Maarten, where he and Sally were on vacation, and made a personal appeal. (“Give me this one, pal.”) In the wake of that episode, and a Vanity Fair piece in July 2010 that recounted many of the family tensions in terms unflattering to everybody, the once fragile family dynamics were in ruins.6
All of this to say: Ben isn’t perfect, and his life isn’t perfect. With his first three kids he was not the world’s greatest dad, and from what I have seen he really does let Sally roll him most of the time where those kids are concerned. Part of this is a function of his age, but it must be said that part of it isn’t. When Sally is on the march, Ben checks out, and then, in the aftermath, he turns on the charm to try to smooth his way through the
fallout. He’s good at it; it’s clearly a kind of survival strategy for him. “Sally has done nothing but enrich his life,” a close friend of theirs told me. “But he’s had to make some sacrifices for it, which includes accepting some of her more outrageous judgments.” That is the truth.
Ben has never spoken to me about the toll that all this has taken on him, but I can see it in small ways. In his office at the Post, there are pictures of all of Ben’s kids on the walls. In the last few years, as the tensions with Dino have escalated, more and more pictures of Dino have turned up in Ben’s office, tacked to Ben’s corkboard and taped over other pictures on his wall. It is a quiet demonstration of love, and of some sorrow at the loss, even if Ben never says anything about it out loud.
“My children all know that Sally Quinn has made me enormously happy for thirty-umpteen years,” Ben told Vanity Fair, “and that is more important to them than anything else, I think.” Doubtful. But Ben’s commitment to Sally is complete. They love each other, and have loved each other for a long time. You can feel it in Ben’s spirited public defenses of her, and also in that agonized unsent letter from 1978—even just in Ben’s beau geste of tearing the letter down the middle and then deciding not to send it. I have often felt this intensity when I’ve been around them, however exasperated they pretend to be with each other at times.
One night at Grey Gardens Ben came down for cocktails with a huge grin on his face. “She smiled at me before I even said anything,” he said to me, with genuine enthusiasm, having encountered Sally on his way downstairs. “Tonight could be my lucky night!” As Ben would say, they’re still in business.
A few days later we went to dinner in Westhampton. It was nearly an hour’s drive, so in Bradlee style the houseguests at Grey Gardens took a limousine. On the way home it was dark and late and quiet, and most people were starting to doze off. Sally was between me and Quinn on one side, and Ben was sitting with friends on the other.
Yours in Truth Page 44