American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) (11 page)

In Sickness and in Health

Regular routines have a bad reputation and are rarely celebrated by those who practice them. Susan Mary complained at times
about the monotony of her life, judging it to be useless, especially when she compared herself with her friend Marietta Tree, who had returned to New York and become an activist for the Democratic Party. “I am sick of running a travel agency,” she told Marietta. “You do so many things of use and importance. I sit here and, except for an absorbing life with my two little children, the rest is meeting trains and making hotel reservations for the mothers of girls I didn’t even like at school and taking them to the American Hospital when they have acute appendicitis, which turns out to be overeating half the time.”
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She also regretted that Bill had obliged her, in the name of the professional discretion imposed on all diplomats’ spouses, to turn down the offer to write a weekly column for
Harper’s Bazaar.
Invited to inaugurate a community center near Lille in the presence of the French health minister, she went off, trembling, in a pretty hat and came back in high spirits, basking in the warm welcome her accent and carefully rehearsed speech had received. “That’s the life for a woman. How sad to have had a taste of it just one sweet hour and now back to doing up Anne’s nappies.”
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Susan Mary loved taking care of her children even though, if truth be told, she rarely changed their diapers herself. As sincere as her regrets about not having a career of her own might have been, they remained periodic and rarely troubled her serenity. The atmosphere at the embassy and the nature of Bill’s work had changed for the better since their arrival. In May 1949, the Francophile David Bruce, who until then had been head of the French branch of the Marshall Plan under the overall European supervision of Averell Harriman, replaced Ambassador Caffery. Chip Bohlen became his number two. David and his second wife,
Evangeline, and especially Chip and Avis Bohlen, were old friends of the Pattens. Much to Bill’s delight (for he had grown weary of economic and financial questions), Chip took him on as part of his team. As Susan Mary began her sixth year in France, she had only one wish: that Bill’s position—secured by her efforts, divine providence, and the State Department—continue on an even course. But turbulent changes were on the way.

The first incident was not too serious. The Aldrich cousins had decided to take back the house on the square du Bois de Boulogne so that they could rent it at a better price. This was fair enough, but it created a problem, because the postwar Parisian housing crisis was still very much a reality. Hearing the news, their circle of friends came together to help. There were some grandiose plans, including an apartment in the Hôtel Lambert, but this never came to fruition. Finally, in April 1950, the Pattens found a house on the rue Weber, just steps away from their former home. The children would be able to continue playing in the Bois de Boulogne. While she was waiting for her furniture to arrive from the United States, Susan Mary amused herself by cobbling together a sitting room à la Pompadour and a Three Musketeers–themed dining room with the help of shabby old cinema sets, which she rented in a rare and deliberate spate of bad taste that appalled the nanny, Duff, and Charlie de Beistegui.

Then Bill fell badly ill at the beginning of June. What began as pneumonia evolved into heart failure. Dr. Varay came to the house morning and evening. One of Bill’s legs was paralyzed and a pacemaker was put in his bedroom. An English specialist was called in for a second opinion and recommended that Bill be
transported to London for a bronchoscopy, a plan that Dr. Varay opposed. Trying to keep herself from panicking and painfully aware of her ignorance in such matters, Susan Mary decided that Bill would stay in Paris. His condition varied constantly. He often had trouble breathing and this made his pulse race even faster. Suffering led him to utter spiteful remarks, which Susan Mary bore without answering back, sad to see him grasp so hopefully at each minor and passing remission. At night she wrote to Duff, and sometimes, while Bill was sleeping in the bedroom next door, she called him on the telephone and wept uncontrollably. After ten days, the worst was over. It was decided that Bill and Susan Mary would leave for the United States on July 1 so that Bill could undergo treatment at the Lahey Clinic in Boston.

In the early 1950s, steroidal treatments were just beginning to be used in America. They worked quite well on Bill, and soon he was strong enough to play canasta and alternate between cortisone and Veuve Clicquot. Surrounded by family and friends, Susan Mary felt safer than in Paris, even though she had to placate Mrs. Jay and Mrs. Davies, who hated each other so much that each of them had brought a wheelchair for Bill’s arrival, neither of them trusting the other to do so. Susan Mary also noticed that several friends who came to visit seemed moved by one of the rarer emotions of the human soul, that strange, secret pleasure taken from seeing somebody, particularly a loved one, suffer.

The doctors said Bill might live another four years. “I personally think I would rather not have my life prolonged, he is different from me,” remarked Susan Mary, not without a certain harshness.
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She was amused to see the doctors’ perplexity when
confronted with young Billy’s perfect lungs. “All their ideas on asthma heredity are upset and they are writing learned papers for the medical journal on him.”
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One question gnawed away at her but remained unasked: would they be able to return to Paris?

After two weeks in Boston, the doctors allowed Susan Mary to take Bill to Bar Harbor, where the children were already waiting. The solidly constructed house had held up against the passage of time and the ocean winds. For once, Susan Mary found it a welcoming shelter and even approved of the old-fashioned carpets and muted colors of the William Morris wallpapers. Set up in a second-floor bedroom, Bill spent his days on the balcony, away from the children and the nanny’s pitiless war against the rest of the household staff. Susan Mary left all decisions to her mother. She protested only once when 250 missionaries from one of the charitable organizations her mother sponsored held a meeting in the sitting room. This was all right, but when they began singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” at the tops of their lungs, it launched Bill into heart palpitations.

Soon Bill was able to move around, and he began to take drawing classes with an eccentric local artist who crept about town in a velvet vest and floppy cravat, like a character out of
La Bohème
. When Susan Mary watched her husband in the harbor, drawing the rocking fishing boats in happy concentration, the pressure she had been feeling since his health had deteriorated began to subside.

Bill had to return to the Boston clinic twice for checkups and spent a few days in a local hospital to have an abscess looked after that had formed “from having had so many shots.”
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The doctors
decided that he did not have lung cancer and that the Pattens could return to Paris. And returning to Paris meant being near Duff again.

So Bill recovered, resuming a more or less normal existence, and was even able to go to Italy twice the following year. In May 1951, he and Susan Mary went to Rome to visit Bill’s sister, who had married an Italian. They met the black nobility, who lived in the Vatican’s august shadows, the aristocrats in their palaces, and Princess Bassiano, who was trying to revive lyrical poetry with her review,
Botteghe Oscure.
For the length of their ten-day visit, the Pattens were all the rage. One of her admirers told Susan Mary, “Madam, everyone has been saying that with five kilos more you would have a tremendous success in Rome.”
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That spring, however, everybody’s eyes were turned to Venice.

“I feel like Stendhal’s young hussar in
Le Rouge et le Noir
trying to describe the battle of Waterloo,”
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began Susan Mary’s account of the party given in the Palazzo Labia by Charlie de Beistegui on September 3, 1951. Twenty years later, Paul Morand would echo her words, “An Italian ball, like in Stendhal!”
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Cocteau noted, “Socialites don’t understand the secret of theatre—what is striking and what isn’t. According to the magazines, it would seem that Diana, Elizabeth, and Daisy wore their costumes well.”
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Morand was there, Cocteau was not. Neither was Nancy Mitford—she had not wanted to spend two hundred pounds on a costume. But Jacques Fath came as the Sun King in white and gold, along with Chilean billionaire Arturo Lopez, who was disguised as a Chinese ambassador, and Marie-Laure de Noailles, who was dressed as the Lion of the Piazza San Marco. Other
guests were Leonor Fini, Orson Welles, Gene Tierney, Dalí, Dior, Cecil Beaton, Christian Millau, Deborah Devonshire, the Marquis de Cuevas and his ballet company, the Aga Khan and his wife, and Venetian firemen dressed as harlequins. It was a mélange of fine old names and new money, young beauties and aging beauties, celebrities from two continents. Seven hundred people came to the ball, which their unsmiling, white-wigged host had wanted to be as splendid as in the old times, when the Serenissima reigned unchallenged.

A number of
tableaux vivants
were indeed striking. There was Diana Cooper as Cleopatra, right out of the Tiepolo fresco in the palazzo’s main hall, and Elisabeth Chavchavadzé, magnificent as Catherine the Great. Daisy Fellowes, wearing an enormous feather on her head, claimed to be the incarnation of the pre-Columbian Americas. Susan Mary had watched Diana get dressed. While Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel transformed her into the Egyptian queen, Diana sewed a little bag for Duff’s domino so he could keep his flask and not risk running short of alcohol. This turned out to be unnecessary, for the banquet was sumptuous like everything else. Susan Mary noted with admiration that even the shoes seemed historically authentic. She and her friend Odette Pol-Roger had decided on simple dresses and handsome velvet masks from Reboux. At three in the morning, Susan Mary went to bed, but Odette continued dancing to the accordion music among the crowds on the piazza, where the ball had overflowed into the Venetian night.

A few days later, there was another party in the Palazzo Volpi, where Susan Mary ended the evening on a sofa next to Duff, barely keeping a proper distance. But best of all was an outing to
Torcello. At the end of the year, she wrote to her lover with a list of resolutions:

Life Without Duff

Retirement has advantages. It gave Duff more time to read and write, and his literary production became quite regular. In 1949, he published a short essay,
Sergeant Shakespeare
, followed by
Operation Heartbreak
, a novel inspired by a true story from the war. Then he set about writing his autobiography, a project that he saw as both testimony and revenge. Work went slowly, because the sources he needed were often hard to find and the prime minister’s office was closely monitoring everything he wrote. It annoyed Duff, who knew time was limited. One August evening in 1951, after a dinner at Susan Mary’s house in Senlis, he got a nosebleed that lasted for several days. This initial warning caused him to change his ways, but last-minute sobriety could not make up for a lifetime of excess; his liver and kidneys were in a sorry state. Duff suffered a second severe hemorrhage in May 1953 and was swiftly taken to a hospital, where he was saved by blood transfusions. He was not able to attend the June 2 coronation of
the young Princess Elizabeth, although his recent elevation to the peerage and new title, Viscount Norwich of Aldwick, meant he had a reserved seat in Westminster Abbey. Many households purchased their first television sets for the coronation and screens were set up all over London. Like twenty million other English subjects, Duff had to be satisfied with watching from afar.

Susan Mary was somewhat luckier on that rainy morning. Isaiah Berlin gave her his place at one of the windows of the War Office, from which she was able to see the scarlet and gold procession of Queen Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter to Westminster Abbey.
Vivat Regina
. The English monarchy knows how to put on a show, and although Elizabeth II was no longer empress of India, the ceremony kept enough of the old imperialist flavor to remain dazzling. The same day, London learned that a New Zealander and his Nepalese guide had conquered Mount Everest for the first time. It was a victory for the Empire that had been rebaptized the Commonwealth.

Duff’s memoirs were published at the end of 1953 under the title
Old Men Forget
and were well received, apart from a few snide remarks exchanged between Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. The Coopers had been invited to Jamaica to celebrate the New Year, and they were getting ready for the voyage, which the doctors had approved. Sunshine would benefit Duff’s health. They had lent Saint-Firmin to the Pattens, who were spending the holidays with Joe Alsop, the Sulzbergers and their children, David and Marinette, and other friends. A few days before Christmas, Duff and Susan Mary went shopping and bought a green velvet handbag for Diana. They had a drink and Duff gave Susan Mary a lesson in international relations. John Foster
Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, had been threatening the French with an unfavorable shift in American policy if they did not overcome their divisions and their fear of German rearmament and ratify the European Defense Community. Supported by the French president of the council, René Pleven, and inspired by the ideas of Jean Monnet, this project for a common European army was intended to be an extension of the Schuman Declaration, which had created the European Coal and Steel Community and had managed to overcome opposition from Gaullists, Communists, and steel manufacturers. Duff was in favor of the EDC, as were Bill and Susan Mary, but he regretted Dulles’s clumsy shakedown of the French government, even though the project had been lame for eighteen months, with nobody in France daring to present the plan for consideration before the National Assembly. The conversation then turned to lighter subjects. They talked about the Coopers’ upcoming cruise, which Duff was looking forward to and Diana was dreading, although nobody understood why. She usually loved travel.