American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) (12 page)

On New Year’s Eve, a radio message arrived in Saint-Firmin asking if the Pattens could send Dr. Varay, the doctor who had cared for Bill, to Spain. Duff was suffering a serious relapse and the ship they had boarded the previous day was going to change route to drop them off at Vigo. Then John Julius, the Coopers’ son, called. Duff had hemorrhaged to death while still at sea, and they had decided to repatriate his body to England by air. Fog ultimately forced the plane to land at Le Bourget, outside Paris, and Diana spent the night with the Pattens, soothed by tranquilizers and Bill’s comforting words.

To suffer in secret is harder to bear than official mourning.
Susan Mary’s sense of propriety and respect for Diana were far too strong to allow her to express more grief than the rest of Duff’s friends. Still, she was touched by John Julius’s gesture when he asked her to spend a few moments alone with Diana on the morning of the funeral. Afterward, Susan Mary blended into the crowd of mourners who had gathered at the Duke of Rutland’s, where Duff was buried on January 6, 1954, and at the public service held the following day at Saint Margaret’s in London. There were many French and British obituaries full of praise, except for the
Times
, which, to Susan Mary’s indignation, criticized Duff’s dilettantism. It did her good to have something to be angry about. Talking kept her from crying, and fretting from thinking too much.

In March, reprising her role as Mildred Jungfleisch, she accompanied Diana to Greece. They visited Corfu, Athens, and Olympia with its blue irises and anemones, went to Delphi (in the company of the writer Roger Peyrefitte), and the Cyclades. Diana sometimes managed to forget her sadness, and would recite the genealogy of the gods as they bounced up and down in tightly packed buses on tiny roads meant for donkeys. Transported by the smell of wild thyme, Susan Mary idly talked about buying a villa, and reserved a caïque and a crew of two men for the month of September. Diana was amused by her friend’s unbridled excitement, and the sound of Susan Mary’s schoolgirl’s voice carefully reading the guide helped dry her tears. After three weeks of travel, Susan Mary returned to the bitter cold of France. Her life suddenly seemed empty.

Of course, there were the children to comfort her. Anne was chubby, happy, and easy to deal with. Billy was more intense.
Given to temper tantrums, he was nevertheless full of affection and goodwill. He had trouble adjusting to his strict French school, but he loved having stories and poetry read to him. A French governess named Mademoiselle Ogier had replaced the English nanny, and Billy and Anne became true French children, saying
o
oh là là
and
dis donc
, solemnly shaking hands with adults, and viewing American food with dismay. Billy nearly fell off his chair in a Maine restaurant when he saw a plate of cranberry jelly covered with orange mayonnaise. “Look at that, Anne. It’s called ‘salad’ in America. Can you believe it?”
¹
he loudly exclaimed. Susan Mary had wanted her children to be familiar with French culture, but she had also hoped her son would learn English manners. At her request, Duff had enrolled him at Eton. What was to be done now that Duff was gone? The worst of it was that little Billy had shown a genuine and at times embarrassing liking for his mother’s friend, answering the phone “
C’est toi, Duff? Ici Billy
,”
kissing Duff’s photos in albums (“Merry Kissmas, Duff”), and asking his mother, “Is Duff as good as he is pretty?”
²
Bill took no offense at any of this, simply remarking that Billy was “only interested in Duff and motor-cars.”
³

In spite of the tenderness she felt for Billy and Anne, Susan Mary had been more at ease as a mistress than as a mother, as she had often confessed to Duff. “Suppose I had to choose right now, never seeing Duff again or never seeing my children, there seemed to be only one choice, not even a hesitation. Poor little things, I do love them too.”
⁴
The choice had been made for her. She was alone now, she who had written after a few weeks of summertime separation, “I have just about reached my maximum Dufflessness.”
⁵

The Fine Art of Memoranda

Fortunately for Susan Mary, the world was still full of seemingly unsolvable problems. Her reason for existence had disappeared with the death of her lover, so she shifted gears and became more interested in international affairs than ever. In her own manner, she tried to do her part. Respectful of official hierarchies to the point that her insistent and unfaltering praise of all American ambassadors’ wives in Paris seemed at times insincere, Susan Mary knew all the same that she was a fixed point in a shifting diplomatic universe. Intimate knowledge of French politics, customs, and sensitivities had given her a kind of status. As the corridors of power remained out of reach to all but career diplomats, she cast her nets in Parisian salons. Sidling up to the man she had singled out, she would engage him in conversation. Her voice would descend a pitch, her brows furrowed with interest, and she would tilt her head in a pose of absorption. Fingering her pearls, she would murmur, “How fascinating.” Her favorite moments were those when she acted as a go-between, discreetly passing on messages. In addition to this diplomacy of whispered asides, she analyzed the political situation in her letters to Marietta Tree in the hopes that her friend, who was a Democratic Party supporter and very close to Adlai Stevenson,
would put the knowledge to good use. Without exaggerated illusions about the importance of her role, Susan Mary continued to dedicate herself to these causes with the bubbling eagerness that Duff’s teasing had never managed to dampen.

One of Susan Mary’s goals was to improve relations between the French and the Americans, an increasingly difficult task as French prosperity and self-confidence returned in the early 1950s. Raymond Aron described the French rejection of all things American as “pathological” in a conversation with Susan Mary. It was an attitude that came in waves. In 1950, Coca-Cola had become public enemy number one. The French Communist Party claimed the Marshall Plan had been created to increase the consumption of the unhealthy soda, the distribution network of which was purportedly used by spies.
Le Monde
took the hysteria even further. According to Janet Flanner, “What the French criticize is less the drink itself than the civilization, the style of life of which it is a sign and in a certain sense a symbol. The very soul of their culture is in danger.”
⁷
In November 1952, Eisenhower’s election set off another round of anti-American tirades. Eisenhower was initially popular as the supreme commander of NATO’s SHAPE,
⁸
but was criticized later for making comments during his presidential campaign on France’s supposed moral decadence. When
Paris Match
published a list of the main things that the French disliked about Americans’ living in France, it included too many people riding in powerful cars, lack of support in French Indochina in spite of France’s effort to defend the “free world,” and America’s rigidly anticolonialist and hysterically anti-Communist attitude. Although, strangely enough, the Communist newspaper
L’Humanité
was the only French
newspaper that did not cover the exploits of Senator McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt, it derided the United States daily. In the spring of 1953, shortly before the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, Paris was plastered with posters depicting President Eisenhower, his broad jaw lined with electric chairs instead of teeth.

To Susan Mary’s eyes, part of this criticism was legitimate. The Pattens knew many diplomats who had suffered from the State Department’s incessant anti-Communist investigations. Chip Bohlen, for instance, had gone through a humiliating interrogation when he was named ambassador to Moscow. Still, America could not be boiled down to a list of regrettable excesses, Susan Mary explained to the head of France’s national police. She also defended the virtues of the Marshall Plan to the Duke de Luynes, who had attacked the American program as virulently as if he had been a French Communist Party member. But just when she thought she had convinced General Alphonse Juin of the soundness of Eisenhower and Dulles’s policies, she discovered he had given a particularly virulent anti-American speech the following day. Her powers of seduction had limits.

In 1954, plans for the European Defense Community ultimately fell through, and the French Indochina War came to an end. Susan Mary had followed the unfolding of both events with intense interest. She kept Marietta up to date on the parliamentary crusade led by the center and the right-wing parties in favor of a European army until a breach of procedure brought ratification to an anticlimactic halt on August 30, 1954. She had realized how serious the Indochinese situation was when, at the end of December 1953, Joe Alsop asked her to tell Dulles about
his conversation with Georges Bidault: Bidault had begged the United States to get involved in the war for fear that it would otherwise be lost. Susan Mary sent a telegram through the embassy, and Dien Bien Phu stuck in her mind. “I don’t like the sound of it,” she wrote to Marietta.
⁹
A few weeks later, the name became familiar to the entire world as the site of the final French defeat, which happened just before the Geneva conference that had been scheduled in hopes of resolving the conflict.

Two days before the conference, on April 24, 1954, the Pattens were invited to dine at the British Embassy. They had a drink with Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who returned to London to be told by Churchill that the British would not come to the aid of the French garrison under Viet Minh fire at Dien Bien Phu. “I sat by Gladwyn talking about the French theatre, imagine my frustration,” wrote Susan Mary to Marietta, “but I don’t know him well and dared not ask any questions.”
¹⁰
At dawn on May 7, the final French defenses were overrun. “Strange that we foreigners should feel so shaken by the fall of a little French fortress in the jungle thousands of miles away.”
¹¹
Susan Mary did not know what to think about the American position on the issue, which had been divided and hesitant to the very end, but she admired the determination with which Pierre Mendès France, the new president of the council of ministers and French minister for foreign affairs, had found a solution to the conflict at the conference. She thought Mendès France an extraordinary man and rightly imagined that he would not last long as head of the French government.

Things were beginning to change in the old city of Paris. In March 1956, the Préfecture forbade animal-drawn vehicles in the
city center during the day. The 500,000th Renault 4CV, an iconic French car, was proudly displayed at the Trocadéro, across from the Eiffel Tower. More and more French households purchased refrigerators, and the young Brigitte Bardot and Françoise Sagan were brazenly putting their elders out of style. But the essentials that had charmed or intrigued Susan Mary for more than ten years remained the same—the noisy animation of the place de la Contrescarpe, the existence of things like a state school for slate-tile roofers in Angers, the population’s continual griping about politics and politicians, and the openly recognized right of everyone to have an opinion on everything.

“The dentist is quite apt to quote Baudelaire, the grocer is an expert on proportional representation, the politician wants to talk about the Proust exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the priest compliments you on your dress and says, knowledgeably,
‘
Dior,
n’est-ce pas?
’
(Of course this is a fashionable dining-out abbé, not a worker-priest or a country priest).”
¹²
What she loved, simply put, was the French
art de vivre
; it had survived for so long and was still holding on.

The merry-go-round of the Parisian social calendar continued. On February 14, 1956, Marie-Laure de Noailles gave a ball in her town house. The parquet was covered with playing cards, and 340 people were invited and told to come disguised as artists. Susan Mary had attended the countess’s previous ball with Bill, but this time he was too tired, so she took one of Marietta’s cousins, dressing him up as Edgar Allan Poe. Siezed by a sudden moral fit just before stepping into the party, the young man began spouting off about rebels in Algeria and the French homeless looked after by charismatic Abbé Pierre. Susan Mary whacked
him over the head with the stuffed raven that was part of his costume and told him to keep his opinions to himself. “One comes to Europe to see the sights.”
¹³
A repentant Poe mounted the grand staircase to the fanfare from
Aïda
with Susan Mary on his arm and the bird back on his shoulder.

Susan Mary had a talent for turning such events into cultural homework, interweaving frivolity and reporting. Dancing never kept her from investigating. She was keenly aware of the situation in Algeria. The French ties to that country seemed to her as obvious and respectable as the need for reforms. She had little patience for ideological simplifications and for the moralizing attitude of her countrymen, such as young John F. Kennedy, who explained one evening in Paris to an angry group of French people that the North African colonies ought to be given independence at once. She almost understood Odette Pol-Roger, who had felt like slapping the ignorant young congressman. In her own way, Nancy Mitford was no different. When an American asked her why the French preferred not to discuss the situation with his countrymen, she replied, “Well how would you like it if we began to interfere with your lynching arrangements?”
¹⁴
More serious minded than Nancy, Susan Mary deferred to Raymond Aron on the subject. In 1957 she warned Marietta that Aron told her he would soon be publishing a pamphlet showing that the Algerian War was ruining France financially and that the nation needed to prepare for Algeria’s independence.