American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) (2 page)

When the United States entered the war in 1941, most of the men Susan Mary knew went off to war and scattered around the world. Bill had serious asthma and to his great chagrin had to take a desk job in Washington. Desie, as my father was called, joined the army as a private, but went through officer training and in early 1944 found himself in Burma as the adviser to a Chinese battalion trained in India. Knowing how important letters were to soldiers far from home, Susan Mary wrote to him—as doubtless to others—every few months. Her letters did not survive the monsoon rains and the constant marching, but she kept some of his return letters, and from them one can see what a wonderful correspondent she was even then. Excerpts from one of Desie’s letters show her range of interests.

In another letter dated December 19, 1944 Desie wrote:

Bill and Susan Mary went to Paris—he as the economic attaché to the American embassy and she determined to help his career and to get to know France. Two years later my parents divorced—their marriage one of the many casualties of long separation during the war—and both remarried afterwards. Happily Susan Mary got along famously with my English stepfather, Ronald Tree, whom she had met before he married Marietta. The two shared passionate interests in art, architecture, and British politics. In the immediate postwar years she and Bill spent weekends at Ditchley, the Georgian house he had in Oxfordshire. Later she often came to stay with us in New York or in the house Ronnie had built in Barbados. She also remained friends with Desie, who had joined the CIA and settled in Washington. So our lives remained entwined.

In Paris, away from her domineering mother, Susan Mary flourished. Bill’s asthma often debilitated him and prevented him from advancing in the foreign service, but Susan Mary had enough energy and ambition for two. Like many women of her time, she never went to college, but she educated herself in French literature and politics, art, architecture, and foreign affairs. She made friends in what most other Americans considered the impenetrable society of French aristocrats and intellectuals. She also made important English friends, among them Duff Cooper, then the ambassador to Paris, and the love of her life. In her frequent letters to Marietta she described the privations of France after the war and the events she witnessed from the trial of Marshal Pétain to the opening of Dior’s first collection. (“Going into the fitting rooms,” she wrote, “was more dangerous than entering a den of
female lions before feeding time…”
^*
) Later she described meeting Raymond Aron, the renowned political scientist: “He is tiny, birdlike, electric, with a thin big nose and long fingers, which he curls and uncurls when someone else is talking, not because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say but because his quick mind has caught the other’s thought from the first words and he wants him to get on with it.”
^†
She also relayed the account of a meeting at Matignon between the prime ministers of Britain and France at a tense moment in Anglo-French relations. The British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, arriving hours late, made a speech about the failure of the Greek city-states to band together against Philip of Macedon. The moral, she wrote, was obvious, but Macmillan, carried away by his subject, began to speak in ancient Greek, and other members of the delegation outdid each other in quotations from Demosthenes about the disastrous disaccords of the Achaean and Delian leagues. At last, Gladwyn Jebb, the ambassador to France, and one of the best performers, noticed the growing indignation of the French.
^‡

Susan Mary also described what now seems an antique civilization in which Europeans of the
grand monde
gave elaborate picnics in the countryside and costume balls, where everyone danced until five in the morning. (Today the rich build houses half as big as Versailles with Jacuzzis in every bathroom, but they never seem to entertain, much less give balls.) The most extravagant of these
parties was Charles de Bestegui’s 1951 masked ball in Venice, where the guests came in eighteenth-century costumes to match his eighteenth-century palazzo and its Tiepolo frescoes. Susan Mary, who drove down from Paris with Bill, wrote Marietta: “We first encountered the party in the courtyard of the Beau-Rivage hotel in Lausanne, where we spent the night. At 9
A.M
. it was full of chauffeurs strapping and re-strapping Dior boxes to the tops of basketwork Rolls-Royces in preparation for the Simplon Pass, which we crossed in what I can only describe as a human chain of Reboux hatboxes.”
^*

Summers, Susan Mary would sometimes go to Mount Desert to visit her mother, and if Desie was there on one of his short vacations from what we called “the pickle factory” (aka the CIA) the two would hike together. Desie, who had marched across Burma and up through China, had a long stride, and only Susan Mary could keep up with him. They would pack sandwiches and walk across the mountains from one side of the island to the other talking nonstop.

Susan Mary had a talent for friendship. She didn’t suffer “tedious” people who went on about their illnesses or their domestics, and she preferred those who led more worldly lives. But the attachments she made were strong. Her several close women friends—Marietta, Marina Sulzberger, Dottie Kidder, Elise Bordeaux-Groult, and others—claimed her attention no matter what else she was doing. She looked after them in sickness or in sorrow, and they in turn took care of her. She once said that she made a better friend than a wife or a mother, and possibly that was
true. All the same, I remember her and Bill as more child friendly than many couples my mother knew. In those days Americans in Europe used to send their young children off with the nanny to beach resorts on the English Channel for a couple of weeks every summer. It was thought to be good for them. Susan Mary did that when her two children, Billy and Anne, were small, but to her credit she sometimes endured the fog and freezing water with them. Bill, whom I remember as a handsome man with a sweet smile, adored children, even when they weren’t behaving well. Susan Mary had less talent than Bill for engaging the very young, but she had the generous, if disconcerting, habit of treating children over eight as if they had something interesting to say.

After Bill died in early 1960, Joe Alsop, an old friend of hers and Bill’s, proposed to her. According to de Margerie, he not only offered her a marvelous life in Washington but admitted that he was a homosexual and seemed to reveal a lonely, vulnerable person beneath his tough exterior. The message—or the message she read—was that he needed her, and that with her he might change. Marietta later told me that she had implored her friend not to marry Joe. Yes, he was a brilliant journalist and cultivated man, but in addition to being a closeted homosexual, he was a confirmed bachelor and something of a tyrant. “Marry the man today and change his ways tomorrow”—Adelaide’s line in
Guys and Dolls
—was, Marietta said, one of the worst pieces of advice ever given. Susan Mary, however, married Joe, and for some years it seemed that Marietta had been wrong.

I was abroad during the Kennedy years, but the novelist Ward Just, then working for
Newsweek
, dined with the Alsops several times in that period and remembers the dinners as marvelous.
There would always be men like Chip Bohlen, Robert McNamara or McGeorge Bundy and their wives plus a couple of young reporters or foreign service officers. Joe, benign, at one end of the dinner table, would draw out his important guests, often seeming to be conducting a tutorial for the younger men with the flattering implication that they would one day become a part of the august establishment that ran American foreign policy. Susan Mary at the other end of the table would always see to it that everyone was included in the conversation. She was, Ward thought, the best of hostesses, attractive and sexy, with a twinkle in her eye.

In those days Joe was in top form. He was pleased with the progressive shift in Washington on domestic issues, particularly civil rights, and he was uncharacteristically optimistic about U.S. prospects in the Cold War. Even while writing his weekly columns he managed to finish a book on one of his other great interests, the archaeology of the Greek Bronze Age. His mood, however, changed with the growing disaster in Vietnam. He had always been a hawk on Vietnam—once taking credit for having invented the “domino theory” and always pounding on in his column about the need for an expansion of the war. Some, only partly in jest, said that Lyndon Johnson had committed regular troops to the war because he was afraid of Alsop. Having served with General Claire Chenault in the China-Burma theater during World War II, Joe saw Vietnam through the lenses of the war with Japan. Throughout the sixties he made one or two trips to Vietnam every year, meeting only with the ranking generals, flying in their aircraft and reporting that the United States was winning the war. He refused to hear any evidence to the contrary,
even when it came from well-informed old friends. As time went on, he grew more and more adamant. At dinner at the Alsop house in the mid-sixties, I and a friend of mine had the temerity (and the stupidity) of youth to challenge one of his sweeping pronouncements. He roared so that his ancestral portraits shook on the walls. It got worse. As American casualties mounted and there was still no light at the end of the tunnel, he accused fellow journalists and antiwar congressmen of seeking an American defeat. (Privately he even accused one of them of working for the KGB.) His years of reporting on Vietnam were nothing but ashes, and somewhere he knew it. The Alsop dinner parties became nightmares, with Joe drinking too much and Susan Mary sitting in anguished silence at her end of the table.

Susan Mary bore the brunt of Joe’s anger and frustration. She never said a word about it except to Marietta and perhaps to one or two other intimate friends. In company she defended Joe and even seemed to endorse his untenable positions about the war. I thought of her as a victim of the Stockholm syndrome. How cruel he was to her I find out only now, but I saw the consequences. Her hard-won self-confidence disappeared, and she put up a brittle front where it used to be: anything but appear pathetic or less than a great conversationalist. She tried so hard that even her voice sounded unnatural. The marriage lasted until 1973—far too long—but clearly she loved Joe, for she continued to see him frequently afterwards. Both of them were much better off as friends.

Susan Mary moved into a Watergate apartment and in its anonymous surroundings began to make a new life for herself. In 1975 she published an edited version of her letters to Marietta from Paris 1945–1960. The book showed off her wit and style, and
now that the world she wrote about has disappeared, Atlantis-like, into the distant past, it reads even better than it did at the time. There’s a nugget for historians on almost every page. The book was well received, and encouraged, Susan Mary took up writing in earnest and published three books of history within a decade. When her sight failed to the point where she could no longer do extensive research, she became a contributing editor of
Architectural Digest
and wrote about architecture, gardens and interior design. She worked hard and loved it.

Susan Mary’s mother died in 1977 at the age of ninety-eight and, as de Margerie writes, unlamented. Even in her last years as an invalid the old lady never stopped talking—or making it clear to everyone that she was the center of the universe and that only her wishes counted. By then Susan Mary was actually able to say that she found her mother “tiresome.” (She told me her mother was 103, and I believed her, not realizing the number was a metaphor.) In any case, Susan Mary finally inherited the house she loved in Northeast Harbor, Maine. Bought by her mother sometime after the 1947 fire devastated Bar Harbor, the house had been built by Charles William Eliot, the famous late-nineteenth-century president of Harvard. A white shingled house on the top of a bluff overlooking the sea, it had well-proportioned rooms full of light and air. Susan Mary painted it in pale colors and furnished the living room with comfortable chintz-covered sofas and reading chairs. A wide window opened onto a view of islands and sailboats tacking across the Western Way. She also inherited a house in Georgetown—well described by de Margerie—and resumed a
hectic social life. In the early 1990s I stayed with her often there on reporting trips. She’d grill me about the person I’d just interviewed or tell me what she’d learned about a famous house before rushing off to a dinner party on Embassy Row. She had more time in Maine, where life was relatively simple. My husband, a newspaper man, amused her, and when we went for a walk or dined with her, she would tell us wonderful stories about figures like Sumner Welles or about Bar Harbor when she and Marietta were young. (If only I had written them down!)

In her last summer in Maine I read to her. As the summer drew to a close, we were finishing Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin when I came across a paragraph quoting her description of the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, in what Isaacson said was her “delightful portrayal of the period” in
Yankees at the Court
.
^*
I know she was thrilled, but she wouldn’t say so. Similarly, were she alive today, I think she would be thrilled by
An American Lady
. She would have to admire the depth of de Margerie’s research and the clarity of her style—and perhaps she would even have to admit to the acuity of de Margerie’s insights into the main character. Still, because she was trained not to take center stage, she would never say so.