American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) (20 page)

Of course, Susan Mary was capable of making things up out of pride, discretion, or the desire to spare her friends the chore of comforting her. This stoic politeness did not foster intimacy, but she had always preferred to serve herself a second glass of sherry rather than call out for help. Still, an optimistic tone, a little strained perhaps, began to color her mood in the spring of 1975. “Life ahead is going to be very gay.”
⁷

At last, it was time for rewards. The reviews in the
Washington Post
, the
New York Times
, and
Library Review
were all favorable. Readers also responded to the book, which went through six printings, selling more than twenty thousand copies. When
Letters to Marietta
was published in England the following year, Antonia Fraser praised it in an article titled “So Chic, So True, So Sad,” noting the pertinent analyses and vivid style of a white-gloved reporter in postwar Paris who served up a mixture of politics and cosmopolitan life against the somber background of her husband’s chronic illness.
⁸

Like so many brownie points, Susan Mary collected her reviews and sent them to her family. She graciously accepted all requests for book signings and interviews. In fact, promoting the book was an unexpected pleasure. Finally,
she
was the person whom people were waiting for, listening to, and photographing.

For a November book tour in Texas, Oscar de la Renta suggested she wear a navy blue mohair coat over a dress in the same color. She arrived in Dallas on November 18 and was driven to bookstores in Doubleday’s Cadillac. A chill went down her spine as she recognized the route, familiar to her from a fateful afternoon twelve years before. “I hear Jackie’s voice in Dumbarton Avenue sitting on the sofa, clinging to Joe’s hand: ‘It was so hot, we turned the corner and I saw the underpass and thought, Oh, good, it will be cool for a few minutes, then I heard the shot, the first one.’”
⁹
Susan Mary also appeared on a popular television show and did so well that the channel’s director offered to make her a reporter in Washington. Flattered, she refused, seeing a “mental picture of Joe’s face if he hears that I am to do political reporting.”
¹⁰
In her place, she suggested Sally Quinn or Barbara
Howar, both well-known journalists. She left Dallas for Austin, where her friend Walt Rostow took her to a football game. It was a real disappointment—there was not a single cowboy hat in the entire stadium. The local men were dressed in tweeds, as though attending a steeplechase in the south of England. So much for local color. She gave a few radio and television interviews before heading off to the university library to do research for her next project.

The Adventures of Lady S.

The success of
Letters to Marietta
had encouraged Susan Mary to begin work on a biography of a remarkable woman, Lady Sackville. It was her English editor, George Weidenfeld, who had suggested it.

Victoria Sackville had inherited her temperament and impressive head of long black hair from her mother, a Spanish dancer named Pepita. She spent her childhood in the difficult position of an illegitimate child, for although Pepita was dearly loved, she was not married to the English diplomat Lionel Sackville-West, who had set up houses for his irregular family in Paris and Arcachon. Upon Pepita’s death in 1871, Victoria was dispatched to a convent, then rescued and sent to Washington in the capacity of hostess to her father, who had been appointed plenipotentiary in the American capital. Queen Victoria and the American First Lady approved of this rather daring initiative, which suited eighteen-year-old Victoria very well. She knew she was up to the task in spite of her total lack of experience. Intelligent and willful, she did the job brilliantly, turning a
number of heads in the process. Her own remained steady. She wanted to marry money. When she returned to England with her father, who in the meantime had inherited Knole House in Kent and the title of Lord Sackville, she met her cousin, who also happened to be the handsome heir to her father’s title and estate. Marriage followed. All her problems seemed solved; besides, she and her husband loved each other so much, it was said, that they never wanted to get out of bed in the morning. They soon had a daughter, Vita, who would become an author and the lover of Violet Trefusis and Virginia Woolf.

The marriage cooled after a few years, but Victoria was well on her way to fame, reigning over Knole House and her entourage of friends and dependents. She successfully fought two lawsuits filed against her, the first by one of her brothers who wanted his share of the family fortune, and the second by the family of John Murray Scott, who had inherited part of the Wallace Collection and had given some of it to his friend Victoria. Lady Sackville did not hesitate to defend herself in court and air out family secrets. She seduced the judges as easily as she had seduced the other men she crossed paths with, including J. P. Morgan, Lord Kitchener, Rudyard Kipling, William Waldorf Astor, Auguste Rodin, and especially the architect Edwin Lutyens, whom she tormented with an irresistible mixture of tenderness and aloofness. Her daughter and son-in-law, Harold Nicolson, were also treated to her violent whims and took them with less patience. Toward the end, there were so many family quarrels and reconciliations that Susan Mary—fascinated though she was by all that charm, fury, and bad faith—had trouble keeping everything straight.

Research on Lady Sackville began during the summer of 1975.
Kitty Giles, whom she had known since her time in Paris, got in touch with her cousin Nigel Nicolson and arranged a trip to England, during which Susan Mary stayed with Nigel at Sissinghurst and with Lord Sackville at Knole. Thanks to charming Kitty, Susan Mary was able to borrow suitcases full of family papers that she took with her to Maine, terrified at the idea that she might lose them at the airport. She spent months deciphering letters and other documents covered in Lady Sackville’s tiny, faded, irregular hand, dictating them to her secretary, and blushing at the erotic descriptions of Victoria’s honeymoon. She found a few more papers in Texas, but “nothing on Victoria, my girl. Naughty thoughts run through my mind—I sell everything I have here to the University of Texas under an assumed name, tell Nigel tearfully that documents have been stolen (having xeroxed them secretly), write Lady Sackville, retire to [the] finest villa in Tuscany, or should it be a château in Burgundy?”
¹¹

Susan Mary enlisted her friend Kay Evans to help her read old newspaper accounts of Washington diplomatic life. Every ten days, Kay would bring back a harvest from the Library of Congress, where she had been patiently combing through years of microfilmed newspapers.

When at last she started to write, Susan Mary found the task as difficult as research had been enjoyable. It was the first time she had actually tried to write a book, and her subject was a complex, multifaceted woman. In fact, one critic would later reproach her for not having captured the many nuances of Lady Sackville’s character, unlike Nigel Nicolson, Victoria’s grandson, whose book
Portrait of a Marriage
subtly depicts the loving but complicated
relationship between his parents, Vita and Harold. This criticism seems unjustified, for although Susan Mary was interested in decor and described with evident relish the dresses and bibelots that ornamented her subject’s life, she also managed to revive the turbulent emotions of a heroine more passionate than she herself was, but with whom she shared a taste for the French language, a love of art, diplomatic experience, and a certain
savoir-vivre
. Both Susan Mary and Lady Sackville knew how to behave. When they broke the rules, they did so with style.

To make things harder, Susan Mary was constantly interrupted because she could not and would not forgo her obligations to her family, friends, and Washington society. Joe, whom she often saw, invited her to a dinner for the Berlins with Henry Kissinger and to another for the Harrimans. She organized a reception in honor of Frank Wisner and his fiancée, Christine de Ganay. In August 1976, she went to Barbados to comfort the recently widowed Marietta, who felt lost and broken since Ronnie’s death. After three exhausting weeks, she flew to Paris to attend her goddaughter Anne de Rougemont’s wedding and visit Cy Sulzberger, who was mourning the loss of his wonderful wife, Marina, who had died in July. When Susan Mary finally came home, the presidential campaign was in full swing, pitting Gerald Ford against Jimmy Carter. It would be a political autumn.

“Is it true, Mrs. Carter, that when you and your husband find that you are filled with lust for someone of the other sex you kneel down one on each side of the bed and pray for guidance?”

“What nonsense, we have never done such a thing in our lives, who said that asinine thing?”

“Your husband, this morning, in Pittsburgh.”
¹²

If he was elected, Jimmy Carter had said he would do all he could to restore family values. This was not enough to convince Susan Mary to vote for him, and indeed, Gore Vidal was not alone in thinking that the Democratic candidate took his initials a little too seriously. On September 23, she gave a dinner party before the first of three televised presidential debates. All the journalists who were invited took notes. Joe was dismayed by the former Georgia governor’s mediocre performance.

“He looked so tired, don’t you think it was just that?” asked Susan Mary.

“Politicians are not permitted to get tired,” Joe coldly remarked.
¹³

In the end, Susan Mary decided to vote for Ford, “betraying my party and in hot disagreement with all my best friends.”
¹⁴
Results had not been so close in sixty years. On election day, Joe took Susan Mary to New York. The vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, was having a party with a few friends in his enormous Fifth Avenue apartment to celebrate Henry Kissinger, who was about to leave the job of secretary of state, which he had held under the Nixon and Ford administrations.

“It is tragedy that his plans should be left unfinished,”
¹⁵
Joe lamented glumly, sitting next to Susan Mary in a bar later that evening. She was nearly as depressed as he was.

Joe never relented about President Carter, whom he criticized for his lack of realism and tendency to moralize. This was not true of Susan Mary, whose misgivings gradually evolved. Naturally, she also remained on friendly terms with Kissinger, who came one evening to watch one of David Frost’s televised interviews with Richard Nixon. Feeling that the former president had
minimized his role in foreign politics, Kissinger got himself into such a state that Susan Mary ended up writing a letter of protest to Nixon. He answered without delay: “I pointed out over and over that without Henry’s creative ideas and diplomatic skills we would never have succeeded with our China initiative, the Soviet SALT I agreement, the Vietnam Peace Agreement and the progress toward reducing tensions in the Middle East. My own evaluation is that he will be remembered as the greatest diplomat of our times.”
¹⁶
Susan Mary was asked to deliver the message to Kissinger.

While remaining faithful to old friends, Susan Mary made new ones as well. Always on the lookout for talent, she started inviting congressmen Tim Wirth and Bruce Caputo, noting, “I like the young men in this administration.”
¹⁷
Figures from the past also reappeared, like Cyrus Vance, who, during a December dinner party in 1976, told the story of his recent nomination as Carter’s secretary of state. Vance, who wanted the job, had spent a long day talking foreign policy with Carter in the president-elect’s hometown of Plains, Georgia. At the end of the day, he still was not sure what his chances were.

“What time does your plane leave?” asked Carter.

“Seven thirty.”

“Good. That will just give you time to help me cook dear little Amy’s supper. Rosalynn is away.”
¹⁸

The two men cooked a hamburger, but dear little Amy was a picky eater and they had to put it back on the grill twice before she was willing to touch it. Then the dessert was not to her liking. Just as Vance started looking for his coat in desperation, Carter asked him if he would be so kind as to accept the job.

The most astonishing Washington saga from the Carter days was the meteoric rise of Pamela Harriman, “unquestionably the hostess of the new administration. It’s sheer Trollope,” wrote Susan Mary in a letter to a friend. “Kay Graham and Polly Fritchey are vitriolic about her, for they were the discoverers of Carter when Pam and Averell had dismissed him from their calculations; now Pam, the chameleon, has Brzezinski and the State Department Russia expert as permanent guests living in her house in swansdown comfort. She even dresses like Miss Lillian (Carter’s mother) in simple jersey double knits. The Georgetown ladies rage.”
¹⁹

Susan Mary was fairly annoyed herself. She had never liked Pamela much since the old days when they were both in Paris. Pamela, who was divorced from Randolph Churchill, had once obliged the Pattens to put up her young son, Winston, while she and her lover, Giovanni Agnelli, holidayed in Italy. “When I think of my only friend who is a proper professional courtesan, and how pretty she looks, I feel pretty strongly that illicit love is the one that pays off,”
²⁰
Susan Mary had written to Duff with the envious admiration she had never shaken off. She had been none too pleased to see Pamela move to Washington after her marriage to the old and wealthy Averell Harriman in 1971.

Still, such superficial irritation did not mar the overall satisfaction that Susan Mary felt during the autumn of 1977. She had finished her book and Nigel Nicolson had written to congratulate her. Her editors were delighted. She could finally take a much-needed break. More important, she had managed to achieve the two things she cared most about: keeping her place in society while living alone, and maintaining friendly, peaceful
relations with Joe. One day, noticing that Susan Mary was feeling low, he sent her a comforting note. “Do not think of yourself as a ‘tired, frail old lady.’ You are an extremely beautiful woman, with a thousand friends and a great many people who love you, including me. We are both getting on a bit, but you don’t show it, you give everyone a glorious time, and you have a long, rich life ahead of you.”
²¹
Then Mrs. Jay died on Christmas Eve, typically causing, as Joe put it, “maximum inconvenience.”