First Ladies (41 page)

One of their grandsons, Henry Adams, who would achieve his own kind of fame, remembered visiting John Quincy and Louisa in Washington as a boy. To him Louisa seemed “singularly peaceful, a vision of silver gray, presiding over her old President and her Queen Anne mahogany… an object of deference to everyone.” Unlike Grace Coolidge, who was blessed with serenity from the start, Louisa Johnson Adams took several decades of turmoil to achieve it. In the end this star-crossed First Lady gave her driven husband a measure of inner peace in the bargain.

—

T
HE
W
HITE
H
OUSE HAS NOT ALWAYS BEEN DRENCHED IN TRAGEDY
. Some First Ladies have been lucky enough—or clever enough—to escape—or at least transcend—tears. One is a relative of sorts, Julia Gardiner Tyler. The Trumans have long claimed her husband, President John Tyler, as kin. Another, Frances Folsom Cleveland, I had the pleasure of meeting when she was an elderly lady. She was as uncannily self-possessed in old age as she was when she married a bachelor President with an illegitimate child in his past and became the youngest First Lady so far.

When men praised Dolley Madison, they were complimenting her charm more than her looks. When they purred over Julia Tyler, they were complimenting both—with the emphasis, as the song from the musical
Damn Yankees
puts it, “on the latter.” Many students of First Ladies consider Julia the most beautiful woman to have strolled the White House halls. Like Edith Wilson, she married a President who had lost his wife after he was elected. But that was only part of the role the Grim Reaper played in Julia’s ascension to First Lady.

In one of those odd historical coincidences that give you the shivers, John Tyler, Harry Truman’s putative kin, was the first vice president to move into the White House by virtue of a President’s death. He succeeded a hero of the War of 1812, William Henry Harrison, when the old warrior died after only a month in office. Tyler was the first to encounter the animus that seems to greet every accidental President. Some critics even called him “His Accidency.”

Tyler was a member of the new Whig Party, which had sprouted from the grave of the Federalists. But he was more interested in being President of all the people and declined to cooperate with the Whig congressmen and senators who had broken the power of the Democratic Party in 1840 with the first modern political campaign. The Whigs added Tyler to the ticket to help carry the South. He had been governor of Virginia, as well as a congressman and senator. They did not bother to check out his political opinions, beyond noting that he was not a Democrat.

The Whigs should have noticed that Tyler had independent opinions about everything and never hesitated to swim against the political tide. As President, he proved to be so independent, virtually his entire cabinet soon resigned and the Whigs formally expelled him from the party. Ignoring mobs of angry Whigs who threatened to burn down the White House and even talked of assassinating him, Tyler rejected so many bills from the Whig-controlled Congress he soon acquired another nickname: “014 Veto.”

The President brought an invalid wife, Letitia, to the White House. Crippled by a stroke in 1839, she descended from the second floor’s family quarters only once, to attend a daughter’s wedding in 1842. A few months later, she died at the age of fifty-one. Early in 1843, when the official period of mourning for his wife had barely expired, President Tyler resumed entertaining at the White House, with a daughter-in-law as hostess. At one of the first parties, he met and was mesmerized by Julia Gardiner.

A smashingly attractive twenty-two-year-old brunette from Long Island, Julia was the daughter of one of New York’s senators, David Gardiner. The President managed to kiss her on her second visit to the White House and proposed to her two weeks later at a
Washington’s Birthday ball—ignoring her repeated murmurs of “No, no no!”

Such denials were de rigueur for young ladies in those early Victorian days. Julia was clearly entranced with Tyler—and with the White House. Born to wealth, she had displayed a fondness for the limelight at an early age. In 1839 proper New Yorkers had been shocked to open their newspapers and discover an illustration of nineteen-year-old Julia in a sunbonnet, urging readers to shop at a popular department store on Ninth Avenue. She told her mortified parents she had posed for the ad “for the fun of it.”

The enthralled President bombarded Julia with flowery love letters, praising her raven tresses and snow white skin. She kept her fifty-three-year-old suitor at arm’s length, though she was a frequent White House visitor—with her indulgent father as chaperon. At the same time she carried on serious romances with a congressman from South Carolina and a justice of the Supreme Court, using the timeless principle that nothing whets a man’s ardor more than competition.

Then the Grim Reaper intervened once more. One chilly February day in 1844, Tyler invited Senator David Gardiner and his daughter for a cruise on the Potomac River aboard the U.S. Navy’s new steam frigate,
Princeton
. The male guests went out on deck to see a demonstration of a new cannon, the Peacemaker. With a shattering roar, the big gun exploded, killing eight people, including the secretary of state, the secretary of the navy, and Julia’s father.

Back at the Washington Navy Yard, a distraught President carried Julia ashore, almost falling into the Potomac himself when she awoke from her swoon and began struggling fitfully. Thereafter their tragedy-tinged romance progressed at a rapid tempo. In June the President slipped up to New York, eluding reporters, and married Julia in a private ceremony at the Church of the Ascension on lower Fifth Avenue.

When the news of this May-September union got out, some newspapers were pretty ribald. A pro-Tyler paper in Washington had described the President’s departure from the capital as a vacation from his arduous duties. “We rather think the President’s arduous
duties are only beginning,” chortled the
New York Herald
. Others made political jokes. One of Tyler’s goals was the annexation of Texas, which had won its independence in 1836 and was eager to join the American union. The
Herald
referred to the President’s marriage as a treaty of annexation “without the consent of the Senate.” That was not far from the truth. Along with her beauty, Julia conveyed a handsome fortune to Tyler, who was, like many Virginia landowners, frequently short of cash.

Dolley Madison brought merriment to the White House; Julia Tyler brought zing. Impish, impulsive, flirtatious, she dazzled every politician in Washington, even congenital sourpusses like the South’s champion, John C. Calhoun, who became Tyler’s secretary of state. At one banquet, Julia reported to her mother, the captivated Calhoun spent most of the time whispering poetry “of infinite sweetness and taste” in her ear.

Almost every day was crowded with glamour and excitement in Julia’s breathless reign as First Lady. When she was not presiding at luncheons, dinners, receptions, the new Mrs. Tyler dashed through the streets of Washington behind four snow white horses, finer than those of the city’s preeminent connoisseur of horseflesh, the Russian ambassador. When she was not driving, she was cruising on the Potomac or picnicking in the woods around Rock Creek. Strolling, she was accompanied by an Italian greyhound, the favorite pet of fashionable ladies.

Even before she became First Lady, Julia was intensely interested in politics and had made a habit of visiting the House of Representatives to listen to the debates. There too she had worshipers, among them one of the many political bachelors of those days, a rather homely, bucktoothed character named Richard D. Davis from Saratoga County, New York. Whenever Julia appeared, he abandoned the issue of the moment and made a dash for the gallery to sit beside her. One day she appeared looking spectacularly beautiful in a huge flowered hat, which induced the panting Davis to break all previous speed records for getting to the gallery. A few minutes later, someone called for a vote on the issue under debate. When the teller got to
Davis, another congressman rose and announced: “Mr. Speaker. Mr. Davis has gone to the gallery to study horticulture.”

Julia Tyler looked-and acted-like a queen during her whirlwind occupation of the White House. Men, someone said, were so many notches in her parasol
.
(White House Historical Society)

Julia also charmed the press. The Washington correspondent for the
New York Herald
, which was well on its way to becoming the nation’s most powerful newspaper, was so hypnotized, he volunteered himself as her press agent. He dubbed her “the Lovely Lady Presidentress” and never described her with fewer than two flattering adjectives. Among his raptures was the claim that Julia was superior to Queen Victoria and every other crowned head of Europe back to the consort of Louis XIV.

Not content with the fabulous notices she received in the
Herald
, Julia assigned her older brother Alexander to pen equally lyrical accounts of her parties for other New York papers. She was not above dropping her scribes saucy notes, asking why a recent White House event had not yet been publicized. Because she married Tyler when
there were only eight months left in his term, Julia knew she had no time to waste if she wanted to make her mark as First Lady.

In the beginning, it looked as if her father’s death might pose a problem; it was customary to mourn a parent or a spouse for a full year by wearing black and eschewing any and all kinds of revelry. Julia persuaded herself and everyone else that White House entertaining was not revelry but a duty. With advice, some say, from Dolley Madison, who had returned to Washington after her husband’s death, Julia solved the mourning clothes dilemma by wearing black during the day and white, which was also acceptable, in the evening. Sometimes she combined the two colors, covering white satin or silk with black lace. Ropes of small pearls adorned her neck; on her forehead she wore a jewel cut out of black jet.

Determined to ignore her husband’s unpopularity with the Whig half of Washington, D. C., Julia played her First Lady’s role to the hilt. When it came to entertainment, her motto was “the grand or nothing.” With lavish use of Gardiner money, she turned the White House from a “dirty establishment” (her phrase) into a shining model of contemporary good taste. In its spacious rooms she staged a succession of brilliant receptions, balls, and dinners that left staid Washington dizzy with delight.

With delicious daring, Julia introduced the polka at White House balls. This dance was considered so racy, President Tyler had previously forbidden his daughters (several of whom were older than Julia) to perform it. But he did not so much as peep when the First Lady pranced across the East Room in the arms of one ambassador after another. The dance soon became the national rage.

There was only one shadow on Julia’s reign—her husband’s jealousy of her long list of previous suitors. One in particular, the Supreme Court justice, still gazed wistfully at her whenever they met. One morning President Tyler refused to let her go to church because he feared the justice would be in a nearby pew with his eyes fixed on Julia instead of on the altar.

I must confess that even I, who have gone on record in favor of every First Lady following her natural bent, was somewhat taken aback by
some of Julia’s antics. She played the part of a royal consort a little too extravagantly for my down-home Missouri taste. She received her guests seated in a large armchair on a raised platform with a “court” of a half dozen or so ladies-in-waiting banked around her, all dressed in white. At times she wore a headdress of miniature gold bugles which resembled a crown. Only a President who was hopelessly in love—and knew he had no political future—would have tolerated such behavior.

In one of those unexpected twists that unsettle political pundits, John Tyler’s embattled administration ended on a high note. When the Senate rejected the treaty of annexation he had negotiated with Texas, Tyler outfaked them. He argued that Texas could be added to the Union by a simple majority vote of both houses of Congress. Determined to get his way, the President used patronage and his not inconsiderable national following to pressure the opposition party, the Democrats, into making annexation one of the main planks of their 1844 platform. Thereupon he threw his support to the Democratic nominee, James K. Polk. When Polk defeated Henry Clay in yet another of the Kentuckian’s many attempts to become President, Congress concluded that the people had spoken and voted the Lone Star State into the Union in the final week of the Tyler administration.

Many people think that without Julia’s magnificent entertainments in the first three months of 1845, this happy event might not have taken place. Like Louisa Adams’s ball for Andrew Jackson, Julia’s galas made Tyler look irresistibly popular, even if he lacked the support of the two major political parties. Julia began her campaign with a New Year’s Day reception that crammed two thousand people into the White House. One bemused reporter described the crush in verse: