I Married a Communist (39 page)

"Then there was the union,
AFTRA
, the battle for control of the union. A lot of shouting, terrible infighting, but that was nationwide. In my union, in virtually every union, it was right wingers and left wingers, liberals and Communists struggling for control. Ira was a member of the union executive board, he was on the phone with people, God knows he could shout. Sure, things were said in her presence. And what Ira said, he meant. The party was no debating society to Ira. It was not a discussion club. It wasn't the Civil Liberties Union. What does it mean, 'a revolution'? It means a revolution. He took the rhetoric seriously. You can't call yourself a revolutionary and not be serious in your commitment. It was not something fake. It was something genuine. He took the Soviet Union seriously. At
AFTRA
, Ira meant business.

"Now, I never saw Ira at most of this stuff. I'm sure
you
never saw Ira at most of this stuff. But Eve never saw
anything
of this stuff. She was oblivious to
all
of it. Actuality wasn't something that mattered to Eve. The woman's mind was rarely on what the people around her were saying. She was a complete stranger to the business of life. It was too coarse for her. Her mind was never on Communism or anti-Communism. Her mind was never on anything present, except when Sylphid was present.

"As told to' meant that the whole malevolent story was dreamed up by the Grants. And dreamed up not at all for Eve's sake, and not merely to destroy Ira, much as Katrina and Bryden hated his guts. The consequences for Ira were part of their fun but largely beside the point. The Grants dreamed it all up for Bryden to ride his way into the House on the issue of Communism in broadcasting.

"That writing. That
Journal-American
prose. Plus Katrina's syntax. Plus Katrina's sensibility.
Her
fingerprints are all over the thing. I knew right off that Eve hadn't written it, because Eve couldn't write that badly. Eve was too literate and too well read. Why did she allow the Grants to write her book? Because systematically she made herself the slave of just about everyone. Because what the strong are capable of is appalling, and what the weak are capable of is also appalling. It's all appalling.

"7
Married a Communist
came out in March of '52, when Grant had already announced his candidacy, and then in November, in the Eisenhower landslide, he was swept into the House as representative from New York's Twenty-ninth District. He would have been elected anyway. That radio show of theirs was a big Saturday morning favorite, and for years he had that column, and he had Ham Fish behind him, and he was a Grant, after all, the descendant of a U.S. president. Still, I doubt that Joe McCarthy himself would have traveled up to Dutchess County to appear by his side if it hadn't been for all the big-shot Reds 'Grant's Grapevine' had helped to expose and root out of the networks. Everyone was in Poughkeepsie campaigning for him. Westbrook Pegler was up there. All those Hearst columnists were his pals. All the haters of FDR who'd found in the Communist smear a way to drive the Democrats into the ground. Either Eve had no idea what she was being used for by the Grants or, more likely, she knew but didn't care, because the experience of being an attacker made her feel so strong and brave, striking back at the monsters at last.

"Yet knowing Ira as she did, how could she publish this book and not expect him to do something? This wasn't a three-page letter to Zinc Town. This was a big national best-seller that made a bang. The thing had all the ingredients to become a best-seller: Eve was famous, Grant was famous, Communism was
the
international peril. Ira was himself less famous than either of them, and though the book would guarantee that he would never work in radio again and that his accidental career was over, for the five or six months the book was at the top of the charts, for that season, Ira was conspicuous as he'd never been before. In a single stroke Eve managed to depersonalize her own life while endowing the specter of Communism with a human face—her husband's. I married a Communist, I slept with a Communist, a Communist tormented my child, unsuspectingly America listened to a Communist, disguised as a patriot, on network radio. A wicked two-faced villain, the real names of real stars, a big Cold War backdrop—of course it became a best-seller. Her indictment of Ira was of the sort that could win a large public hearing in the fifties.

"And it didn't hurt to name all the other Jewish Bolsheviks affiliated with Ira's show. The Cold War paranoia had latent anti-Semitism as one of its sources, and so, under the moral guidance of the Grants—who themselves loved the ubiquitous troublemaking left-wing few just about as much as Richard Nixon did—Eve could transform a personal prejudice into a political weapon by confirming for Gentile America that, in New York as in Hollywood, in radio as in movies, the Communist under every rock was, nine times out of ten, a jew to boot.

"But did she imagine that this openly aggressive hothead was going to do nothing in response? This guy who used to have these ferocious arguments at her dinner table, who used to storm around their living room shouting at people, who, after all,
was
a Coramunist, who knew what it was to take political action, who'd tenaciously gained control of his union, who'd managed to rewrite Sokolow's scripts, to bully a bully like Artie Sokolow—she thought he was now going to take
no
action? Didn't she know him at all? What about the portrait in her book? If he's Machiavelli, then he's Machiavelli. Everybody run for cover.

"I'm really angry, she thinks, I'm angry about Pamela and I'm angry about Helgi and I'm furious about the renovation of the shack and all the other crimes against Sylphid, and I'm going to get the attention of this lecherous, heartless Machiavellian bastard. Well, damn right she got his attention. But surely the obvious thing about getting Ira's attention by sticking a hot poker up his ass in public is that you're going to enrage him. People don't yield to that kind of shit cheerfully. People don't like seeing exposés on the best-seller list that falsely denounce them, and you wouldn't even have to be Ira Ringold to take umbrage. And to take action. Only that never occurs to her. The righteous resentment that fuels her project, the
blamelessness
that fuels her project can't imagine anybody doing anything to her. All she has done is to settle the score. Ira did all the horrible things—she is merely coming back with her side of the story. She gets last licks, and the only consequences she imagines are consequences she deserves. It has to be that way—what did
she
do?

"That same self-blinding that led to so much pain with Pennington, with Freedman, with Sylphid, with Pamela, with the Grants, even with Helgi Pârn—in the end, that self-blinding was the worm that destroyed her. It's what the high school Shakespeare teacher calls the tragic flaw.

"A great cause had taken possession of Eve: her own. Her cause, presented in the grandiose guise of a selfless battle to save America from the Red tide. Everybody has a failed marriage—she herself has four of them. But she also has the need to be special. A star. She wants to show that she also is important, that she has a brain and that she has the power to fight. Who is this actor Iron Rinn?
I
am the actor!
I
am the one with the name, and I possess the
power
of the name! I am not this weak woman whom you can do anything you want to. I am a star, damn it! Mine isn't an ordinary failed marriage. It's a
star's
failed marriage! I didn't lose my husband because of the horrible trap I'm in with my daughter. I didn't lose my husband because of all those kneeling 'I implore you's.' I didn't lose my husband because of his drunken whore with the gold tooth. It has to be grander than that—and I must be blameless. The refusal to own up to what it is in the human dimension turns it into something melodramatic and false and sellable. I lost my husband to Communism.

"And what that book was really about, actually accomplishing, Eve hadn't the faintest idea. Why was Iron Rinn served up to the public as a dangerous Soviet espionage agent? To get another Republican elected to the House. To get Bryden Grant into the House and put Joe Martin into the speaker's chair.

"Grant was ultimately elected eleven times. A considerable personage in Congress. And Katrina became
the
Republican hostess of Washington, the sovereign of social authority throughout the Eisenhower years. For someone riddled with envy and conceit, no position in the world could have been more rewarding than deciding who sat across from Roy Cohn. In the hierarchical anxieties of the Washington dinner party, Katrina's capacity for rivalry, the sheer cannibal vigor of her taste for supremacy—for awarding and depriving the ruling class itself of their just desserts—found its ... imperium, I think the word would be. That woman drew up an invitation list with the autocratic sadism of Caligula.
She
knew the enjoyment of humiliating the powerful.
She
sent a tremor or two through that capital. Under Eisenhower and again, later, under Bryden's mentor Nixon, Katrina straddled Washington society like fear itself.

"In '69, when there was that spurt of speculation that Nixon was going to find Grant a place in the White House, the congressman husband and the hostess-novelist wife made the cover of
Life.
No, Grant never got to be Haldeman, but at the end, he too was capsized by Watergate. Threw his lot in with Nixon and, in the face of all the evidence against his leader, defended him on the floor of the House right down to the morning of the resignation. That's what got Grant defeated in '74. But then, he'd been emulating Nixon from the start. Nixon had Alger Hiss, Grant had Iron Rinn. To catapult them into political eminence, each of them had a Soviet spy.

"I saw Katrina on C-SPAN at the Nixon funeral. Grant had died some years before and she's died since. She was my age, maybe a year or two older. But out there at the funeral at Yorba Linda, with the flag waving at half-mast among the palm trees, and Nixon's birthplace in the background, she was still our Katrina, white-haired and wizened but still very much a force for the good, chatting it up with Barbara Bush and Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan. Life seemed never to have forced her to acknowledge, let alone to surrender, a single one of her pretensions. Still wholeheartedly determined to be the national authority in rectitude, stringent in the extreme about the right thing's being done. Saw her talking there to Senator Dole, our other great moral beacon. She didn't look to me to have relinquished one bit the idea that every word she spoke was of the utmost importance. Still oblivious to the introspection of silence. Still the righteous watchdog over everyone else's integrity. And unrepentant. Divinely unrepentant and brandishing that preposterous self-image. For stupidity, you know, there is no cure. The woman is the very embodiment of moral ambition, and the perniciousness of it, and the folly of it.

"All that mattered to the Grants was how to make Ira serve their cause. And what
was
their cause? America? Democracy? If ever patriotism was a pretext for self-seeking, for self-devotion, for self-adoration ... You know, we learn from Shakespeare that in telling a story you cannot relax your imaginative sympathy for any character. But I am not Shakespeare, and I still despise that hatchet man and his hatchet wife for what they did to my brother—and did so effortlessly, employing Eve the way you do a dog to fetch the paper from the front porch. Remember what Gloucester says of old Lear? 'The king is in high rage.' I came down with a bad case of high rage myself when I spotted Katrina Van Tassel at Yorba Linda. I told myself, She's nothing, nobody, a bit player. In the vast history of twentieth-century ideological malevolence, she's played a clownish walk-on role and no more. But it was still barely endurable for me to watch her.

"But the whole funeral of our thirty-seventh president was barely endurable. The Marine Band and Chorus performing all the songs designed to shut down people's thinking and produce a trance state: 'Hail to the Chief,' 'America,' 'You're a Grand Old Flag,' 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic,' and, to be sure, that most rousing of all those drugs that make everybody momentarily forget everything, the national narcotic, 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' Nothing like the elevating remarks of Billy Graham, a flag-draped casket, and a team of interracial pallbearing servicemen—and the whole thing topped off by 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' followed hard upon by a twenty-one-gun salute and 'Taps'—to induce catalepsy in the multitude.

"Then the realists take command, the connoisseurs of deal making and deal breaking, masters of the most shameless ways of undoing an opponent, those for whom moral concerns must always come last, uttering all the well-known, unreal, sham-ridden cant about everything but the dead man's real passions. Clinton exalting Nixon for his 'remarkable journey' and, under the spell of his own sincerity, expressing hushed gratitude for all the 'wise counsel' Nixon had given him. Governor Pete Wilson assuring everyone that when most people think of Richard Nixon, they think of his 'towering intellect.' Dole and his flood of lachrymose clichés. 'Doctor' Kissinger, high-minded, profound, speaking in his most puffed-up unegoistical mode—and with all the cold authority of that voice dipped in sludge—quotes no less prestigious a tribute than Hamlet's for his murdered father to describe 'our gallant friend.' 'He was a man, take him for all and all, I shall not look upon his like again.' Literature is not a primary reality but a kind of expensive upholstery to a sage himself so plumply upholstered, and so he has no idea of the equivocating context in which Hamlet speaks of the unequaled king. But then who, sitting there under the tremendous pressure of sustaining a straight face while watching the enactment of the Final Cover-up, is going to catch the court Jew in a cultural gaffe when he invokes an inappropriate masterpiece? Who is there to advise him that it's not Hamlet on his father he ought to be quoting but Hamlet on his uncle, Claudius, Hamlet on the conduct of the new king, his father's usurping murderer? Who there at Yorba Linda dares to call out, 'Hey, Doctor—quote
this:
'Foul deeds will rise / Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes'?