Paris: A Love Story (12 page)

After Peter’s arrival, I did not want to stay in my sister’s house. So, on Christmas Day Peter drove me to a nearby hotel. He said he was giving me until spring to “figure things out.”

It was my choice, but I felt very alone—a particularly bitter feeling at Christmas. But I did not need until spring to figure things out.

A friend—not close, but someone whose company I had enjoyed over the years—had called the day before, reaching me at my sister’s house. He said he heard I was in Paris, heard about my situation. “Really sorry, and hope it’s for the best,” he said. He had just driven over from Germany, he said, and was staying at the residence of the American ambassador, Pamela Harriman. “Christmas is no time to be alone,” he said. “How about a little trip to cheer you up? What’s your favorite spot in France?” Before I could even pause to think, I blurted out “the Loire valley.” I remembered happy days there as a student.

•   •   •

On December 26, an armored Buick the size of a small tank, the official car of the American ambassador to Germany, rolled up the gravel drive of the Hotel Petit Trianon in Versailles. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke was behind the wheel. I stood on that gravel path, my frozen hands jammed in the pockets of my camelhair coat, and wondered what the hell I was doing. Taking in my swollen, red-rimmed eyes, Richard, radiating excitement and good cheer, said, “C’mon! Let’s go!” I jumped in. Our lives are turned in such split seconds.

The weather was gray and bone chilling and matched my mood perfectly. As we meandered toward the Loire valley, my mind was far from Richard or our little trip. I was wondering what my kids—with their father and my sister in Paris—were doing just then, and were they missing their mother at Christmas? Watching the wintry landscape roll by, I hoped Richard did not notice the tears that kept flowing. Had I just made the biggest mistake of my life? I saw no future, just the mistakes of the past. Frequently blowing my nose, I warned Richard I would be terrible company. He did not seem to mind.

We stopped in Chartres. We found just the right restaurant near the cathedral, an old-fashioned country inn called La Vieille Maison. A fire roared in the gabled dining room and the maître d’ seated us next to it. Richard knew his way around French menus and ordered for us both. The food was wonderful and the wine warm against the winter chill. I was relieved to be with someone who expected nothing more than my presence. He was burrowed in a book about the great cathedral from which he was reading out loud to me. Suddenly, he looked up and saw someone he recognized passing in front of the restaurant’s plate glass window. Jumping up, Richard walked right into the glass front door. I could not suppress a smile at this scene from a
Road Runner
cartoon.

Rubbing his forehead, he returned to the table. “That guy is the greatest living guide to Chartres and I wanted him to give you a tour,” he explained. “I missed him.” I was charmed by this man who had driven so far to have lunch with a woman in such a miserable state, only to be rewarded with an angry bump on
his forehead. This was not the Richard Holbrooke I knew, mostly from the Council on Foreign Relations and television interviews.

It was twilight when we left the restaurant, the gray sky blending into the ancient stones. Smoke rising from chimneys gave the town a timeless feeling. Inside the cathedral, the famous blue in the stained-glass windows shone brightly even in the dim light. We sat in a pew, enveloped by the smell of incense and the hush of a winter evening. But even in this stillness, Richard was irrepressible. “Just imagine,” he whispered urgently, “the pilgrims’ first reaction to the sight of these windows! The power of this place for medieval peasants.”

For five days we visited Loire châteaux. Richard kept up a steady stream of stories of royal intrigue and dynastic blood-spilling. His excitement on the subject of French architecture and history was contagious. He preferred the more earthbound Romanesque to the soaring Gothic that it begat. The winter days were short and each night we stayed in places he had circled in his
Guide Michelin.
He knew so much French history, and read passages from old guidebooks he had since 1968, which he had brought along from Germany.

In Tours, I was the guide. I showed him the
maison particulière
on the rue Jules Simon, where I had stayed with the family of Count Clouet. The garden of the Cathédrale St.-Gatien, where I once sat by flower beds the color of the setting sun, was now covered with frost. He laughed when I described my earnest, enchanted, Francophile self of two decades earlier. “You are so different in France than in New York!” he exclaimed. You, too, I thought.

We drove back to Paris and he asked me where we should spend our last night before he returned to Berlin and I to New York. Place des Vosges, I said impulsively. So he booked us two rooms at the Pavillon de la Reine. Tucked deep inside one of the arcades, the hotel is almost invisible from the square. Our gabled rooms had low ceilings and a rustic feel, and the hotel seemed a world away from the lights and the bustle of Paris. I called my children, who told me they were having fun skiing in the Alps with their father, my sister, and their cousins. My heart constricted for just a moment. But I knew I was where I was, by choice.

“I know just the place for our last dinner!” Richard said. “Chez Benoit. Haven’t been there in years,” he said, “but it’s an authentic Parisian bistro. We won’t run into anyone we know.”

He was right about the authentic part, but otherwise dead wrong. The first person we spotted as we entered Benoit’s cozy warmth was Ambassador Pamela Harriman, dining with two New York society figures. I headed for the ladies’ room and told Richard to explain to his old friend the need for discretion, as Peter and I were still married. I needn’t have worried. Though Pam had been a guest in my home, and I in hers, she had never before seen me without Peter. Now she had no idea who I was. She was focused entirely on Richard.

The next day, Pam put out the word that Holbrooke was seen dining in Paris with a mysterious Swedish journalist. Not worth the trouble learning her name, she told a mutual friend of ours. “Dick” goes through so many women. That was fine with me. In years to come, Richard loved to tell this story as a
perfect illustration of Pam Harriman’s absolute indifference to women not in a position to do anything for her.

Pam was an important figure in Richard’s life. Her husband, the man Richard always called the Governor—W. Averell Harriman—picked Richard, a callow twenty-five-year-old Foreign Service officer, as the youngest member of the Vietnam peace talks in 1968. His title was “Expert,” only he didn’t know what he was supposed to be expert in.

He thought Pam was doing a superb job as ambassador. When once I asked him why she was so effective in representing her country at the Élysée Palace, he answered, “Four words: Pamela
Digby Churchill Harriman.
The French love all that history.”

Somehow, Pam’s unexpected presence, and the reminder that we were about to part and return to our very different lives—he to Germany and I to New York—after five surprisingly stress-free days, shifted our mood.

We had talked about every subject: politics, history, art, our shared love of French culture—everything except us. During that final dinner in Paris, we began to cross from banter into different territory.

Richard told me he had been anticipating my separation for years. He proceeded to list about a decade of sightings of me at parties, meetings, and even in elevators. I was astonished. He had never given away his more than friendly interest in me, even when the two of us would have lunch alone once a year or so. Now I was bemused at how openly he talked about his feelings. He said he had known for years I was just right
for him, intellectually and emotionally, and in other ways, too. I had never known a man so comfortable with his own feelings—nor so confident. I did not yet know that this was the same patience, perseverance, and focus Richard brought to the negotiating table—applied to his personal life.

•   •   •

We walked back to the place des Vosges, warmed by the food and wine against the biting cold of the Parisian night. He put his arm around me and I felt very secure there. We circled the place before going into the Pavillon. He took my hand for the first time. That, too, felt natural. We discovered great hand-holding compatibility: not too tight, not too loose. For the next seventeen years, even when watching TV, we held hands.

When he drove me to Charles de Gaulle Airport next day, I felt more hopeful about the future than when I had arrived two weeks earlier.

Hours later, when I walked into my New York apartment, the phone was ringing. I remember thinking, I hope it’s Richard. And it was.

Our love story unfolded over the telephone. There has never been a better talker than Richard Holbrooke. The surprise was that he was a good listener, too.

He installed a special phone line in his Bonn residence, and soon in Berlin as well (so the American taxpayer would not be subsidizing our nightly phone sessions, he said). Sometimes we talked for two hours. They were the easiest conversations of my life. He was interested in everything: my children, my writing, my parents, and soon, my painful divorce. His observations about the world were original and based mostly on his own experiences. I don’t remember ever hearing him utter a single cliché. Nor did he let me get away with much. “Be precise!” he would say in an attempt to tame my Hungarian love of a good yarn. “Facts are sacred.”

He laughed when I used what he called a “ten-dollar word” to impress him. “Jejune!” he’d tease. “Where did you learn that word, refugee girl?” I confessed to keeping a list of new words as I was still self-conscious about my English. Now I had someone to whom I could show off.

I began to follow the news differently. Through Richard,
I felt that I was inside the room where events unfolded—and not only in the present. The players took on real personalities. I was no longer a journalist, my nose pressed against the window of big events. I soon felt that I knew Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson, General William Westmoreland, Bobby Kennedy, and even FDR and Woodrow Wilson—personally. It was exhilarating. But he was just as passionate about lower forms of art. We would “watch” David Letterman’s show together, he in Germany, through a special feed, me in New York. “You
cannot
go to sleep until we hear Letterman’s top-ten list,” he would insist, as I was dropping off.

It was the purest courtship of my life. We had only the sound of each other’s voices on the telephone. In a month’s time, we were deeply enmeshed in each other’s lives, thoughts, dreams, and ambitions. In those pre-email days, we faxed back and forth, sending things we were writing, for the other’s comments. It is hard for me to imagine getting through that period of hurt and disappointment, ending fifteen years of marriage, without Richard’s mellow “Hel-lo Katika” at the day’s end. He was calm and unflappable in family crises—mediating my conflicts with my children and parents. He was more easily moved by historic events than by human foibles. Years later, when he met with the newly elected president, Barack Obama, in Chicago, he teared up at the enormity of the moment: shaking hands with our country’s first African-American president. Richard did not think his show of emotion went down well with Mr. Obama.

In 1994, I was relieved that Richard was far away. Lizzie and Chris adored both their parents and were pained to see our family
come apart. I was desperately trying to be loving and present for them, while dealing with Peter’s anger. For a very long time Peter refused to move out of our apartment. Whatever his role in our marriage, I was the initiator of our divorce. Our children covering their parents’ bed with rose petals, and lighting candles in our bedroom—one of Chris and Lizzie’s final attempts to bring us back together—is still a searing memory.

Richard visited me in late January, and I spent some days with him in both Bonn and Berlin in February. The absence of drama in our relationship was an adjustment for me. I had never before been in love with a man who was so
un
elusive. He said he had waited a long time for me, and I was for him, and that was that. He had been single for two decades and did not want to waste any time. When we disagreed, he would cut the argument short. “Look,” he would say, “you and I both know where we want this to come out, so let’s just get there fast.”

After so many years expending emotional energy on my volatile marriage, I suddenly had energy to spare. I finished my fourth book,
A Death in Jerusalem,
on the assassination of the first Arab-Israeli peace negotiator, Count Folke Bernadotte; became chair of the Committee to Protect Journalists; and soon started a new book.

One night as Richard and I were reluctantly winding up a long conversation that neither of us wanted to end, I said teasingly, “Well, maybe when you come home, in a couple of years, we should try living together.” Oh no, he answered. “I’m too old for that. I did that with Diane Sawyer for seven years.” “Okay then,” I teased. “I guess we just have to get married.”

The next morning my fax machine disgorged the following note, on the letterhead of the United States ambassador to Germany: “Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke accepts with great pleasure the offer of marriage to Miss Kati Marton, at a date to be determined.” A few days later the mail brought an elegant, gold embossed card, complete with the ambassadorial seal, with the following handwritten poem, dated April 14, 1994:

Wilt Thou be mine—As I am Thine,

With or without this rhyme?

The card sits today in a silver frame on my dresser.

Later that winter of 1994, he joined me in Budapest, where I was working on a travel piece. Walking down the Andrassy Boulevard, hand in hand, I felt that I was home, really home, for the first time—my past and the present joined. We had a shared attachment to history and were viscerally bound to the violent twentieth century our parents had barely survived. Sitting side by side in Budapest’s Great Synagogue, I felt a powerful current pass between us. My great-grandparents had been married in that synagogue by my great-great-grandfather, a rabbi who had traveled from Prague to perform the ceremony. I was just beginning to learn my own history, as my parents had kept all of this hidden. I was outraged by how much they had withheld, but Richard understood them, and was forgiving. “They are survivors,” he said, “strong people who lived through things you and I have not. You are here, and you are who you are, because they survived.”