The Irregulars (21 page)

Marsh was bound to find out eventually. Alice had confided in her sister Mary Louise, as well as her cousin Alice, who was married to Welly Hopkins. Various members of Marsh’s staff, including the Kolingers and Claudia Haines, had observed them together one too many times and drawn their own conclusions. Although Marsh had finally extracted his divorce in 1938, he had not succeeded in getting Alice to the altar, though it was not for want of trying. “He was asking her and asking her and asking her to marry him,” her sister Mary Louise recalled. If Alice was holding out hope that Lyndon would leave his wife for her, she underestimated his ambition. A divorce would have killed any chance he ever had for high office and was out of the question. In 1939–40 Johnson was eyeing a Senate seat, and his hopes of advancing his political career already looked doubtful in light of his close identification with Roosevelt, who by the seventh year of his presidency was facing an erosion in popularity and opposition to his running for an unprecedented third term.

Alice also misunderstood one of the most fundamental tenets of Johnson’s worldview—loyalty. It was one thing to fool around with another man’s mistress, quite another to wreck his home and carry off the mother of his children. The political society they moved in regarded adultery as no one’s business—the lure of flesh was one of the things men sometimes succumbed to, along with liquor and cards. Divorce was something altogether different. It was a public affront to the rules of the church and conventions of society. Divorce was dishonor. According to Johnson’s code, that would be an unforgivable transgression. “Everything was subordinate to loyalty,” said Luther Jones, who worked for Johnson in his first term. “You must be loyal. That dominated Johnson’s thinking.” For Johnson, the shame was not in the affair, it was in being foolishly indiscreet. He had behaved like a cad and had gotten caught.

Marsh knew Alice had been unfaithful in the past, but to the extent that he was a possessive man, with an outsize ego, her involvement with Johnson infuriated him. He never revealed what tipped him off, but Antoinette recalled Claudia telling her about an angry confrontation between Marsh and Johnson late one night at Longlea. After loudly berating Johnson, Marsh threw him out. The next morning the chastened congressman returned to apologize and vowed to keep his hands off the lady of the house. The two men picked up their friendship where they had left off, and nothing more was ever said on the subject. “They didn’t let her come between them,” said Antoinette, noting that her father and Johnson, despite some memorable ups and downs, remained very close. “Men in power like that don’t give a damn about women,” she added. “They were not that important in the end. They treated women like toys. That’s just the way it was.”

Marsh chose to overlook Alice’s lapse and married her in early 1940. He then adopted little Diana, endowing his natural child with the name that was rightfully hers. The exchange of vows did nothing for their relationship, which soured almost immediately. Marsh made no bones about his troubled marriage. He had few secrets from his close male friends and talked obsessively about women and sex, often in shockingly crude terms. “At a formal dinner, he was as apt to discuss his erections as he was to expound on Einstein’s theory,” recalled Ingersoll. “His non-stop conversation varied from the profane to the profound, and there is no evidence that he ever considered anything about himself secret.”

For a long time, Marsh truly loved Alice and tried to make her happy, showering her with gifts and jewels, including a quarter-of-a-million-dollar necklace of emeralds fit for royalty. But in the end, Alice did not want to be kept. The age difference was too great, and no amount of expensive finery could prevent her from straying.
*
Complicating matters no end, her sister, Mary Louise, had some notion that she had become indispensable to Marsh and might succeed her libidinous sibling. Charles had other ideas. Not one to waste time on regret, he was already making plans to exit his second marriage much the same way as he had his first, with a fait accompli. He would free himself from both Glass sisters, he told Ingersoll, confiding his design for domestic tranquillity, and in their stead promote his pretty typist. “I will make that little Claudia my secretary
and
my mistress,” he declared triumphantly.

By the time Dahl became a regular at Longlea in the summer of 1943, Charles and Alice barely made any pretense of being a couple. She lived in the country and had her apartment in New York. Marsh was spending weeks on his own at the R Street house and ventured only occasionally to Virginia, and then only armed with a battery of friends. On his first few visits to Longlea, Dahl was treated as a welcome distraction, and Alice enjoyed engaging him in her teasing badinage. He was Charles’ pet, but he and Alice had rubbed along just fine until he incurred her wrath. According to Antoinette, Dahl made the mistake of rejecting Alice’s advances late one night and was subsequently banned from Longlea: “He turned her down, and that was it.”

As it turned out, that was the least of his housing problems that summer. Finding decent lodging in wartime Washington was a perpetual nightmare and required constant perseverance and ingenuity. Dahl had spent weeks searching for a new place, when in mid-July he heard through the rumor mill of a house in Georgetown that was unexpectedly available following a grisly murder and suicide. What made it all rather awkward was that the house on 35th Street was occupied by several young female researchers at the OSS, some of whom he knew in passing, including the murder victim, a Chicago debutante by the name of Rosemary Sidley, who had inherited part of the Horlick malted milk fortune. Her roommate, a beauty from the north shore of Boston named Barbara Wendell Soule, had told friends that she could never set foot there again. Dahl was determined to have the place for himself, but he was a bit too keen for some people’s taste, and in the end his eagerness backfired and became the source of macabre amusement around town. “It is an incredible story,” Mary Louise Patten wrote Joe Alsop, explaining that Sidley had been murdered by “an ardent suitor” named William Chandler, who was her boss as well as the married father of two:

It was a dreadful thing, as they both worked in the O.S.S. and she was very attractive and much liked, and he had been pursuing her for months and she would have none of him. Finally one night he came to see her and her tactful girl friends left her alone with her beau and he proceeded to shoot her and then kill himself. I didn’t know either of them, but everyone else in Washington seems to have and you can imagine the excitement caused locally…. To show you how desperate the real estate situation has become, the day after the murder there were a line of people waiting to see if the house was going to be in the market for rent, including several of our friends who shall be nameless. Anyway, the first person to get there was one Dahl.

 

By all accounts, he was in such a hurry to rent the house that he failed to notice that there were still bloodstains on the carpet, not to mention a bullet hole in the ceiling and one in the floor. When Dahl went back later to take a closer look, he was horrified. “This was too much for his Nordic sensitive temperament,” wrote Patten. “He told me the other day that he gets up at six every day to think over the problems of the postwar world for two hours before breakfast without even a twinkle in his eye so you can [see] the type he is.” It just so happened that Isaiah Berlin and his friend Ed Prichard, a brilliant New Deal attorney, were hunting for a new bachelor pad and suffered from none of Dahl’s misgivings. Apparently Dahl confessed to Berlin that he had returned to the house and “sat in the twilight to see if ghosts would occur—which as a creative writer he would find disturbing to cope with.” The ghosts duly appeared. “So he hastily rented the house to the unfeeling Berlin, who is calmly moving in,” Patten reported, “and has asked me to find a good cheap plasterer for him and where he can buy an inexpensive rug of some darkish color!”

Dahl spent the last weeks of August getting his life back in order and renewing his attention to his work. He had received some disappointing news from Disney. In July, Walt wrote that they would no longer be proceeding with the
Gremlins
as a feature and were instead planning to put it out as an animated short, “because of its timely nature and the fact that it should be out now.” The truth, however, was that the studio had run into too many complications with the copyright and the RAF restrictions and was getting cold feet. Walt admitted to feeling “a little apprehensive” about Clause 12 of the contract, which stated that the air attaché could make suggestions and that the British Air Ministry had final approval over the picture: “With the amount of money that is required to spend on a feature of this type we cannot be subjected to the whims of certain people, including yourself.” With so much risk involved, he concluded, “it simply is not good business.”

Dahl had gone to considerable pains to arrange a tour for a Disney film crew of the Royal Canadian Air Force stations in Ottawa, Dartmouth, and Nova Scotia, including having Spitfires flown in for a demonstration, but the reduced budget meant the trip would have to be scrapped. After a year of story conferences and bicoastal meetings, Dahl could tell the project was stalling. Walt ended on an upbeat note, reassuring Dahl that he would try to make a trip to Canada himself “to look things over,” adding that they should “get together for a cocktail” when he was in New York the following month. A few weeks later, when he heard that Lord Stansgate of the Air Ministry had paid Walt a visit in Burbank, Dahl felt every reason to be optimistic. A fat packet of gremlin material had arrived from Stansgate, who asked Dahl to forward it to Disney. Dahl dashed off a quick note advising Walt to ignore the Air Ministry’s research, as it would only confuse him, but adding that he was sending it along anyway as “I must comply with orders.”

In August another of his short stories, “The Sword,” was published in the
Atlantic
. He was beginning to earn a reputation as a skilled raconteur. “The Sword” was autobiographical in tone and was set in Dar es Salaam in the autumn of 1939, “when the German armies were already mustering on the Polish frontier and when the whole of Europe was boiling and heaving under the threat of war.” It was a poignant tale of a young African houseboy who, in his excitement at the news that England was at war with Germany, took his master’s silver scabbard off the sitting room wall and ran over to a rich German merchant’s home and chopped off his head. It was also good Nazi-bashing propaganda, which was more in demand than ever. Once again, the author’s note gave the grisly tale a thrilling and romantic overlay of verisimilitude, explaining that Dahl had in fact been in East Africa with the Shell Oil Company when war broke out.

He also managed to sell another fictional story, called “Katina,” to
Ladies’ Home Journal
. Evoking the chaotic last days of the RAF fighters in Greece in 1941, it tells the story of a little blond girl who is wounded during a German bombing attack on the village of Paramythia. Two off-duty RAF pilots, who had spent hours digging around the ruins for the wounded, find her and take her back to the doctor at their fighter squadron, located in a muddy field on the outskirts of the village. After learning that her family is buried beneath the rubble, they make her the camp mascot, and in a few days’ time she knows the nickname of every pilot there. When they are told to move to Argos, in a futile attempt to give cover to the retreating ground forces, she comes with them. And when the German Messerschmitts spot their makeshift aerodrome and move in with guns blazing, she runs out onto the airfield “raising her fists at the planes,” and is mowed down. The story is simply told, almost crudely executed in places, but is nonetheless effective. Dahl’s anger at the waste of human life is palpable when he describes how the pilot turned away from her body to the burning wreckage of his plane and “stood staring hopelessly into the flames as they danced around the engine and licked the metal of the wings.”

Marsh was convinced that Dahl had the makings of a serious writer and that he should begin planning bigger projects and forging the relationships that could help his career after the war. He thought Dahl would benefit from talking to someone in the business, and since there was nothing he could not fix with a phone call, he contacted the New York publisher Curtice Hitchcock and invited him to Longlea. Marsh had come to know Hitchcock through Henry Wallace, as Hitchcock and his partner, Russell Lord, were in the process of publishing a collection of the vice president’s speeches. Hitchcock and Dahl spent the weekend deep in conversation, and shortly thereafter Marsh received a letter from the publisher thanking him for his hospitality and adding, “I was greatly taken with your young Dahl and I think I have some ideas based on his stuff which might result in a good book.”

Dahl sought to repay Marsh’s kindness by helping him reestablish his personal relationship with the president and to return in the capacity as a confidential adviser, something he knew his American benefactor desired but seemed strangely unable or unwilling to initiate. They had discussed the matter at length that August while vacationing together at Marsh’s cottage in Cape Cod, and Marsh had worried aloud about his close association with Wallace and had theorized that perhaps that was one reason for Roosevelt’s apparent ambivalence toward him. After Charles returned to Washington on business, Dahl sent him a long letter analyzing his situation and advising him on the best recipe for “a return ticket.” In a role reversal of sorts, he provided a list of pointers that might help Marsh get his foot in the door. He counseled the publishing tycoon that “the Great White Indian Chief” thought of him only “as a man who owns a few newspapers,” that FDR had even said as much to Dahl during his visit to Hyde Park, and that it was up to Marsh, by force of his personality and ideas, to persuade the president that he could be a useful member of his brain trust. He cautioned Marsh that when he got in to to see the president he should make every effort to modify his usual loud, overbearing style, to take a more “gentle” approach, and after making a brief presentation to “just stop talking and listen to what he has to say.”