The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (65 page)

EHRLICHMAN:
Other than just being there, huh?

MRS. MITCHELL:
I have a problem.

EHRLICHMAN:
What is your problem?

MRS. MITCHELL:
My problem is his being there.

The conversation already strained, Ehrlichman sought a way out. His solution was to treat the attorney general’s wife like a crackpot constituent. “How can I help you?” he asked. Martha sensed his impatience: “Well, I don’t guess you can help me if you don’t want to help me.” “I want to help you,” Ehrlichman countered, “but I don’t know
how
to help you.” After a few more, similarly desultory, exchanges, Ehrlichman cut things short with a suggestion that Martha contact Defense Secretary Mel Laird (whom the White House distrusted; “He runs that little empire over there,” said Ehrlichman, “and doesn’t talk to anybody”). “I’ve already talked to him,” Martha snapped. The call ended with her curtly thanking Ehrlichman for his help, and Ehrlichman replying, curtly and aptly: “Not at all.”
⁸

“I got a lot
of calls from Martha,” Ehrlichman recalled in 1992. “She was unhinged. She was just not—not normal.”

EHRLICHMAN:
You’d be at dinner, eight or nine, ten people at dinner, at a table. She demanded that everybody at that table give her undivided attention. You couldn’t conduct a separate conversation down at the other end of the table. She’d say, “You people down there, be quiet, I want to say something.” And she was, you know, very insecure, very demanding and, and very unbalanced.

ROSEN:
How do you think Mitchell dealt with that strain?

EHRLICHMAN:
By withdrawing…. When she would pull something like that, he would be like a turtle going back into his shell.
⁹

Such instances were numerous and legendary. Brent Harries, one of Mitchell’s Wall Street chums, recalled Mrs. Mitchell leaping onto furniture at upscale private parties in the early sixties—long before Mitchell went into politics—and her husband just standing there, chuckling, helpless. Anna Chennault remembered hosting a party at her Watergate apartment that ended with Martha madly flinging one of her stiletto heels across the room at her husband. Most unforgettable, however, was the portrait drawn by Maxine Cheshire of the
Washington Post
.

Martha’s drinking problem, now well known, should have been publicly disclosed a lot earlier than it was. One
Post
reporter covered a small dinner party—one of the first the Mitchells attended when they came to town—where Martha became so drunk that she passed out and fell face down in her soup bowl. John Mitchell almost let her drown before he pulled her up. The reporter, a Republican, was outraged when a
Post
editor would not allow the incident to appear in her story the next day.

Cheshire was a frequent visitor to the Mitchells’ Watergate home and therefore learned much earlier than the rest of the Washington press corps the sad truth blanketing the lives of the women John Mitchell cared for most: Martha and Marty. “One time,” Cheshire wrote, “my knock was answered by the black chauffeur-bodyguard, and standing behind him was Martha, with an almost empty glass in her hand. Though it was early afternoon, she was obviously very drunk. I asked her a question, and she started to tell me that she was leaving Washington. Then she handed the glass to the chauffeur, and, placing her hand on her behind, she began a little dance, singing something about ‘Goodbye to Washington,’ wiggling with her fingers as she waved her posterior. At that, the chauffeur closed the door in my face.”

I returned a few days later, again in mid-afternoon, and this time my knock was answered by a large black woman in a white uniform, who appeared to be a nurse. As I stood in the hall, eleven-year-old Marty came down the apartment’s stairs. She was in pajamas and looked as if she had not been outside in the sun for months. As the woman turned toward the child, I heard the clink of metal and noticed a large key ring attached to her belt. “I want to go in my mommy’s room,” said Marty. “Would you open the door so I can see my mommy?” The woman shook her head. “I’ve told you over and over. You can’t see your mother until she wakes up.”

Again the door was shut in my face, but not before I saw the look of anguish on the child’s face. The curtains were tightly drawn, and the interior of the apartment was in deep shadows. Whether the nurse had locked Martha in her bedroom or Martha had locked herself in, I did not know. But I later learned that one of the main items of regular “housekeeping” in the apartment was to repair or replace Martha’s bedroom door. She would often lock herself in, and when threats were ineffectual, John Mitchell instructed the chauffeur to kick the door down. I didn’t like to dwell on what this was doing to Marty.
¹⁰

Why did Mitchell marry Martha in the first place? The chronology suggests their relationship began as an extramarital affair; presumably, then, the initial attraction, for Mitchell, lay in adultery’s usual draws: sex, excitement, illicit adventure. A source close to Mitchell confirmed, many years later, what the FBI had learned during its background check on him in 1968: that Martha was pregnant when they married. The two made an odd couple—he in pinstripes, pipe, and wingtips; she in bouffant wigs, costume jewelry, and stilettos—and recalled Katharine Hepburn’s famous commentary on Astaire and Rogers: “He gave her class, she gave him sex appeal.”

Mitchell’s staid exterior and resemblance to Alfred Hitchcock made it difficult to conceive of him in sexual terms at all, let alone as an edgy character. But a few saw past the Wall Street façade. Among them—working backward, in deduction, from the presence of Martha—was William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative commentator who knew the attorney general well enough to have introduced him, in 1968, to Henry Kissinger. “A bond dealer!” Buckley began his eulogy for Mitchell in
National Review
. “It was part of the grander design that John Mitchell should have had that profession, and that face. He looked like the Anonymous Man, clerking his time away until the Social Security payments began. And all the while, in private life and in public, he was a picaresque figure. Anyone married to Martha Mitchell had to be, in hidden life, one true gay blade.”

Since tales of Martha’s erratic behavior date back to the early sixties, Mitchell must have recognized early on in their marriage the severity of his second wife’s mental and emotional problems; it was this recognition that gave him pause before he finally capitulated to Nixon’s pleas to serve in government. He stayed with her, most likely, because they had a child together and he wanted to avoid visiting upon Marty the same dislocation that afflicted his children from his first marriage. His divorce from Bette Shine had also been expensive. Finally, there was some evidence, after his death, that he carried on another affair—at least one—after marrying Martha.

A family member once said Mitchell was intellectually brilliant, “but not when it came to women.” Still others saw Mitchell’s consuming devotion to work as the central problem in his relationships. “Martha was very family-oriented,” Mitchell’s brother, Robert, recalled in 1998. “John was always busy with his success…. I think the only problem with Martha was that as [John] got more and more, you know, successful…she was apparently left alone a lot and I guess she took to alcohol, that’s all. And she had the weakness, and she became an alcoholic. But Martha wasn’t always that way.”
¹¹

Watergate was the final strain that pushed Martha over the edge. The bloody altercation in Newport Beach and the escalating shrillness of her calls to reporters in the spring of 1973 signaled the encroaching darkness that was to cloud her remaining days. Erratic, even dangerous behavior Mitchell, in private practice, was able to police—like the time when his wife, like some malevolent cartoon character, sprang from a concealed position in their apartment and, without provocation, smashed a chair over the head of one of Mitchell’s law partners, or the occasion, far more chilling, when she got hold of a gun and trained it menacingly on Marty.

Now, however, indicted and struggling to stay out of prison, Mitchell could no longer manage his wife’s madness. With the twin terrors of the Watergate scandals and Martha Mitchell, no man, no matter how strong, could cope; a change had to be made.

On September 11, 1973,
with Marty safely ensconced at boarding school in Connecticut, Mitchell finally walked out on Martha, taking whatever he could carry, including an alarm clock, to the Essex House on Central Park South. Eight months later, on May 10, 1974, Martha initiated formal divorce proceedings, accusing Mitchell in court papers of “cruel and inhuman treatment and abandonment.” Mrs. Mitchell—she kept the name—also sought legal advantage by reminding the court of her ex-husband’s “leadership” role in “the Watergate break-in and cover-up.”
¹²

In his legal papers, Mitchell argued Martha had “disregarded her duties and obligations as a wife” and behaved “in such a manner as to justify” his leaving her. In a private letter he railed at “that sick [expletive] that has caused so many problems for Marty and me.” Throughout the summer of 1973, he told the court, his efforts to prepare for the Vesco trial were hampered by Martha’s “unstable condition, [her] refusal to sleep during the night, and harassment during the day.” Worse, her “frequently…excessive alcohol intake” left her “unfit” to care for Marty, in whom she “instilled fear…subjecting her to harassment both at school and while visiting friends, and upon occasion, to physical abuse.”
¹³

In the annals of divorce, the dissolution of the Mitchell marriage, and the competing child-custody and property claims it engendered, surely rank among the longest, nastiest, costliest, and most painfully public of the media age. The drama played out in New York State Supreme Court, on local and national television, in the newspapers, and occasionally—as when Martha set fire to her ex-husband’s most cherished items and dumped the rest in their foyer—violently. Coupled with the two criminal trials and multiple investigations he faced, the character assassination raining down on him from every newsstand and anchor desk in the nation, Mitchell’s divorce represented still another front in his seemingly boundless struggle for survival.
¹⁴

Despite her later claims to have been shocked at Mitchell’s departure, Martha appears to have anticipated his move and taken preemptive action to blunt its impact. The previous July, the Mitchells had hired Soll Connelly and Marshall, a Park Avenue law firm, to assist in transferring ownership of their Fifth Avenue co-op to Martha, a move likely triggered by Mitchell’s indictment in the Vesco matter two months earlier. But with the sting of the Newport Beach needle still fresh in memory, their marriage obviously failing, Martha, according to previously unpublished documents, secretly contacted Soll Connelly and requested “the advice of a firm other than Mr. Mitchell’s law firm, so she could be sure her interests were protected.” She knew the end was near.

Five days after Mitchell stole away in the night, Martha told Helen Thomas he had left on advice of counsel. “He walked out, yes,” Martha confirmed. “But I’ve been trying to get him out. If you’ve got a man twenty-four hours a day, I couldn’t stand it. He was watching the football games. I’m so glad he’s out of here. Anyone who sits here and never goes out, and never accepts invitations.”
¹⁵

Soon, however, Martha realized she was entirely ignorant of the family finances and unable to perform even the most elemental administrative tasks necessary to maintain her (costly) existence. “For seventeen years of her marriage to the defendant,” her lawyers later argued, “she was accustomed to a certain style of living and the security that went with it.” Her security, the lawyers frankly acknowledged, derived from “having had the luxury of people taking care of her personal needs and financial needs all of those years.” When Mitchell left, he “took with him all the security that the plaintiff may have had, and the plaintiff was left on her own without being aware or knowing which way to turn to take care of
any
personal matters.”
¹⁶