Watergate (5 page)

“We’re so thrilled you could be here!”

Oh, golly, the name: a redhead, but which one? Arlene Dahl? Rhonda Fleming? She and Dick had always seen a lot of movies but could never keep those two straight.

“That’s so sweet of you to say! But I know you’d all be
more
thrilled if Dr. Kissinger had been able to make it after all!” She winked, a woman-to-woman tribute to Kissinger’s supposed charm and magnetism, which Pat couldn’t say she’d ever really experienced. Henry had been the administration star promised for this fundraiser by the Committee to Re-Elect; she was aware of herself, a bit painfully, as the second choice, and she hoped it didn’t look like a bait-and-switch—Kissinger really did have to attend to something that had come up in the Far East. Still, she wished that the Committee had asked Julie or Tricia (well, Julie) to substitute instead, and that Dick hadn’t pushed her so hard to come out here at the last minute.

“We’re so happy to have you!” said the redhead, maybe even meaning it. Of course the real commotion here tonight was being provided by Martha. By now she was probably a bigger draw than either the first lady
or
the national security advisor, but enough protocol remained in politics that they couldn’t make a cabinet wife the official guest of honor—no matter how many times Martha made the evening news. Poor John: there he was, not thirty feet away, his hand gently on his wife’s back, trying to keep her from skyrocketing into another burst of hilarity or rage.

“And you look so beautiful in that dress!” said yet another executive’s wife, moving up the line behind the redhead.

“Well, look who’s talking!” said Pat, with an up-and-down appraisal of the gal’s flouncy chiffon outfit. Sleeveless, of course. She herself never
had the nerve for it, not even in California in June. She was always getting compliments, or protective cluckings, about how thin she was; well, she might have the waist to wear anything, but not the arms.

The executive’s wife wasn’t smiling. Her mouth was open in a little “o” of disbelief—shock, even—that the first lady was capable of making a joke. Not even a joke; just a funny figure of speech:
look who’s talking
. Good Lord, thought Pat: Was her image (she hated the word) really
that
bad?
That
“plastic”? Well, there was nothing she could do to change it. Every couple of years the press talked about a New Nixon, but that was Dick. She was stuck where she was with the reporters. Especially when it came to clothes. That
beautiful
inaugural gown with the golden jacket! On anyone else it would have been deemed magical, but once she stepped into it,
Women’s Wear Daily
pronounced: “schoolteacher’s night out.” She’d felt so bad for poor Karen Stark, who’d done such a beautiful job designing it. Dick had been furious, and gone on a toot about pansies in the fashion business, which of course had nothing to do with the sharp-clawed lady cats in the fashion
press
.

Actually, they were half right. The dress
was
beautiful, but in some ways the whole past twenty-five years had been a schoolteacher’s night out, an improbable recess from what still seemed the real life she’d been settling into as Miss Ryan in the classrooms of Whittier Union High. When she’d made this observation to Dick—as a joke with some truth in it, just to have a laugh and get him off the subject of
Women’s Wear Daily
—he’d only gotten madder.

Taft Schreiber was cutting the line. She hadn’t yet met the host, and before she could thank him for this lovely party and his generosity to the campaign, he was all over her with flattery of Dick that not even Kissinger could have matched: “When I think of all that the president—one of California’s own—has done for the movie industry, I burst with pride as well as the sincerest gratitude. The investment tax credit, the accelerated depreciation allowances—magnificent! But I shouldn’t bore you with such technical things.”

“Praise of Dick never bores me,” said the first lady.

In fact, her curiosity was piqued. With a raised eyebrow she beckoned Connie Stuart, her top aide, to come stand next to her, as Schreiber threw a last bouquet: “Attorney General Mitchell
—former
Attorney
General, I should say—has been particularly splendid. But enough. No more politics. Let me relinquish you to all the people who’ve come to see you.”

She and Connie, now by her side, stepped back from the receiving line for a confidential moment.

“I thought it was just Israel,” said Pat, “that made Taft Schreiber such a big supporter. What’s John Mitchell done for him? John doesn’t run tax policy
or
the Middle East.”

“Justice filed an antitrust suit against the TV networks,” Connie explained, “to stop them from making their own movies for television. Which means they’ll have to keep buying movies from the men here.”

Pat, a quick study, nodded and got back to the receiving line. She glanced over at Mitchell, who didn’t look happy for a man with such grateful and generous friends. Well, how could he, with Martha berating him in that loud, slicing voice? She sounded like a parrot in a cage. Pat could hear her all the way from over there, scolding the poor man for
being
unhappy.

“John Mitchell!” cawed Martha. “I do not understand why each and every man from the Committee to Re-Elect Mr. President is looking lower than a snake’s belly tonight!”

John mumbled and placated and continued to caress the back of his wife’s dress. The two of them, even now, Pat had to concede, were a love match. But Martha would be the death of him. And Dick only made things worse by encouraging her with all those give-’em-hell notes and across-the-room thumbs-ups. Instead of clamping down on Martha, the most anyone ever did was try for a little distraction, as John was doing now, pointing out Zsa Zsa Gabor to her.

Even as she watched, Pat could hear herself telling—yet again, automatically—the
Becky Sharp
story she’d already told three times tonight; about how she’d gotten work as an extra on the film during her days at USC, and then been given a single line to read. “But they cut it!” she concluded, once more, with a laugh. “Maybe Chuck,” she added, gently touching Charlton Heston’s arm, “can ask Governor Reagan where my Screen Actors Guild card is. I’m still waiting for it!”

She’d made the same joke ten minutes ago to John Wayne and his Peruvian wife.

Like most of her memories, the ones involving
Becky Sharp
were something she’d prefer to keep to herself—not that there was anything so private about the story, only that it seemed to lose vividness, be less real to
her
, with every occasion she had to tell it. Each time she described driving over from campus in Ginny Shugart’s red Ford, the car grew a little less red, the sunshine above it a little less warm and a little more like CinemaScope. Of course, she never mentioned how she’d hated all the time wasted standing around on the set; how one of the assistant directors had come over to the house one night, drunk, and been tossed out by her brothers. But because she never added any of these details to the recitation, they remained fresher, oddly more satisfying, than the story’s rote, pleasant parts.

She saw John Mitchell leaving Martha in the care of that man from Mississippi, the one with the soft, soothing voice whose name she could never remember. He’d been Mitchell’s man in the White House, and by now she supposed he’d gone over to the Committee to Re-Elect. She was struck by how patient he was with Martha, who seemed more agitated by the moment.

Six years ago, on the evening they first met, Pat had felt sorry for Martha. It was just after John’s law firm had merged with Dick’s and his wife was feeling slighted at some University Club function in New York. Pat remembered talking to her softly, as the man from Mississippi was doing now. Martha, responding well that night, had called her “Patty,” something she alone in the world continued to do. Like most drunks and flamboyant people, Martha was actually, secretly, shy, whereas Pat knew herself—however unlikely it seemed—to be naturally an extrovert. She held her real self in with discipline, the same way Martha unleashed a false one with drink.

But she had long since lost patience with Martha. It was all too much now, the late-night and early-morning calls—five a.m. tirades to Connie about one thing or another—and the
stupid
comments to the press: how Fulbright needed to be “crucified” and all the rest.

And now Martha was coming straight toward her; the man from Mississippi helpless to stop it. “I’m going to stand beside Patty when Mr. Mitchell speaks!” Martha brayed. “That is, if he can tear himself away from one more hush-hush little huddle back there!”

Oh, no, you’re not, thought Pat. Taking Connie by the elbow, she swerved away, as unnoticeably as she could. Together they made their way to a punch bowl. (Better to be photographed with a little crystal cup—
schoolteacher’s night out
—than that tumbler of scotch Martha had in her hand.) Martha now looked furious, well and truly snubbed. Still, she would have no choice but to keep silent, at least for a few minutes, since her husband had begun addressing the crowd of contributors.

You be president; I’ll be secretary of state
. She remembered hearing Dick say this to John, just after the election: evidence of his esteem for Mitchell and a poignant indicator of his own real interests. But right now John looked too exhausted to be even a justice of the peace. He was probably more loaded than Martha, and he was making it through his remarks with the help of a microphone, talking about all the millions of dollars they’d taken in, as if the campaign were for cancer research or the Heart Fund, a money-raising operation that would go on forever. Back in 1960 no one had ever spoken this way. The money was handled by one or two men and went mostly undiscussed even in the press, let alone polite conversation.

It was Reagan’s turn now. He had mounted a little box beside the poolside crowd, his skin as smooth and brown as Mitchell’s was blotchy. He was making a joke about how he wouldn’t be governor today if Lew Wasserman had done a better job getting him parts in movies. Pat threw back her head and laughed and wondered again where all the young men from the campaign kept disappearing to. Martha was right: they’d been scurrying around, nervous and gloomy, all evening. What was going on? What news had they had from Washington? Mitchell himself had once more gone back to the house after finishing his remarks, and the absence of male attention—even the man from Mississippi had vanished—was giving his wife fits.

As Reagan went on talking, Pat wondered how Dick had spent his evening in the Bahamas, at the Abplanalps’. Probably watching a movie. The time difference made it too late to call, but she knew how the conversation would go in any case. She’d mention that Schreiber’s house was in Bel Air, and Dick’s file-card memory would pop out a recollection of their own brief time here, in ’61, between the two defeats. He’d
ask if she recalled the day the big fire swept through the neighborhood and he and the fellow helping him write
Six Crises
had gotten up on the roof of their rented house to hose the place down. As he told her this, he’d be silently remembering how by that point he’d already decided to run for governor in ’62, something he’d been wrong and she’d been right about. Though neither one of them would mention this now, the conversation would get frosty for a moment or two. No, she thought, smiling: there was no new Nixon.

She hadn’t been happy until they’d left Los Angeles and gone to New York, and not really happy until Tom Garahan had come along. And then not really miserable until she’d pushed Tom away. But she wouldn’t think about that now; she’d put it out of her mind just as lately she’d been expelling pictures of that boy shooting George Wallace and that madman taking his hammer to the
Pietà
. Still, it was harder to shut out the sensation of happiness, what she’d briefly known with Tom. Best of all, its memory was undulled by the confession of it to anybody, ever. The eight months wearing kerchiefs and dark glasses; the afternoon meetings in movie theaters: there they were, the still-vibrant images and feelings, coming to her, assaulting her will power right now, as Reagan finished speaking.

She needed to get back once more into the receiving line. Shaking another fifty hands would be less of a chore than staying here and being encircled by people who wanted extended conversation. But before she could take a first step forward, she saw the man from Mississippi coming out of the house, no doubt redeputized to look after Mrs. Mitchell. She waved to him, merrily indicated that he should come over; maybe she could delay his getting an earful from Martha about the little snub of a few minutes before.

The man squinted to make sure he was really being summoned. She now remembered the way his weak eyes had kept straining to read the printed handouts at the one meeting she’d ever been at with him; something about the hurricane, back in ’69. They’d assigned it to him because he came from Mississippi.

“Hello, Miz Nixon. Fred LaRue.”

“Somebody called me ‘Miz’ about an hour ago, but I’m pretty sure she had it spelled ‘M-s-period’ in her mind!”

The man smiled and looked at his shoes. “I meant what you call a lady, not a women’s-libber.”

The soft voice was such a relief from the clipped tones of all the young campaign sharpies who’d come out on the plane. No wonder he was good with Martha.

“I’m remembering that you briefed me about Hurricane Camille. Wasn’t that just an awful thing?”

“Yes, ma’am. I imagine it was the worst storm most folks’ll ever go through.” He looked back at the house, through its glass doors, to the cluster of men still around John Mitchell, before he added: “But you can never be sure.”