The Irregulars (33 page)

Annabella had begun her career as a dancer and at sixteen was cast as Violine Fleuri in the French director Abel Gance’s silent classic
Napoléon
. She rose to become a star of French cinema, appearing in three classics: the René Clair films
Le Million
and
Quatorze Juillet
and Marcel Carné’s
Hôtel du Nord
. When she came to Hollywood in 1938, she was twenty-nine and had already been married twice—to the French writer Albert Sorre, who died, and to the much older French actor Jean Murat, with whom she had a daughter. Later that year the volatile actress made news with her divorce and snapped at an interviewer: “It is not always good to be a film star in America…they want to know what I eat, what I think, they even want to know whom I love—and that I tell no one.”

She had met Tyrone Power on Twentieth Century–Fox’s back lot shortly after arriving in America. Annabella had just appeared opposite Henry Fonda in
Wings of the Morning
, Britain’s first full-length color film, in which she wore her blond hair cropped short and masqueraded as a bewitching young boy. After seeing her at a screening of the film, the bisexual Power was smitten. Hoping to turn her into the next Greta Garbo, Darryl Zanuck, the head of Twentieth Century–Fox, cast her in
Suez
, a big-budget quasi-historical drama that was designed to be a vehicle for Power. Much to his dismay, however, the two fell in love during the production. Power was then one of Fox’s most bankable stars, and Annabella—a foreigner, a divorcée, and several years senior to the twenty-five-year-old Power—was a far cry from the all-American sweetheart the studio had in mind for their golden boy. After communicating his disapproval to the pair, Zanuck attempted to get rid of Annabella by shipping her to London to work on a picture. Annabella refused to go and wed Power in April 1939 in the garden of her friend and compatriot, Charles Boyer. Zanuck was incensed. Studio chiefs thought nothing of rearranging the lives of their contract stars to conform to Hollywood press releases—ordering abortions and ending affairs—and her defiance cost her countless roles.

By the time Power reported to boot camp in January 1943, he was trying to escape a stalled career and rocky marriage, strained by his more than passing interest in male companionship. In an effort to protect the image of their valuable star and avoid potentially ruinous gossip, the studio pressured them to keep up the facade of a happy couple. The continental Annabella quickly accommodated herself to the arrangement. While Power continued his protracted training—after officer’s training school at Quantico, Virginia, he did a stint at a command school, then received advanced flight training before finally being shipped to the Pacific more than eighteen months later—Annabella became a U.S. citizen and threw herself into a war-bond-selling tour. She gave rousing speeches in cities across the country, entertaining small crowds at post offices, factories, and insurance buildings. She also starred in a series of propaganda films, including
The French Underground
and
Tonight We Raid Calais
. Both pursued a succession of outside relationships: Power, between men, fell madly in love with Judy Garland; Annabella, in retaliation, took up with a well-known British actor, a writer, and a wealthy scion of an old New York family. Dahl knew he was by no means her only paramour and vice versa. As this was an arrangement that suited them both, they carried on a clandestine love affair.

Jacobowsky and the Colonel
opened on Broadway in March 1944 to rave reviews and went on to a hugely successful six-month run. Dahl often took the train up to New York to be with her and waited for her backstage at the Martin Beck Theater, and afterward they would go to dinner. One night, not long after his return from England, he and Annabella ran into Marsh’s daughter, Antoinette, and her husband at the Plaza Hotel. “I went to the Oak Room after the theater and ran into them,” recalled Antoinette. “She was very pretty, and Roald looked pleased as punch.” On the night of August 22, after being told in the wings that the radio had just announced the news that Paris had been liberated, Annabella took to the stage alone and, tears streaming down her face, announced to the audience that her native city had been freed. The whole audience got to its feet and joined her in singing “La Marseillaise.”

When Dahl was in New York, he usually stayed at Marsh’s town house, on 92nd Street just off Fifth Avenue. Antoinette and her husband had an apartment in the building and often invited Dahl to parties: “Roald would bring Annabella to dinner—he’d come whenever he couldn’t get reservations.” Dahl also stayed at Annabella’s hotel suite. On one occasion, when Dahl was in town on BSC business, he had a plainclothes assignment and asked if he could leave his uniform at her place until his return. He told her not to press him for any explanation because he had already told her more than he should. Annabella was greatly amused at the idea that Dahl could go anywhere incognito. “He was so tall and good-looking,” she recalled. “You had to look at him!”

As much as she enjoyed her liaison with Dahl, Annabella had not entirely given up on her marriage with Power, whom she later described as “the one great love of her life.” They saw each other for brief, intense visits during a few days’ leave, while he waited—and wondered if the marines would ever send a movie star into battle—for his orders. Despite everything that had happened, there was still something between them. The war had broken up a great many marriages, and Annabella knew their future together was doubtful at best, but she was willing to give it another go when his tour of duty was over. She was old enough to know that Dahl was not the kind of man you marry, in the end summing him up as “kind of impossible.” They clicked, physically and emotionally, and that was enough. She always regarded Dahl as a genuine hero but knew in her heart that “the crazy thing” with the handsome British pilot was not going to last. At all times, things were clear between them. “We had a complete understanding,” she said, “and he trusted me.”

Annabella was one of the few women Dahl did not quickly tire of and discard. They continued their friendship and their on-again-off-again sexual relationship. It was the rare exception to a pattern of short, tempestuous affairs that even his closest friends at the time, like the happily married Antoinette, found distressing. Dahl could be incredibly insensitive where women were concerned, to the point of utter heartlessness. She could recall being shocked by the occasional callousness of his conversation and by the sight of his intended victim across the table, white and shaken. “He could be mean, just awful,” she recalled. “When he got bored, he could lay into them, and be very, very sarcastic.” To Ogilvy, he appeared to pursue women more for the sake of sexual conquest than from any real interest, and “when they fell in love with him, as a lot did, I don’t think he was nice to them.”

The last few weeks of 1944 were chaotic and filled with uncertainty. Cordell Hull fell ill and tendered his resignation. Roosevelt failed to offer his job to Wallace and instead, without so much as a hint about what he was up to, completely reorganized the State Department and nominated Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. to succeed Hull. He promoted Will Clayton, the assistant secretary of commerce, to be his number two. In effect, this meant that Berle was out of a job. Dahl and his BSC colleagues were happy to see the back of him, and delighted in the
Time
story announcing the resignation of the “gnome-like, greying Boy Prodigy.” There were rumors that Berle would be awarded the ambassadorship to Brazil, but at least they would be free of his watchful presence in Washington.

Marsh, however, was infuriated by FDR’s calculated ambivalence toward Wallace, whose future was still uncertain. Roosevelt had departed for Warm Springs without a word, leaving the vice president in an embarrassing limbo. There was only the vague promise of the commerce job, which Roosevelt appeared reluctant to formalize. Eleanor Roosevelt told Wallace she regarded him as “the outstanding symbol of liberalism in the United States” and put in a plea for him to lead a greatly expanded liberal political action committee. Dahl heard the British were pushing for Wallace to be appointed to the UN, as head of the Food and Agriculture Organization, which would effectively keep him out of government for three years. Others within the administration, like Sidney Hillman, were trying to relegate Wallace to the less important post of labor secretary and were adamant that he should not be given the commerce job.

Marsh and Wallace spent hours holed up in his study plotting their next move, fearing that if they did nothing the opposition would use the situation to their advantage and try to oust him from the cabinet altogether. On the morning of December 5, Marsh gave Wallace a lengthy strategy memo to read before meeting with Ickes about his going to bat for him with the president. Marsh interpreted the news that the president was returning to Washington as “favorable” and predicted that the next ten days would see “very fast action with Roosevelt on the job.” He cautioned Wallace not to trust Ickes, that he was merely “fishing,” and that anything he told him would be passed up the food chain—to Baruch, Hopkins, and the president—“within the hour.”

Late that same evening, Marsh got a call from Drew Pearson, who reported that Ickes had given him a detailed account of his meeting with the vice president over the telephone and had said Wallace appeared “sad” and that there wasn’t any “fight” left in him. When Marsh got off the phone with the “Merry-Go-Round” columnist, he was mad, and he stayed mad for the rest of the month.

The mood at the R Street house that Christmas was bleak. They were all in for a rough winter. Dahl, who usually filled the role of Marsh’s “favorite court jester,” as Ingersoll described him, was in no condition to lift their spirits. He was in quite a lot of pain and was resigned to the fact that there would probably be no avoiding another operation on his back. Once again his old war injuries were spoiling his fun and threatening to put him out of action. After seeing him limp across the room one afternoon, Marsh observed that the classic horror actor Lon Chaney, who starred as
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
, “never dragged his crippled body along more beautifully that you did when extracting sympathy.” An expert on all things, Marsh was of the opinion that the doctors at the wartime hospital in Alexandria may not have done the best job of patching him up. There was something very much amiss in his thin body. After New Year’s, Marsh packed Dahl off to the Scott and White Clinic in Temple, Texas, to see its leading specialist, Dr. Arthur Scott, who was his friend and personal physician. Scott determined that an operation on his spine was necessary. It was not happy news for Dahl, who dreaded the thought of more surgery. He came through it well, however, and spent the next several weeks recuperating at the Texas clinic. Marsh saw that he had a splendid room all to himself and footed the bills.

Marsh, as usual, wrote constantly, sending him bulletins from the front lines of the long, lonely fight over Wallace’s nomination as secretary of commerce. Jesse Jones had told a newspaper reporter that Roosevelt would have to dynamite him out, and he was as good as his word, galvanizing Senate conservatives to block Wallace’s appointment. Jones and his mob of like-minded senators, many of whom had worked to dump Wallace from the national ticket, banded together again to defeat their old adversary and argued that the vice president lacked the business acumen to handle the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and other important lending agencies. The
New York Sun
summed up the collective outrage: “The fourth term was scarcely twenty-four hours old before it thus became known that into the hands of the most radical, impractical, and idealistic dreamer in his entourage, Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt has placed a large measure of responsibility for the ultimate liquidation of billions of dollars’ worth of industrial property now under the control of the Federal government.”

Determined not to lose this battle, Marsh helped Wallace mount a defense. He worked the phones, urging old friends like Lyndon Johnson and Claude Pepper to join the fray. Ironically, they were somewhat helped by the fact that some southern Democrats were beginning to worry that the extreme opposition to Wallace might create a backlash and actually work in his favor with the Democratic Party rank and file for the presidential nomination of 1948. If that was the case, it might be better to take the pressure off him now, before they created a martyr. On January 22, just before Wallace was set to testify before the Senate committee to contest allegations that he lacked the necessary competence to administer the agency, Dahl sent a telegram to his apartment at the Wardman Park wishing him good luck. He had followed the proceedings carefully, and despite his superiors’ objections to Wallace, he did not want to see that crowd of jackals on the Hill drive a good man out of government. Finally, on March 1, the Senate confirmed Wallace’s appointment. But it had been a near thing, and before giving the commerce job to the former vice president, the Senate stripped it of all the lending powers that his predecessor had exercised. Several weeks passed before Wallace responded to Dahl’s wire. Apologizing for the delay due to an overwhelming amount of work, he wrote, “Nevertheless, even at this late date, I want you to know I am personally grateful to you for your support, especially in the days before my confirmation,” adding, “I hope I always merit your kind opinion of me.”

To keep his bedridden friend amused, Marsh sent a stream of comic letters, each one wilder and more nonsensical than the last, most of which centered on their activities as spies in the employ of an outfit called “Screwball, Unincorporated International.” Dahl, who had spent far too long in the wilds of Texas with far too little in the way of diversion, happily took up their imprudent correspondence, again impersonating Halifax and inventing his own plots and subplots. He wrote of “placing” an agent in the R Street house to keep him informed of all Marsh’s movements and to monitor the comings and goings of his friends, assorted statesmen, amateur politicos, and highbrow writers who were all members of a gang of notorious spies. Marsh’s longtime black butler, Mr. Clinton, was in fact a tracker of enemy agents and had them all under investigation: “This man reports to me each day, and you will know how important his information is to me.”