American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167)

American Lady

American Lady

THE LIFE OF

SUSAN MARY ALSOP

CAROLINE DE MARGERIE

INTRODUCTION BY FRANCES FITZGERALD

TRANSLATED BY CHRISTOPHER MURRAY

VIKING

This book was completed with the help of Aniela Vilgrain.

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Notes

Sources and Bibliography

Index

One evening in October 1962 Susan Mary and Joe Alsop gave a small dinner for Chip Bohlen, the State Department’s leading authority on the Soviet Union, who was leaving Washington to become ambassador in Paris. The President and Mrs. Kennedy came, and dinner was badly delayed because the president took Bohlen into the garden and walked up and down with him for a long time. Susan Mary worried. Chip’s wife Avis had a bad back, the leg of lamb was drying up in the oven, and it wasn’t like the president to conduct business before dinner. They finally came in, and dinner was served, but then Susan Mary noticed two other unusual things. Twice that evening the president asked Bohlen and the other Russian expert there, Isaiah Berlin, what happened in history when the Russians found themselves in awkward situations from which it would be difficult to extricate themselves. “This startled me,” Susan Mary later wrote, “for Kennedy was the best extractor of information I ever met, and I was most surprised that he wanted to go back for more on a subject that didn’t even seem interesting.” Her other impression of him, she wrote, was
physical. “That night he was revved up—I wish I could think of a better simile. It seemed to me that a very powerful engine, say Bentley or Ferrari, beside which I had the honor of sitting many times, running at fifty miles an hour, had been thrown into the intensity of full power, controlled, the throttle was out and, what was more, he was enjoying it. It was thrilling, like sitting by lightning, but it made no sense. My mind struggled to comprehend, but the news had been very commonplace that week and I couldn’t imagine what made me say to Joe as we went to bed that something was up, for sure.”

It was. That morning President Kennedy had been shown the first CIA reconnaissance photographs of the Russian missiles sites in Cuba.
^*

Susan Mary became a historian in her sixties. Before that she would have described herself as a housewife, but she was always a writer, and she often had a front seat to the making of history of her own time. With her first husband, Bill Patten, an attaché to the U.S. embassy in Paris, she lived through the dramas of France from the end of World War II to the crisis in Algeria that ushered in the Fifth Republic and the presidency of Charles de Gaulle. Her marriage to the columnist Joseph Alsop in 1961 brought her back to Washington and into the inner circles of the Kennedy administration. Like the heroine of Henry Adams’s
Democracy,
she then made her own place in Georgetown society. Invitations to her parties were sought after by the foreign policy makers of subsequent administrations—as well as by European statesmen and intellectuals. She found this all perfectly normal. She was,
after all, a Jay, the daughter of a veteran diplomat and a descendant of John Jay, one of the founding fathers of the United States.

In the cosmopolitan life she led, Susan Mary came to know an astonishing array of people, ranging from Winston Churchill to Evelyn Waugh, and from Isaiah Berlin to Christian Dior. Her friends included Walter Lippmann, Paul Reynaud, Jean Cocteau, Henry Kissinger and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. She met Ho Chi Minh and General de Gaulle. And she wrote about all of them brilliantly in her letters. David Bruce, the distinguished American diplomat, wrote of her collected letters that they reminded him irresistibly of the letters of Madame de Sévigné. Susan Mary thought of herself as an observer but she herself was as remarkable a character as any she observed. Her life was never an easy one—not as a child and not in her two marriages—but, relentlessly energetic, highly intelligent, and charismatic, she overcame most of the troubles it sent her—and rarely spoke of them. Frail looking but physically strong, I think of her as one of those small focused birds that (unbeknownst to most of us) fly thousands of miles every year from their winter to their summer habitat and back.

My acquaintance with Susan Mary began early. She and my mother, Marietta, became friends—friends for life—in the late 1930s when as teenagers they spent summers together on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Susan Mary’s family had a house in Bar Harbor, then a fashionable resort for grand families from the Pulitzers to the Potter Palmers. Franklin D. Roosevelt visited, as did Jane Addams, the Chicago reformer. Marietta, the daughter and
granddaughter of New England clergymen, far preferred Bar Harbor to the small summer community across the island where her Peabody family had a house. She wanted to live in the big world, and Susan Mary Jay, though painfully shy, was a part of it. In summers, freed from their boarding schools, the two went through the trials of the debutante parties together. Marietta met my father, Desmond FitzGerald, in Bar Harbor, and while they were engaged, my father introduced Susan Mary to his friend from Harvard Bill Patten. Bill and Susan Mary were married in 1939 within months of my parents—the two women just twenty-two and their husbands “older men” in their early thirities. Susan Mary became my godmother when I was born a year later, and to my eternal gratitude she took the job seriously all of her life. She sent Christmas presents every year—often a book she liked—and always kept up with me, if not in person, then through Marietta or in letters.