American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) (22 page)

Susan Mary’s prominence doubtlessly contributed to the book’s success, and vice versa; this suited her perfectly. Before
Yankees at the Court
was even published, she had already begun work on a new book about the Congress of Vienna—
The Congress Dances
—this time for Harper & Row.

A few critics thought Susan Mary had been overambitious in choosing such a complex subject. No doubt, she simplified things, devoting more attention to the spectacle of Czar Alexander’s arrival in Paris on March 31, 1814, the medieval tournament at the Hofburg, and the procession of royal sleighs at Schönbrunn than to the political consequences of the negotiations. She did not offer
an opinion on whether the Congress of Vienna was responsible for a hundred years of European peace (as Henry Kissinger had maintained when she consulted him) or had merely preserved an archaic social order, which was blind and deaf to brewing national and social forces that would later take a terrible revenge. Still, she had no pretention of being more than an amateur, and she discussed the issue honorably enough while focusing on what interested her readers. Beside the male actors of the congress, she chose to follow the intrigues and affairs of three women: Dorothée de Talleyrand-Périgord, Wilhelmina de Sagan, and Princess Catherine Bagration. Susan Mary was far too proper to peek through history’s keyholes and was always careful to protect the propriety of her heroines. Their bosoms remained covered, though at times the fabric was dangerously gauzy. Her book echoed with the sounds of waltzes and sabers clashing. Susan Mary was clearly amused by the boudoir diplomacy of the day, the elegant debauchery, the aristocratic bacchanals. She liked showing ambassadors and princes undone by the night’s revelry and the difficulty of splitting up Saxony and heroic Poland.
The Congress Dances
tells of great events and of great lords and ladies, history of the kind that Susan Mary knew and understood. Duff strolls about in the book in the guise of Castlereagh or Talleyrand. “Mistresses here in Washington simply aren’t as politically influential as they once were,” she told the journalist Susan Watters. “I wish they were. It would be a lot more fun.”
²⁹

The Congress Dances
was published in the United States and Britain in the spring of 1984, and, like Susan Mary’s previous works, it was well received. It would be her last book. Her poor eyesight, hardly improved by two cataract operations, forced her
to give up research, much against her own will, for it had been an activity she had thoroughly enjoyed, both in itself and for its rewards. Her four books, together with a few literary reviews in the
Washington Post,
had lent to her reputation, put her on television, and brought her into lecture halls as Susan Mary Alsop, the writer. None of the women she knew, neither friends nor rivals, even the most beautiful, rich, and influential among them, could claim as much. She was proud to have her name printed in the card catalog of the Library of Congress, next to that of Joe, who, after retiring in 1974, had finished his magnum opus,
The Rare Art Traditions
, a universal history of art collecting, published in 1982. Susan Mary’s achievements were, in effect, remarkable. In less than ten years, and no longer young, she had stirred up the energy and talent to build a literary career, all while maintaining one of Washington’s most important political salons.

What was she to do with herself? She had never had much zeal for civic service or philanthropy, although out of friendship she gave some time to the foundation for abused children created by Evangeline Bruce in memory of her daughter Sasha, who had died tragically in November 1975. Stopping work altogether was inconceivable. She still felt she had not accomplished enough and wanted to continue earning money. For a while, she played with the idea of writing a mystery novel. Then Paige Rense, the dynamic editor of
Architectural Digest
, came up with a solution. Rense knew Susan Mary by reputation and was aware that she had an exceptional network of friends whose homes would be perfect subjects for
AD
. Would Mrs. Alsop be willing to accept a position as contributing editor? She would. Beginning in March 1984, her collaboration with
AD
lasted more than fifteen years, during
which she wrote three to five articles a year, to the complete satisfaction of all involved.

Susan Mary had little trouble adjusting to
AD
’s stringent quality standards. Most of the time she had the ideas for her own articles, although she was occasionally sent on assignment. Each story required two photo shoots, the first a simple scouting mission and the second the definitive spread. Once the photographs were taken, she would do a tape-recorded interview. She had an excellent assistant, Jan Wentworth, who had worked for Walter Lippman and would soon enter Susan Mary’s circle of close friends. Sometimes the interviews were conducted over the telephone, but Susan Mary also had the pleasure of going to Albi in 1986 to visit the former house of Toulouse-Lautrec and to Paris to see the rooms at the Travellers Club where Duff Cooper and Bill Patten had so often let loose and tippled, far from the prying eyes of women. Many doors opened: the Auchincloss family in New York, Teresa Heinz in Idaho, Lady Bird Johnson on her Texas ranch, Kay Graham in her Georgetown mansion, Ethel Kennedy in her office, former French first lady Claude Pompidou, and Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. When she did an article on Blair House in Washington, where presidential guests stay, Reagan’s chief of protocol, Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt, thanked her in a kind note, calling her “a marvelous writer and a delicious friend.”
³⁰
From Riyadh to Moscow, Susan Mary’s new job allowed her to discover new places and meet new people—it was interesting and respectable work, and it even paid well.

She wrote in the upstairs office of her Georgetown house after a light breakfast of an egg and a few pieces of toast, or an omelet at most. Faithful friends would come for tea in the afternoon.
These included Lucy Moorhead, Liz Stevens, her niece Teeny Zimmermann, and new additions Patsy Preston and Susan Brinkley. There were young men too—gifted young men always. She chatted about books with Roger Pasquier, and found Trevor Potter and John Irelan quite charming. There was also writer Leon Wieseltier, to whom she told the story of going to France in 1934 and meeting Edith Wharton. “A plump, elderly lady who seemed to me more upholstered than dressed with several scarves wound around a rather heavy, shapeless suit.”
³¹
Far from home, Wharton was hungry for New York gossip, and young Susan Mary, who had hoped to hear illuminating talk of Proust and Bourget, soon grew bored. Now
she
was the one people doted on reverently. Oh, well. At least
she
had kept her figure. In Vidal-Quadras’s portrait of her from 1985, she was still pretty and fetching, her shapely legs in fishnet stockings.
³²
Her memories of visiting Wharton’s home, Pavillon Colombe, served as the introduction to a collection of Wharton’s short stories.

In the evening, Susan Mary continued to entertain or go out. When she and Joe were invited to the same party, she would pick him up in the little Honda that she drove dangerously fast. They talked on the telephone twice a day. Sometimes they would walk around Georgetown and look at familiar houses whose prices had become hair-raising. People would see them together, she in a hat, Joe stooping, leaning on a cane and touching the poles of the streetlights as he passed. “You are the wittiest and most diverting man alive,” she wrote to him. “Washington would be a desert as far as I’m concerned if you weren’t there.”
³³

Susan Mary watched her grandchildren grow up with a pleasure that felt more natural than when Bill and Anne had been
young. Anne’s daughters, Katie and Molly Crile, sent her letters that she treasured, and on the Patten side of the family, she eagerly awaited visits from her grandson, Sam, who was already becoming interested in politics; from her granddaughter Eliza, who had her grandmother’s eyes; and from the youngest, Sybil, to whom she wrote from Paris in September 1988, “I am so happy I may never leave Paris, except I want to see you.”
³⁴
Although they asked nothing of her, Susan Mary was always ready to pull strings and offer help. They told her about their studies and plans for life far more than their own parents had ever dared to do. At the time, always afraid to disappoint, Anne and Bill would gladly have traded their mother’s high hopes for a few hugs. But Susan Mary, regrettably perhaps, had thought that ambition for her children was the best token of her affection.

In the summer, all three generations would get together at Blueberry Ledge in Maine. Joe, whom the children called Grandfather, often came along, as well as friends like David Sulzberger and Guido Goldman. Susan Mary would take the children to swim or play tennis, walking through the forest to Jordan Pond. In the evening, particularly when Marietta Tree was there, they would change for dinner. “Perhaps you’d like to go and brush your hair, Eliza?” Susan Mary would say casually, disguising her order as a useful suggestion. Although legally speaking she was no longer married to Joe, Anne had divorced and married John Milliken, and Bill and Kate had separated at the beginning of 1987, Susan Mary still referred to these times as family vacations, the sort of vacations she had never known as a child. When nobody was watching, she would pour herself another vodka and raise her glass in a silent toast.

Adieux

Susan Mary’s affection for the irascible Joe was returned, and he never missed an opportunity to pay homage to the woman he no longer lived with. “We are closer to one another than most married couples I know,” he wrote in the conclusion to his memoirs, adding, “And so the story, which still continues, has a happy ending.”
¹
Shortly after this declaration, their story came to an end. Joe had been suffering from lung cancer for two years when he died at home on August 28, 1989, watched over by his sister-in-law Tish and his faithful Italian caretaker, Gemma Pozza. Susan Mary was deeply affected, for they had been happy together as friends.

There was no question, however, of putting her sadness on display or slowing the rhythm of her activities. In the fall, she went to London to visit Henry Catto, who had just been appointed as American ambassador. Since Mrs. Catto was scheduled to visit the United States at the same time, a British newspaper published
a photograph of Susan Mary with the headline A
UNT
S
UE
M
ARCHES IN AS
H
EIRESS
F
LIES
O
UT
. In May 1990, Aunt Sue co-presided over a fund-raising event for the Sasha Bruce Foundation. The previous year, she had given the foundation some of her finest evening gowns for a charity auction, including a black sheath dress by Balmain that she had worn when Jackie Kennedy met General de Gaulle in the Élysée Palace on May 31, 1961. At Paige Rense’s request, Susan Mary was put in charge of welcoming a group of interior decorators scheduled to give conferences at the Smithsonian Institution. They were thrilled to be invited to Mrs. Alsop’s house and she enjoyed their company. “It is so odd to have sixteen people for dinner in Washington and nothing more serious than silk fringe mentioned. But it’s a billion dollar industry and so its leaders are bright men and women.”
²
Still, she remained more interested by current events, which included the “incredible”
³
happenings in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, followed by the invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War ordered by President Bush, a man she had not, until then, thought of as made of presidential stuff. She continued to be seen about town, refusing to admit that her strength might be starting to wane. At the beginning of 1991, during a holiday spent in Connecticut with her daughter’s in-laws during which everybody, including her four granddaughters, caught the flu, she admitted to Cy Sulzberger, “I feel a hundred and fifty years old.”
⁴
The year would soon bring another terrible blow.

At the age of only seventy-four, still active, admired, and full of life, Marietta Tree had been battling cancer for months. As she wanted to see the pine forests and the ocean one last time, she came to Blueberry Ledge at the end of June. Her extreme frailty
made the short stay difficult. In the following weeks, Susan Mary called her in New York every day to hear the ever-worsening news, and spoke constantly of Marietta’s condition to her friends Louise and Anne de Rougemont, who had come to stay in Maine during their summer holiday. On August 15, 1991, Marietta’s battle ended. Grief stricken, Susan Mary managed to speak at the funeral service at Saint Thomas’s in New York. “You are the complete companion of my life,” she had written to her friend ten years earlier.
⁵
As long as Marietta was there, Susan Mary had been able to face life’s hardships and to keep secrets. She had felt someone was holding her hand, giving her the safety she had known as a child until the Jays left Argentina, never again to celebrate Christmas as a family. Now, with her buttress gone, solitude would roam freely through her life.

The Confession

She kept up appearances. She continued to work for
Architectural Digest
and was constantly receiving visitors, as a revered yet accessible monument, “a cross between Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Betty Boop,”
⁶
one of her admirers used to say. An entire chapter in a little guide to Washington was dedicated to her, and she was featured in an article on Georgetown in
Town and Country
wearing a hat, an umbrella resting jauntily on her shoulder as if it were an accessory and not an ersatz cane.

When Maureen Dowd came for an interview, expecting to listen respectfully to a flow of memories, she found herself, to her surprise, caught up in an energetic discussion of Hillary Clinton’s plans to reform health care.

“There’s nothing sentimental about that woman. She’s very impressive,” declared Susan Mary admiringly.