From This Day Forward (5 page)

 

CR: Actually he tried to back out with, “Can't I just give a toast?” We said no.

 

SR: In the end he hit exactly the right note—a short talk on the Jewish view of marriage, a few Hebrew prayers, the traditional breaking of the glass. And that fulfilled our main goal, making my parents and their friends feel recognized and respected. But Goldberg's presence was important for me, too, a way of saying, very publicly, this is who I am, this is my tribe and my tradition, and that tradition will always be part of our family.

But the other big question was who to invite. Hale was the whip of the House, the Democrats were in the White House, and this wedding was going to have a political dimension to it. So my mother-in-law kept bugging my father-in-law, “Who should we invite from the Congress?” And finally, in exasperation, he said to her, “All the Democrats from the House.”

 

CR: This was after the '64 landslide.

 

SR: There were over three hundred Democrats in the House of Representatives. And a good many of them came. Years later, when we reported on the House in the eighties, people would come up to us all the time and say, “I came to your wedding!” And we had no idea who they were.

 

CR: We have more presents with the seal of the House of Representatives engraved on them!

 

SR: In fact, many look like they were stolen because they just say U.S. Representative “X” on them. One of our favorites, a great conversation stopper in New York in the sixties, was a cake server signed by Senator Strom Thurmond. Cokie's mother was incredibly well organized, every present got a number so we could tell who gave it to us, and all these years later we still find little numbered stickers on the back of a tray or dish we don't use very often. But Lindy left some of the organization to Cokie, and she managed to fall down on one key issue.

 

CR: Here I was, frantically making notes about everything that had to get done—apartments, china, priests, all that. My boss at the TV production company where I was working, Sophie Altman, gave us a party on the Wednesday before the Saturday wedding, and when Steve flew in from New York, I immediately asked, “Did you pick up the wedding rings?” With some irritation, he answered, “Yes, yes, I picked up the wedding rings.” I said, “Good, that's it, that means we're set. I've picked up the dress, we've got the rings, Uncle Robbie and Arthur Goldberg are set, and so the one other thing is…marriage license!” I had completely and totally forgotten about the marriage license. So the next morning at the crack of dawn we went out to Rockville, the county seat, now something of a suburban horror, but then a beautiful little town with a pre–Civil War courthouse. Sitting there was what was surely a pre–Civil War clerk in a pre–Civil War gray sweater. We told her we needed to apply for our marriage license and she informed us of a forty-eight-hour waiting period. “Okay,” we said, “we'll pick it up on Saturday.” “Closed on Saturday,” came the oh-so-self-satisfied response. Steven kept trying to argue with her, “But—but—but we're having fifteen hundred people at the wedding on Saturday!” She was really loving this now: “Sorry, you'll just have to get married on Monday.” Poor Steven was practically in tears:
“But the president's coming!” None of this impressed her one bit. I was asking more practical questions like, “What's the fine for getting married without a license?” Which tells you a lot about our subsequent life—I was always the one more willing to break the rules, or at least bend them. Then we had to call my parents for help—not exactly an easy call to make—and my father dispatched my brother, who was licensed to practice law in the state of Maryland. It doesn't get more humiliating than that—my big brother to the rescue! When he found a judge to waive the forty-eight-hour waiting period, the judge told Tommy, “You're lucky you caught me now because I have a full docket today and a full docket tomorrow and there is no way I would've seen you.” We got in just under the wire with the marriage license, and my father's press secretary thought this was such a funny story he released it to the news wires. So it was in newspapers all over the country that I had forgotten to get our marriage license. It was unbelievably embarrassing. That Saturday night my uncle Robert, the priest, asked from the altar, “Has somebody got the marriage license?” Which I've never heard before or since at any wedding. He wanted to make sure it was legal.

 

SR: Of course it wasn't your normal wedding, with the president coming, and I think that was the first day I got a taste of life in the public eye.

 

CR: It wasn't normal in a lot of ways. My grandmother wouldn't let me into the bathroom to get dressed. I stood in the hall outside the door, begging, “Coco, I really need to get in there, I'm getting married!” And she kept saying, “Darling, just another minute, just another minute. If you give me a whole minute, I'll let you borrow my eye shadow.” (My thrice-widowed grandmother had an interesting perspective on the institution of marriage. “All of life is one long date,” she used to tell my sister and me. “When you're married, you
have to date the man you're married to, but before and after him, you can date whomever you please.”) When I finally did get in the bathroom, my father started banging on the door shouting, “Cokie, you've got to come out of there. The president's here.” And I blew up: “Well, the bride's not!”

Then I hustled and bustled to get ready, run downstairs, and rush outside to get married because the president was there! The wedding party lined up outside, including my not-quite-five-year-old nephew Hale, who was the ring bearer. We have pictures of his mother carefully tying the rings onto the little satin pillow he carried. But just as the trumpet started Purcell's “Voluntary,” Hale turned to my father and said, “Pawpaw, I lost the ring.” We have a picture of that moment, too! We all started scrambling around looking for the ring, with my father pulling on my arm, insisting, “Come on, Cokie, we've got to do this now. We've got to do this wedding!” Wedding guests handed me their rings. We didn't know which one was lost, so I had about a half-dozen men's and women's rings on my fingers, but I protested, “No, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going on without the ring.” My sister, the matron of honor, kept trying not to laugh as I stamped my foot, pouting: “Daddy, the symbolism of this is just all wrong.” And he said, “Cokie, don't you think there's enough symbolism going on here for one night?”

He persuaded me to go down the aisle, but I was all teary. There's nothing worse than teary brides; they always make you wonder if they should be doing this. Fortunately, my niece, who was not quite four, saved me. She was the flower girl, and at the rehearsal the night before, my mother kept repeating, “Strew the petals, Elizabeth, strew the petals.” Instead she took clumps of petals and dumped them out of her little basket, making everyone laugh, including me. Then of course she ran out of flowers halfway down the aisle, so she had to retreat and collect a bunch to refill her basket. It was so funny that I cracked up and from there on out I had a good
time. When I got under the
chuppah
, I learned it was Steve's ring that was missing. It landed in the bushes where the doctor who always travels with the president found it with his little ear light before the ceremony was over.

 

SR: Remember, this was 1966, I was twenty-three, the Vietnam War was heating up. The president was not all that popular with people our age and my ushers had threatened, only half-jokingly, to march down the aisle chanting, “End the war in Vietnam.” Not such a great idea. But my ushers did perform one important job. There were only two or three rows of chairs, reserved for elderly aunts and cabinet officers. Everyone else had to stand. At one point a tall man with a crew cut in a red dinner jacket, a brusque, aggressive fellow, pushed his way to the front.

 

CR: It was a black-tie wedding.

 

SR: Following instructions, one of my ushers asked him, “Excuse me, sir, these seats are reserved, so could you please tell me who you are?” At that point he drew himself up to his full height and said, “I am the head of Steven's draft board.” Which he was. His name was Harold Tucker, an old friend of my father's. They had run many losing political campaigns together—being a reform Democrat in Hudson County, New Jersey, was not a promising career. But they had actually won once, helping elect a high-school drafting teacher as mayor of Bayonne. And as the payoff for that one victory, this man had become the postmaster, and in that job he was head of the draft board, a rather important man in my life. So we kicked someone out, I think it was Justice Tom Clark, and Harold got his seat!

One of the most memorable parts of the ceremony was Arthur Goldberg's talk. He turned to Cokie and said, “In my tradition a home has rarely been a castle; throughout the ages
it is something far higher, a sanctuary.” He was right about that—eleven years later we moved back into that same house where we were married and it has been a sanctuary for us ever since. Then he said to me, “Be careful not to cause a woman to weep, for God counts her tears.” He got that one right, too.

 

CR: I don't much remember what happened after that. It was a beautiful night. There were lots and lots of people. We were in the receiving line forever and ever. Gene McCarthy kept bringing us champagne because we were stuck in the receiving line for so long.

 

SR: My new mother-in-law, who had been slaving for weeks cooking for this extravaganza, looked like she didn't have a care in the world as she greeted almost every one of the fifteen hundred guests by name. The ones she didn't know she simply called “Darlin',” her all-purpose form of address. My brother later said that watching Lindy perform that night was like watching Heifetz play the violin or DiMaggio play baseball—nobody did it better. I don't think we ever got off the receiving line.

 

CR: No, we did. There are pictures of us dancing. We definitely danced. It was a truly special wedding; my mother had done a fabulous job. A big tent covered the side yard, and white flowers, including my favorite, lilies of the valley, decorated the whole thing; the
chuppah
was covered with flowers as well. Mamma remembered an outdoor wedding from her youth where the bridesmaids, instead of marching all the way forward, unwound a ribbon and formed the aisle. So we did the same thing. The bridesmaids carried baskets of multicolored flowers and each one wore any long white dress she wanted to wear. But my sister and my best friend and Steve's sister did process down the aisle, and they wore these awful
1966 dresses I chose for them, olive green with cotton lace flounces. Horrible. When our daughter Becca and I went dress shopping for her wedding, we carried around one of my wedding pictures, because she was trying to decide whether to wear the same veil that I wore. The picture included my sister in that dreadful dress. The wedding-dress saleswomen took one look and laughed: “Sixty-five, sixty-six, right?”

 

SR: Our parents had started married life in such a different way, at such a different time—right in the middle of the Depression. They all told stories about how they didn't have any money. Hale helped work his way through college giving out gum samples to other students and writing for a New Orleans newspaper. He and Lindy used to talk about sharing one po'boy sandwich for dinner. My folks would return used soda bottles to scrape up enough change to afford the movies, and lunch was often a ketchup sandwich.

 

CR: There's a very funny story about my parents' first date. My mother claims they originally met her freshman year of college at a dance when Daddy said to her, “Lindy Claiborne, I'm going to marry you someday.” He denied that mightily, but at some point they did go out and his car, an old Model A Ford, broke down. They had to keep stopping and filling it with water from the ditch next to the road. They got home very, very late. Mamma lived with her grandmother Morrison, her mother's mother, who ran a boardinghouse in New Orleans. Daddy kept saying to her, “Don't you think we ought to call your grandmother and let her know why we're so late?” Mamma said, “She absolutely never wakes up. We would just be bothering her.” When they got home, every light was on. My great-grandmother was up and pacing, furious. My father was abashed beyond belief and not too pleased with my mother. Her grandfather Claiborne had died that night and they had been trying to reach her to tell her.
Which was the only reason her grandmother was up. Then Daddy went to his house, he was living at home of course, and his mother was also pacing the floor, also furious at the hour. She demanded, “What kind of girl would keep you out until all hours of the night like that?” And he said, “A wonderful girl that you'd be lucky if you ever got to meet.” But their serious dating didn't start until later, when Mamma had graduated from college and was teaching school.

 

SR: After my parents met, on Mom's seventeenth birthday, they never dated anyone else, but they got married secretly, at City Hall in New York. Which is maybe the exact opposite of having fifteen hundred people at your wedding. They didn't have enough money to set up housekeeping, but they wanted to be married, so they went to City Hall on their lunch hour with a couple of friends. My father had been saving money for a wedding lunch, that was about all he could afford, and as he told the story, he was carrying this coin bank with him. It was a metal bank, and he dropped it, right in the middle of the ceremony. Fortunately, it didn't break, but it made a horrendous crash. After the wedding they didn't tell anyone. They were both still living at home, with their own parents, only a few blocks apart. My mother's older sister was also married and was living with her husband in the family house. A few months later my aunt and uncle got enough money together to rent their own place, and the day they moved out my father and mother announced that they had in fact been married for three months. And my father moved in the same day.