Hollywood (21 page)

As always, the President, once done with moralizing about man’s estate, descended to practical politics. It had been Burden’s experience that the great Wilson, in the unlikely event that any of the President’s many selves should ever be raised to that prime category, was the party manager. No congressional district was alien to him. On his desk he kept what looked like a large sentimental family picture album. Inside were the highly unsentimental photographs of every member of the House of Representatives and Senate. During the early days of the Administration, he had studied each face; and committed it to memory. Burden was almost alone in knowing that in the next year’s election Wilson was planning to purge those Democrats, mostly Southern and Western, who had ever defied him. Burden had warned him against this sort of reprisal but Wilson was grim. He would weed
his
garden; and that was that.

At the moment, the President was not looking to future elections; rather, he was still shaken by the recent election of the Hearst-Tammany candidate for mayor of New York City, a Brooklyn County judge named John F. Hylan. When Hearst saw that his own candidacy would divide the Democratic Party, he and the Tammany boss, Murphy, had selected Hylan to defeat the incumbent, John Purroy Mitchel. The election had been unusually bitter. Colonel Roosevelt had campaigned for Mitchel, denouncing his ancient enemy Hearst as “one of the most efficient allies of Germany on this side of the water.” Hearst was the Hun within the gate, more dangerous than the one without. “Hearst, Hylan and the Hohenzollerns should have been a winning slogan for Mitchel,” said Roosevelt. Then Hearst’s candidate had won by 147,000 votes. So much for the Roosevelt magic.

“I don’t understand that city. I never have.” Wilson shook his head.

“I do,” said Burden, “it’s anti-war, anti-English, anti-French. What I don’t understand is Hearst. Why, with all he’s got, does he bother?”

“To come here, my friend. He thinks he’ll be nominated in 1920; and elected. That’s the arrangement he made with Murphy.” Wilson was now very much the nuts-and-bolts politician. “Hearst stays out of the mayoral race, pays for Hylan, supports him with his papers, and a grateful Tammany delivers the New York delegation in the summer of 1920, an eternity away.”

“But if we all survive this eternity, it will be you, Mr. President, not Hearst.”

Wilson smiled. “If I have done that well with the war and then the peace, I might think myself worthy …”

“You are modest. You’ll be elected by acclamation.”

“No, Senator. Never that. I am not a popular sort of man, like Roosevelt. Nothing is ever easy for me. Nothing. Nothing at all.”

Burden nodded a sorrowful assent to this astonishing falsity. In exactly two years, Wilson had been elected both governor of New Jersey and president. No American politician had ever had such a rapid, lucky rise. But then no one knew how Wilson himself saw those elections, or how he saw himself in relation to the field, much less to history. Vain about his intellectual achievements, he was oddly modest about his political prowess. It might, Burden thought somewhat enviously, be the other way around. The schoolteacher Wilson was very much, as Lodge liked to remind anyone who would listen, run-of-the-mill, but as political manager and eloquent if sometimes monotonous enunciator of man’s better nature, Wilson was unique.

“Do you know Hearst?”

Burden nodded. “I saw a good deal of him when he was here in Congress.”

“Amazing to think of him in so humble a job.”

“He was a bit amazed, too. I had to show him how to introduce a bill.”

“I wonder,” said Wilson, not listening, “if he could be charged with treason.”

Burden unfolded his legs; and his two feet struck the floor simultaneously. “For what?”

“For aiding the German cause in war-time. Of course, I’m not a constitutional lawyer and I’ve never properly studied the Espionage Act, but it seems that we might charge him, somehow, with aiding and abetting the infamous Paul Bolo Pasha, a proven German spy. After all, Hearst used to entertain him in New York.” During the election, much had been made of Hearst’s connection with the unsavory Bolo, who had later been given money by Bernstorff in order to subvert the French, who had promptly imprisoned him. Put on the defensive, Hearst had said that he had met Bolo only once; then he printed even more colored flags on the
Journal’s
front page.

“Well, Mr. President, I’d be very careful with Hearst. He’s capable of anything.”

“So,” said the kindly old Presbyterian minister in the chair opposite, “am I.”

“Yes,” said Burden; and left it at that.

“Do you remember that dreadful photo-play serial—
Patria
—that Hearst made two years ago?”

Burden nodded. Whenever news was dull, Hearst would invoke the Yellow Peril. But in
Patria
he had outdone himself. He had combined the Yellow Peril with Mexican outlaws, each bent on the destruction of the United States. The Japanese government had complained bitterly. “I used to see it at Keith’s,” said Wilson. “Ridiculous, I thought. But I had to write him a letter, asking him to desist. Moving pictures have such a—powerful effect on public opinion. They can actually alter circumstances.” Wilson laughed. “I have just made a paraphrase of Burke, which suits us all: ‘Expediency is the wisdom of circumstances.’ ”

Burden nodded his appreciation; then he made his own gloss: “Wisdom is to find it expedient to do nothing at all.”

Edith entered on Burden’s diminuendo. “The clan is gathering. Do stay, Senator.”

“No. No. It’s late. I have my own clan gathering and then …”

“New Year’s Eve at the McLeans’.”

“Exactly.” Burden bade the President a happy New Year; he had received not only the information that he wanted on the possible seizure of the coal mines but a dozen other messages of the sort that politicians exchange without the use of sometimes compromising and always ambiguous spoken words.

Edith led Burden onto the cold dimly lit landing. The only comforting light came from the open door to the upstairs oval sitting room, where the voices of her family were slightly louder than those of his. “I have the book.” Edith crossed to her secretary’s desk beneath the fanlight at hall’s end. Burden had entirely forgotten what book he had asked for. She returned with a thin volume.
Philip Dru, Administrator
was the title. Burden remembered: a novel by Colonel House, published six years before. Now that House was the President’s alter ego in Europe, Burden was curious to know more about this courtly wealthy Texan, who wanted only to serve as the President’s loyal eyes and ears if not always tongue, for, according to Edith, “He is something of a yes-man. A few weeks ago I showed him Mr. Wilson’s address to Congress, the one where he took over the railroads—and the Colonel didn’t like it one bit. And he told me why. And I was really impressed. So I told him to tell the President the next day. Naturally, I warned Woodrow, and he was upset because he thinks the world of Colonel House. Well, the next day, Woodrow says he’s sorry Colonel House doesn’t like the message about the railroads, and the Colonel got all nervous and said, ‘Well, I’ve reread it since and I now agree with every word of it.’ ”

That, thought Burden, was the only way to handle the President; and he admired Colonel House all the more. Burden took his leave with the book, which, he had been told, dealt with the first dictator of the United States, a most enlightened and benevolent man who, having solved all domestic problems, solves those of the world as well by setting himself up as the chief of a world concert of nations.

The fact that the McLean estate, Friendship, had once been a monastery never ceased to delight Blaise, as he and Frederika descended from what she called “our land yacht,” a huge enclosed sedan, driven by a Russian refugee, who spoke French and claimed to have been captain of the Czar’s personal guard. “All in all,
not
a good reference,” Frederika had said.

Friendship was an extraordinary place to have within the limits of the
District of Columbia, and Blaise quite envied the Ned McLeans their eighty acres of ponds and streams and parks; he did not envy them the somewhat common old-fashioned house with the low ceilings favored by the glum heat-conservers of the previous century. But now, after the icy night air, the warmth of the house was an agreeable shock. The Friendship conservatories had produced a thousand rare plants; and the rooms smelled of wood smoke and gardenias. Once outer coverings had been surrendered, they were warmly received by the butler. In the long run, Blaise decided that the only people one ever really got to know in life were servants and bartenders and maîtres d’hôtel. He had had more conversations with the headwaiter at the Cosmos Club than with his mother-in-law, who now stood, blindly, in the doorway to the main drawing room.

“It’s Mother,” murmured Frederika in much the same tone of voice that a fourteenth-century woman might have warned her family of plague.

Simultaneously, the butler announced, “Mr. and Mrs. Blaise Delacroix Sanford,” and mother and daughter embraced, while Evalyn approached, wearing on a chain that huge ominous lump the Hope Diamond, and the glittering Star of the East in her hair. Evalyn greeted the rival publisher with a somewhat frothing champagne kiss. “Isn’t it wonderful!” she exclaimed.

“
You!
As always.” Blaise wondered what “it” was.

“Yes!” Evalyn embraced Frederika, who had fought Mrs. Bingham to a standstill.

“Can you tell?” Evalyn looked at Blaise conspiratorially, but turned her body toward Frederika. “I’m pregnant.”

“That
is
wonderful.” Frederika had a way of drawing out her syllables that made the listener feel as if he alone of all the world’s population had attracted not only her interest but delighted wonder.

“Vinson needs a little brother, I said to Ned.”

“What,” asked Frederika, “did Vinson say?”

“He is only six.”

“I,” said Mrs. Bingham, eager to dispense terror, “would get rid of that diamond first if I were you.”

“Oh, it’s all right now. I had a priest exorcise it. In Latin, too.” Evalyn pointed to a fantastic six-foot-high arrangement of purple orchids. “Alice went up to that thing and in her loudest voice said, ‘Good evening, Mrs. Wilson.’ ”

There were two hundred for dinner; then dancing until 1917 was safely done for. Blaise got Alice Longworth at dinner, as he often did at her request
as well as his. Alice was aging well; and Blaise wondered what his life would have been like had they married, a thought that had occurred, briefly, to each of them but at different times. She was certainly the best of company, but then Frederika was far from dull. On the other hand, Alice was, forever,
the
President’s daughter. Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln were simply pale precursors set in place by history, like so many John the Baptists, to prepare the world for the wonder of Theodore Roosevelt, soon to be president again, or so Alice—and Blaise—thought. Since anything that did not relate to the messianic mission was trivial, she was probably better off with the passive, amiable, hard-drinking Nick Longworth, a wealthy Ohio congressman, who was seated across the table next to an overdressed, plain woman who was, Alice said, Mrs. Warren Gamaliel Harding, “
our
Senator’s wife.” Alice made the “our” sound like an embarrassing possession, a dog that has just squatted at the center of a rare rug. “Nick has them to the house for poker. I am wonderfully tactful and very, very kind. It is said that she has one kidney, out of a possible two.”

“Usually, you’d only mention that if we’d just been served kidneys.”

Alice poked her fork into the mess on her plate. “Terrapin. See? I am very, very tactful nowadays because we need everybody, Father and I. Of course she could have only one terrapin, located in the third chin.”

“I think she can hear you.” Mrs. Harding’s ice-blue eyes were fixed without fondness on Alice while Nick, ever the courtier, murmured in her ear.

The dinner was grand, as all McLean occasions were. Thus far, Ned was not yet drunk; and Evalyn was in her element. It was said that she was even richer than Ned, from Western gold mines. Blaise found her a relief from the other hard-panners, as the Western new rich were called. Unlike the other ladies, she revelled in her low birth and vast income; bought more diamonds than anyone since Marie Antoinette and, in general, created euphoria all about her. Who else would have lit up their palace so splendidly when the lights were dimmed throughout the country and Broadway’s Great White Way switched off?

“Where’s Caroline?”

“At the other table, I think.” Blaise had caught a glimpse of his sister in deep conversation with Ned McLean’s aunt, wife to what had been the czarist Russian ambassador, now ambassador no more. Blaise hoped that Caroline would remember that she was a publisher and collect news.

“Is it true she’s acted in a photo-play?” Alice looked, suddenly, more jealous than sardonic.

“It was just a joke, made by Mr. Hearst.”

“Hearst!” That changed the subject for good. “Father still thinks he’s the most dangerous man in the country,
and
a German spy.”

“I can’t see what he could spy on, outside the Ziegfeld Follies.”

Alice moved yet again; this time for scandal’s jugular. “Have you met her?”

Blaise nodded. It seemed that everyone was interested in the Chief’s “secret” love, Marion Davies. “She’s very young, very blond. She stammers, and she calls him ‘Pops.’ ”

Alice roared; then began to stammer “Pops” over and over again until the removal of the terrapin allowed Blaise to address his other dinner partner.

After dinner, more guests arrived; and an orchestra played in the ballroom. As Blaise watched the dancers, he was aware that someone had sat down beside him in the next chair. It was the British ambassador, Cecil Spring Rice, looking old and tired.

“Dear Blaise. It is hard to believe that there’s a war going on.”

“Half a world away is … half a world away. The whole thing still seems unreal to me, and I’m really French, you know.” Blaise assumed that he had made so untrue a confession in order to console the Englishman for the blood-letting. Certainly the sons of the British ruling class were being used to manure the fields of France; and for what harvest?