Hollywood (55 page)

“Mac is an excellent executive but he has not the power of execution.”

“You mean,” said Edith, who had heard this line many times before, “the power of
reflection.
”

“Surely, that is what I said.” Wilson turned to Burden. “I shall practice law when we leave here. In Washington, with Mr. Colby.”

Burden wished the new law partners well, as Edith looked at him oddly, not certain how he would use this information. “Of course, I’ll write history. Or try to. I’m a bit out of practice. He’s not at all like T.R., is he?”

Wilson’s attention to any one subject was no longer great, and the transitions were apt to be both abrupt and cryptic. Edith translated, “Mr. Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow means. I,” she added, “would not like to be poor
Mrs
. Roosevelt.”

“Surely all … 
that
is over.”

The previous winter Lucy Mercer had married one Wintie Rutherfurd.

“But the way he treats her. Don’t think we haven’t heard all about the night that she left him at a very lively party and then went home and found she’d forgotten her key, and so she had to sit up in the freezing vestibule until he got home at dawn.”

“I think I’d have rung for the servants,” said Burden, who had also heard many versions of the same story.

Wilson pushed himself up straight with his good arm. “You were kind to come,” he said.

Burden shook his hand. “I’m glad you’re doing so well.”

“It is remarkable, isn’t it?” Was this ironic?

Edith was bland. “And how hard he works—we both work.”

The prematurely ancient face looked up at Burden; the dull gray eyes glittered like a wolf’s in the bright sun; the long teeth, too, were distinctly lupine, while the voice was suddenly a low growl. “It is a terrible thing to be helpless.” Yes, thought Burden, the wolf knew that he was in death’s trap, yet still he wanted to kill.

An usher escorted Burden up the stairs to the main floor of the White House, which resembled a deserted hotel off-season. Rugs had been taken up in the Green, Blue, Red rooms. Only the East Room was in use, as a movie theater. Each day, the Wilsons and the Graysons sat in lonely splendor,
staring at flickering images on a bedsheet hung from a crystal chandelier.

Burden shuddered, inadvertently; and then made his way to Rock Creek, where an amiable widow was waiting for him in his own shut-for-the-season house. As his car turned off Connecticut Avenue and into Rock Creek Park, he realized why Wilson had forbade the use of the so-called evidence of Harding’s Negro ancestry. Wilson wanted Cox and Roosevelt to lose: the wolf’s last kill.

O
n the fifty-fifth birthday of Warren Gamaliel Harding, November 2, 1920, the American electorate made him president. Although less than half of those who could vote actually voted, Jess could tell from the figures on the blackboard in George Christian’s living room that W.G. was winning by close to two to one. Also, both Senate and House of Representatives were securely Republican, and the age of Woodrow Wilson was now as remote as that of Cleveland.

Jess was one of a half-dozen trusted volunteers who had sat in the house that Christian had rented next to the Hardings’ and spoke by telephone to various agents around the country to get a sense of who would be coming back to the new Congress and who would not. A number of famous senators had been defeated; and new names had taken their places.

The telephone rang. Jess answered. It was that amiable war hero Charlie Forbes, calling from Seattle. “Tell the
President
,” said Charlie, sounding hardly drunk at all, “that he has swept the whole Northwest.”

“Whaddaya know?” said Jess; the word “president” was beginning to register.

“Tell him happy birthday, and we’ll see him in Washington.”

That, decided Jess, would be his last call. He put down the phone. From the next room he could hear W.G.’s laugh, followed by the Duchess’s familiar “Now, Warren!”

In the dining room of the rented house, the President-elect sat at the head of the dinner table, the remains of a birthday cake in front of him. Daugherty and Christian sat on either side of him while the Duchess and W.G.’s father, old Dr. Harding, studied the returns at the other end of the table.

“That was Charlie Forbes just now,” Jess said to W.G.’s end of the table. “Clean sweep in the Northwest.”

“Good old Charlie.” In his moment of triumph, W.G. was aglow with a generalized human warmth, while Daugherty was at ease for the first time in more than a year. The energetic Christian was busy with the various newspapermen who came to the house, requesting bits of “color,” as they called it. So far, the only color was that W.G. had stuck his napkin into the top of his trousers and left it there.

It was the Duchess who asked, “Why such a low turnout?”

“The ladies—God bless them.” Daugherty’s blue eye was misty not with sentiment but fatigue. “This is their first presidential election and most of them never got around to registering to vote.”

“George.” The Duchess turned to Christian. “I left two bottles of champagne by the front door of
our
house. You take them over to the newspaper boys. Of course, those bottles never came from us, as we observe the laws of the land.”

“The President,” said Daugherty, “technically speaking, has not yet sworn to uphold those laws, so he can, as a former senator and not yet president, commit a felony in good faith.”

“But nothing unseemly,” said W.G., chewing on the end of a dead cigar. Jess wondered what on earth it must be like to find yourself president during dinner, just like that. Of course, it hadn’t been all that fast. For more than a year, Daugherty and Harding had been at work in state after state, gathering support. Now here it all was.

“Oh, and George,” the Duchess was not yet finished, “don’t give
anything
to the news-reel people. I’ve told them once we’re in the White House, they won’t be let in, not after those pictures of me and Warren they took last week when we weren’t looking.”

“Now, now, Duchess.” W.G. was placating.

“I’ve also kept a book,” said Florence Kling Harding, eyes bright as blue searchlights. “Everybody who’s ever snubbed us in Washington’s been listed
with
the snub. Well,
they
’re not setting foot in our White House, ever, let me tell you.”

“Poor Alice Longworth,” Daugherty observed.

“I think we’ll make an exception for her.” W.G. grinned.

“She’s the worst, why, she—”

“Dearie, Nick’s a leader of the House. So we’re going to
have
to let them in the door.”

“Well, only when it’s absolutely official.”

Christian appeared in the doorway. “Associated Press wants to know, did you say, when you were nominated in Chicago, that ‘we drew to a pair of deuces, and filled’?”

“Certainly not,” said the Duchess.

Harding sighed. “Would I ever say anything so unbecoming of what was—until now—the greatest moment of my life? No. I never said it. Governor Lowden was with me. He can testify I asked him to pray for me.”

Christian disappeared. “Not that it’ll do any good,” W.G. observed, sadly. “Once they knot one of those phrases of theirs about your neck you have to wear it forever.”

Daugherty laughed. “Like Hiram Johnson’s who’s supposed to’ve said when you offered him the vice-presidential nomination, ‘You would put
your
heartbeat between me and the White House?’ ”

“So puffed-up,” said the Duchess. “I’m glad we got Calvin Coolidge instead.
He
stays out of the way. I wish I could say the same for her.”

Jess was perched on a chair between Harding and Daugherty. Outside there were cheers and, from time to time, passing automobiles would sound their horns. All Marion was up for the night to celebrate.

Hands linked behind his head, Harding summed up: “It’s like this Senate group—what did that New York
Times
man call them? The ‘Senate Soviet.’ They were supposed to’ve got together in Will Hays’s smoke-filled suite …”

“That part’s mine,” said Daugherty, “looking into my crystal ball last spring.”

“Then they decided—for every sort of sinister reason—that I was going to be the candidate the next morning.” Harding frowned for the first time since glory had draped him like a Smith’s Emporium Genuine Gold Thread
and Chinese Dragon Silk Dressing Gown Deluxe. W.G. discarded his well-chewed stub and deliberately lit a proper Havana cigar. Despite warning hums from the Duchess, Harding puffed deeply and contentedly and said, almost dreamily, “Yet the next day, on the first four ballots, the thirteen senators who were supposed to’ve agreed the night before that I’d be their candidate all voted
against
me.”

To Jess’s surprise, Daugherty nodded agreement. Usually, Daugherty liked to take credit for what was supposed to have happened in Will Hays’s suite at eleven minutes after two of that famous Saturday morning. Actually, Daugherty had not known of the meeting until morning, by which time other forces were at work. “That’s why,” said Daugherty, “when Lodge called for a recess, I thought I’d have a stroke.”

“That was because you didn’t know Lowden and I were having a con-fab on what to do.” W.G. gazed benignly at a group of wide-eyed young relatives gathered about the Duchess. “Even up to the ninth ballot, my senatorial colleagues were still hoping to nominate Hays. But by then Lowden and I were in accord. On the ninth ballot, ten of my supposed senatorial managers voted against me while the three who switched to me had been in the cards all along, as the press would say.”

“But does that mean,” Jess could not contain himself, “that the senators had
nothing
to do with getting you the nomination?”

W.G. nodded. “When the number-one and number-two candidates cancel each other out, number three is usually chosen. Well, I was number three. Simple as that. They couldn’t stop me once Governor Lowden and I had got together. The fact that some of them were still trying to get it for Hays between the eighth and ninth ballot shows how little they know about these things. Fact, most folks would’ve been pretty scandalized if the senators
had
managed to stop me.”

“As it is,” said Daugherty, “once we were in, that four-flusher Harvey and some of the others started talking about the smoke-filled room, pretending that they were the bosses. But they weren’t. You did it. You were the convention’s choice.”

W.G. rubbed his eyes. “And that’s pretty much the way we planned it. Of course, for a while there I was afraid …” When the President-elect did not complete his thought, Jess wondered if it might have something to do with the galleries, with all those people who truly wanted Herbert Hoover, who wasn’t even, in the party’s eyes, a candidate. Yet they kept yelling, “Hoover, Hoover!”

Christian entered, smiling. “Governor Cox has conceded.”

“Don’t you believe it!” said the Duchess. “That Jimmy Cox is treacherous as can be. George, you check—” But everyone else in the room was now too busy cheering and applauding as a crowd of journalists and photographers surrounded the President-elect.

Daugherty drew Jess to one side and gave him an envelope. “She’s on the seven
-A.M
. from Chicago. She’ll go straight to the Marion Hotel. Meet her by eight.”

“Is she … alone?”

“Say your prayers, Jess. Just as I say mine. I’m going to bed. We done it.”

“We done it,” Jess repeated. Then he wondered what on earth they were going to do with Nan Britton for the next four years.

Jess found Nan in the coffee shop of the Marion Hotel. Except for a tired woman behind the counter, there was no one in sight. Nan was reading the Chicago
Tribune
, which she must have brought with her: yesterday’s headline predicted a Republican victory. Jess had a copy of the Marion
Star
, with the great news:
Harding Sweeps the Nation
. Jess said, without thinking, “Whaddaya know?”

Nan said, “I know it’s wonderful! I was so worn out I actually slept in that Pullman car and it wasn’t until I was getting up at six-thirty that I asked the porter who won and he said, ‘Harding’s the man, miss.’ ”