Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (14 page)

Henry Kissinger, who believed him to be anti-Semitic, did not confront Nixon with his thoughts, but muttered them to people who worked with him. RN’s outspokenness was certainly a way to shut off discourse—to stun people into silence. People pay to swim in the presence of dolphins, hoping to absorb their reputed mammalian wisdom. Could we imagine the dolphins being called out to save RN from drowning in his malice? Imagine H. R. Haldeman suggesting, “Mr. President, when you go to Florida this weekend, you might want to try swimming with the dolphins.” You can’t; such dialogue is impossible. But wait: dolphins are supposed to be drawn to people who are ill. Not only is their touch said to be healing but they seem to have a sense of their potential usefulness. They seem to function in agreement with one another and to choose the problematic over the usual.

Writers are dolphins.

R
ichard Nixon, in his red, white, and blue bathing trunks, stood with Bebe Rebozo, his longtime confidant, at the top of the pool where the dolphins swam. He expected Bebe to back down—Bebe would understand Dick wanted him to be the first to back down—but Bebe seemed out of sync with him today, preoccupied, a bit dazzled by the motion in the water below. “Well, I hope those fellows down there know to vote Republican,” the President deadpanned. Bebe Rebozo smiled. He found his friend the President a very amusing fellow. Look at that bathing suit! He, himself, was wearing his usual black swim trunks with a white stripe along each side, properly faded from being out on his boat, on the glistening water he loved. He put a hand on RN’s shoulder and registered the fact that RN stiffened and stepped backward. There was a blond woman, mid-twenties, who’d been assigned to explain how things worked in the water, but the Secret Service were still talking to her, and the one agent who remained by the pool seemed as dazzled by the surface of the tank as he, Bebe, was. He would have to speak to the President about the people protecting him, but this did not seem to be the
time. The agent bent and touched the water, staring at his fingers as if examining a dipstick. “Well, there’s really not much time for this today, if we want to get in the boat,” the President said. “We’ll come back another time, and thank that yellow-haired mermaid who was going down in the tank with us for her trouble.” He was speaking more to the agent than to Bebe Rebozo. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each, all of that,” the President said. “If we can’t eat those fellows, we should get some fishing poles and try to catch some fish we can eat.”

Bebe Rebozo was not quick on the uptake, the President noticed. Also, Bebe did not read poetry.

“Mr. President?” the Secret Service agent said. He was wearing blue swim trunks. There were swimming fins on the ground beside him. A snorkeling mask.

“I bet they’d be surprised to see us stick up a bank in these getups!” the President said, “but maybe today we’ll just go fishing.”

He waved the agent away—why did they so often simply say, “Mr. President?” as if every time he saw them, he had something to say? He walked toward the door, where another agent stood guard. If the guard said, “Mr. President?” as he approached, he was going to ask him to jump in the tank to test the water temperature. That would be a good one. Quite the story to take back to the others.

But the agent stared straight ahead—all right, it was an odd assignment, but he was the President, damn it—and Bebe Rebozo suddenly turned, ran to the tank, squeezed his nostrils shut, and jumped in. That was good: the President didn’t know how to dive, either. Fine to just jump in. Bubbles rose to the surface. In there without any mask, he’d be up in a minute. The President gave the Secret Service agent a smile, raising his hands to indicate: boys will be boys. He had used the same gesture often, on television, it
had been pointed out to him, when he was emphasizing a point. The less hand action on TV the better was the bottom line. Viewers were made nervous by hands moving around. His hands hung at his sides, waiting for Bebe to surface. He suddenly remembered that there was one more adjustment, or—what would you call it?—another transfer that Bebe Rebozo had to make by shifting some funds so that he could buy Pat diamond earrings for their anniversary. Good of Bebe to do it, but that was Bebe: loyal. He’d stood as stiff as the groom atop a cake during his wedding to Pat, and what a cake that had been, with real flowers on top. The room in the hotel had been rented—the Presidential Suite, whose name turned out to be productive (wait a minute:
prophetic
was the right word), and then they had taken a road trip for their honeymoon, which began as soon as their allotted time in the room was up. Which made him think: Where the hell was Bebe? Was he pulling one of his practical jokes? Well, he would just wait and see. Outlast them. That was the ticket: outlast ’em all.

He’d done the right thing in finding Pat, finessed the outcome by being patient. He was a man who could be patient. He was being patient now. Bebe down there with the fish, and some half-assed Secret Service man drowning with him, well, that was the price you paid in the job, and there wasn’t a job you could get without paying a price. Let any of those Secret Service fellows go on television and tell the whole world how much he made, how much he spent on gold cross necklaces for his Catholic girlfriend, from the looks of it, him with his Irish face, he’d be Catholic, and so would the girlfriend, and they could say, Thanks, Pope, and breed into eternity.

Next agent into the pool, and where was the other one, who’d disappeared with the mermaid? Probably having quite a time with her, wiggling their tails. Well, that was understandable. Dress
yourself in that kind of bathing suit, you’re asking for trouble. Of course, you can’t always get involved in giving people what they want, because they ask for one thing, then, once they’ve got you involved, it can turn out they want another. Then another and another, and so on, until you can’t give them any more and you have to get rid of them.

There was another agent replacing the one who’d torn off his shirt and jumped in the tank . . . this was getting funny. Something to tell Haldeman about, show him how his plan turned out: Bebe dead, all the Secret Service fellows dead, a whole tank of drowned people, well, what could you expect, a harebrained plan like that? Good to have free enterprise, but a dolphin tank was going too far, better that people do an honest day’s work. Or send ’em to Hanoi. Let the intellectuals figure their way out of that.

Everyone was expendable. Let ’em drown in a tank of sharks, that’s what they deserved, on their way to audition for another goddamn rainbow poster with its Commie hippie peace and love propaganda that numbed young folks like another one of their drugs, and kept them from becoming contributing members of society. Mrs. Nixon would agree that a good day was a day that involved hard work, and so would the girls. They’d married young but completed their studies, that was the right thing to do, and Tricia even read and liked
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
.

He went to the rim of the tank and shook his fist at the water until the bubbles disappeared. Oh, in some storybook you could find magic and whatnot, but in real life there were known dangers and unknown dangers, and this one hadn’t made a fool of Nixon. Let the impulsive ones jump in and drown, and those who went after them, all in the pursuit of what? Pleasure. Well, now they saw what happened.

The presidential helicopter would lift him out of this sorry place, and he’d look down on all of it from the distance from which it deserved to be seen: high in the air, as high as the pilot could fly—and of course someone would have checked the pilot’s credentials, and so forth, making sure he was a good Republican.

Dear Ms. Beattie,

You reveal yourself to be a smug fact bender. Why don’t you leave President Nixon to history? If you’re writing scurrilous things it must be fashionable right now because what have you ever done that’s original? History will decree that he is a different person than the one you present so simplistically, but I suspect you are looking for book sales, not truth.

Dear Anne Beattie,

Your book seems to slander a man who has been criticized enough. You obviously do not know the real Mrs. Nixon. I notice that your thoughts on her were not printed in
The New Yorker
.

Hi, Professor Beattie!

I was in your short story class in 2005 when we read the Frederick Barthelme story about doing that dance step you got up and showed us, saying you felt old because we’d never heard of it. I have continued to read Mr. Barthelme’s stories.

I would like to know if you could write a letter of recommendation for me for a Fulbright. You can download the instructions directly from the website. I have attached the link. In case you don’t remember me, I’m enclosing a picture of me taken with Professor Blair (printed in
UVA Magazine
), who suggested I take your course. My sister just finished reading
Janus
in high school. Vanessa Prince (she has a different last name from me) also may be coming to U.Va. I’m telling her to take your class!

In advance, thank you, Professor Beattie. I know many people must make requests on your time.

Dear Mrs. Beattie:

As a fighter pilot in the Air Force, I led several strikes against Rabaul in New Britain. We flew P-39s out of Bougainville and refueled at Green Island coming and going. We were also there on D-Day. How much we appreciated Lt. Nixon’s hamburger stand on Green! As rushed as we were, I would never leave without those refreshments.

It meant so much—just a few minutes’ relaxation, good sandwiches, and the coldest pineapple juice in the islands. I didn’t know then who our benefactor was. I’d like to thank him now on behalf of the 347th Fighter Group.

The final letter is real, and was written by Chandler P. Worley of Indianola, Mississippi. It was sent to
Life,
where it was published as a letter to the editor. The real salutation is “Sirs.”

M
rs. Nixon thought about being in the movies, as many attractive young women living in California did, and still do. The first Mrs. Reagan was in the movies. So was Mrs. Nixon, but her tiny part in
Becky Sharp,
a lackluster 1935 movie based on Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair,
was cut. You can understand what she’d like about being an actress: acting was something like travel—moving into another identity; moving to another place—and Mrs. Nixon’s love of travel was part and parcel with her love of freedom. Even going away to visit her aunt who was a nun seemed to her like freedom. Julie Nixon Eisenhower reports that her mother liked the glamorous costumes an actress got to wear, though she did not like waiting around while the director did retakes. Standing around a movie set wouldn’t appeal to most people, but you can imagine that Mrs. Nixon found it frustrating in part because it was a demystification of the art of moviemaking. If she ever thought the people involved in the process were in some way special, that illusion disappeared when one of the directors of
Becky Sharp,
who fancied her, got drunk and went to her apartment and carried on. Her brothers were there, so that was that. Still: not exactly a magic moment.

How much did Mrs. Nixon know, years later, about her husband’s attempts at fictionalization? He’d been an actor, too, briefly. But he went on to write his own scripts, so to speak. Others enacted them, but he was like a movie director on a national scale. He even tried his hand at costume design, putting the White House guards in outfits out of a Marx Brothers comedy. RN was also the scriptwriter (old joke in Hollywood: “She was so stupid, she slept with the writer”). During his administration, a telegram was phonied up to give the impression President Kennedy had ordered the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem. In
The Time of Illusion,
Jonathan Schell writes: “By the spring of 1972, President Nixon was setting himself up as the scriptwriter of the whole of American political life. He looked upon America as his predecessors in the White House had looked upon Vietnam: as a great theatre for a sweeping dramatic production, in which a real nation was used as the stage, real public figures were used as unwilling actors, and the history of the nation was used as the plot.” He was actor, producer, director, screenwriter, costume designer, outdoing Orson Welles. More protesters, more pesky extras than had been called for, mobs of them, showed up on the set, but he hoped to mitigate their power by instigating a campaign of letter writing sympathetic to the President. It was so extensive that publications and television stations assumed it must be a real reaction. This was a bit like flashing the “applause” sign for the studio audience. The audience, of course, was his own staff and those to whom they delegated the task of mass mailings. Nothing suggests Mrs. Nixon knew about this at the time, though if she later came to read about it and believed what she read—what
could
Mrs. Nixon believe?—she must have been quite surprised. She was a patriot. She was a loyal wife who believed her husband was acting for the good of the country, but “acting” had connotations she would have been
shocked to consider. No matter: she’d become just a member of the audience, along with everyone else.

The marginalized person’s point of view is always informative, as is that of the unsophisticated person, who perceives with limited awareness (Faulkner’s child narrator), or that of the minor character. Tom Stoppard’s
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
was a big hit: the two men who accompany Hamlet on his voyage—their POV, instead of the main character’s. (Also John Gardner’s
Grendel
; Jean Rhys’s
Wide Sargasso Sea.
) It’s a common problem that can turn into an advantage, when a writer creates a minor character who won’t stay in his limited role and insists on dominating the scene. Sometimes this can be the voice of the Sirens, trying to throw the writer off course, but more often it’s an indication of some sort of shift within the material that is causing it to escape the writer’s grasp. Stoppard didn’t stumble into writing a play about the two messengers, but many writers will tell you that in revising, to their surprise, they realized who the real subject of the piece was—whose story it was. And if the writer sticks with the original plan, it’s nonetheless possible that another writer will come along and sort out the initial story differently, so that characters on the periphery of the action are recycled and re-presented, with different emphasis, through a different writer’s sensibility.