American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) Read online

  American Lady

  American Lady

  THE LIFE OF

  SUSAN MARY ALSOP

  CAROLINE DE MARGERIE

  INTRODUCTION BY FRANCES FITZGERALD

  TRANSLATED BY CHRISTOPHER MURRAY

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin China, B7 Jaiming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 10020, China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Editions Robert Laffont, Paris, 2011

  Translation copyright © Christopher Brent Murray, 2012

  Introduction copyright © Frances FitzGerald, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in French as American Lady: Une reporter en gants blancs by Editions Robert

  Laffont, Paris.

  Acknowledgment is made to Bill Patten for permission to use photographs on insert page 5, top,

  left and right.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Margerie, Caroline de.

  [American lady. English]

  American lady : the life of Susan Mary Alsop / Caroline de Margerie ; translated by Christopher Murray.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-60116-7

  1. Alsop, Susan Mary. 2. Upper-class women—United States—Biography. 3. Upper class—United States—Biography. 4. Socialites—United States—Biography. 5. Alsop, Susan Mary—Friends and associates. 6. Americans—France—Paris—Biography. 7. United States—Biography. 8. Paris (France)—Biography. 9. Political culture—Washington (D.C.)—History—20th century. 10. Washington (D.C.)—Social life and customs—20th century. I. Title.

  CT275.A6228M3713 2012

  975.3’04092—dc23

  [B] 2012003424

  Printed in the United States of America

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON

  To our beloved children, Stanislas, Pierre, and Éléonore,

  Jean-Rodolphe, Donatella, and Alexandra

  This book was completed with the help of Aniela Vilgrain.

  Contents

  Introduction

  I. THE JAYS

  II. ON THE EDGE OF LIFE

  III. PARIS

  IV. AFFAIRS OF THE HEART

  V. THE AGE OF SERENITY

  VI. WHEN SHADOWS FALL

  VII. AT THE COURT OF KING JACK

  VIII. ANATOMY OF A MARRIAGE

  IX. THE PLEASURE OF WRITING

  X. AND NIGHT CAME

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Sources and Bibliography

  Index

  Introduction

  One evening in October 1962 Susan Mary and Joe Alsop gave a small dinner for Chip Bohlen, the State Department’s leading authority on the Soviet Union, who was leaving Washington to become ambassador in Paris. The President and Mrs. Kennedy came, and dinner was badly delayed because the president took Bohlen into the garden and walked up and down with him for a long time. Susan Mary worried. Chip’s wife Avis had a bad back, the leg of lamb was drying up in the oven, and it wasn’t like the president to conduct business before dinner. They finally came in, and dinner was served, but then Susan Mary noticed two other unusual things. Twice that evening the president asked Bohlen and the other Russian expert there, Isaiah Berlin, what happened in history when the Russians found themselves in awkward situations from which it would be difficult to extricate themselves. “This startled me,” Susan Mary later wrote, “for Kennedy was the best extractor of information I ever met, and I was most surprised that he wanted to go back for more on a subject that didn’t even seem interesting.” Her other impression of him, she wrote, was physical. “That night he was revved up—I wish I could think of a better simile. It seemed to me that a very powerful engine, say Bentley or Ferrari, beside which I had the honor of sitting many times, running at fifty miles an hour, had been thrown into the intensity of full power, controlled, the throttle was out and, what was more, he was enjoying it. It was thrilling, like sitting by lightning, but it made no sense. My mind struggled to comprehend, but the news had been very commonplace that week and I couldn’t imagine what made me say to Joe as we went to bed that something was up, for sure.”

  It was. That morning President Kennedy had been shown the first CIA reconnaissance photographs of the Russian missiles sites in Cuba.*

  Susan Mary became a historian in her sixties. Before that she would have described herself as a housewife, but she was always a writer, and she often had a front seat to the making of history of her own time. With her first husband, Bill Patten, an attaché to the U.S. embassy in Paris, she lived through the dramas of France from the end of World War II to the crisis in Algeria that ushered in the Fifth Republic and the presidency of Charles de Gaulle. Her marriage to the columnist Joseph Alsop in 1961 brought her back to Washington and into the inner circles of the Kennedy administration. Like the heroine of Henry Adams’s Democracy, she then made her own place in Georgetown society. Invitations to her parties were sought after by the foreign policy makers of subsequent administrations—as well as by European statesmen and intellectuals. She found this all perfectly normal. She was, after all, a Jay, the daughter of a veteran diplomat and a descendant of John Jay, one of the founding fathers of the United States.

  In the cosmopolitan life she led, Susan Mary came to know an astonishing array of people, ranging from Winston Churchill to Evelyn Waugh, and from Isaiah Berlin to Christian Dior. Her friends included Walter Lippmann, Paul Reynaud, Jean Cocteau, Henry Kissinger and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. She met Ho Chi Minh and General de Gaulle. And she wrote about all of them brilliantly in her letters. David Bruce, the distinguished American diplomat, wrote of her collected letters that they reminded him irresistibly of the letters of Madame de Sévigné. Susan Mary thought of herself as an observer but she herself was as remarkable a character as any she observed. Her life was never an easy one—not as a child and not in her two marriages—but, relentlessly energetic, highly intelligent, and charismatic, she overcame most of the troubles it sent her—and rarely spoke of them. Frail looking but physically strong, I think of her as one of those small foc
used birds that (unbeknownst to most of us) fly thousands of miles every year from their winter to their summer habitat and back.

  My acquaintance with Susan Mary began early. She and my mother, Marietta, became friends—friends for life—in the late 1930s when as teenagers they spent summers together on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Susan Mary’s family had a house in Bar Harbor, then a fashionable resort for grand families from the Pulitzers to the Potter Palmers. Franklin D. Roosevelt visited, as did Jane Addams, the Chicago reformer. Marietta, the daughter and granddaughter of New England clergymen, far preferred Bar Harbor to the small summer community across the island where her Peabody family had a house. She wanted to live in the big world, and Susan Mary Jay, though painfully shy, was a part of it. In summers, freed from their boarding schools, the two went through the trials of the debutante parties together. Marietta met my father, Desmond FitzGerald, in Bar Harbor, and while they were engaged, my father introduced Susan Mary to his friend from Harvard Bill Patten. Bill and Susan Mary were married in 1939 within months of my parents—the two women just twenty-two and their husbands “older men” in their early thirities. Susan Mary became my godmother when I was born a year later, and to my eternal gratitude she took the job seriously all of her life. She sent Christmas presents every year—often a book she liked—and always kept up with me, if not in person, then through Marietta or in letters.

  When the United States entered the war in 1941, most of the men Susan Mary knew went off to war and scattered around the world. Bill had serious asthma and to his great chagrin had to take a desk job in Washington. Desie, as my father was called, joined the army as a private, but went through officer training and in early 1944 found himself in Burma as the adviser to a Chinese battalion trained in India. Knowing how important letters were to soldiers far from home, Susan Mary wrote to him—as doubtless to others—every few months. Her letters did not survive the monsoon rains and the constant marching, but she kept some of his return letters, and from them one can see what a wonderful correspondent she was even then. Excerpts from one of Desie’s letters show her range of interests.

  “Somewhere in Burma” 20 April 1944

  Dear Soozle [a pet name she later abandoned]

  Your delightful letter of March 25 arrived today…My promptness in replying isn’t in the least typical of me, but your letters give me such pleasure that I am inspired to seize the nearest chunk of papyrus…

  What you say about the newspapers’ idea of the geography of Burma is vividly truthful…Frequently between the Sunday Times and Monday Herald [Tribune] I find I have migrated a couple of hundred miles and crossed a range of mountains…all of this quite painlessly.

  Your life in Washington with New York interludes sounds very gay and crowded with cosmic characters. I think your attitude about the Balkans is quite reasonable. I would suggest that a section of Libya be roped off for their future quarrels…

  In another letter dated December 19, 1944 Desie wrote:

  Your letters are a joy and your sketches of our friends very deft and amusing. What is more, they leave me feeling as if I had seen them again myself…

  M. [Marietta] tells me that Bill is off to Paris and that you will follow in a few months. That sounds perfect for the combined Patten talents. We count on Bill [to return the franc to its former condition] and you to make the French a nation of USophiles.”

  Bill and Susan Mary went to Paris—he as the economic attaché to the American embassy and she determined to help his career and to get to know France. Two years later my parents divorced—their marriage one of the many casualties of long separation during the war—and both remarried afterwards. Happily Susan Mary got along famously with my English stepfather, Ronald Tree, whom she had met before he married Marietta. The two shared passionate interests in art, architecture, and British politics. In the immediate postwar years she and Bill spent weekends at Ditchley, the Georgian house he had in Oxfordshire. Later she often came to stay with us in New York or in the house Ronnie had built in Barbados. She also remained friends with Desie, who had joined the CIA and settled in Washington. So our lives remained entwined.

  In Paris, away from her domineering mother, Susan Mary flourished. Bill’s asthma often debilitated him and prevented him from advancing in the foreign service, but Susan Mary had enough energy and ambition for two. Like many women of her time, she never went to college, but she educated herself in French literature and politics, art, architecture, and foreign affairs. She made friends in what most other Americans considered the impenetrable society of French aristocrats and intellectuals. She also made important English friends, among them Duff Cooper, then the ambassador to Paris, and the love of her life. In her frequent letters to Marietta she described the privations of France after the war and the events she witnessed from the trial of Marshal Pétain to the opening of Dior’s first collection. (“Going into the fitting rooms,” she wrote, “was more dangerous than entering a den of female lions before feeding time…”*) Later she described meeting Raymond Aron, the renowned political scientist: “He is tiny, birdlike, electric, with a thin big nose and long fingers, which he curls and uncurls when someone else is talking, not because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say but because his quick mind has caught the other’s thought from the first words and he wants him to get on with it.”† She also relayed the account of a meeting at Matignon between the prime ministers of Britain and France at a tense moment in Anglo-French relations. The British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, arriving hours late, made a speech about the failure of the Greek city-states to band together against Philip of Macedon. The moral, she wrote, was obvious, but Macmillan, carried away by his subject, began to speak in ancient Greek, and other members of the delegation outdid each other in quotations from Demosthenes about the disastrous disaccords of the Achaean and Delian leagues. At last, Gladwyn Jebb, the ambassador to France, and one of the best performers, noticed the growing indignation of the French.‡

  Susan Mary also described what now seems an antique civilization in which Europeans of the grand monde gave elaborate picnics in the countryside and costume balls, where everyone danced until five in the morning. (Today the rich build houses half as big as Versailles with Jacuzzis in every bathroom, but they never seem to entertain, much less give balls.) The most extravagant of these parties was Charles de Bestegui’s 1951 masked ball in Venice, where the guests came in eighteenth-century costumes to match his eighteenth-century palazzo and its Tiepolo frescoes. Susan Mary, who drove down from Paris with Bill, wrote Marietta: “We first encountered the party in the courtyard of the Beau-Rivage hotel in Lausanne, where we spent the night. At 9 A.M. it was full of chauffeurs strapping and re-strapping Dior boxes to the tops of basketwork Rolls-Royces in preparation for the Simplon Pass, which we crossed in what I can only describe as a human chain of Reboux hatboxes.”*

  Summers, Susan Mary would sometimes go to Mount Desert to visit her mother, and if Desie was there on one of his short vacations from what we called “the pickle factory” (aka the CIA) the two would hike together. Desie, who had marched across Burma and up through China, had a long stride, and only Susan Mary could keep up with him. They would pack sandwiches and walk across the mountains from one side of the island to the other talking nonstop.

  Susan Mary had a talent for friendship. She didn’t suffer “tedious” people who went on about their illnesses or their domestics, and she preferred those who led more worldly lives. But the attachments she made were strong. Her several close women friends—Marietta, Marina Sulzberger, Dottie Kidder, Elise Bordeaux-Groult, and others—claimed her attention no matter what else she was doing. She looked after them in sickness or in sorrow, and they in turn took care of her. She once said that she made a better friend than a wife or a mother, and possibly that was true. All the same, I remember her and Bill as more child friendly than many couples my mother knew. In those days Americans in Europe used to send their young children off with the nanny to beach resorts on
the English Channel for a couple of weeks every summer. It was thought to be good for them. Susan Mary did that when her two children, Billy and Anne, were small, but to her credit she sometimes endured the fog and freezing water with them. Bill, whom I remember as a handsome man with a sweet smile, adored children, even when they weren’t behaving well. Susan Mary had less talent than Bill for engaging the very young, but she had the generous, if disconcerting, habit of treating children over eight as if they had something interesting to say.

  After Bill died in early 1960, Joe Alsop, an old friend of hers and Bill’s, proposed to her. According to de Margerie, he not only offered her a marvelous life in Washington but admitted that he was a homosexual and seemed to reveal a lonely, vulnerable person beneath his tough exterior. The message—or the message she read—was that he needed her, and that with her he might change. Marietta later told me that she had implored her friend not to marry Joe. Yes, he was a brilliant journalist and cultivated man, but in addition to being a closeted homosexual, he was a confirmed bachelor and something of a tyrant. “Marry the man today and change his ways tomorrow”—Adelaide’s line in Guys and Dolls—was, Marietta said, one of the worst pieces of advice ever given. Susan Mary, however, married Joe, and for some years it seemed that Marietta had been wrong.

  I was abroad during the Kennedy years, but the novelist Ward Just, then working for Newsweek, dined with the Alsops several times in that period and remembers the dinners as marvelous. There would always be men like Chip Bohlen, Robert McNamara or McGeorge Bundy and their wives plus a couple of young reporters or foreign service officers. Joe, benign, at one end of the dinner table, would draw out his important guests, often seeming to be conducting a tutorial for the younger men with the flattering implication that they would one day become a part of the august establishment that ran American foreign policy. Susan Mary at the other end of the table would always see to it that everyone was included in the conversation. She was, Ward thought, the best of hostesses, attractive and sexy, with a twinkle in her eye.