A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth (15 page)

A striking example of what a brilliant woman of my generation could accomplish and not accomplish in the diplomatic world may be seen in the career of Susan Mary Jay (later Patten and Alsop). When she wrote history with an emphasis on chatty biography, her shrewd observation and lively style gave her a success to which her sex was no impediment. But where her real ambition lay it was, which was to influence the great men of her time through the charm and fascination of her salon. She certainly succeeded in getting to know many if not most of the leading political leaders in Paris, London, and Washington, but what in the end did she really have to show for a lifetime of parties? Would she have been content to have had it written on her tombstone that she had given the only dinner party which Colin Powell had left his office to attend during the whole of the Gulf War?

Susan Mary's assets and liabilities for a career of constant affiliation with the great were evenly balanced. On the plus side she had looks and charm, and her social position, as a direct descendant of our first chief justice and daughter of an ambassador to the Argentine, was assured. Her family was not wealthy but comfortably off, with residences in town and country. On the liability side she suffered the loneliness of an only child with a bereft widowed mother who had lost a husband from a lingering asthmatic ailment. I remember in Bar Harbor summers in my boyhood visiting Susan Mary in the Jays' house on the beautiful Shore Path and hearing her poor father's incessant hacking cough from the second story. When I first met her charming but always ailing first husband, Bill Patten, and heard that same cough, I knew there had to be a romantic element in the pity and love it inspired in the woman exposed to it by parent and lover.

Starting in a minor government position with a constantly ill though always delightful spouse in the postwar Paris of 1949 hardly seemed the initiation for a great social career, but it was all Susan Mary, who saw all and forgot nothing, needed. She borrowed the perfect little house from rich and absent American cousins and trained a small staff to give perfect little dinners. She perfected her French and studied French history. But perhaps
one key
to her phenomenal social success in the French capital lay in her cultivation of an intimate friendship with the famous and beautiful Lady Diana Duff Cooper, wife of the British ambassador and queen of Paris. Lady Diana had long tolerated her husband's mistresses, but she did this most comfortably when she chose them herself. Susan Mary was her prize; she did more than fall in love with Duff Cooper, she had a child by him. Everyone knew, and nobody seemed to care, including Bill Patten, who may have been gallant enough to feel that his illness entitled her to a less afflicted lover.

Certainly there was no romance in the second marriage that she contracted after Bill's long, expected, and sadly received demise. Joe Alsop, the famous political columnist, was a known homosexual, and Susan Mary knew all about it and totally accepted it. Here was her chance to be what she had always dreamed of being!

Nobody in Washington was too great to be asked to her dinner parties. Small and intimate evenings with the Kennedys in the White House were part of her social schedule. But fate can play cruel tricks on the most subtle of social climbers. Susan Mary had reckoned with Joe's tremendous charm but not with his terrible temper. What good does it do to a hostess to plan the perfect dinner party if she must see the guest of honor—be he a Supreme Court justice or cabinet member—reaching for his hat and leaving in a huff because he had just been insulted by Joe? Of course, the quarrel would be made up later—people were used to Joe—but the party was still in pieces.

***

These eruptions caused Susan Mary ultimately to seek an amicable divorce. Joe told me himself that he had assured Washington hostesses that he had no objection to appearing at parties to which his ex-wife was also asked. "Otherwise she would have had no invitations," he typically added.

The sad thing about Joe's characteristically egocentric remark was that it was perfectly true. Susan Mary had spent her life trying to be a kind of Joe Alsop, even to the extent of marrying him, but women in her day didn't have that kind of political influence. Their charm went just so far and no further. A generation later she would have used a man's tools. She might have even been a John Raben.

T
O BEGIN THIS DISCUSSION,
which may be ill-timed but which is meant only to be amusing—I must zip back momentarily to childhood, when I never had a pet, either cat or dog. Nor did I want one. During my childhood there had always been one or two of the latter in the house, for my mother loved them, particularly a beautiful boxer whom she had to get rid of when it slit the throats of the two black poodles of our next-door neighbor in Long Island, who was not only a dear friend but the architect of our house.

Mother put the boxer in a kennel until it was time for us to go to Maine, where she gave him to a farmer under condition that she could visit him every summer. The dog greeted her ecstatically on each visit until there came one where she was told he was dead. But driving away she heard him barking. The farmer had been afraid she had come to take him back.

My parents thought it odd that I showed no desire for a pet and thought I might be surprised and pleased if I found a puppy as my principal present under the Christmas tree. But I was only angry when told that because it was of an expensive breed it was in lieu of several toys that I had asked for. And my anger turned to fury when the puppy made a mess and I was told I had to clean it up. My elder brother then offered to swap his copy of Martin Johnson's
Safari,
which I greatly coveted, for the puppy, which I refused because of the great difference in price. I ended up by being obliged to accept my brother's offer or nothing and told I had spoiled everybody's Christmas.

Well, I certainly hoped I had.

Another controversial present was given me by an eccentric aunt, a yellow and blue macaw whose huge and formidable beak so terrified me it had to be given to the Bronx Zoo where, considering their longevity, it may still be.

Although I never wanted another pet I loved going to the zoo and delighted in watching large dangerous animals safely locked away behind bars. This interest culminated in my adult years in two visits to see uncaged beasts in Kenya and Botswana. The latter country was then still so wild that some of the animals might never have seen a man, and I made a particular friend of our young guide David, who was a specialist in the wild dog, an endangered species. He had managed to make himself an accepted guest at the lair of a particular pack, and he took me there once when they returned from hunting, at always the same hour.

The dogs went about their business of feeding their young, forcibly if necessary, without paying us the slightest attention. "Do they even know we're here?" I asked.

"Watch me," he said and leaped out of the jeep. The whole pack immediately jumped up, and he leaped back in. "They know our bargain," he explained.

Indeed they were almost human in their behavior. Or like the best humans, as David liked to point out. They killed only just what they needed and as quickly and painlessly as possible. When the two alpha females gave birth, the pack counted the litters, knowing just how many cubs they could support and rapidly killed the small surplus. The others were carefully nursed to survival even through serious ailments.

I still preferred elephants. I remember in Botswana looking for elephants in a small jeep bus containing five tourists and a guide. The latter was young and over-adventurous, for he was too close to a suspicious herd when we got stuck in long grass. The herd, led by a huge trumpeting cow, her ears flapping, besieged us in a tight little circle, and we thought our last day had come until the cow, diverted by our guide's odd yodels, decided we were harmless and let us go.

I really think I was not scared until it was over. I kept thinking, "Wow! I never thought it would all end this way!" And I remember, when the dreaded beasts had departed, asking the neat little silent old lady from Cincinnati who was sitting beside me, "Weren't you scared?" and her replying, "Mr. Auchincloss, to use a vulgar word, which I never do, I was scared shitless."

Theodore Roosevelt, though a remorseless hunter, was a great lover of wildlife and liked to speculate that some animals had morals. Certainly the wild dog had more than the lion. The king of beasts has been known to kill his own cubs to bring their mother back into heat for his pleasure.

Elephants are notorious for supporting their own sick and dying and are even believed to mourn their dead. In transporting one of them by air to a zoo, it is wise to prevent their dangerous stamping by placing small animals in their compartment, as they dislike crushing them. On the other hand they will kill a rhino for no reason at all, and a rogue elephant is always to be avoided.

I was not destined to have many contacts with dangerous animals, but the one I most recall did not occur in the wilderness but in the heart of civilization: London. It was during World War II and I was a naval officer on leave who was visiting, for no particular reason, the London Zoo. Many of the animals had been removed to escape the bombing, but when I passed the reptile house I asked a keeper if the dragon lizard of Komodo was still there and was surprised to hear it was. So I decided to go in.

I found the reptile house empty, with neither a visitor nor a reptile, except for one glass cage that contained the very monster I was seeking. It was moving back and forth, perhaps impatient for a delayed meal, and saw in me either the supplier or the meal itself. It even rose on its hind legs and approached the glass so that our heads were almost level. And then the silence was broken by the rattle of a V-1 flying bomb in the sky above. Of course I knew I was safe as long as the rattle continued; its stoppage would signify that the bomb was dropping. And then it stopped and I had a horrid moment of imagining myself and the beast facing each other over the soon to be shattered glass. But a distant detonation soon reassured me and I fled the reptile house.

My interest in this monster stemmed from childhood when I read
The Dragon Lizards of Komodo
by Douglas Burden, who led an expedition to the little-known Indonesian island where they had uniquely survived. He was a great naturalist and a romantic figure, remarkably handsome, as can be seen in the charcoal drawing of him made by Sargent for his mother when he went overseas in World War I. Happily he survived to bring home the bodies of the dragons so beautifully mounted in the diorama in the American Museum of Natural History.

In later life I knew Burden well, for I married his niece, Adele Lawrence, in 1957, four years after she graduated from Bryn Mawr. A rare and loving creature she was an artist and astonishing companion. I was luckier than could be imagined when she agreed to marry me.

Douglas Burden always behaved peculiarly about the dragons. He seemed to feel that because he had brought them to the attention of the greater public that they were somehow his property and that even scientists of repute should not mention them without giving credit to his role in their rediscovery. I could never convince him that the law gave him no greater rights in the beast than I had.

M
Y WIFE, THE FORMER
Adele Lawrence, observed, in the first year of our marriage, 1958, that, as by this time I had received some acknowledgment as a novelist, she had expected to meet more members of the literary world. She did not say this with any particular disappointment; her reading was mostly of detective fiction or works connected with her passion: saving the natural environment.

Adele became the assistant administrator of New York City parks and was a founding trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council. She had simply assumed that writers would see other writers, and had no objection to that. Indeed the oddity of our very happy union was that our interests were almost complete opposites.

"Is there some particular writer you'd like to meet?" I asked her.

She didn't know many, so she picked a famous one. "Well, what about Norman Mailer? You know him, don't you?"

"Certainly. And I happen to have an invitation from him in my pocket. For Wednesday night."

"Fine. Let's go. What time and where?"

"His apartment's in Brooklyn. But there's no point getting there before midnight. It won't get started before then."

"Midnight! In the middle of the week! No thanks. We working folk will be beddy-bye well before that."

She understood thereafter why it was so difficult in that day for writers caught up in the workaday world to see their confreres socially. It was not only the hours; it was the heavy drinking then associated with creative writing that wasted so much time. In my bachelor days, and when I was not practicing law, I had ample time to meet, and did, some of the great literary figures of the time, and adapt myself to their hours. I can recall coming home at eight A.M. after an all-night drinking session with Jean Stafford and Philip Rahv and thinking nothing of it. As a married lawyer-novelist I soon changed my ways.

Childhood had not brought writers into my ken. The only one who came regularly to the house was my parents' great friend Arthur Train, author of the popular Ephraim Tutt stories about a wily but good-hearted old lawyer who didn't hesitate to misuse his legal genius to get an innocent man off the hook. But Train was no Thackeray. At Groton I read deeply in the British nineteenth-century classics: Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, George Eliot, but nothing contemporary, no Hemingway or Faulkner or even Fitzgerald. We were then living in an age where many believed that Galsworthy was the greatest writer in English and Anatole France the greatest in French. I passionately agreed with this evaluation until Proust crept into my life. But with him I preferred the social parts about the parties of the Guermantes. I thought his whole theory that love springs from jealousy was twaddle. As a matter of fact I still do.