Personal History (19 page)

We all became great friends. In fact—in a most unprofessional manner, I realize now—Pat and I became more than friends; he was an early romance of mine. We really liked each other—he was not only highly intelligent but very good-looking. Some weeks after we met, I realized that he
was married. I also realized that he had a serious drinking problem. His courage and extraordinary leadership abilities revealed themselves during World War II, when, in the Battle of the Bulge, he was promoted from a private to an officer after all his officers had been killed and he took charge. Unfortunately, after the war he went on with his hard living and drinking, and eventually committed suicide by leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

I had carefully guarded my identity and was merely viewed by the labor leaders as the reporter from the
News
until my allotted time at the paper was about to expire. Patton had made some reference to future plans, and I said I wasn’t sure I’d be there. “Why,” he said, “are they going to fire you?” Not exactly, I responded, and then told them I had been hired only for two months at the request of my father, who was an Eastern publisher. They wanted to know who he was, of course, and what the paper was. When I told them, they were momentarily surprised and puzzled but accepted it, and we went on as usual.

It was lucky that they knew of my connection to the
Post
, because later Melnikow, a somewhat humorless and paranoid figure, said to them, “Be careful, we have a spy in our midst.” Somehow he had found out that I was the daughter of a capitalist and therefore suspected I was a capitalist spy. Since I had already confessed, my pals were able to laugh and say, “Yes, it’s all right, we know who she is.”

There was no secret on the paper about my new friends, although the extent of our nightly forays was probably not known. I tried to be above-board. I told the paper and my family and felt I maintained objectivity in my reporting. Such behavior wouldn’t be tolerated now: I shouldn’t have been getting too close personally to one side of a dispute, no matter how useful my new friendships proved to the paper.

Things on the waterfront eventually came to an impasse and went into mediation, at which point the coverage scene changed to long waits outside the mediation-room door, with half a dozen of us sitting around for hours whenever we thought there might be a break. One day the principals were getting seated while the reporters were still inside the room. The night before had been the opening of the Opera, one of the biggest social events of the year in San Francisco, for which everyone dressed absurdly elaborately. I had been invited by my aunt and had sent east for my best dress from the previous year—it was long black velvet with leopard-skin shoulder straps forming a V in front and a lower one in the back. A photograph showing a large expanse of my back had appeared amidst the massive coverage of this event. Suddenly, to my consternation, Sam Kagel looked up and said to Bridges across the table, “Well, Harry, black velvet and leopard skin, what do you think of that?” Amidst peals of laughter from the table, I vanished.

After the lockout was over, I was assigned almost full-time to an even
more important dispute from the point of view of the newspapers, the retail-store clerks’ strike, which, like all San Francisco labor disputes, was long and violent and damaging to the economic prosperity of the community. By the time my two months on the paper were up, I was in the throes of all the excitement and wanted very much to stay on, but this was complicated by economic belt-tightening on all the papers due to linage losses caused by the retail-store strike. I wrote a troubled letter to my father asking for his advice on what to do next. He responded quickly by calling my boss, thanking him for the past weeks, and making it easy for him to close the incident. Happily, my boss said he wanted me to stay, that I was doing fine work, that they would be delighted to keep me permanently, and that my father had a right to feel proud of me. Dad said that from that point on I was there on my own, and I decided to stay until I thought the point of diminishing returns had been reached.

My social life in San Francisco was a curious but happy mix of my friends from work and the waterfront and the people I met through the family and a few old connections, each set of friends perfectly aware of the other. Through Aunt Ro, who with her wide range of artistic and civic interests had become a leader of the San Francisco community, I met Maurice Sterne, a fine artist, and his wife, Vera, and through them the Mexican artist Covarru-bias, who was in San Francisco to do his murals for the upcoming Exposition. I went to the theater to see Gertrude Lawrence in
Susan and God
and then met her at a party given in her honor by Albert Bender, an elderly art-collector and bachelor friend of my aunt’s, who became a friend of mine as well. It was Albert who gave Ansel Adams his first camera and Adams, the great photographer of Western scenery, and his wife, Virginia, were two other good friends out there. With Bill Hewitt, who ended up as the CEO of the John Deere Company, I went to Yosemite Valley to spend New Year’s Eve with the Adamses, who were running a photography store there. The Adamses had only their guest bedroom, where I slept. Bill, amazingly handsome and tall, slept on a cot in the front display window of the studio, where they had hung curtains to shield their sleeping guest from passersby.

I had also become close to Jane Neylan, the most glamorous, interesting young woman friend I had ever had. Jane, the daughter of Hearst’s lawyer and close associate John Francis Neylan, was far more worldly than anyone I had known, and I was more serious and work-oriented than most of her circle. We became friends almost instantly and have remained friends all our lives. I also saw a good deal of my friend from Madeira, Jean Rawlings.

Many Sundays, Aunt Ro and I went to Stern Grove for concerts and picnics. Aunt Rosalie had given the city this hillside grove of eucalyptus trees, which formed a natural amphitheater in which a concert stage was built and where she funded free Sunday-afternoon concerts. There were
jars discreetly placed around the Grove for donations if you felt so inclined, and Aunt Ro used to stay after the concerts and count the contributions, which were a tangible measure of public appreciation.

In a funny way, I kept in touch with the world outside San Francisco through my parents. My father asked me to send him all my stories, even the most inconsequential ones, and urged me to keep writing him letters as another way of learning to write. It was also my father who kept me up on both domestic and international politics—he was especially worried about the growing anti-Semitism in Germany. One of his ways of helping to deal with the horror was to support a great friend of his, the psychiatrist Marion Kenworthy, with a legislative scheme to permit the adoption of twenty thousand refugee children.

What was more important for my personal future than his review of the domestic and international scene was my father’s appraisal of what was happening at the
Post
. Although all the papers in Washington were down in linage, the
Times
and the
Herald
were suffering the most and the
Post
the least. Still, the
Star
had more than double our share of the advertising field. Dad was optimistic about circulation growth, as well he might have been with the
Post
making significant gains after a rather stationary period. We were at 117,000, and hoping to reach 125,000 before the rise abated. Although I rarely had time to read the whole paper, the
Post
did look better to me all the time.

My father’s worries about the
Post
no doubt escalated in February 1939, when Cissy Patterson created one big all-day paper by combining the afternoon
Times
with the morning
Herald
, though first she had to settle a costly strike threat precipitated by all the people she was firing. Mother reported to me that Cissy was ill in bed and said, “I don’t think she will last much longer”—a comment that I wasn’t sure referred to Cissy herself or reflected Mother’s wishful thinking about Cissy’s newspaper.

Mother’s life went on in its usual fashion. Her latest spiritual conquest was DeWitt Wallace, owner of the
Reader’s Digest
and her next-door neighbor in Mount Kisco. She had met Anthony Eden and described him as a slender reed for democracy to lean on; in fact, she was struck by the lack of virility on the part of a number of the world’s supposed leaders and concluded that if democracy was going to be saved, the United States would have to save it. She, like my father, was working hard to help get Jewish children to Palestine, or at least out of Europe. She was busy lecturing to women’s clubs and actively speaking out against fascism.

Meanwhile, Thomas Mann remained the focus of much of Mother’s energy throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s. Mann awed her, but she felt she surprised him a little, too. Somebody once asked him if my mother was German, to which he replied, “Oh, yes, very. She is a Valkyrian type with something else—a mixture of Valkyrie and Juno.” She was so pleased
with this description that she thought it ought to be put in writing for her grandchildren, so here it is.

The Manns often visited my parents in Washington and Mount Kisco. I met him on one of the early visits, in 1938, and was disappointed, for I thought him cold, unfeeling, and hard to talk to. But Mother worshipped him. She wrote me: “He is the biggest thing I ever met bar nothing.” Though my father lived fairly amicably, and generally uncomplainingly, with most of my mother’s male friends, he got rather tired of being left with Mann’s wife while the two spouses went off into intellectual discussions, most often conducted in German.

She adored Mann openly, but he returned her adoration diffidently. Nonetheless, she still had the “feeling I am one of the few people and one of the
very
few women he has ever liked.” In truth, the real passion seemed to be on her side only. Mann has been described by one of his biographers, Donald Prater, as a “cold nature” with a “complete lack of interest and of real feeling for others.” According to Prater, Mann tended to exploit people for his personal convenience. He may well have cold-bloodedly maintained the relationship because knowing Mother—and taking advantage of her resources—proved of great help to him.

Indeed, Mother came to his rescue time and again. Over the years of their friendship, she did an immense number of favors for Mann and his family. She tried to make him more understandable to the American public by translating some of his essays and writing long reviews of his books, many of which appeared in the
Post
. In one letter to her he referred to the plethora of honors showered on him in the United States but said, in essence, that what he really needed was financial sustenance. Mother’s immediate response was: “If my intellectual efforts are at your disposal, why not then every material resource I possess?” She swung immediately into action. Having already helped smooth the way for an academic berth for him at Princeton, a position that entailed little work and gave him time to write, she now got the Library of Congress, on whose board she served, to make him “Consultant in Germanic Literature,” with a yearly stipend of $4,800. There were endless other courtesies, including help in acquiring passports for some of his children.

Prater describes my mother as wanting to become too much a part of Mann’s life, and therefore becoming a burden and an irritant to him. Mann wrote at one point that he felt an “almost uncontrollable desire to give this woman tyrannizing me a piece of my mind”—which is just what he seems to have done in a frank letter he wrote her later, saying that he had “served” their friendship faithfully and with care:

Theirs, like all of her relationships, was clearly a complicated one.

T
HREE THEMES
dominated my own letters: the anguish of the impending war in Europe, my work, and my play. No matter how immersed I was in the latter two, it was hard to forget that so much hinged on events in Europe, even though Europe seemed much more remote from California than it had from the East Coast. I listened one morning to a speech by Hitler and wrote afterwards that “the broadcast sounded a little bit as though you had gotten the zoo by mistake—that rasping voice punctuated by roars that sounded like a pack of insane animals.” The more serious the situation abroad became, the more I thought it important to work terribly hard to learn the game well. Not that I thought I or any individual could make a difference, but I thought I’d go mad if I wasn’t doing as much as I could in my own little rut.

As the labor story wound down, I looked forward to writing again. The routine activities involved in being a legman and getting kicked around were lots of fun after the highly theoretical existence I’d been leading in Chicago, but I was ready to start becoming a reporter. Initially, I covered sob-sister stuff—a little girl whose Christmas tree had burned and to whom the
News
sent presents, a suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge, an interview with a woman who, in a fit of despondency because her husband didn’t love her anymore, tried to choke her baby.

The news from Europe was crowded out of the San Francisco papers by a first-class sex murder with a beautiful blonde corpse. One brush with crime reporting came when I was sent out with a photographer to cover a distinctly unglamorous incident: a garbage truck emptying its contents at the city dump had turned up a corpse, a man who had been dead at least a week. My prayers were answered when the undertaker arrived just before we did, made off with the corpse, and saved me from the grisly spectacle. Not my story but that of another reporter was the discovery of a lady brutally murdered, her breasts cut off; across her torso, with her lipstick, had been written, “Honey, I love you.” My mother sympathized with my assignments, deploring the way ugly things rest in the mind. In her inimitable
fashion, she suggested I apply Schopenhauer’s rule of objectivity: unhinge the will until you feel neither hate nor fear.