Personal History (31 page)

And so the year 1946 was the beginning of a new and drastically altered era for us. We went from young, fun-loving people with few responsibilities to the other extreme. The day-to-day changes were gradual, so at the time I didn’t see how different our lives were becoming, but in fact we had taken an enormous step into a new and more serious life.

After a terminal-leave vacation in Phoenix, Arizona, Phil started his postwar work at the age of thirty as associate publisher of the
Post
. My father had said that he himself was too old to let Phil take an entry-level job and work his way up through different departments, so Phil came into the
paper as deputy to my father and had to learn an entirely new and very competitive business, starting essentially at the top.

Because he had to work so hard, I took more than ordinary charge of our private lives. And I, too, had to work very hard at learning a variety of things—mostly domestic, some social. My life was centered on shifting gears from the camp-following of the war years and my times alone. Everything seemed new to me, including life in a family with a husband and children.

On a morning newspaper, at least, no one really gets started until ten or so. Lally was our alarm clock. Most mornings at eight she came thundering in, full of cheer, shouting, “Wake up, Daddy!” This was my wake-up call—at which point Phil would grunt and go back to sleep for another hour.

Although we had Mamie Bishop as our children’s nurse, I was more actively involved in the care of the children and the running of the house. After Mattie, who never got well enough to return to work, we had a cook, Bessie, and a laundress, Ethel Beverley, who managed to tear up everything. Phil said her husband must be called Peg Leg Beverley, or else why did he possess only one sock out of every pair? Alas, I was never able to fire anyone—a problem I had to face years later, when I went to work—so she remained, and the sock problem stayed with us.

The children were fast developing into individuals, but my own maternal skills were developing more slowly. Despite the help, every day seemed hectic, and Mamie’s days off often sent me into a tailspin, in which I seemed more than ever all thumbs. One week when she was away, Donny fell out of his crib because I had left the side down, and out of his swing while I was weeding the yard. He ended up looking like Donald Duck, with his swollen upper lip sticking out an inch. That was the same week I put the nipples for his bottles on to boil and forgot them while I took time out to call people for a party. When the smell of burning alerted me, I found flames a foot high shooting out of the pan, threw it into the sink to put out the fire, and turned the water on, only to have the pot explode glass all over the place. I couldn’t help wondering how the children would fare if I took care of them all the time.

At times, Donny was a difficult baby. He took a great deal of patience, and I had very little. From the age of six months to a year, he alternated between violent activity and ensuing exhaustion and crankiness. It was often hard to get him to eat. One day, when he had thrown his entire dinner on the floor, I was so desperate that I asked Lally what to do. With total common sense, she suggested, “Try him with a sandwich.” I must say it worked quite well. After that she became my able and enthusiastic assistant.

Even as a three-year-old, Lally was beginning to make a good deal of sense. She loved being “grown-up,” accompanied me everywhere, and was
a marvelous companion, with plenty of humor and sympathy. I was quite silly about her and scared that I was spoiling her. Lally and Donald both seemed indefatigable, and once we acquired a Springer-spaniel pup the three of them together managed to keep Phil and me, as he put it, “in a constant mood of subdued fatigue.”

Despite the occasional calamities, however, my practical knowledge was growing—of how to run houses, bring up children, and relate to them as a parent. Most of all, I had to learn how to relate to Phil himself in a very different environment from what we had experienced previously. He was overworked from the start, and grew tired from the pace and the increased responsibilities, but he also thrived on them.

Our social circle was expanding, and even though some of our prewar friends had left town, we remained close. Prich was one of these. He had turned down several job offers in Washington, including assistant attorney general for civil rights and leader of the liberal group the Americans for Democratic Action, and moved back to Kentucky to start a law firm, but he made frequent visits to Washington on behalf of all kinds of clients.

It was in these immediate postwar years that we entered into our lifelong friendship with Joseph Alsop, who was writing a popular syndicated column with Robert Kintner for the
Herald-Tribune
. Joe was a prominent figure around town by this time, so he entertained a great deal and went out to dinners on nights when he didn’t entertain. Joe always lived well beyond his means—partly on his expense account, but more because he knew so well how to live. Someone once said of Joe that he was the only person who liked his friends better than they liked him. In the beginning that may have been true, but not as the years passed.

Phil and I were also developing another and very different group of friends. This group included the columnist Walter Lippmann and his wife, Helen; Massachusetts Representative Joe Casey and his wife, Connie, and her brother, Drew Dudley, who worked for the World Bank and was a single man, very much on the town; Joe Alsop’s younger brother, Stew, and his young British wife, Tish; Marquis Childs, the columnist, and his first wife, Biddy; Bill and Betty Fulbright; Arthur and Marian Schlesinger, and the
Post
’s editor, Herbert Elliston, and his wife, Joanne.

Walter was the most widely read political columnist of his time. He was very intelligent, but he was also a prima donna. He had married Helen in 1938, after stealing her away from Ham Armstrong, who was Walter’s best friend and whose wife she had been. She was tremendously protective of Walter, who led a carefully controlled existence. He wrote his column by hand in the morning, during which time he was not to be interrupted, while the house was kept tranquil and quiet by Helen. Afternoons were for interviewing, reading, and walking their two beautiful poodles. Helen’s solicitude for Walter was legendary. Once Robert Schuman,
who had been the French prime minister and foreign minister, was their guest of honor at dinner. When the wine was passed, Schuman interrupted something Walter was saying to discuss the origins and vintage with the waiter, as Frenchmen are apt to do. When he finished, Helen leaned over and said to Walter,
“Et tu disais?”
—“And you were saying?” We played tennis frequently with Walter and Helen on my family’s court. Little boys from the neighborhood used to stand outside the fence, shouting, “Mista, give me a ball.” Once when this happened, Helen turned to them and said, “Shush, boys, Mr. Lippmann is serving.”

Other people we got to know better in those first years after the war were Avis and Chip Bohlen—he was the new counsel for the State Department and had interpreted at the meetings of the Big Three during the war—the Bob Lovetts, and the John McCloys. Bob Joyce, also in the State Department, and his wife, Jane, were friends, as were the David Bruces. These four couples, together with the Alsops and Frank and Polly Wisner, made a group of which we gradually became a part.

Two others who remained friends for life were James (Scotty) Reston, then a star reporter for
The New York Times
, and his wife, Sally. Scotty was on his way to becoming the most influential reporter in Washington, later a columnist. About them I can only say that Phil and I willed them our children. At a time when we were traveling a great deal, we had to decide whether we would fly together or separately. Since we traveled so much, it didn’t seem practical to take different planes, so we decided against it. However, we thought it irresponsible not to have made firm arrangements about the children. We believed Scotty and Sally would most nearly approximate our values and our love; in addition, they knew the children and the children knew them. The Restons performed the ultimate act of friendship by agreeing to this arrangement.

My best new friendship was with Polly Wisner. She and Frank had moved to Washington from New York right after the war. Polly’s spirit was always erupting with fun and laughter, and she was constantly hatching ideas for things that the four of us could do together. She and I became the closest of friends almost immediately, and stayed so for life.

At some point soon after Phil went to work at the
Post
, we gave a dinner for Cissy Patterson. Relations between Mrs. Patterson and our family naturally had ceased after the “pound-of-flesh” incident relating to the comics, but Phil had been head of the negotiating committee trying to work with the craft unions on behalf of all the papers in Washington, so my father said, “If you are in this position, you really should know Cissy.”

My memory has always been that, despite the turbulent history between Cissy and my father, he himself took Phil to call on her at her home at 15 Dupont Circle. I only recently learned from Frank Waldrop—the editor of the
Times-Herald
at the time, but really Cissy’s top aide, who gave
himself the title of “hired gun”—that it was Phil who called Frank suggesting that they collaborate to get the two old rivals back together. Frank protested that it would be an interesting spectacle, “something like two scorpions in one bottle,” but in planning the maneuver Frank said, “You handle your man, I’ll try to handle mine.”

Frank arrived an hour before the allotted time of three in the afternoon and found Cissy completely flustered, rushing around, “dripping her handkerchief off her knee, which was always a sure sign of trouble for somebody,” and giving orders right and left. Finally, she ordered the butler to put all the liquor away, saying, “I don’t want Eugene to go away from here saying I’m a drunk.” So the booze went into the cabinet, Phil and my father arrived, everyone sat down, and they all behaved in a perfectly grown-up fashion. According to Frank, after a short time my father said, “Cissy, have you got anything to drink around here?” She pressed a buzzer, called for the butler, and said, “Get it out,” and out came the booze.

Phil’s and Cissy’s charm led to an immediate rapport, and she said, “Oh, Eugene, you’re so lucky to have this charming son-in-law; think of the son of a bitch I got”—referring to the columnist Drew Pearson, who by that time was a great friend of ours and had divorced Cissy’s daughter, Felicia, and married Luvie Moore Abell. Right after his divorce, Drew had remained friends with Cissy, but Cissy and her paper had been violently right-wing and isolationist, whereas Drew was a Quaker, a liberal, and pro-Allies. They parted company, and the
Post
gained a great asset with his column, by then the most widely read of any.

In any case, Phil and I decided it was time to resume relations with Cissy, so we gave a small dinner for her. By that time I had a couple working for us. Not realizing that cooks need a little notice, I only notified them that morning that we would be fourteen for dinner. I also hired the one available roving waiter I knew of, who went from house to house helping at parties. That evening he reached into the icebox, grabbed a wine bottle, and poured. To my dismay, he had pulled out a bottle containing leftover martinis. Cissy was extremely gracious, despite the sketchiness of the arrangements, and sent me a huge bunch of violets and a warm thank-you note and asked us back for something at her house.

B
ECAUSE
I
WAS
developing a “pot” from several pregnancies, several of us started an exercise class, meeting in the mornings at Joey Elliston’s large house near the corner of 29th and R Streets. One day Joey told me that the house next door was for sale and that Phil and I should buy it. Although we’d been in our O Street house less than a year, we had begun casually to look around for one better suited to a family with small children. I had always liked the house Joey was talking about, which belonged to
General “Wild Bill” Donovan. The outside looked very much like the Ellistons’ house, an imposing cream-colored brick structure, but I thought of it as much too big and grand for us, and certainly well beyond our means to buy or to run. “It’s not as big as it looks,” Joey persisted, “and you should look at it.” I did, and it was love at almost-first sight. It looked like a comfortable country sort of house that the city had grown up around—it was oblong, with simple lines, and had a large expanse of front lawn, a long pebble driveway, an old-fashioned back porch, and a big sloping back yard with lots of trees. At the foot of the hill was an old stable that served as a garage with an apartment over it.

With some trepidation, I asked Phil to look at it. I knew that if its size and the amount of land on which it sat worried me they would worry him more, but I told him that in an ideal world this was the house in which I would live. One Sunday afternoon, we walked up from O Street. As we passed the high stone wall that marks the property, the wall seemed to loom larger and longer than ever, taking up most of the block. When we finally got to the flight of stairs up to the house from the side, Phil blurted out, “Are you mad?”

“Wait until you look inside,” I muttered nervously. “It’s much less grand inside, and it’s not as bad as it looks.” And, indeed, when Phil saw the whole house, he too fell for it right away. After talking as if it were already ours, discussing where children and furniture would go, we agreed to try to buy it. I asked our agent to make an offer of $115,000, slightly below the Donovans’ asking price of $125,000. This offer, which was more than twice as much as I’d paid for the house we were leaving, seemed astronomical to me.

My father had been keeping an eye on the houses I was looking at, and I’d shown him one or two I thought of interest. Here, at last, was a Georgetown house he considered worthwhile—it was brick and therefore solid, it stood alone, and it had some space and land around it. One day while my offer was still outstanding, my father came over to see me and said, “Well, you’ve bought the house.”