Personal History (40 page)

Phil immediately went after our friend Scotty Reston to be Herbert’s successor. Phil’s offer to Scotty sent
The New York Times
into action to keep him there. The result was that Arthur Krock moved out of the way to allow the
Times
to make Scotty its Washington–bureau chief. From Scotty’s point of view, that wasn’t even necessary; his response to Phil was simply to say, “I can’t leave the
Times.”
At that point, Phil surprisingly turned to the youngest member of the editorial staff, thirty-four-year-old Robert Estabrook, to run the editorial page. At about the same time, he cajoled Al Friendly, whom he considered one of the paper’s top reporters, to be assistant managing editor for the daytime. This provided Russ Wiggins with the first real backup he had ever had. For a distinguished reporter to become an editor is one of the most difficult transitions, both for the person and for management; the two jobs require different skills, and naturally some reporters make the transition and become able editors and some don’t. There is no good way to know except to try. For too long, the
Post
was not very good at helping people to learn to be managers, but though Al missed reporting, he took up the challenge of management with enthusiasm.

——

T
HE PATTERN OF
our lives was changing. As the busyness increased, I tried to find ways to give Phil some relief. Because both he and I had had strong negative reactions to the summer of 1949, when we tried to take the children away to New England—Phil to the commute, and I to the life of women and children all week without their men—we decided to look for a summer retreat closer to home. I had concluded I’d take any house no more than twenty minutes away from Washington, and in the summer of 1950 we rented a house in Warrenton, Virginia, a bit farther out, but still acceptable to me. Phil liked it so much that we rented another house in the fall to continue country life on weekends.

I would probably never have done any of this had Phil not insisted. He loved the country, and the children thrived on it. I was less enthusiastic, having never lived this way. It meant a lot of work for me every weekend to pack up the children, the household, the food, and later the dogs, but Phil pronounced it all such a success that we started to drive around the countryside looking for a place of our own. Our dream was a house about an hour from Washington with a few acres around it to protect us. Just before Christmas, Phil remarked that he didn’t think I really wanted to find a place and asked whether there wasn’t anything I’d seen that I liked. I had indeed liked one place in Marshall, Virginia, but had thought it was too big and too expensive. In addition, it was a working farm, which I didn’t want to take on and run. As I set out again on the search after New Year’s 1951, the agent told me that the place was still for sale, they’d come down in their price, and the farm part was rented out, so the farming was taken care of. We went back to look at it again, and, as happened with our house in Washington, we fell in love with it—the house and the land.

Glen Welby, as the house was called, is located in a secluded area halfway between Warrenton and Middleburg, Virginia, about an hour and twenty minutes from Washington. The house was set in the middle of 350 acres, about sixty of which were woods. We bought Glen Welby for $87,500—a sum that is ridiculously small when looked at today, but which seemed a really large undertaking for us then, particularly since the house needed a lot of restoration and repairs, and, of course, I had to furnish it completely. The house was a real family house, large and sprawling. The center part probably dated to the early 1800s, and the back room had been added by the time of the Civil War. A kitchen wing followed, and a large living room and master bedroom and porch had been added by the former owners in 1929, just before the Crash.

It was typical of our marital relationship that Phil conceived the idea of a country house for summers and weekends and I did the actual work. Our relationship resembled that of a chief executive officer—Phil—and a chief operating officer—me. He had the ideas and spark; I carried them
out and ran things. Despite the extra work for me, I’m grateful to Phil for this idea of buying the farm. It’s now a familiar phenomenon for those who can afford weekend country life on a greater or lesser scale, but then it was much less common. My son Donald and his wife, Mary, now own Glen Welby and spend time there with their children in much the same way we did.

On the social front, we were getting to know an ever-wider number of people. I lunched with a variety of women, many of whom were close friends. At one point Phil noticed that there was always a three-way morning conversation among Polly Wisner, Evangeline Bruce, and me. He dubbed this the “nine o’clock network” and said he was going to buy time on it. Yet, despite having a circle of friends, I was still maladroit at managing our social life. Because Phil was consumed with work, he was strict with me about how many invitations to accept for the evenings. At first I rather stupidly told people I would consult Phil about whether we could accept. He insisted that I just tell them no, pointing out how hopelessly awkward it appeared if I hesitated or said I’d ask him. I remember once saying, “Shouldn’t we go? I’ve said no to the French Embassy five times already,” to which he quickly responded, “What’s wrong with a sixth?” One day he came home to Glen Welby with an invitation from the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to go out on the
Sequoia
—then the official government entertainment boat—which he said he’d regretted. “Why?” I asked. “It sounds like fun.” His response: “It
sounds
like fun, but think who’s going to be there.”

Whereas Phil was disinclined to accept invitations, once he got wherever we were going he usually enjoyed it hugely and was reluctant to come home. I, on the other hand, initially would want to go much more than he did, but often felt uncomfortable or shy once we got there. One example during these years was the Dancing Class, an old Washington tradition that had been started by Mrs. Joseph Leiter’s mother, known as “Ma” Williams. The Dancing Class was the ultimate snobbish social event, and rules for entry were excessively rigid. Politicians were not among those invited to attend. Truman’s Vice-President Alben Barkley and his young wife, Jane, were turned down, for example. Someone once wanted to invite Richard Aldrich, the producer, but this request was turned down because it was feared he might want to bring his beautiful actress wife, Gertrude Lawrence, who was in town with
The King and I
.

I confess I wanted to be included. Janet Barnes, our close friend who had grown up with all those people, proposed us to the committee, and we were accepted. I suppose I may have wanted to be accepted because of my childhood and because I knew that my parents had not been members. I suppose I may also have liked the idea of the Class because the rest of my life during those years seemed so unglamorous—houses, children, boards,
and good works. Phil could not have cared less but, typically, rather enjoyed the whole thing once we went. Whereas I was usually overcome by an outbreak of nerves and the old fear of getting “stuck” with a partner on the dance floor. I remember Phil telling me, with some impatience, that it was up to me to take care of myself—that if I got stuck with someone I should just say goodbye, walk away, and find someone else. It didn’t do to be passive and feel sorry for myself.

Our public life kept me busier than ever—accompanying Phil on trips, social and business dinners,
Post
-related activities. I kept less careful track of my own activities than I did of Phil’s. Yet, although it may have seemed prosaic to those looking on, I really loved the life I led. I went on writing “The Magazine Rack” for the
Post
until 1953, when I just couldn’t cope with all that I was doing and—against Phil’s wishes—gave it up without really discussing it with him. He said, “I hear you’ve resigned. Have you gone to the competition?”

What I was doing was a good deal of fund-raising for local groups and serving on several boards dealing with welfare and children’s issues. And, naturally, my own children were taking up a great deal of time—the usual endless carpools, mothers’-group meetings, birthday parties, riding and tennis lessons, field days, dogs, doctors’ and dentists’ appointments.

I
N
1951, at a time when Phil was away, I found I was having another miscarriage. (He seemed always to be away on these occasions.) I went over to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore the next day and, after a minor operation, was sent home sad and depressed, but Phil, following a reassuring call from the doctor, reported to my mother that I was “really in very good shape, both physically and mentally, although the only slightly upsetting thing about the development is that it frustrated our perfect time schedule.”

In April 1952, I had our fourth and last child, Stephen. Mother wrote me a note two months later, on my birthday: “35 years ago you gave your parents great joy by coming into the world. And now that lovely baby has four lovely children of her own! May your own astonishing tribe give you as much satisfaction and happiness as you have always given us.” And she sent along what she called her “usual little check.” She wasn’t exaggerating—it
was
a small check, like those she sent throughout my life. In fact, Mother was very unwilling to take any trouble with gifts or to give something sizable, except, of course, for the huge business-related transactions that involved the Post Company. Many Christmases would go by in which she would shake her head about the state of the world and say that things were much too serious to bother about Christmas. Or she would say, “Darling, please buy the children something lovely from me”—usually after
I had finished Christmas shopping, leaving me to choose something we were giving and sign it with her name. Unfortunately, she never learned to derive pleasure from giving. In fact, she had a streak of real discomfort at parting with things. I responded in various odd ways to this inheritance: overdoing Christmas and birthdays with a neurotic concern that a child not be disappointed, or giving inadequately myself, until I learned from Phil’s lavish generosity and from observing friends.

Our relationship with my mother and father continued to be close yet difficult. The connections among the four of us were no doubt complicated by all the various hats we wore with each other, whether child, spouse, parent, friend, mentor, benefactor, or some mix of several of these. Dad was to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday in 1950, and my parents had gone to Europe, so Phil and I were charged by my mother with planning some event to mark the occasion. What we came up with was a small party for him with his grandchildren, and then a dinner for over a hundred friends the following night. Mother had commandeered her friend Rudi Serkin to play the piano in Dad’s honor. And the speeches were all appropriate and gratifying. In his, Joseph Pulitzer said that, of the many bankers and industrialists who had owned newspapers, Eugene Meyer was the first who turned out to be a natural newspaperman. Bernard Baruch spoke of his acumen, General Omar Bradley about his public service, and Steichen paid a touching tribute to the whole family. It was all a great success.

Because both my parents loved occasions and celebrated them to the utmost, we always seemed to be having these ceremonies for their birthdays or wedding anniversaries, or anniversaries of the
Post’s
founding or of my father’s acquisition of it. Sometimes we would return from halfway around the world for these events. There was always considerable pressure to arrange them, to say nothing of attending them.

Rituals in one’s life often start accidentally and then perpetuate themselves as a pattern. We developed several happy rituals in those years. Because Phil saw so little of the children, we began to take vacations with them. An early one, in St. Petersburg, Florida, turned out to be my introduction to baseball, since the Yankees trained there and we watched the exhibition games. After that—and because of Don’s passion for the game—I learned to enjoy baseball and even keep score, because this was something both Phil and Don liked to do.

After we bought the television station in Jacksonville, we began going to a beautiful beach half an hour from town. For several years in a row, we spent ten days there right after school let out for the summer. Directly on our return from Florida, we would give a party at Glen Welby for
Post
people to celebrate the anniversary of the purchase of the paper; it started with the twentieth anniversary but became an annual event—and a large burden on me at the time, since I still hadn’t learned how to organize people
to get the work done. The caterer did a great deal, but I used to weed the garden, tidy up the house, get my neighbor to arrange the flowers, and generally run around worrying over all the details, including how many portable toilets to bring in for 150 people. We printed a newspaper about my father’s achievements and the
Post
’s progress, which Lally distributed riding astride a tiny mule someone had left with us. Don, displaying a capitalist streak, collected small parking fees at the end of the lane.

G
IVEN ALL HIS
responsibilities and interests, and despite his native abilities and skills, Phil was stretched very thin, which took a toll on his endurance and his health. He suffered from numerous illnesses, increasingly so as the years went by. There were moments of strain between us, mostly when he drank too much, after which—almost inevitably—a rather violent quarrel would ensue, followed by abject apologies and diminished drinking, or even a temporary period of no drinking at all. Whenever I saw the drinking begin, I started to freeze; dreading the inevitable fight, I grew overworried. Probably I could have handled these situations better if I had been calmer about them, but I couldn’t be. He was usually guilt-stricken, especially if there had been a sequence of unpleasant episodes.

One such difficult evening occurred in the spring of 1954, when we were cohosts at a large party we all referred to as the Bankruptcy Ball. Tom and Joan Braden had come to town. Tom, good-looking and attractive in a craggy way, had been in the CIA, and Joan was extremely strong, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, with a mysterious hold on the opposite sex. The party was in a huge but almost empty house across the Potomac, on the Virginia side, where the Bradens were living at the time with the first few of their eight children. The hosts—Stewart and Tish Alsop, Joe Alsop, Paul and Phyllis Nitze, John and Joanne Bross, Frank and Polly Wisner, and ourselves—each contributed $400 toward the expenses. The party was a lot of fun, but for me it was one of those all-too-frequent nights when Phil had too much to drink. On our way home from the ball he told me to stop the car, got out, and walked for a while, fuming, with me driving slowly alongside; finally he got back in and we went home.