Personal History (58 page)

Phil was clearly upset, too. He told me that he wanted to preserve our marriage and our family; he said that he loved Robin but would tell her the affair was over, and that he would stay with his family.

It was a memorable Christmas holiday. I was wrenched apart by finding out about the whole thing, and Phil was torn at having decided to end it. He knew a breakup would be terribly difficult for Robin, so, to help her recover, he sent her on a vacation in the sunshine and even sent along a friend of his to keep her company. The friend turned out to be another girl from his past, about whom I, of course, had never known.

For some reason, in those immediate days after my discovery of Robin’s existence, Phil seemed to have a compulsion to tell me much more than I wanted to know about this side of his life, of which I had been happily oblivious—about his past relations with other women, of whom there apparently had been several. I was, of course, shattered, as well as completely stunned to learn of his interest in others, including some of my own friends to whom he had made approaches, and Robin’s companion, with whom he said he had had a long, strange relationship.

Of the children, at first only Lally knew that something was wrong. She had planned to go skiing in Aspen with friends over the holidays, but
Phil told her what had happened and asked her to give up her trip and stay home while we all tried to get our bearings, which she heroically did.

A sad, small, but symbolic event took place during this time, which seemed to me to be the nadir. We were at Crescent Place, and my mother gave me some long, pretty paste earrings of hers. It meant a great deal to me; she was not very forthcoming about that kind of thing, and it had never happened before. Phil said, “You don’t wear long earrings and Lally does. Give them to her.” How could I have simply obeyed? But I did. I handed them to Lally and went out by myself to the pantry, where I burst into tears. I suppose I didn’t have the strength to resist and just quietly laugh and keep them, which any normal person would have done. To me, it was symbolic of losing everything. I felt ultimately demeaned.

During the few weeks after I found out about Robin, Phil drank a great deal and there were many problems, overlaid with our attempts to hold things together and keep our lives going. One night before the end of the college holidays, and so before Lally and Don went back to school, I had an especially hard time with Phil. We were at home, and he had had a lot to drink and was saying some wild things, most of which were not very rational. I finally got him to go to bed, but not until around two in the morning. When I came out of our room to turn off the lights throughout the house, I saw Don, looking spectral and drawn, sitting at my desk in the room right next door to the bedroom. “How long has this been going on?” he asked, referring to Phil’s drinking and the row. I confessed that it had been for some time. “Why have you never told me?” he asked.

Should I have told him? Who knows? We all try to protect our children, and my natural response was to keep this from them. I don’t know that I was right; perhaps it’s better to share problems with children as they grow older.

We somehow got through the nightmare holiday season. Phil and I were both trying to make things work, to keep up some semblance of normalcy even as our personal world had fallen apart. We attended some dinners and went out a few times. I remember one evening going to a musicale at the Frankfurters’. On our return home, Phil reprimanded me for looking so dejected and drawn when we were trying to conceal things.

At the beginning of January, Phil went to New York for a meeting of COMSAT, which he was still running, and running well. He had breakfast with Larry Collins, who was leaving for Paris, telling him, too, that he was very much in love with Robin but wanted to get his priorities straight and keep the family together.

We were both just moving numbly through our days. Phil wired Lally at college about a routine matter, but it ended with: “All is very well here. Much love to you. Pa.” At some point, however, not quite three weeks after Christmas Eve, the phones started to work again between Phil and Robin.

On January 12, 1963, after dinner, Phil and I had an argument—I can’t remember what precipitated it. The upshot was that he walked out of the house holding a blanket, got in the car, and drove away. I had no idea where he’d gone. He later told me that if I had come after him he would have come home. My response was that I hadn’t known where he’d gone, and still didn’t know.

“Where would I go?” he replied. “The office, of course.”

By this time, Robin had returned to Paris. Phil called and told her to come back to America as soon as she could. Evidently she protested, saying that she was just beginning to recover and that he had been right the first time, they should end the relationship. He said that if she didn’t come he would come and get her. According to Larry Collins, Robin thought that Phil was in a really bad state and that she was the only person who could really talk to him, so she decided to come back.

Robin Webb behaved well throughout. She was as much caught up in the tragedy—and a victim of it—as the rest of us. She was obviously mesmerized by Phil, charmed out of her mind, and she couldn’t have understood the background.

Phil flew to New York the day after he walked out of the house. I sent him a telegram reflecting my own despair:

Phil wrote me back a pretty strange letter:

He added a P.S., saying, “Les will know my plans.” Farber again. I wonder still what Farber must have advised Phil.

Lally called Larry Collins in Paris, told him of Phil’s departure for New York, and asked where Robin was. Larry called her apartment and when he got no answer checked with TWA and found she was indeed on a plane flying to the United States. And so it all started again.

Phil welcomed Robin with a carload of flowers, and together they flew to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where Phil and I had been scheduled to go, and where he was to make a speech to the Chamber of Commerce and to talk with the publisher of the local paper, the
Sioux Falls Argus Leader
, about buying it. George McGovern, then senator from South Dakota, flew along on this trip, and he later told me about the flight, on which Phil and Robin sat separately and Phil wept a good deal and spoke of loving me. The three of them were met by the publisher of the paper, who said he had heard great things about Phil, to which Phil replied: “I hear you are a son of a bitch.” Naturally there was no sale of the paper.

I had told no one about Phil’s departure—not even my mother. Finally, fully two weeks after he had left, I couldn’t hide it any longer. I also felt the need for consolation from someone, so I walked down the hill to visit my friend Lorraine Cooper and told her what had happened and that Phil had left. Expecting the sympathy and commiseration of a friend, I was startled when she said, “Good!”

“What do you mean, good?” I replied. “It’s terrible.”

“No,” Lorraine responded firmly. “You’ll be better off without him.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, incredulous.

“Don’t you realize what he does to you? Don’t you realize he puts you down all the time, that you are the butt of all the family jokes?” She gave me several instances. Though I didn’t agree totally, I got a glimmer of what she meant, but Lorraine didn’t understand the other side—that he had also built me up. I literally believed that he had created me, that I was totally dependent on him, and I didn’t see the downside at all.

From Sioux Falls, Phil and Robin flew to Phoenix, where many of the nation’s most prominent publishers were gathered for a meeting of the Associated Press. Otis Chandler and his wife, Missy, met Phil and Robin at the airport. According to Otis, who told me all of this only much later, Phil was disheveled and spinning out ideas, some of which Otis found interesting and others of which were unintelligible. It was clear to him that
Phil was not well. He said that from the moment he first saw Phil, he began to worry about how he was going to handle the dinner that evening and what he could do to help Phil get through it.

Otis was unsure if it was Phil’s mental state or if he was keeping himself perpetually drunk—or both—but certainly Phil was making very little sense. He had even gotten upset over the Chandlers’ not staying right next door to him and Robin at the Biltmore Hotel. Also, by this time there were a lot of four-letter words.

At the dinner, when Ben McKelway, editor of the
Star
and president of the AP, rose, Phil stood up and went straight to the lectern, where he began to speak. He started out saying some nice things about the
Star
, but his remarks quickly degenerated, turning into nonsense interspersed with ugly language. No one present that night has ever told me exactly what happened or what Phil said. Reports of his obscene comments have appeared in several books, but at the time those who witnessed this sorry spectacle seem only to have talked among themselves. As with other outrageous behavior by noted or known persons in those days, the incident was hushed up and not reported. Apparently, though, Phil’s wild remarks attacked individuals as well as the press in general.

Nobody knew what to do. Finally, Ben McKelway’s wife went up and managed to get him off the platform and back to his seat, but not before he had begun to take off his clothes. Otis and some other men got him to his room. From there, Phil actually called President Kennedy and, incredibly, must have gotten through to him at a late hour on Eastern time. Soon Otis had Phil banging on his door saying, “Come and talk to the president.” When Otis said, “Phil, you didn’t wake up the president, did you?” he responded, “Yes, he’s a buddy and I want him to meet and talk to Robin.”

Otis called John Hayes, the company’s head of broadcasting, who also happened to be at a meeting in Phoenix, and got the message through that Phil needed to be taken out of there and back to Washington. Someone—I’ve never been sure who—reached President Kennedy, who agreed to the use of a government plane to transport the doctors to get Phil, for the situation was described as extreme.

By then, Phil had made telephone calls all around the country to many people, some close and some whom he hadn’t seen in years. One of these calls had been to me. It was the only exchange I ever had with Robin Webb, and was a sensitive one. She said, “I do love him, but you were there first.”

One of the most important calls Phil made was to Lally, who adored her father more than anyone in the world, but who was a pillar of strength and stability to me then and throughout all those terrible months at the same time as she was trying to be understanding with her father. She was
always loving but firm with both of us. At this point she called me from Cambridge and said he needed her and she thought she had to go.

Since at that point it had been decided that Dr. Farber and a fine Scots psychiatrist, Ian Cameron, whom Farber had brought in to consult, were to bring Phil home, I was reluctant to have her go. I understood her desire but hated her being there for what was sure to be an ugly scene. Her response was adamant: “I’m his daughter and he says he needs me, so I have to go.” I couldn’t help agreeing.

Don drove her to the airport in Boston and, on an impulse, got on the plane and went with her. The doctors had decided to try to get Phil to return to Washington voluntarily, and if not to bring him back forcibly. I gather that Farber initially tried to read him passages from Martin Buber, and when this failed to work, they forcibly tranquilized him and put him on the plane. Under the strained circumstances, Robin was sent away with too little care and attention.

When the plane landed in Washington, there was an ambulance waiting and another scene in a small, private terminal at National Airport. At this point, Phil simply walked away, and had to be talked back by the children. The three of them then got into the limousine, and the doctors drove off in the ambulance without their patient. He was taken first to George Washington University Hospital and later to Chestnut Lodge, a private mental hospital in a suburb of Washington, selected by Farber. Phil viewed this whole sequence of events, with some reason, as a violation of his rights and civil liberties. As he was being taken out of George Washington, he loudly proclaimed who he was and what was being done to him and that he was a prisoner.

Once Phil was installed at Chestnut Lodge, where I considered him “safe,” I wrote to President Kennedy, thanking him for being a “real life saver,” and telling him that the hours that the government jet had saved the doctors “turned out to be critical as the situation snowballed so rapidly. No one involved could have lasted that much longer without serious harm being done in some way.” I also thanked him for his kindness toward Phil, saying, “He would and will die at the thought that he might have hurt you in any way. I hope he didn’t—too much—and was awfully relieved to hear you understood,” and concluded that I knew Phil would recover.