The Irregulars (14 page)

McLean’s parties were famous for attracting an interesting cross-section of the power elite, in part because her guest lists were regularly reprinted in the “Town Talk” section of the
Washington Post
, and in part because Friendship—her palatial Massachusetts Avenue manor house complete with ballroom, theater, ornate gardens, golf course, greenhouses, and stables—had earned a reputation for being a gathering place of fifth columnists, appeasers, apologists for Hitler, right-wing Republicans, and Roosevelt-haters. President Roosevelt once went so far as to compare her crowd to Britain’s “Cliveden set,” a privileged circle of anti-Semites and Hitler admirers who had frequented Nancy Astor’s Buckinghamshire house, Cliveden. McLean viewed the presidential snub as a badge of honor, particularly as FDR also slammed her pal Cissie Patterson as a social “parasite” who was more interested in tea-partying than helping the war effort. The controversy only served to make her gatherings more newsworthy. The
Washington Post
took to sending a reporter by most Sunday nights to take down all the license plates and published them in the morning paper.

Evalyn Walsh McLean’s father had discovered gold in Colorado and had left her a huge fortune. With more money than sense, she married a bounder by the name of Edward (Ned) Beale McLean, and after two decades of headlines covering his incredible indulgences and debauchery, she filed for divorce. Before the papers were finalized, Ned McLean descended into an alcoholic stupor, and she had him committed to a mental institution in Towson, Maryland, where he insisted to the end that he was a German spy and a double agent. Widowed in 1941 at the age of fifty, Evalyn dedicated herself to regaining her lost stature and reputation. Perhaps realizing that her aristocratic way of life was in poor taste now that American boys were dying by the thousands, she negotiated a deal with the government to donate the historic Friendship mansion and fifty-seven acres of the seventy-five-acre holding to provide housing for defense workers. She even had the estate’s massive wrought-iron gates melted down to make armaments. Before she surrendered the family seat, she threw a sumptuous wedding for her fourth child and only daughter, Evie, who married Robert Rice Reynolds, a much older second-term Democratic senator from North Carolina and a well-known Anglophobe and isolationist. Washington’s most indomitable hostess then relocated to the red-brick ghetto of Georgetown, where she kept up her lavish level of entertaining at Friendship II, a hastily acquired twenty-room town house at Wisconsin and R Street, even though it meant enclosing the balcony and putting tables on the patio to accommodate her large parties.

Drawn by the glamour and good food, New Dealers and foreign diplomats overlooked her politics and flocked to the parties, where she was known to seat interventionists and isolationists side by side. McLean avidly sought out a brilliant, eclectic group for her sparkling soirées, collecting admirals, senators, judges, journalists, famous writers, and Hollywood stars to adorn her tables. She regarded Dahl, an unencumbered male, as a prized new addition, and made the dashing RAF pilot a regular at her “Sunday nights.” It didn’t hurt that he often escorted British dignitaries when they came through Washington and would offer to bring along the likes of Noël Coward as an extra man. Little did she realize that both Dahl and Coward had been contracted to do second-story work for the BSC and were scribbling notes on the backs of matchbooks and dinner napkins. Dahl would report back to the BSC on all those in attendance, which at one fete included such VIPs as Lord Halifax, Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle and his wife, Colonel Byron Foy and his wife, the former U.S. ambassador to Japan Joseph Clark, the magazine publisher William Ziff, Herbert Hoover and his pal Gene Tunney, now a commander in the navy, three Supreme Court justices, seven senators, a couple of representatives, and assorted members of the diplomatic corps. Naturally Frank Waldrop, the hard-line isolationist who was managing editor of the
Times-Herald
and author of its anti-Roosevelt editorials, and his boss, Cissie Patterson, were present.

Also to be found at most of her parties was her conservative son-in-law, Senator Reynolds, who had modified his views since Pearl Harbor—after initially blaming the December 7 attack on the British—and distanced himself from the ultranationalist, fascist, and anti-Semitic organizations he had aligned himself with in the early days of the war. Back in 1939 Reynolds had founded the Vindicators Association, which disseminated its poisonous ideas in a publication, the
American Vindicator
, that was often sold at German American Bund rallies. He furthered his reputation for being pro-Nazi and anti-British by associating with such demagogues as Gerald K. Smith, an infamous American fascist, and Father Charles Coughlin, an anti-Semitic radio priest, accusing the president of leading the country into war, and voting against the Lend-Lease Act as well as most of FDR’s aid-to-Britain policies. After war was declared, he disbanded the Vindicators Association and became fiercely promilitary, advocating national unity, the purchase of war bonds, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and renewal of Lend-Lease. Despite his bitter opposition to FDR’s foreign policy, he became the powerful chairman of the Military Affairs Committee, and the British, who trusted him about as far as they could throw him, monitored his every move.

At one of McLean’s seated dinners, Dahl caused quite a scene when he found himself across from Waldrup, who along with labor leader John L. Lewis were the evening’s honored guests. Seated nearby was Lieutenant Winston Frost, a naval hero just back from the Pacific, lending their end of the table a distinguished military air. Quite forgetting himself, Dahl confronted Waldrop. “Just why are you trying to create friction between the British and American governments? First will you answer yes or no, are you?” he demanded. “Yes, I am,” Waldrup answered immediately. “So is Goebbels, carry on,” retorted Dahl. “I am against the British now, yesterday, and tomorrow,” Waldrup continued more heatedly, “I am for America first, last, and all the time. I am afraid of the British. They are clever and I don’t want any more of this ‘Winnie’ and ‘Franklin.’” Dahl snapped: “So says Hitler. Carry on.” The silence around the table was deafening.

Dahl invited Lewis to join the fray, but he preferred to remain silent, staring uncomfortably into his demitasse cup. Apparently unable to stand it a minute longer, Frost unleashed a ten-minute tirade against Waldrup: “Do you realize that if you were in the South Pacific today there are boys in the U.S. Eighth Air Force who would tear you limb from limb for the things you write?” Waldrup muttered, “Well, I guess I won’t go to England.” After dinner was cleared, Frost continued his frontal assault, pinning John Lewis into a corner until he was finally rescued and mollified by the hostess’s daughter-in-law.
*

Far from ruining the evening, Dahl discovered that his unschooled-puppy routine, running ragged over the rules of decorum and pissing all over an important guest, pleased his hostess no end. Evalyn Walsh McLean considered these little contretemps the key to a successful gathering, especially as it guaranteed that her party would be discussed in discerning circles for days afterward. When it came time for her guests to leave, she bid Dahl good night, adding gaily, “Be sure and come back at your regular time next Sunday. We won’t count this one.” Then, holding out the necklace with its large blue gem in her habitual, dramatic parting gesture, she declared, “Look, here is the Hope diamond! Look at it. And you
will
come again, won’t you, and I
will
see you again next Sunday, won’t I?” As he bowed his way out the door, Dahl offered, “Do you want me to wear it for good luck until next Sunday?”

Marsh had no appetite for McLean’s nonstop revelries and considered her a drunk and a fool. He questioned why anyone in their right mind bothered with the woman. While Dahl conceded that McLean was an exhibitionist and often “tipsy,” he respected the way she had thrown herself into relief work, volunteering at veterans’ hospitals and opening her home to wounded soldiers. Dahl maintained that McLean, far from being a bubble-headed pleasure-seeker, had “a brain” and knew what she was about. “Her basic thought is anti-Communism,” he advised Marsh, noting that she was part of a growing clique who believed that Russia was the real enemy and who warned one and all that “Stalin is ten times as dangerous as Hitler.”

On more than one occasion, she had told Wallace just exactly what she thought of him for “being so friendly to the Russians.” One night when he came to dinner, she asked him: “Now, Mr. Vice President, suppose you were in a barroom brawl and got rescued by a barroom bum. He might have saved your life. But would you take him home and let him share your home with your daughter and wife?” Dahl told Marsh he thought her fixation with the Hope diamond was that it symbolized private property, which she believed Roosevelt, the war, and the Russians all endangered. While he disliked the fact that she catered to “two of the biggest anti-British baiters in town” (Waldrup and Patterson), this objection was outweighed by larger concerns. “She runs a good saloon,” he told Marsh matter-of-factly, “and there are lots of folks to see and that’s my business.”

Less than two weeks later Dahl was invited to another lavish dinner at Friendship, this one a seated affair for sixty guests. He soon found himself up to his neck in anti-Russian talk. At the end of the night, when the British air attaché finally made to leave, Mrs. McLean drew him to one side and asked to see him again, so eager was she to sponsor and instruct the tall, talented, delightful flier. “Come back Friday night for an intimate little talk,” she whispered in his ear. “I want to get you straight. You are a presentable young man. I know some people who may control your future.”

Dahl, whose confident sexuality only added to the powerful effect of his intellect, “cut quite a local swath,” as a young Katharine Graham pointed out in the course of promoting one of his new stories in her
Post
column, “The Magazine Rack.” Graham, whose husband, Philip Graham, had just recently taken over the
Post
from her father, Eugene Meyer, was very much part of the social swim, and Dahl saw her often at the parties of bright young New Dealers in Washington. “Girls just fell at Roald’s feet,” confirmed Antoinette Marsh. “I think he slept with everybody on the East and West Coasts that had more than fifty thousand dollars a year.” At the time, it seemed that almost no one was immune to his charms, an impression that was reinforced when Dahl turned up at the R Street house one night with “Eisenhower’s girlfriend” on his arm. “There was a parade of women,” said Antoinette, adding, “I think he liked to show them off to my father.”

As his popularity grew, Dahl became more arrogant. He had discovered that nothing was so persuasive to a woman as a man in uniform, especially against the backdrop of ever-present danger and imminent separation. Dahl had no qualms about laying claim to the perks of war and took to bragging about his many conquests to Creekmore Fath, who was convinced his friend was “one of the biggest cocksmen in Washington.” Fath remembered Dahl proudly showing off various trinkets bestowed upon him by his many admirers as tokens of their affection. The most famous of these was Millicent Rogers, the Standard Oil heiress, a former model and fashion plate, who presented Dahl with a Tiffany gold key to her front door, along with a gold cigarette case and lighter. Extravagant, and extravagantly beautiful, she was notoriously frisky, and her love life had been making headlines for years. At nineteen, she had defied her parents and eloped with a dissipated Austrian count, surfacing some weeks later in Paris pregnant with his child. Count Ludwig Salm von Hoogstraten, an internationally known tennis player who was descended from an aristocratic European family that had lost all its money in the last war, held out for a huge settlement. Rogers’ father paid off the penniless fortune-hunter and forced her to return home, so her baby would be born in New York. Immediately after the divorce, she became engaged to the Argentine playboy and sportsman Arturo Peralta-Ramos and produced another two sons. She followed up with another divorce and another marriage, this time to a square-jawed Wall Street banker named Ronald Bush Balcom.

Forty-one and freshly divorced when she met Dahl, she was independent and adventurous and inclined to similar men. Dahl found her intoxicating: wide-set blue eyes, high cheekbones, and alabaster skin framed by soft shining hair in a pageboy cut. She was intelligent, with a quick wit and well-developed gift for mimicry that made her quite devastating at parties, and the best company. More than anything it was her forceful personality and originality that distinguished her from other society women. She dressed with enormous flair, in creations of the greatest couturiers of the day, from Mainbocher and Schiaparelli to Charles James, remaking their clothes to complement her long frame and paring them with dramatic twenty-four-carat gold jewelry of her own design, so that no one who saw her would ever forget it. She favored attention-getting costumes, appearing one day as a Tyrolean peasant, in a dirndl and matching hat, and the next as Marie Antoinette, swathed in yards of silk taffeta.

Raised on sprawling estates in Southampton and Palm Beach, as well as a succession of rented European castles, Rogers lived in an eighteenth-century manor in Tidewater, Virginia, that more closely resembled a museum than a home. Dahl, who thanks to Marsh was fast developing a taste for the finer things in life, was bowled over by her collection of art, which included treasures from all over the world, including Empire and Biedermeier furniture rescued from her Arlberg chalet and a trove of modern French paintings. Inspired by her eclectic finds, from the group of antique clocks to a cluster of superb drawings by Watteau, Fragonard, and Boucher, Dahl vowed that as soon as he had enough put away, he would begin buying paintings for a modest collection of his own. Rogers’ house was a jewel box, crammed full of furniture and objects she had picked up along the way from her marriages and many travels, but every piece told a story, and taken together they added up to something more and seemed to him evidence of a life well lived.