The Irregulars (19 page)

Marsh always claimed that he had no interest in socializing with FDR because he was so insincere and that listening to him made him “positively sick to his stomach.” Dahl suspected his sour attitude stemmed from years of feeling snubbed by the Democratic leader, and he occasionally suggested ways the publisher could make overtures of friendship that might be well received. Whatever Marsh’s personal feelings, they did not interfere with his admiration of the president as a leader. As Wallace noted in his diary, “According to Charles, Roosevelt is the most skillful politician this country has ever had. Charles has absolutely no respect for Roosevelt as a man but as a politician he thinks Roosevelt has remarkable ability and that he is great asset for the world, that he has done great good and probably will do even greater good.”

When Wallace assumed the vice presidency in 1941, swept in when FDR was elected to a third term, Marsh saw his chance. Taking his cue from Colonel House, Marsh positioned himself as Wallace’s shadow adviser, becoming his minister without portfolio, inundating him with memos, reports, and suggestions, writing drafts of speeches, and conferring with him several times a day. Marsh was always at his best at these informal, feet-up sessions, and Wallace, who never took much interest in the minutiae of Washington politics, was all too happy to leave the nuts-and-bolts analysis to him. To commemorate his ascendance, Marsh commissioned a large oil portrait of himself, labeled it “the Preceptor” (a reference to a running gag between him and Dahl that had to do with a California religious cult run by a “master of mental-physics” who called himself the Preceptor), and hung it over the mantelpiece of the R Street house. Dahl took to calling Marsh by the painting’s title and occasionally addressed his letters “Dear Preceptor.”

If his White House access extended no further than the vice president’s office, Marsh would make the most of it. “He always wanted to be great manipulator behind the scenes,” said Welly Hopkins, a Texas legislator who first met Marsh when he was in the Texas House of Representatives and later saw a lot of him in Washington while working as a special assistant to the U.S. attorney general. “He had grandiose ideas. He would have liked to have been a little William Randolph Hearst, because he got into very much of a newspaper broker position. He bought and sold newspapers all over the United States.” According to Hopkins, Marsh’s biggest problem was that he could be extremely difficult, to the point of being abrasive. “He could be rude at times because of his over-weening ego. Charlie Marsh, to himself, would think he could do anything, get anything done that he wanted done. He was a very forceful fellow, and to some people very persuasive.”

By June 1943 Dahl could almost always find Marsh and Wallace together in the late afternoons, huddled down in “the cooler,” the air-conditioned conference room on the first floor of Marsh’s town house, plotting the vice president’s future. When he interrupted them one muggy evening in June, they were in deep discussion about a recent report in Pearson’s “Merry-Go-Round” column that Harry Hopkins was working to secure Roosevelt a fourth term but was against Wallace as his running mate for a second term because it might cost them votes. After the item appeared, Hopkins had personally reassured Wallace that there was no truth in it, but neither Marsh or Wallace was confident he could be trusted. They were constantly trying to gauge every nuance of the president’s attitude toward his vice president, and the way it manifested itself in the various statements and actions of members of his brain trust.

While Wallace respected Marsh’s judgment, consulted him on a wide range of matters, and seemed to rely on him heavily at times, his journal entries make it clear that he took much of what the bombastic publisher said with a grain of salt. After a dinner party given by Sir John Orr, the well-known Scottish scientist and politician, in which Charles proceeded to totally monopolize the discussion, holding forth at length on why a fellow like Hitler had to blow up or subside, Wallace noted in his diary: “As I listened to his [Marsh’s] conversation, I could not help thinking that perhaps he himself was an illustration of what he was expounding.”

By late summer, when the heat drove away most of society and nothing much was happening in the capital, Dahl began spending his free time at Marsh’s vast eight-hundred-acre Virginia estate, Longlea, located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The eighteenth-century English-style manor house, modeled on a mansion with a similar name Marsh had spotted on a visit to Scotland, was Charles’s gift to his young mistress, Alice Glass. He had bought the land in 1932 and spent four years and a small fortune building the rambling stone mansion, with its many bedrooms and broad, hundred-foot-long flagstone terrace, which ran the length of the house and was bordered by a low stone parapet, beyond which the land dropped off steeply to reveal a scenic bend in the Hazel River. Here, in the heart of Virginia hunt country, sixty miles outside Washington, Marsh set up his bride-to-be in great style, giving her free rein over the design and decoration of their palatial new home. She hired the New York decorator Benno de Terey, a handsome Hungarian known for his exquisite taste, and filled the interior rooms with sumptuous furnishings. The magnificent drawing room boasted an eighteenth-century Aubusson carpet, an enormous crystal chandelier, a Monet landscape, and at the far end of the room, a gilded Chinese Chippendale mirror hung over the mantelpiece. A grand piano stood in the bay window facing the terrace, framed by rich brown and gold damask curtains. The room was painted the palest blue, and every piece of furniture was upholstered in pure white. It was so ornate and forbidding that Marsh preferred to retreat to the mahogany-paneled library, with its large, inviting fireplace, bright Persian rug depicting a hunting scene, and Chinese opium table piled high with the day’s papers.

Dahl thought it by far the finest house he had seen in America. He would always remember the long winding drive that led up to the house, allowing a first fleeting glimpse of the blue slate roof and great chimneys that rose above the rolling hills. The approach was long and winding and cut through the woods and across green meadows that seemed to stretch for miles and were empty save for a herd of Black Angus cows. Longlea was a working farm. A half mile down the hill from the main house was the manager’s cottage, stables for Alice’s horses, a barn for the milk cows, and a poultry yard stocked with chickens, turkeys, ducks, guineas, and some ferocious hissing geese. There was a vegetable garden, a cutting garden, and a strawberry patch. All this was overseen by Marsh’s very correct Bavarian butler, Rudolf Kolinger, a former cavalry officer who had served the kaiser and who dictated menus to the chef, stocked the wine cellar, ran the staff of twenty black servants, mixed the drinks, and waited on table in the tradition of great country houses on the Continent.

Longlea had everything required to entertain on a grand scale, which Charles and Alice did constantly, hosting lavish weekend parties for all their new Washington friends and old Texas chums. Marsh believed in patronage, and beyond wanting to consolidate his power and influence in government, he built a house that would attract artists and musicians and writers. He sought to surround himself with a lively, sophisticated court, and his frequent guests included Vice President Wallace and his advisers; Welly Hopkins and Harold Young, a hearty back-slapping Texas politico; Lyndon Johnson, and Lady Bird; Beanie Baldwin, head of the liberal Political Action Committee and his aide, Palmer Weber; the wealthy Brown brothers of the Brown and Root construction company; the musicians Erich Leinsdorf and Zadel Skolovsky; the Randolph Scotts; as well as assorted cabinet officials, academics, writers, and journalists.

Charles also believed in pleasure and urged his friends to indulge their sybaritic natures. Guests would spend leisurely days relaxing by the pool, sunning, swimming, or playing tennis. There were all the pastimes of landed gentry, including fishing, shooting, and riding. Alice often went for morning rides and occasionally organized a hunt—known as the Hazelmere Hunt after the river—leading a small party of friends in a fast gallop across the soft green hills. She was a superb horsewoman and, Texas country girl that she was, an excellent shot. She had a skeet shoot installed on the high bluff overlooking the river and picked the spinning clay disks out of the sky with deadly precision. In warm weather, the outdoor terrace, with its breathtaking view of the mountains, became the center of activity. It was an idyllic spot, framed by flowering trees, mimosa, and a rose garden, and in the evenings their perfumed scent hung heavily in the air. Alice had ordered thousands of daffodils to be planted from the stone balustrade down to the cliff’s edge, so that in spring it was a blazing carpet of yellow. Breakfast and lunch were served outside, as well as cocktails, which were on offer morning, noon, and night. A bottle of champagne was always open. At Longlea, dinners were a very formal affair and were served in the elegant dining room with its long mahogany table, laden with gleaming crystal and silver, and rows of ribbon-backed Hepplewhite chairs. Alice loved to dress up and dazzled in the latest evening gowns, while Marsh, with his sculpted profile and gleaming pate, looked almost regal in his Fortuny smoking jackets. “Alice was a beautiful and charming hostess, very out-going and friendly, and interested in everything that was going on in Washington and the war,” recalled Creekmore Fath, who looked forward to the glamorous weekends. “It was an amazing time, and an amazing house, and Charles made it all very entertaining.”

To Erich Leinsdorf, “People like Charles and Alice [were] the best in any country under any circumstances.” The Marshes had first befriended the young concert pianist at the Salzburg Music Festival during one of their many sojourns to Europe during the early years of their affair. He had played at their private villa in St. Gilgen on the Wolfgangesee, and afterward Alice, who was very much taken with the gifted twenty-five-year-old, had awarded him pride of place next to her at dinner and later invited him to come visit them in Virginia. Leinsdorf, who by his own account was lucky “to conduct his way out” of Nazi-swamped Austria by getting himself invited to lead the 1937 season of New York Metropolitan Opera, remembered Longlea as something out of a dream. “There was a constant stream of guests,” he wrote in his memoir. “The accents were new, the lavish and easy life with martinis served at eleven in the morning was new, my room with its elegant antique furnishings was new…. I just sat goggle-eyed.”

Longlea was a showplace, designed to display Marsh’s most exquisite acquisition, and Alice, like the house, did not disappoint. Almost six foot in her bare feet, she was slim, graceful, and startlingly beautiful, with delicate features, wide-set blue eyes, and strawberry-blond hair that cascaded past her shoulders. When she descended Longlea’s dark, oak-paneled staircase, a hush would fall over the hall as all the assembled guests turned to stare. The noted New York society photographer Arnold Genthe, who was hired to take her portrait and was known for taking the famous picture of Greta Garbo that first piqued Hollywood’s interest, maintained that Alice was the most stunning woman he had ever seen. He was so besotted—by the queen and her palace—that he asked her to scatter his ashes on the grounds when he died.

If there was one thing Alice knew, it was how to make a lasting impression. The first time Charles Marsh saw her, she was stark naked, a pale, shimmering goddess rising unexpectedly from the mists of his Austin swimming pool. Marsh was then in his midforties and still made his home in the Texas capital, where he was a prince of the city and one of the most powerful men in the state with his string of fifty newspapers and a fortune that included oil wells and large tracts of real estate. He lived in the proverbial big house on the hill, an immense Tudor mansion in the exclusive district of Enfield, which had a commanding view of town and boasted one of the first private swimming pools in the area. With Leona, his wife of twenty years, and their three children away for an extended stay at their summer home on Cape Cod, he had been feeling bored and lonely and on a whim had decided to throw a party and open his home to Austin’s elite. At two
A.M.
, after the last of his many guests had said good night, Marsh had wandered back outside to enjoy a cigar in the early morning cool when, as he later recounted the episode to Ingersoll, he was stopped in his tracks by the sight of a bold young girl emerging from the water, “her long blond hair flowing among her fresh young breasts.”

Alice was not yet twenty. Intelligent and ambitious, she had fled the small Texas town of Marlin, where her father was the bank president, for the excitement of the capital city. She was working as a secretary in the state legislature and already had a long line of suitors when she entered Marsh’s life in the summer of 1931. The morning after the pool escapade, a smitten Marsh reportedly rolled over in bed and announced to Alice, “You are not for Austin, Texas, little girl.” Always one for rearranging people’s lives and underwriting their futures, he offered to send her to New York, where she could attend college and complete her education. Within weeks, Alice was installed at the Barbizon Hotel in Manhattan, and Marsh, who had left his wife and Austin with little more than his slippers, was a frequent visitor. By the fourth year of their affair, he had bought her an apartment on Central Park South and was enjoying a new life in New York when she announced she was pregnant.

Marsh was determined to marry Alice, but it was easier said than done. Leona took a dim view of divorce and announced her determination to fight it tooth and nail. She engaged an ex-governor of Texas as her lawyer to persuade Charles to change his mind. Failing that, she warned she would file suit against him for violation of the Mann Act: Alice was most definitely a minor when Marsh first set her up in New York and had been transported across state lines with “immoral purposes” in mind. When Marsh met with Leona’s team of lawyers, he told Ingersoll, he called their bluff, telling them that when they had him in court, he was prepared to testify before a jury of his peers that the reason he was seeking a divorce was that he could not “get a hard on” in bed with his wife. “The choice is hers,” Marsh claimed he told her attorneys. “Does she want me in public court, so testifying—or do you gentlemen care to advise her to stop with this whole silly business and keep our private lives to ourselves?” Leona agreed to settle, and Marsh got his divorce. During the extraordinarily nasty and protracted proceedings, however, the court tied up all his assets for years, and by the time he got out from under, he had signed away all his oil fields to his greedy partner, Sid Richardson, and a generous share of his fortune to provide for Leona and their children.