The Pursuit of Laughter (59 page)

When Georgiana returned to England from her two years exile little Hart did not recognise her at first, but he soon grew to love her. Lady Liz brought Caro St Jules with her, she was supposed to be a French refugee. Aristocrats were flocking to England; in 1793 France was gripped by the Terror. The Duke adored Caro St Jules, who was the
prettiest
little girl ever seen, and once, when the news was grim and he thought she might be in danger from the Paris mob, he had openly wept.

There were now huge house parties at Chatsworth, and great celebrations for the
wedding
of the elder daughter, but from this time on beautiful, generous Georgiana was never quite well. She had blinding headaches, she lost the sight of one eye, she suffered agonies from stone in the kidney. The treatment of illness in those days involved frightful
barbarities
from the doctors, which the Duchess endured with great courage.

She died in 1806, and fairly soon afterwards the Duke married Lady Elizabeth. She outlived him for many years, and when in 1824 she was dying in Rome the devoted Hart, now sixth Duke of Devonshire, hurried out from England and knelt at her bedside. Hart combined his mother’s loving, generous nature with his father’s cool intelligence. Known to history as the Bachelor Duke, it is possible to imagine that he had seen too much of the vagaries of married people to wish to marry himself.

The complicated loves and the children, legitimate and illegitimate, of the Devonshire House circles are described in detail by Arthur Calder-Marshall. His theory, that but for Lady Elizabeth Foster the Duchess would have remained childless, may be true.

Politics (except for the famous Westminster election in which Georgiana and her
sister
canvassed so boldly for Charles James Fox) are not much mentioned. As Whigs, the Devonshires were inclined to view the French Revolution in an almost indulgent way, although they had been well received at Versailles by Marie Antoinette, Mrs Brown as they called her. A friend of theirs writing to Georgiana described the Queen: ‘… she is one of the most disagreeable looking women in the world, as I always imagined her one of the worst.’ Compare this with Edmund Burke who also saw her: ‘Surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision… glittering like the
morning
star, full of life, and splendour, and joy.’ Notabilities are never seen by their
contemporaries
except through the eyes of political prejudice.

Revolution or no revolution, when a love child was to be born they went to France. Georgiana’s daughter by Grey was born in 1793, the year when the King of France was beheaded. (One of those who voted for his death was Philippe Egalité, Duke of Orleans.
Mr Calder-Marshall says he was the King’s brother, which makes him even more odious than he was. In fact he was the King’s fourth cousin once removed.)

It is not correct to refer to Georgiana as the fifth Duchess of Devonshire. Supposing four dukes in a row each married twice (and many a modern duke has had three wives) would the second wife of the fourth duke be the eighth duchess? Of course not. She would be the second wife of the fourth duke. Such details do not detract from the
interest
and amusement of
The Two Duchesses
. Both ladies were legends in their own lifetime, exceptional in their beauty and charm, as all can see in their portraits by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Angelica Kaufmann and other artists. There is a picture of Georgiana as the moon goddess by Marie Cosway in which her face is much finer and lovelier than in the more famous Reynolds. Hart said this was the best likeness of his mother ever
painted
.

When he was quite old, Lord Melbourne, prime minister, describing what a great
character
his mother, the celebrated Lady Melbourne, had been, added: ‘But she was not chaste’! He might have said the same of his mother-in-law Lady Bessborough, and of her sister Georgiana, and of their bosom friend Lady Elizabeth, second wife of the fifth Duke of Devonshire.

The Two Duchesses
, Calder-Marshall, A.
Books and Bookmen
(1978)

The Lives of Others

This is a hatchet job on the father of President Kennedy, but the axe falls on America itself. Is the story true? Who knows.

Joe is lunching with Cardinal Spellman: ‘I just bought a horse for $75,000, and for another $75,000 I put Jack on the cover of
Time
.’ The Cardinal’s comment, if any, is not recorded. His nephew was present, and told the author. Joe Kennedy was very ambitious, and at one time hoped to be President himself, but Roosevelt appointed him ambassador to Great Britain, to get him out of Washington. He hoped at the same time to annoy, by sending such a very Irish American to England, but in fact Joe Kennedy became a
popular
figure in pre-war London, with his charming smile and large family.

He firmly believed money is power, and he amassed a huge fortune. He was clever about money, selling all his stocks and shares just before the crash in 1929, to buy back later.

If he could not be President himself, he determined his sons should succeed. In Jack he had a perfect candidate, handsome, charming, and a war hero. He organized the
campaign
in detail, but never appeared with his son in public. The ‘image’ is so important, and by 1960 Joe’s image was not the brightest. He is supposed to have said, ‘I’ll pay for a win but not for a landslide,’ and a narrow win is what he got.

After his well-known affair with the actress Gloria Swanson, Janet Des Rosiers was Joe’s mistress for nine years. She speaks well of him: affectionate, thoughtful, generous, according to her, and she probably knew him better than anyone. He was clever, energetic, untiring and devoted to his family.

After his great triumph of getting his son into the White House things went
desperately
wrong for Joe Kennedy. He had a stroke which left him speechless until he died. Two of his favourite children had been killed long before in aeroplane crashes; now he had to endure the assassination of first Jack, then Bobby. Each time he was told the terrible news he sat in bed, tears streaming down his cheeks. He must have been in an agony of
frustration
as well as sorrow; the only word he could say was a loud ‘no’ whenever his wife Rose appeared in the doorway of his room, and he waved her away.

For such an executive man, accustomed to running manifold businesses, as well as everything connected with his children, loss of the faculty of speech must have been enough purgatory to cancel out any number of sins.

The Sins of the Father: Joseph Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded
, Kessler, R.
Evening Standard
(1996)

‘I think you’re the most American American I’ve ever met,’ said the Foreign Minister to Ethel Merman in
Call Me Madam
; and the same could very well have been said to William Randolph Hearst. He was the European’s idea of an American—not the typical American, because to be the multi-millionaire owner of the world’s biggest chain of newspapers could not he said to be typical of anything, but rather the personification of what, presumably, the typical American aspires to be.

Business, success, money; with a glorious background of swimming pools, film actresses, Gothic banqueting halls, Arabian Nights palaces stocked with the Best Art that Money Can Buy, (this reverence for Art is a very touching American trait); it was glamour, glamour all the way.

What else can money buy? Why, power of course. It is no fun possessing more
displaced
Spanish monasteries, more square miles of California, more tapestries, silver, wild animals, Old Masters, Cadillacs, Tanagra figures and apartment buildings than anyone else if you cannot influence affairs and mould history.

Here is where the newspapers were supposed to come in. Hearst’s genius for knowing what the public wants to read—sex, crime and comic strips—gained his papers their vast circulation and made him richer year by year. Money is power, and newspapers form
public
opinion.

Hearst was ambitious. He wanted to be Governor of New York and he hoped to be President; he also had causes he wished to promote (crusades as he called them). He spent millions of dollars, the presses poured out millions of gallons of printers’ ink, on these crusades and on recommending W.R. to an ever-growing number of his fellow citizens. What a shop-window! America’s biggest—the world’s biggest. Everything about him the biggest in the world. And his political campaigns the world’s biggest flop. Not only could he not put himself over, even his backing was fatal. To be supported by his newspapers was a disaster dreaded by politicians both Republican and Democratic. ‘The
professionals
… wanted no more to do with him, since his touch was fatal to a candidate,’ his
biographer
writes. His political power was a minus quantity.

For, incomprehensible though it must have been to him, even though x million
families
bought his papers daily through the length and breadth of the States and thoroughly enjoyed the comic strips and stories of sex and violence, and even (possibly) spared a glance for the carefully chosen political news and the inspired leaders composed with words of one syllable in sentences of not more than five words, this did not mean that x million men and women paid the least attention to what they had read (or skipped) when the time came for them to cast a vote. It almost seemed as though the mere fact of being invited to vote one way, the invitation cunningly sandwiched between a delectable rape and a coloured comic strip, was enough to make them do the opposite. It was very perverse of them. Could it have been that they distinguished what was serious and important to them from what it amused them to look at as they travelled to work?

‘The Chief is gone, the man we all called Boss; Colossus of an age that changed the
world; The galleons of his genius knew their course, his finger-tips around the cosmos curled’, wrote Nick Kenny, the Hearst papers’ poet laureate, when W.R. died. And that must be one of the most American verses ever penned in English.

The Life and Good Times of William Randolph Hearst,
Tebbel, J. (1953)

Born in 1884 to a family ravaged by alcoholism, Eleanor Roosevelt was an orphan when she was ten. Her father died of drink, and her maternal uncles all succumbed to the demon. Brought up by her grandmother, nobody bothered to get a clever American dentist to do something about her unfortunate teeth.

All her relations were what Americans call aristocrats, descended from passengers in the Mayflower or a similar Dutch ship. Her father’s brother was President Theodore Roosevelt.

Eleanor was sent to Allenswood, a school near London run by an intelligent head mistress, Mlle Souvestre. It was a positive nest of lesbians; one mistress was Lytton Strachey’s sister Dorothy who wrote
Olivia by Olivia
, a lesbian love story. Natalie Barney had been a pupil. Mlle Souvestre had favourites, of whom Eleanor was one, and they went all over Europe together.

Back home, she married her distant cousin Franklin, and had to live with her detestable mother-in-law for years. With no say in running the house, she had six children and became thoroughly bored. A redoubtable prig, she longed to do good in the world but until Franklin went into politics she only joined a few ‘leagues’ and committees for this or that good cause. When she discovered he had a love affair ‘the bottom dropped out of her life’; she moped for a few months, but then rediscovered her love of feminists and civil rights enthusiasts. Roosevelt did nothing to discourage her, busy with his career. But she was mocked by her sons.

Her good causes really were good, and she and her lesbian friends were worthy in the extreme. Two with whom she shared a cottage gradually came to consider Franklin more important than Eleanor, a sin she could never forgive. She dropped them, and went galumphing dressed in knickerbockers with two others, who had the words ‘
TOUJOURS GAI
’ painted on their house.

Franklin nearly died of polio, and Eleanor nursed him devotedly, but during his long convalescence in Florida she stayed in New York, teaching at a school she bought, chairing endless committees and working as a journalist and speaker all over the country. She was careful to keep her private life out of the newspapers because of Franklin’s career.

He was elected President in 1932 and Eleanor could hardly conceal her dismay. She loathed the idea of living in the White House as first lady, unable to dash about serving her causes. Fortunately at this juncture she fell deeply in love with a woman journalist sent by
AP to cover the new President’s wife. Both ladies were about fifty; the passionate letters Eleanor wrote have survived.

The book ends with Roosevelt’s inauguration in the depth of the slump. Banks failing, businesses bankrupt, the stability of the country was threatened.

Seen from outside, American presidential elections are still exhausting and crazy. But as with Eleanor’s middle aged liaison, it’s their business, not ours. Written in American, this biography is instructive and occasionally comic. I look forward to the next volume.

Eleanor Roosevelt
, Cook, B.W.
Evening Standard
(1993)

It is highly interesting to try to discover how a cinema star of the 30s and 40s became President of the United States for eight years, succeeding finally in ending the Cold War and helping to bring about the collapse of communism. It is such an unlikely story.

Ronald Reagan was a convinced anti-communist even when he supported ‘liberal’ causes in his youth. His history is the classic rags-to-riches so popular in America. Born in 1911 in the mid-western town of Dixon, he went to Hollywood to seek his fortune. He found it, and by the time he was 30 was a star and a box-office success.

He worked for Warner Brothers, first generation immigrant Jews who had fled from pogroms in Russian Poland. The Warners discovered him not only as an actor who excelled in outdoor roles as the good guy, but also as a speaker and committee man who was adept at defending the motion picture industry when it was under attack, as it rather frequently was.