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Sunday
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: DPC.
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Hot
and muggy weekend in New York, broken finally by torrential rains
on late Saturday afternoon, cooling the evening and introducing a
bright, breezy, beautiful sunny Sunday in New York.
I’d been reading Balzac’s Old Goriot over
the weekend which was so good I didn’t want it to end. But
of course it did, and so in keeping the curious sentiment going I
picked up Americans
in Paris, a new “literary anthology” edited by
Adam Gopnik. The first thing I turned to was James
Gallatin’s
Paris Diaries from the end of the second decade of the 19th
century during which his father Albert Gallatin was President
Monroe’s
envoy to France — just about the time that Old Goriot was
set in.
I am not a Francophile like some people I know, but I was this weekend.
Of course Balzac would have felt right at home writing about the
men and women – and especially the women – of New York
(and Southampton and Palm Beach, etc.) at the beginning of the 21st
century,
170 years after he wrote about Eugene de Rastignac and old M.
Goriot and their travels through the treacherous waters of the haute monde.
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Gloria
Emerson
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Formidable women. Gloria Emerson died at the beginning of the month,
of her own hand. Some may have seen her obituaries in the Times,
the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune.
She was seventy-five and suffering from Parkinson’s, sensibly
fearful that she would soon be unable to write, the only way she
had to support herself.
I met her thirty years ago when she came to the fore as the first
woman correspondent for the New York Times in Viet Nam,
from 1970 to 1972. She was the first of all of the correspondents
(that I know
of) who lambasted the military establishment mercilessly in her dispatches,
and with such power – the kind of power that only a woman possesses
– that her reportage had a profound effect on the opinion of
many, as well as altering the way some things were done in the conduct
of the war.
I met her in late 1973 at an anti-war rally in Stamford, Connecticut
to which she had come to speak. She was a very magnetic creature.
Tall, willowy, bone-skinny, delicate fair-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed
with a most elegant manner of speaking and comportment. Wearing an
army surplus jacket and jeans, sometimes glasses, she was not pretty
with a noticeably receding chin, yet so powerful a feminine presence
that she had her own beauty. She reminded me of a very patrician
woman who had chucked it all to devote herself to getting a fateful
message out to the world.
Her message was that the war in Viet Nam was a dreadful, stupid,
wrong-headed, corrupt endeavor that sapped the vitality and youth
of this great country. She liked to tell the story of coming back
to New York and being invited to a dinner at the home of Iphigenia
Sulzberger, the dowager of the family which owned the Times,
mother of the then publisher Arthur Sulzberger and grandmother of the present
publisher. Mrs. Sulzberger, a very elegant and formidable woman herself,
coming from another age, asked Gloria at this dinner what she thought
of the military balls in Saigon.
“In Saigon, Mrs. Sulzberger, the American military have no balls, ” was
Gloria’s proudly caustic reply.
She was a very compelling figure to listen to. Her recounting of
her experiences, of what she had seen, the violence, the horrendous
deaths, the hideous injustices of warfare were painfully articulated.
She was a woman with a mission. A mission to stop the killing. She
was also a woman whose righteousness was beyond question, angry but
sainted.
I knew very little about her life until I read her obituaries although
it was evident on meeting that she was from a very cultivated, most
likely upperclass, probably WASP-ish background. She didn’t
give a fig for any of it and had no respect for those who didn’t
see things her way. She was married twice, albeit briefly. She’d
secured a job writing about fashion for the New York Times when
in her thirties – something which she dismissed almost contemptuously,
and was assigned to Saigon when she was forty-one.
After coming back from Viet Nam, she was on a tear. She stood up
in Professor Dr. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s lecture hall at
Harvard and shouted out her questions on his stand on the war in
Viet Nam. And unsatisfied by his attempts to avoid the affront, she
continued with more hard, unrelenting (and you might have thought – unforgiving)
questions.
She was so fiercely independent in her thinking that it was hard
to imagine her involved in a personal relationship. Although. She
was, as I said, not a pretty woman, but with a most definite allure,
the kind which seems at once needy and yet witheringly dismissive.
I could only think the men who fell for her probably didn’t
know what hit them after it was over.
She was a woman who was deeply humanitarian, who cared about the
people who were victims of humanity’s terrible war machine
that was grinding up lives on the other side of the planet, all in
the name of stopping the Red Chinese “domino theory,” from
eventually taking over the world. That meant, as it often seems to
with those who have a greater cause, that no one was excluded from
her intolerance of ignorance, or what she so righteously regarded
as ignorance. How ironic it must have seemed to her that three decades
later, this “mortal” enemy has transmogrified into a
flamboyantly capitalistic financial system which invests its mega-surpluses
into the securities of the U.S. government.
“I didn’t write to be famous; I wrote to keep a record,” she
told an interviewer with the Washington Post years after
her Viet Nam experience. Indeed, after that she wrote several books
including
a novel (“Loving Graham Greene”) and frequently for magazines
and periodicals. I never saw her after that brief encounter during
the months after her speech at the rally. I would like to have seen
her again but felt that I had nothing to bring to her table of important
world affairs. Her eloquence and elegance intimidated this young
man. There was also a powerful feeling of futility about her passionate
quest. I couldn’t disagree and yet had nothing to offer by
way of agreement.
What she was was smart, and powerful, and way ahead of most of us
in the department of human courage, raw, but not unwise, futile but
graced by brains of loving kindness. The life, it seems, personified
the
struggle she wrote about so compellingly and brilliantly.
Formidable
women, Part II. Susan Mary Alsop died this
past week at her home in Georgetown. It had been quite a
life. She was eighty-six
last June and in the last fifteen years of her life had battled
cancer. She was born Susan Mary Jay, a direct descendent of John
Jay, the first Supreme Court Chief Justice.
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Susan
Mary
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She was brought
up in a society that only remotely exists today, and with
none of the élan and political power that she experienced
and probably took for granted. It was the Boston-Philadelphia
axis within the reach of the oldest New York families whose
bloodlines
extended back to the earliest Colonial times. She attended Foxcroft
and Barnard and before she was finished, married a young diplomat
named William Patten. Early on in her marriage she was connected
to the Franklin D. Roosevelt White House and
then through her husband’s
diplomatic assignments to Paris, the great big world of literary,
political, royal and movie personages.
Her husband died when she was forty and she married a school-hood
friend of his, Joseph Alsop, the political pundit who counted the
Roosevelts as cousins and played an adeptly promoted role in social-political
Washington. Alsop was homosexual and although this was widely known
by his friends and family, as it was in those pre-Gay Liberation
times, it was not discussed, let alone openly acknowledged, although
no doubt Susan Mary was aware of the facts when she married him.
Whether or not it was a motivating force, the couple divorced after
sixteen years of marriage, although they remained friends and a
kind of social collaboration for the rest of his life.
She was a tiny woman, with an unassumingly fiery yet gentle charm.
She was always called Susan Mary by anyone who knew her beyond
formal introduction, wherever she went. It was a child’s
name that brought affection in its sound all her life.
I never knew her but did meet her, and as a guest of mutual friends,
I went to her house for dinner a couple of times in Northeast Harbor
in the early 90s. She was said to be very ill at the time and looked
palpably weak physically, but strong-willed enough to keep up.
And keep up she did.
Reading the London Telegraph obit it is hard to imagine her as
anyone's mistress because she had a very brittle feminine allure.
Although indeed, it was an allure. She was a very delicately constructed
woman, not weak in stature but small and thin enough that you might
think you could blow her over.
She was very WASP-ish in a way that most people are now unfamiliar
with, with that now almost extinct mid-Atlantic accent. Words
with "r" rolled,
like Perrr-uh for pearl, beh-rrrd for bird. There was a kind of
snobbishness to it that wasn't snobbishness at all, just an Eastern
Seaboard way of life, very separated from the hoi-polloi, VERY,
very well-aware by nature, of her upbringing; that she had ancestors
(like John Jay) who were Founding Fathers and that her friends
shared similar, if even, indeed, the same ancestors. Amanda
Burden,
because of her father, the late Stanley Mortimer, is also a descendant
of John Jay (whose homestead is still standing, incidentally, in
Katonah).
I'm sure the Kennedys were very impressed to be on Susan Mary’s
list, being only one generation removed from “lace curtain
Irish” themselves and having only recently (at that time),
thanks to the old Joe’s self-made fortune
and Joe's and Rose's
children actually climbed aboard the Social Register express. Remember
they were very conscious of their Irishness, their Roman Catholic-ness
and well aware that they had made the level of (somewhat acceptable)
acceptance in the hallowed halls of New England WASP-Sdom.
Susan Mary had a house forever overlooking Northeast Harbor in
Maine, one that she may have even grown up in summertimes — an
ark of a place, clapboard, big, but in no way grand, where she
entertained. Sam Peabody, whose sister Marietta (Tree)
was one of Susan Mary’s closest lifelong friends, went
there every summer for two weeks. All the neighbors came for
dinner. The neighbors
included Brooke Astor, Nancy and Jackie Pierrpont (Nancy died last
week), Francie Fitzgerald, Marietta Tree's daughter, who wrote
the great Viet Nam book, Fire On the Lake, the Millikens who lived
across the harbor, the Wisters (Diana Wister,
former Strawbridge, a very rich Campbell Soup heiress), a lot
of OLD Philadelphians
who respected (but were never in awe) of each other because of
their shared heritage – and their housefuls of
guesting luminaries.
One July night about ten years ago, at table at Susan Mary's, Francie
Fitzgerald and I were talking about Los Angeles and the multi-cultural
aspect of life there when a very famous journalist, just then retired
from his television career, sitting across from us, burst into
a rant about how the Hispanics in Los Angeles weren't Hispanic
at all but really Central American Indians related to the Aztecs
who sacrificed people and threw innocent women to their deaths
in pits of fire to please their stupid gods. The rant threw the
conversation out of sync entirely, of course because it was a rant
from someone who was heretofore (by me anyway) well respected for
his reportage but now seemed like a daffy old man who was not only
losing it but ornery. So much for the multiculturalism of Los Angeles.
Susan Mary, at the other end of the table and barely aware of
what had transpired, smoothed out the airwaves seamlessly, putting
her
nettled guest at rest comfortably. She was a wonderful hostess,
in the fashion that really barely exists today where she paid
close attention, however briefly, moment by moment, to all her
guests,
including those, like me, whom she didn't know well or at all.
The fare was simple and good. There was a lot of conversation.
Her contribution to the world she was born into, grew up and
blossomed in – a great big world to most of us – remains
memorable for the ease and brightness of her charm. What is remembered
most
is how much everyone liked her. Everyone liked her. They liked
saying her name: Susan Mary. We were very lucky to have been
there. |
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Susan Mary Alsop
London Daily Telegraph
Susan Mary Alsop, who died on Wednesday aged 86, was one of Washington's
leading political hostesses; well known in this country, especially
in high political and social circles, she was one of the many mistresses
of Duff Cooper, the British ambassador in Paris from 1944 to 1947.
She was born Susan Mary Jay in Rome in 1918, the daughter of Peter
Augustus Jay, an invalid whose father had married Emily Astor Kane,
a beauty who was known as "The Black Pearl" and was rumoured
to rouge her nipples. The Jays, a Huguenot family, had produced
John Jay, Foreign Secretary and first Chief Justice of the United
States.
Young Susan Mary was educated at Foxcraft and at Barnard College.
Her ambition was to be a writer, and in the spring of 1939 she
took a job at Vogue for $26 a week. Her first assignment was to
extol the virtues of the open-toed shoe, most of the article being
written for her by her friend, "Babe" Cushing, later
Mrs William S Paley.
That was the summer of the New York World's Fair, attended by King
George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Susan Mary served as a model alongside
Babe Cushing; both girls, in full evening dress, floated from a
kind of parachute for the benefit of press photographers.
Susan Mary had recently met and fallen in love with William Patten
Jr, to whom she got engaged despite warnings of the chronic asthma
from which he had suffered as a boy, and the developing emphysema
which was bound to shorten his life. They married that October.
The Pattens spent most of the war in America, Bill's ill health
preventing him from serving his country. He was first involved
with civil defence in Boston, and then, in 1942, joined the State
Department, which brought the couple into close contact with President
Roosevelt.
In 1944 Patten was sent to the American Embassy in Paris as a Foreign
Service Reserve officer, specialising in economic and financial
affairs. He graduated to more senior diplomatic positions, and
the Pattens became a popular, hospitable diplomatic couple.
They loved Paris, the more so when they were befriended by Duff
and Diana Cooper at the British Embassy. The Pattens were soon
mixing with the Windsors, Susan Mary describing the Duke as "pitiful,
looks young and undissipated, and the famous charm is still there
but I never saw a man so bored".
Figures such as Winston Churchill, General de Gaulle, Noel Coward
and Louise de Vilmorin also peopled their world. They attended
the famous Bestegui Ball in Venice in 1951. Susan Mary described
her life in letters to her childhood friend, Marietta Tree, who
called her "Soozle".
The letters were published as To Marietta from Paris in
1975. An American friend hailed them as reminding him "irresistibly
of Mme de Sevigny", which considerably irritated Diana Mosley
when she reviewed the book. Lady Mosley's view was that "Mrs
Alsop and Mrs Tree certainly did not shape an age; they are entirely
guileless of the dire and dangerous state of the world we live
in. One can think of a number of people who might be blamed for
it: these well-meaning ladies are not among them."
In 1947 Susan Mary became close to Duff Cooper, with the connivance
of Lady Diana. It was a time when he was ill with liver and kidney
trouble, and he welcomed Susan Mary's interest in him; the witty
letters that she wrote cheered him up.
It took him a year to seduce her, after which the affair was discreetly
handled, since she was devoted to her ailing husband. She was sanguine
about Duff Cooper's other romantic attachments, which were numerous,
telling him that she had learned "that if you really love
someone, you don't care what he does so long as he is happy".
She remained close to him until his death in January 1954.
In January 1955 Bill Patten left the Embassy in Paris, returning
to America the next year to work at the World Bank in Washington.
Gradually, his health deteriorated, and he died of cardiac failure
in March 1960. There were two children of the marriage, a son and
a daughter.
In 1961 Susan Mary married Joseph Alsop, a college roommate of
Patten and by then one of Washington's most robust and influential
political columnists. He was well read, and it was generally agreed
that he was the only newspaperman in the United States to have
read The Analects of Confucius in classical Chinese.
Joe Alsop was a great believer in American military power. He decried
the fall of Saigon in 1975 as a battle that the Americans could,
and should, have won. He had been one of the first columnists to
attack Senator McCarthy, and he described America's reaction to
Nixon's Watergate tapes as one of "sheer flesh-crawling repulsion".
Like Susan Mary, he moved easily in the international political
salons, and relished the atmosphere of the Kennedy White House.
Of this era she wrote: "It was exhilarating for me to be in
Washington in 1961, smelling the air of Kennedy's administration." She
became a member of the White House Paintings Committee.
It was said that Susan Mary had her hair done daily on the chance
of a sudden invitation to the White House. On the night of his
inauguration, John F Kennedy had chosen the Alsops' as the only
house he dropped in on, leaving it fortified by a bowl of terrapin
soup.
Alsop was a good stepfather to Susan Mary's children. But he was
homosexual, and the pair gradually drifted apart, living in nearby
houses in Georgetown. They were divorced in 1973; Alsop died in
1989.
In 1965 Susan Mary had to comfort her friend Marietta Tree, when
Senator Adlai Stevenson collapsed and died while he and Marietta
were walking together in London. Susan Mary accompanied her friend
on a visit to Paris, and was so worried that the distraught Marietta
might commit suicide that she did not leave her side until she
was delivered back to her husband in Florence.
Susan Mary went on to establish herself as a Washington hostess
in her own right, and wrote a number of books. In 1978 she wrote
a biography of Vita Sackville-West's mother, Lady Sackville, and
also produced Yankees at the Court: The First Americans in
Paris (1982), and The Congress Dances: Vienna 1814-1815 (1984). She was
a contributing editor to Architectural Digest.
In 1963 she organised an immensely successful visit to Washington
by Lady Diana Cooper, who took the city by storm. ("What a
woman!" said President Kennedy). Susan Mary Alsop herself
remained a regular and popular visitor to England for many years.
Her two children survive her. |
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