Finding the Dragon Lady (30 page)

It was not family nostalgia
that brought Madame Nhu to their front door, although she knew that her father, during his otherwise dignified resignation speech, had choked up at the mention of his daughter. She was suspicious of her father's emotion. Chuong referred to her in public only as Madame Nhu. He told reporters that he simply “did not wish to know her.” Indeed, he and his wife felt a call of duty to tell their point of view in order to “cover the stench” that their daughter was making. Former president Harry Truman, whose daughter was the exact same age as Madame Nhu, was said to have reached out to compliment Chuong on how superbly he was handling his tempestuous daughter.
²

Chuong tried to belittle his daughter in her role as First Lady. She “has not the power she is supposed to have,” he sniffed when asked about the inner workings of the Saigon government. In a CBS interview that aired on network television, he elaborated. His boss of nine years, President Ngo Dinh Diem, was just the front man. The real power in Vietnam belonged to his younger brother and Chuong's son-in-law, Nhu. Madame Nhu might have been infected with the same “power madness” as her husband, but she was “only a shadow.”
³
Chuong was trying to make his daughter seem smaller, but he failed.
Instead he reconfirmed what the Americans had come to suspect and fear: that together the Nhus had enormous power over Diem. That made Madame Nhu more, not less, influential.

The insults still struck
a nerve. When an Italian journalist asked Nhu about his father-in-law, Nhu spoke for himself and his wife. For once he let the mask slip, and his words expressed a retributive violence that seemed utterly alien to the discreet librarian he had once presented himself as. If Chuong tried to return to Saigon, Nhu said calmly, as if remarking on the weather, “I will have his head cut off. I will hang him in the center of a square and let him dangle there. My wife will make the knot on the rope because she is proud of being a Vietnamese and she is a good patriot.”
⁴

The house was dark
when the limousine pulled up to the curb. Le Thuy rang her grandparents' doorbell while her mother waited slightly behind her. Madame Nhu stood with hands on hips, out of the immediate line of sight of anyone looking through the peephole. One fluttering pant leg could be seen through the side slit in her
ao dai,
her heeled foot tapping—with impatience and perhaps nerves. Madame Nhu played the role of the petulant daughter perfectly. Only two days before she had even sounded like one when she whined to the NBC reporters on
Meet the Press
about how her father had been against her since her childhood.

Exasperated with the waiting, Madame Nhu swept Le Thuy to the side and rapped her knuckles on the door herself. There was still no answer. Madame Nhu was keenly aware that the twenty reporters or more who had trailed her to the scene were watching her every move. Lightbulbs flashed against the white trim of the house, catching the humbled First Lady as she stood there. Now Madame Nhu was indignant at being ignored—and at being ignored in front of a crowd. She pushed her shoulders back and marched into the backyard. Poking holes in the lawn with the spikes of her heels, she made her way to the back entrance, where she darted up a few patio steps and peered in through the windows.

The rooms were dark and the walls inside still mostly bare. She might have noticed the borrowed chairs her parents were using or the uncarpeted living room. A photograph of the couple stood propped up on the mantle, and the only art was a delicate painting of Madame Chuong's hands on silk. Perhaps there were still boxes to unpack. When the Chuongs had left the embassy behind, they had surely taken more than this with them—like their collection of books and vases and Asian art. The family picture once on a prominent display in the embassy, the one that showed Madame Nhu as a small child clasping her parents' hands, was nowhere in sight. There was a small phonograph that Chuong had kept next to his desk at the embassy. He had used it frequently to play recordings of Shakespeare's plays. They were “full of wisdom,” he said; Chuong liked to listen to centuries-old tales and absorb their insights into human behavior. The tragicomedy playing itself out in real time on his front lawn had all the urgency—and potential for destruction—of the final act of a Shakespearean drama.
⁵

It was all the Washington newsmen could do to keep up with the First Lady as she stalked off her parents' property. Madame Nhu was upset. “I don't understand. I called and talked to someone here just moments ago.” But the moment had passed, and now the Chuongs were not at home, or they had done an excellent job of pretending not to be. Madame Nhu and Le Thuy folded themselves into the back seat of the limousine, and the car took off. It sped through the quiet streets of the capital until it pulled up short in front of the Vietnamese embassy. When Madame Nhu made her way to the door and knocked, a figure dressed in white opened it almost immediately. “Chau!” Madame Nhu cried out. And then, according to the reporters who arrived just in time to witness the scene, Madame Nhu threw herself into the arms of the small man. Someone would later explain to the press that Chau had been the family cook for many years. He ushered Madame Nhu and Le Thuy inside the embassy, away from the prying press. The new South Vietnamese ambassador had told the Americans confidentially that he didn't care much for the First Lady, but he was smart enough to have laid on a pleasant dinner—his job, if not his life, would have been at risk otherwise. And since the newly arrived diplomat had kept Chau on
staff after the Chuongs had left, the kitchen probably still had plenty of ingredients on hand to re-create some of the dishes Madame Nhu had loved as a girl—maybe the northern soup flavored with ox tail and anise or grilled pork meatballs wrapped in large lettuce leaves with mint and cilantro. Madame Nhu's last taste of home came not from her parents, who left her standing in the cold, but from the cook they had once employed. It was a bitter if familiar reminder, like her childhood all over again, when her parents had left her on her grandfather's estate and handed her care over to nurses.

When Madame Nhu was still in Europe before coming to America, her mother had summoned a close Kennedy aide to her new home for a “vital” meeting. When he arrived, she told him pointedly: get Kennedy to get rid of the Ngos. Diem was incompetent; her son-in-law, Nhu, was
un barbare.
As for her daughter, Madame Chuong said that she had advised people in the Vietnamese community in New York and Washington to run Madame Nhu “over with a car” when she arrived. If they couldn't do that, they should throw tomatoes and eggs. Looking over the edge of her teacup, she vowed to the Kennedy aide that if the White House wasn't going to do anything about silencing Madame Nhu, she, Madame Chuong, was quite capable of organizing “something against this monster.”

That conversation was written up and classified “secret.” An official with a sense of irony had scrawled along the side of the document “mother's love.”
⁶

Over Madame Nhu's
next few days in Washington, she would go against the advice she had received from Marguerite Higgins, the reporter at the
New York Herald Tribune.
The First Lady went back to criticizing the American government, an attack calculated to disrupt and wound the Democratic administration, which she accused of being soft on communism. Certain unnamed liberals surrounding Kennedy, she said, were “not red yet, but pink.”

Still, the crowds seemed
sympathetic to Madame Nhu. Five hundred people packed into the National Press Club to see her on Friday, October 18. The audience interrupted her speech more than twenty times
with applause—on average once every three minutes that Madame Nhu was on stage. In response, she purred and smiled graciously. She was overwhelmed, she said, by the goodwill of the American people. However, she continued a little sadly, she was also dismayed. The Kennedy administration had continued to give her the silent treatment. She understood, she said, that this was not a state visit. “But there are ways in which these things can be done.” Madame Nhu adopted a “more in sorrow than in anger” tone and suggested the Kennedy administration could have handled the whole business, indeed its whole policy with respect to South Vietnam, a little better. She implied that the administration didn't really know what it was doing or with whom it was dealing. Her insinuations must have infuriated Kennedy. But, as so often, Madame Nhu wasn't wrong.

CHAPTER 15

Coup d'État

A
LMOST A YEAR HAD PASSED SINCE
Madame Nhu and I had given up on each other. When she started calling again in the summer of 2010, it was as if nothing had happened. I played right along, as she wholly expected, but my willingness came as a surprise to me. I found it funny how I had missed her and yet dreaded getting dragged back in.

Madame Nhu's voice was gravelly. For the first time, she sounded like the eighty-six-year-old woman she was. She had been sick, she said; she had undergone surgery on her feet and moved out of Paris. I had guessed that something had happened to her. When I called her about three months after she hung up on me, ready to apologize for upsetting her, I had gotten the standard international tone for a number no longer in service. First I worried that something terrible had happened. I scanned the obituaries daily, holding my breath and exhaling when I didn't see her name in boldface. I couldn't imagine that she would change her phone number only because of our disagreement. But I also couldn't imagine that she would have gone so
long without calling me. So much for being her angel, and so much for those memoirs—or so I thought.

“My children,” she said by way of explaining her silence, “they wanted me closer to them. I live in Rome now.” She prattled off the news of the last few months, described her health troubles, and added, almost as an afterthought, that by the way the memoirs were done. She was ready to send them to me.

There were a few technical difficulties between that conversation and my receiving the memoirs in my e-mail inbox, something to do with her children and their full-time jobs and, I inferred, their depleting reserves of patience for their mother's memoir project. I couldn't rationally explain my own obsession with getting Madame Nhu's story, but by 2010, perhaps it was that I had spent so much time, nearly five years, hoping and waiting for them that it was a hard habit to break. I expected the memoirs to fulfill my curiosity about Madame Nhu. I would understand her, I would be able to put her in context, and I could put a neat check next to her name on my list of quirky fascinations, and maybe move on.

Instead, the two volumes that landed in my inbox baffled me. The title didn't help at all:
Le Caillou Blanc
, or
The White Pebble
. Later my mother made a bit more sense of it for me. In France, they say of a momentous event that its date is marked with a white pebble. But at first, scrolling through the pages was like reading something written in code. There were letters and numbers in parentheses, biblical references in bold headings, and italicized subheaders organized chronologically. It appeared Madame Nhu had made a grand catalog of her life, but it was a maze to be deciphered—yet another obstacle to obtaining Madame Nhu's grand narrative. It was much too foreign for me to make out, at least at first glance.

Thankfully, she sent pictures. I pored over them, wishing I could hear the characters speak. There was one of herself at eighteen, taken on the eve of her wedding, in the moment before everything changed. Studying a glossy portrait of her husband, I noticed for the first time that Nhu, the so-called Rasputin of Vietnam, had a slightly upturned button nose. Instead of looking cold and frightening, he was, well, cute.

The parts of Madame Nhu's writing that resembled a conventional memoir were thinly seeded throughout some two hundred pages, but the biographical nuggets were rewarding. This definitely wasn't the memoir she was said to have sold to the
Saturday Evening Post
in the days after the 1963 coup; nor was it the memoir that Madame Nhu was writing when she was too busy to give press interviews in the 1960s and 1970s for less than $1,000 a pop. I doubt these pages had ever existed anywhere as physical copy. If she had been writing them, she was writing them in her head. The two volumes e-mailed to me seemed to have been drafted recently, maybe even in the months since we had last spoken. I hadn't known many things.

Madame Nhu described herself at her desk writing. She wrote of falling and hitting her head. It was heartbreaking to read about her being so vulnerable and old. She talked of land disputes in Italy between her son Trac and their neighbors, who were trying to encroach on their property. But when she dipped back into the rich loam of her memory, she came up with sparkling details, like the rain in Dalat that was so heavy, it filled Le Thuy's backpack on her walk to school. Or her elegant
pousse,
with wheels so big that I easily imagined myself in her place, bouncing along the canals in Hue, feeling a bit like Cinderella on her way to the ball. Her writing style was not linear; at times it was barely coherent. But if you could hang on through the rapids, it was fascinating. I suggested to her that if she hoped for a wide readership, the manuscript would need a good bit of editing, but it would be a valuable addition to the historical record.

“No.” Her voice was raspy and her breathing labored, but she came across the line taut as a steel cable and sliced cleanly through the patter of our otherwise pleasant morning chat. “I trust you completely with the memoirs. You are fully responsible. But there will be no editing. No changes are to be made. They are to be published as they are written. Volume number one, followed by number two. And,” she added, “I am anxious to get this in print as soon as possible. I don't have long.”