Authors: Katharine Graham
T
HE SPRING OF
1940 was spent in a haze of excitement and romance. It was a wonderful time for both of us, but it was also quite crazy to think about getting married so quickly. I suppose I had the usual nervousness about marriage. Phil and I knew each other relatively little, and we were both very young—not quite twenty-three and twenty-five. We came from such different backgrounds but had so much in common—humor, friends, interests, enthusiasms, and political views. There was a great deal going for us, even though the complexities were not understood or addressed, really ever.
Since Phil was going to be Justice Frankfurter’s law clerk the following Supreme Court term, he drove the justice home from the Court one night and told him of our decision to be married and even asked his permission, for there had been an unwritten rule that the law clerks remain single, so as to be at the complete service of the justice, day or night. By this time that tradition had broken down, but Phil still felt the need to ask. Phil later told his father about Felix’s reaction, saying that Frankfurter was, in fact, the only one “who could effectively disapprove … so I talked to him first, and instead of disapproving he was (since he, unlike you, knows the gal) heartily in favor.” Indeed, Felix had been a friend of my family’s—and therefore had known me—for years. According to Phil, Felix reminded him that “the apple never falls very far from the tree.”
Telling his own father about the upcoming marriage proved to be more difficult than telling Felix or my father—and more painful. Phil wrote to his father on March 17, 1940, inadvertently and in his nervousness dating the letter 1939 and misspelling my name:
This should be a very interesting letter for you to read.…
When the Court’s work is over, May 27th, or soon thereafter, I am going to get married.… I know you’ll be in favor. Her name is Katherine Meyer and I’ve not a doubt in the world that you’ll
love her. You probably have heard of her father, Eugene Meyer, who is now publisher of the Washington Post, and has been in the past such things as head of the Federal Reserve.… He is a Jew, a Republican, and rich as hell. For the last two factors I am not especially fond of him—the first seems immaterial to me, but I pass it on to you. Her mother happens to be a gentile; she was one of the first newspaperwomen in this country, is credited with being quite brilliant, and I find her rather unattractive.… Before we get around to discussing Kay (Katherine), this is about enough to mention about the family except possibly to reemphasize the terrible fact that they are lousy rich—for instance, they live in an absurdly huge vulgar castle here, have another in NY, have a ranch in Wyoming, etc. Now we shall get around to Kay.
… she really is about as wonderful a person as you’ll ever hope to see. Of course, I can’t write you why this is so, but I’ll just jot down a few very factual things about her—then when we drop in on you this summer you’ll begin to catch on to what I meant.… We’ve known each other since last fall and finally decided the hell with it all we were going to shove off this summer. As I said before I can’t write you why, yet I’ve no doubt you’ll understand. Naturally, there were a few problems. But I think we’ve dealt with most of them.
In the first place I thought there might be a problem about Florida; I, of course, want to go back and, though you may not understand this, there are lots of girls who have been raised around here who wouldn’t consider this. In any event this turned out to be very little of a problem, for she is quite willing to test Florida’s willingness to feed me. Next, and a little tougher, is the problem of her dough; and I think we’ve got that worked out. It happens that she has a pretty horrible hunk of it in her name and we have worked out this solution: we’ll live in the sort of house, have the sort of furniture, eat the sort of food, go to the sort of places, that young people making salaries like mine can afford. If she wants to spend some of hers on special clothes or special trips, etc., for
herself
she will do so, but none of it will go for the sort of joint expenses that ordinary young husbands pay. Mainly, we hope, she’ll use her gold by way of helping things and projects she believes in. About the only problems we could possibly have besides these are FF, you, and her family. FF we have already taken care of; I hope this will line you up on our side; and we don’t expect any trouble from her family that we can’t handle. This I think just about winds up all I can write about Kay and why we’re, come what may, going to get married this summer.
Ernie upset Phil at first by resisting the idea of his marrying me. There was some talk of my being Jewish, and Ernie mentioned having seen a man on Miami Beach one day who wished he wasn’t Jewish. Phil was protectively indignant. The other issue that concerned Ernie was my family’s wealth. Whether there were letters between the one Phil wrote and the one his father wrote him in mid-April I’m not sure, but Ernie did write Phil then, saying he understood that Phil was getting “considerable advice on the coming marriage,” and thought he’d “pass you on some.” He wrote:
In the first place you and the young lady are the people who are getting married and I have always felt that the contracting parties should do as they please.
I might retell how your mother and I got hitched. We eloped or drove off with a team of broncos with our red setter dog as a witness, guardian, or companion or what. We were married at Sturgis by a Presbyterian minister. Left horses and dog and went to Rapid City (20 miles) by R.R. for one day and got back to Terry with about $2 but the knot tying stuck which is the main thing.
Boy, I wish you all the joy and success in the world. I am anxious to meet Katherine as we all are.… You tell [her] I said to keep you in the middle of the road.…
Ernie eventually wrote me a sweet letter saying Phil “has displayed the best judgment that he has shown so far. I hope you can keep him in line and I will just turn him over to you and quit worrying. You know how it is when a farm boy goes to the city, paw and maw are always worrying that some of the wild women and so on may get him.”
In the end, Phil didn’t invite his father to the wedding, but said we would drive down to see his family afterwards. In part, he was angry over Ernie’s early objections to our marriage. I believe, too, he was concerned about his father’s seeing my parents’ large house and number of servants and the way we lived, all of which, indeed, would have shocked him. In fact, I believe my father and he would have overcome that; they had many things in common. I came to know and admire and, finally, to love Ernie Graham, Phil’s two-fisted, rough-hewn, upright father.
A
FTER WE PUBLICLY
announced our engagement, by which point many people already knew, we were caught up in the excitement and in being celebrated. There was one bad week when the engagement was almost broken. We went to a dinner dance with my brother, Bill. Phil had had a great deal too much to drink, and for the first time I saw a quite
frightening side of him. He was more than ordinarily drunk—there was a sort of out-of-hand, frenzied quality to him. The evening worried me a lot. Bill asked if I had seen Phil like this before. When I said no, Bill said, “Well, you better think about it right now.”
In fact, I decided I had to pull back to think it over, or even to break the engagement. I had a date to meet Phil the next night, and I was primed to have this talk, but when he appeared to pick me up, he had brought Prich with him—as always, he was a step ahead of me. Naturally, the talk didn’t take place, and got postponed indefinitely. I cooled down, the fear went away, his charm took over, and that was that for the time being.
Phil and my family were getting to know and like each other, but Phil went on worrying about my money. I was still working and, in fact, kept working until just before the wedding. I was also busy, with my mother, buying an enormous trousseau of everything I thought I’d need; since I had promised to live on what we both earned, I wanted to have to buy as little as possible later and as much as I could then. This trousseau saw me through for quite a long time.
There was some discussion about
how
we would be married. We were both painfully self-conscious—Phil to the point where he wanted us to be married in New York’s City Hall by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, whom we both admired. And I was to wear a gray flannel suit. I countered with two nonnegotiable demands—I wanted a slightly religious ceremony in a long weddingish dress, and some sort of small, informal, friendly gathering at home. The compromise we arrived at was the garden at the farm at Mount Kisco, which I considered more home than the Washington house. Neither one of us was religious in the formal sense, but I wanted something more religious than a judge, and through Mother we found a very nice low-key Lutheran minister.
We were married at Mount Kisco on June 5, 1940. The guests were the two justices for whom Phil worked and their wives, the Reeds and the Frankfurters, as well as some of our Hockley friends, my family, and a few other close friends, among whom, luckily for us, was Edward Steichen. Phil and I would never have brought in a photographer, but Steichen had his camera along with him and didn’t have to be asked. We were delighted to have his photographs, which I still cherish. My dress was designed by me and made to order at Bergdorf Goodman. It was long, as I had wanted, and austerely simple but beautiful, made of heavy eggshell silk, with a scarf edged with my grandmother’s lace. I carried orchids and wore orange blossoms in my hair but no veil. My sister Ruth was my attendant, and Prich was Phil’s best man—as Phil said, the biggest best man anyone ever had.
At lunch before the wedding, Phil, Prich, and Butch Fisher started arguing with Felix about a case that had been handed down by the Supreme
Court just two days earlier, which Joe Lash later described as the “first wartime civil liberties case.” It was a case on which the young men differed violently from Felix, who had written the opinion of the Court in
Minersville School District
v.
Gobitis
, saying that the state could require public-school students to salute the flag even if it was a violation of their religious beliefs. The Gobitis children in the case were Jehovah’s Witnesses. Phil and Prich particularly were deeply disturbed—even shocked—by Felix’s position. Steichen was also a vocal participant in the argument. He and Bis and I and others—I’m sure my brother—all took part. Felix loved and encouraged loud and violent arguments, which everyone usually enjoyed, but this time the argument went over the edge into bitter passion. Felix deeply believed in the obligation to salute the flag. The fight grew so intense that at one point great large tears rolled down Prich’s reddened, rotund cheeks. Everyone was upset. The argument went on and on, with Felix at another point saying, as Bis recalled, “Everybody always talks about me as a liberal, but I never was one.” Finally, the butler came in and announced that the minister had been waiting for an hour, and Felix broke up the argument by grabbing my arm with his always iron hand and saying, “Come along, Kay. We will go for a walk in the woods and calm down.” And we did.
We then proceeded with the ceremony, after which we had a slightly larger reception to which my aunts, uncles, and cousins were invited. Then Al Phillips, the much-loved family chauffeur, drove Phil and me to the Carlyle Hotel in New York City. Originally, we had planned to stay at the Essex House, but Phil found out there was a strike there and felt we should not start married life by crossing a picket line. I agreed. We tried to look nonbridal entering the hotel, managing somehow until Phil extended his arm to register and out fell a lot of rice.
My mother had filled our room with fresh flowers from Mount Kisco. We stayed in New York a night or two, seeing a few friends. My sister Flo, who had married the character actor Oscar Homolka, came to see us in the Carlyle and was announced via the room clerk—“Mrs. Homolka to see Mrs. Graham,” my first public encounter with my new name, which I very much enjoyed having.
After a few days, we sailed on a steamship for Bermuda, with me taking along an absurd amount of luggage, including, incredibly, a trunk. We stayed at the Horizons on Coral Beach, where we had a room with a small porch attached as a sitting room. I had taken along
War and Peace
, and Phil had equally heavy reading. One day we lent our room to a young army couple, also on their wedding trip. When we got back from a day’s bicycling, they said, “My, you have a lot of books in your room. Nothing but a slap and a tickle in ours.” Phil wrote his sister, Mary, while we were there, congratulating her on the birth of a baby and telling her of the joys of Bermuda: its unbelievable flowers, the color of the sea, the distinctly
not-of-this-world quiet. He added: “She-who-is-wife looks every day more like Health.…”
Despite our concerns about the fall of France, we went on doing very traditional things—bicycling, playing tennis, swimming, and reading. Tennis together had certain tensions built into it, which emerged only later. I had played a little all my life, but liked it increasingly, especially after escaping Bis’s shadow. Phil had played less, but since it was something I enjoyed he gamely entered into it and in time grew better, always compensating for any inadequacies on the court with his wit, which began lovingly but often ended up with a sharp and upsetting edge. We had one hilarious exchange while still in Bermuda that remained in our lore. We were playing doubles and Phil missed an easy shot. I said, “Oh, well, they say he has a fine mind.” Shortly afterwards, I missed one. Phil retorted, “And they say her family spent millions on her game.”
After the honeymoon and a short stay at Mount Kisco, we went down to Washington to see about our new house, which we had rented for the coming year, and then set out for Florida in the Buick convertible I had inherited from my brother. I had only the dimmest notion of Phil’s family, never having met any of them. Nor had I much sense, from having lived in Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco with Mount Kisco summers, what the South was like or what the country outside cities was like. As we entered Florida, I saw a sign in front of an apartment house that read “No dogs or Jews allowed,” and was deeply shaken, never having seen or experienced anything so ugly.