Authors: Gore Vidal
Frederika was now a somewhat faded version of her original bright blond self. Timothy recalled how Caroline had always preferred her sister-in-law to her half brother Blaise. But then Frederika was a born
peacemaker while Blaise liked to wage war, preferably on every front. At the far end of the room he was regrouping his forces beneath a Sargent portrait of his father. Blaise was now stout; mottled of face—had he taken to drink? He looked like one of Timothy’s Boston Irish uncles. To the troops attending him, Blaise was laying down the law as befitted the publisher of the Washington
Tribune
, which was still
the
Washington newspaper despite the efforts of Cissy Patterson, whose
Times-Herald
, published in bumpy tandem with William Randolph Hearst, was only just—at last—making a profit.
Cissy was standing beside Blaise. She was almost as red-faced as he, and even across the room, Timothy could hear the growl of her laughter. Cissy was a reluctant supporter of the Roosevelt Administration while Blaise had been, more often than not, a critic of the New Deal. But on September 1, Germany had invaded Poland. Two days later, England and France had declared war on the aggressor; and the New Deal was history. There was now only one issue: should the United States cease to be neutral and help finance England in the war against Germany? Cissy was beginning to revert to her family’s isolationist roots; her cousin Bertie McCormick’s Chicago
Tribune
had already declared war on both the President and the British Empire, while her brother, Robert Patterson, creator of the New York
Daily News
, was, true to the family’s Irish heritage, no friend to England. Timothy himself was less provincial than these great Irish publishers, possibly because, unlike the McCormick-Patterson clan, he had been brought up poor enough to have no passionate interest in anything but himself.
“Basically,” he heard himself saying to Frederika, “it’s got to be a pretty neutral documentary. L. B. Mayer says I have to be fair to all the people who want us in the war and to all the ones who don’t. I’m not to offend a single ticket-buyer.”
“What do
you
want?” Frederika’s practiced vague stare suddenly focused on Timothy as he took a glass of ginger ale from a passing waiter.
“I’m neutral. Pretty much,” he added.
“Like America!” Frederika laughed. “Come say hello to Blaise. He’s delighted you’re making this film. Just as long as you do it entirely his way.”
“Which is?”
“He changes from day to day. We’ve got three thousand English people here in town, all working out of the embassy.”
“To get us into the war?”
“Splendid party, Mrs. Sanford!” A huge, dark-haired, ruddy-faced Englishman complimented his hostess while giving Timothy the swift Washington lizard’s gaze that asked two simultaneous questions: Who are you? Can I use you?
Frederika introduced Timothy to John Foster. “He’s …
what
at the embassy?”
“Legal Counsel is the latest title Lord Lothian thought up. Of course, it was a busy day. I gather you’re making a film about the great debate hereabouts.…”
“Word spreads,” murmured Timothy, indeed surprised that the embassy knew.
“I’m a great fan of yours, Mr. Farrell. In fact, you and John Ford are my favorites. But then trust the Irish to make the best American westerns.”
Foster moved on. Timothy laughed. “Irish! What can he mean? We don’t get much chance to ride horses?”
“You don’t like the English.” Frederika nearly frowned, something conscientious ladies of a certain age no longer dared do. “Washington is a battlefield these days.”
“Who’s winning?”
“Ah …”
Exuberantly, Blaise shook Timothy’s hand in both of his. “My favorite non-brother-in-law!”
Tactfully, the others withdrew, leaving the two men in front of the fire, whose warmth reminded Timothy of how chilly the Potomac Heights could be on what was now the historic Fourth of November, 1939, when Congress had narrowly revised the Neutrality Act, at the President’s urging. Now it was possible for belligerents in the European war—so solemnly declared and as yet so sensibly
un
begun—to get arms on a “cash-and-carry” basis from what key aides of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt were now calling the Arsenal of Democracy.
“He’s going to get us into this thing. I know it. He thinks he’s
another Wilson, as if the original wasn’t bad enough.” Timothy noted that although Blaise was drinking only champagne, he was, in his decorous way, drunk. Since Timothy was about to go to work, he drank only a “horse’s neck”—ginger ale with lemon twist.
“I thought you—and the
Trib
—are for helping the Allies against Hitler.”
Blaise’s eyes scanned the room, as though looking for someone. “Well, yes. If it comes to that. But the real enemy isn’t Hitler.”
As a onetime secret convert from Catholicism to Marxism and then onward to nothing, Timothy mentally timed Blaise’s familiar hymn, currently being chanted by every other American grandee: the real enemy of the United States, and of God himself, the two being identical and indivisible, was not Hitler and Nazism but Stalin and his irresistible creed calculated to enthrall the world’s mindless masses, godless communism, which would take away everyone’s money.
As Blaise chanted his litany, Timothy noticed a familiar figure looking out a French window at the silver river below; it was someone Timothy knew but someone who ought not to have been there, or, at least, someone he did not associate with Washington or Laurel House or politics but with … The man turned toward him and raised his hand in a near-military salute and Blaise wound up with a quick amen. “There’s Balderston,” he said. “He’s in movies, too.”
Timothy wondered what the screenwriter John Balderston was doing at Laurel House. Mike Romanoff’s Beverly Hills restaurant was more his usual venue. Recently he had written such popular films as
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
and
The Prisoner of Zenda
. He had also been eager to work with Timothy on a film about King Arthur but Jack Warner had told them, sadly, that Errol Flynn was far too gone in alcohol “for me to lend him out. I mean, it would be just like in one of your westerns, Tim, where they give all the cows all that salt so they get so thirsty that they drink all this water to make them heavy so you can get a higher price per ton having watered your stock. Well, Flynn’s scotched his stock. I’d never loan him out to a friend.”
Warner’s humor was always on the heavy side. A relatively unscotched Flynn had then gone on to make a dozen successful films in quick succession and the King Arthur film was never made.
“You’ll be seeing Caroline, I suppose.”
“If I get to France on this trip.” But Blaise was now in deep conversation with Senator Borah, the Lion of Idaho.
Actually, if the budget was sufficient, Timothy did want to interview Caroline at home in Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, the seventeenth-century chateau where she and Blaise had grown up. Fate had so arranged matters that each was born to a mother who had died shortly after giving birth, first Blaise and then, two years later, Caroline, whose famously beautiful mother was daughter to an illegitimate son of Aaron Burr. Timothy had always wanted to make a film about Burr, who had chosen to take his stand at such an illuminating right angle to American history, but, unfortunately, no studio would touch the story of a man mistakenly thought to be a traitor.
The amiable Balderston was more like an Englishman than an American, the result, Timothy assumed, of his years as a London-based foreign correspondent. “I know what you’re doing here.” Balderston’s upper plate at least had a professional American look to it, fully adhesive and not too dazzlingly British white.
“And I
don’t
know what you’re doing here.” Timothy obligingly completed the dialogue.
“Well, I’m not making a film about …” He indicated the room. “But I wish I were.”
“Have you chosen sides?”
Balderston put a cigarette in an ivory holder, rather like the one the President affected. “Well, I’m prone to the British, I suppose. But since you’re Irish …”
“I’m not prone to the British. I’m not anti either, since my family left the bogs of our ancestral island. On the other hand, I’m anti-Hitler.”
“I half-heard Mr. Sanford lecturing you. I hadn’t realized that communism is so much worse than Hitler.”
“Rich Americans all sound like that this season.”
“Do you think they
believe
it?” Balderston was oddly urgent.
“I wouldn’t know.” Timothy felt himself cut loose in deep waters. What
was
going on this night at Laurel House?
“You were married to Caroline Sanford, weren’t you?”
“We kept, as they say, company. Not quite the same thing.”
“Sorry.” Balderston actually blushed. Then he looked about him. “Anyway, here’s the real—not the phony—war. In this room. There’s Senator Borah, taking money from the Nazis to pay for his isolationist line.”
Timothy was never shocked by what film producers or even politicians did, but for a senator to take money from a dictator like Hitler was, perhaps, going too far. “I’ve known the Lion of Idaho for over twenty years.” Timothy was mild. “He’s a total isolationist. Why would he take money for doing and saying what he does and says anyway?”
“I defer,” said Balderston, “to your long years, in and out …”
“Mostly out.”
“… of this Jacobean court.”
“Jacobean?” Timothy found the adjective inappropriate for something as essentially mundane as the American political system. “Will there be poisonings? A sword through the tapestry? Statesman murdered in a bathtub?”
Balderston laughed. “Nothing so good, I’m afraid. But even so, I’ve counted three Axis agents here tonight.”
“How many British?”
“Only John Foster, and he’ll tell you everything that he is trying to do to get us into the war, with absolutely no success. Then, if all else fails, he does a nice imitation of Senator Borah. John is a model spy.”
The young assistant director approached Timothy. “We’re all set up in the library, Mr. Farrell.”
Timothy gave the AD his list of those who had agreed to speak to camera—for and against American participation in the European war. Blaise’s office at the
Tribune
had been happy to do the preliminary work. Thus far, no one had turned down Timothy’s invitation, particularly when they were told that the format would resemble Henry Luce’s
March of Time
, easily the most popular of all newsreel programs, a new one shown each month in every movie house in the land. But where
The March of Time
dealt with a subject for no more than fifteen or twenty minutes, Timothy and his sponsors—an eclectic mix that included pro- and anti-war investors as well as L. B. Mayer’s studio, MGM—were willing for him to make a ninety-minute feature that
could then be cut into smaller segments. The voice-over narrative would be done by the notorious young radio actor Orson Welles, who had terrified the nation the previous year with his “reportage” of a Martian invasion of New Jersey. “I picked what I thought would be a perfectly incredible target for conquest. You see how wrong I was. Everyone believed that Martians lust for dominion over Passaic, New Jersey.” Then Welles agreed to narrate Timothy’s film. “We must call our film ‘War or Peace?’ ”
“Why not ‘Peace or War?’ ” Timothy suggested.
Welles grinned. “Less on the nose, I agree. I’m against Hitler, you know.”
“I’ll tell him, when I interview him.”
Welles’s eyes were suddenly very round and protuberant, like a vast Pekinese confronting dinner. “You’ve got
Hitler?
To interview?”
“Why not?” Timothy lied. He had been in the movie business almost thirty years, longer than the youthful Welles had been alive. But presently, after a prodigious number of stage and radio triumphs, Welles would be making his first film in Hollywood, after first narrating Timothy’s film. Meanwhile, Timothy’s muttered questions and asides would be the only narration in the library with its dark wood paneling and portrait of Aaron Burr over the fireplace. Later, Welles’s voice would be dubbed in.
The five-man film crew, as always when left on their own, had overlit the room. Timothy brought down the lighting, aiming for the sort of Götterdämmerung effect that he had first concocted for Caroline in her ill-fated
Mary Queen of Scots
. After first making a success of the nearly defunct Washington
Tribune
, she had followed her mentor William Randolph Hearst to Southern California, where each had made silent films, she as an unexpectedly popular actress, he as producer of the serial
The Perils of Pauline
. In due course, she had gone into partnership with the ambitious Timothy X. Farrell. Their
Hometown
series was still much admired. Then she had gone home to France and the freelance Farrell had turned to documentaries.
Timothy now relit Blaise’s library so that Washington statesmen would resemble the gods on Olympus, which was how they saw themselves and pretty much looked to be until they started to talk and one
sadly realized that Jupiter, king of the gods, was just another saloon barfly, eager to buzz the new camera in town.
Timothy pulled a red leather wing chair into place beside the fire, noting contentedly that whoever sat in the chair would look agreeably diabolic if the key light were to be raised.
Blaise tapped on the door; then entered his now transformed study. “Looks like that movie you were doing when Frederika and I came out and stayed at the Ambassador.”
Timothy now realized that the first interview would have to be with his host. “All right, Blaise. Sit there, by the fire.…”
“But …” But Blaise had already seated himself in his throne: king of the gods. “Now, Tim,” he began.
But Timothy was already rearranging Blaise in the chair. Did he dare light each grandee in exactly the same way? Would that make the wrong point? After all, Senator Borah was pro-German. The newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann was pro-British. John Foster was exuberantly British. Senator Vandenberg was …