Authors: Gore Vidal
“Why haven’t you married?” Caroline was more to the point than she had intended. “Of course, it’s no business of mine.”
Tim smiled his crooked smile. “Lapsed Catholics don’t make good husbands.”
“Is that an answer?”
“An observation. Besides, I don’t want children. Why haven’t
you
married again?”
Was this her chance? “I seem to have done all that. With you. With others before.” She then erased the subject from her mind. She would continue as she was.
“There is something going on here.” Tim changed the uncomfortable subject.
“Here … where? The White House?”
“Yes. And Washington. It’s about the war.”
“Everything’s about the war now.”
“No.” He walked over to the window; pulled aside the curtain. Mrs. Nesbitt’s patented Hyde Park dust glittered an instant in the lamplight. Across the avenue Lafayette Park looked bleak and wintry. “Who used to live here? In this room?”
“In a hundred and thirty-nine years there have been thirty or so presidents—just about every one, I should think.” Then a memory stirred. “You know I was engaged to Del Hay.”
“Before my time.”
“Yes.” She was cool. “It was very long ago.” But she could not bring herself to give the date when she became engaged to Del. That would have frightened Tim. She felt unpleasantly historic. “Anyway, Del’s father was John Hay, who came to Washington with President Lincoln. He was one of two secretaries, and he told me that this was their room, and how when the President couldn’t sleep, which was often—he had terrible nightmares, like Mr. Roosevelt, who keeps dreaming that there’s a man coming in through the transom to kill him and he wakes up screaming. Anyway, Mr. Lincoln would come in here, wearing only a long nightshirt, looking like an ostrich with his long thin legs and the nightshirt bunched out in back. He would sit down and read something funny to them, to take his mind off the war.… So what do you think is going on?”
Tim turned his director’s gaze on her, intent, impersonal. “The British are secretly getting us into their war. Yes, I know that I’ve been filming mostly isolationists so far, but they are convinced that the British secret services are busy buying up members of Congress, planting horror stories in the press, making films …” Tim started to light a cigar; thought better of it. “It’s the business about the films that convinced me. Because that’s something I know. Remember Balderston? He was at your brother’s. He’s in on it, too. He’s always been an Anglophile, which is his business, not mine. But everything he makes—or wants to make—is a celebration of gallant little England, not to mention France and all those Scarlet Pimpernels.”
“I don’t see how poor Norma Shearer having her head chopped off by the French mob will make Americans pro-French.”
“No. But it will make them anti-mob, anti-Bolshevik, anti-Russia.”
Caroline reminded him of their old ambition to influence—even re-create—people.
“This is more specific than we ever were. It’s more like what’s-his-name. Wilson’s man in Hollywood who saw to it all those anti-Hun movies were made. George Creel, his name was.” He sighed. “I wish I knew what was in the President’s head.”
“I suspect he wishes that he knew too. He acts mostly on instinct, even impulse. Yet he takes his time. He doesn’t dare be too far ahead
of the public. Yesterday when someone asked Eleanor what the President thought about the Russian invasion of Finland, she said, ‘The President doesn’t think. He decides.’ Of course, he wants to be a second Woodrow Wilson. But a successful Wilson.”
“And go to war for England?”
“For himself. Which will include us, of course. Then he’ll want a new League of Nations, which he will personally take charge of to make sure it doesn’t fail.”
Tim rose. “I get the feeling that I’m in some sort of witches’ coven. Everyone is sharing secrets—big secrets—speaking in a code to which I don’t have the key.”
“No one’s apt to give it to someone Irish, who doesn’t want us to go to war.”
“Being Irish has nothing to do with it. Being the maker of
Hometown
does. I want to keep Americans home. To make improvements about the house. Who is Ernest Cuneo?”
Caroline shrugged. “Every day I hear another one hundred unfamiliar names.”
“He works, at times, as a lawyer for the President. He’s also working for BSC …”
“British Security Coordination.” Caroline laughed. “Now, I said that only out of vanity. To impress you when I shouldn’t have let you know that I even know what it is.” She rose. “Yes, I am a witch, too. A kindly one. I just hope you’re not with the Germans in all this.”
“Of course not. I think I must get to know Mr. Cuneo.”
“He’s a friend of the newspaper columnist Drew Pearson, who used to be Cissy Patterson’s son-in-law.”
“I knew you’d know.”
Caroline wondered if by saying far too much, she had put Tim in harm’s way. He was quite right about the gathering of the witches. All sorts of black magic was in the air, and though she was more observer than participant she had quickly realized how great the stakes were for everyone involved. The world was about to be turned upside down in a way never seen before. “One must serve oneself.” She kissed Tim on the cheek and said good night.
Would things now become as bad as they had been when John Hay
and the other one—Nicholas? Nicolay?—slept in this room, wearied with news of bloody defeats at the South, disturbed in their sleep by the cries of Abraham Lincoln, as he dreamed his terrible dreams just down the hall? Caroline took a sleeping pill to ward off the ghosts of ancient nightmares, not to mention premonitory whispers of those as yet undreamed.
“Third table on the left. I’m bald.” The voice on the telephone had a strong New York City accent. Tim entered the Mayflower’s Presidential Room, where breakfast was served to all sorts of visitors to the city as well as to important residents, doing business. At the third table to the left, a thickset half-bald man with narrow eyes was seated beside a familiar-looking thin man whose gray hair was thinning in contrast to his moustache, which bristled like that of a British colonel in a film.
“Mr. Cuneo?” Tim approached the table. Both men stood. Cuneo introduced Tim to the moustache, which belonged to the journalist Drew Pearson, who shook Tim’s hand rather absently while giving him a very sharp look indeed; the contrast between handshake and scrutiny was oddly disconcerting.
“I’m on my way, Mr. Farrell,” said Pearson. “Looking forward to that documentary. When are you releasing it?”
“June, MGM says.”
“Wish it were sooner. All hell’s going to break loose long before that.” Pearson made his wary way across the room. Tim usually read Pearson’s syndicated muck-raking political column “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” co-authored with someone called Allen.
“Sit down, Mr. Farrell.” Cuneo’s smile was amused and amusing.
“I like Pearson.”
“Do you? He’ll take a lot of convincing that you really do. He’s more used to being hated. Look at him dodging around that table
because Senator McKellar is sitting there. Drew’s afraid he’ll get bit. And McKellar’s rabid on the subject of Drew. A lot of people are.”
“Right-wing people, anyway.” Tim was not sure how best to play Ernest Cuneo. After three months of asking questions, he had come to think of Cuneo as somehow the center of everything; certainly he kept cropping up in the oddest places. Originally a legal adviser to Mayor La Guardia of New York, he had joined the White House as special legal counselor to the President. He was also involved, somehow, with British intelligence and the American interventionists. He was said to be close to J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, also to the country’s other powerful journalist, Walter Winchell.
“I’m Drew’s legal adviser.” Cuneo ordered chipped beef on toast; inspired by Mrs. Nesbitt’s cuisine, Tim did the same. “ ‘Adviser’ is a safer word than ‘lawyer.’ ” Cuneo chuckled. “Drew is sued for libel about once a week, and now that he’s on radio he’s sued for slander, too. The lawsuits never stop. Luckily, he loves a fight, good Quaker that he is. I give him advice on how to win the suits. I also tend to pick up odds and ends of information that are useful to people. I saved Drew from that General … I have a block about his name. The pompous ass—you know; the chief of staff who attacked the bonus veterans …”
“Douglas MacArthur.”
“The same. Drew went after him. MacArthur filed suit. We discovered that he had this Eurasian mistress out in Manila. We told him we’d go public. End of suit. Was I on the list?”
The transition was so quick that Tim almost missed it. “List?”
“Mrs. Roosevelt’s. People to talk to. ‘Subtle’ people.” Cuneo waved to the large John Foster in the middle distance.
“No. You weren’t.” Had Caroline talked to Cuneo? If she had, how did she know him? Through all of this Tim remained, he hoped, poker-faced. “No. You weren’t on the list. I guess you know Caroline Sanford.”
Cuneo nodded. “I even went to Saint-Cloud-le-Duc last year. What a place!”
“I’ve never seen it.” There were definitely two quite separate Carolines. He had known the American one intimately; had never met the French one.
“It was a perfect day. She’d invited Léon Blum, at my request, and he arrived with André Gide. It was certainly an educational day for me. I only wish Blum were still in charge over there in France. He’s got Hitler’s number. The others don’t—or they do but they think they can handle him, which they can’t. What can I do for you, sir?”
Tim produced his White House list of names. He read them off to Cuneo, who told him, briefly, even sharply, who was worth talking to and why. Tim made notes. The chipped beef came. The whole room now smelled of roast coffee and cigarette smoke. The steady murmur of masculine voices was like a distant thunder.
“I’ve pretty much finished with the isolationists.”
“Lucky you got Borah back in November. He’s dying as we speak.” Tim noted that Cuneo was never tentative. He never said “I hear that” or “They say.” He simply made flat statements. “Once he’s dead you might try to find out if he took cash from the German government. We know he did. From several sources. But we have no proof so far. No safety box full of cash. I have some leads if you’re interested.”
“Since he’s always been an isolationist, why would he take money to do what he’d have done anyway?”
“This is Washington, Tim. Are any of Mrs. R’s Youth Congress kids on your list?”
“One. But I haven’t seen him.”
“I wouldn’t. Not now. They’re too mixed up with the communists, which means Russia. So they’ll be pro-Hitler for the next few months until Hitler double-crosses Stalin and starts his invasion of Russia and then Mrs. R’s kids will all have to switch again.”
Tim was doing his best to absorb so many mind-boggling revelations. “Hitler, having just signed a pact with Russia, now plans to invade Russia?”
“In the zoo, study your beast. Haven’t you read his book,
Mein Kampf
? It’s all in there. He gives the whole game away. But hardly anyone has ever got through the book, while the few who have read it never take him seriously. He tells just how he plans to carve up Russia. Enslave all the Slavs. Annex the Romanian oil fields, which he really needs. Get rid of all the Jews …”
“How?”
“However he can. He’s been selling a lot of German Jews to the West. But we’re not taking in as many as we should. I fear the worst. But people think I’m an alarmist to be alarmed by what is so plain to see. Anyway, thanks to some nice undercover work, Hitler won’t be invading Russia this summer as originally planned. He hadn’t figured on England and France going to war over Poland, so he’ll have to defeat them first. Then he’ll go after the real prize, Eastern Europe.” Again the amused smile. Tim wondered if Cuneo was making fun of him. Since September 1939 many scenarios had been prepared by various pundits but no one had yet sounded as positive, if not plausible, as this pudgy bald man who seemed to know everything as well as everyone.
“You don’t think England and France can beat Hitler in a fighting war?”
“No. England’s too small. England’s also broke. France is weak.
With Blum they might have.… Anyway, let’s not indulge in what-might-have-been stuff. Without our help, money, ships, planes, information”—the last word he gave special emphasis to—“they’ll go down.” Cuneo was no longer smiling. He suddenly looked like the gangster Al Capone. “We need this film of yours to help with public opinion.”
“So that the boys will enlist in the Army and follow Roosevelt into war?” Tim realized that he was being less than cool.
“I know your inclinations are isolationist. Why not? Most Americans are, and you’re the recorder—if not the inventor—of a real America out there.” Cuneo knew Caroline well enough to have obtained a good blueprint of her onetime lover. “But we’ll be driven into this no matter what.”
“In which case, Mr. Cuneo, why are you—and the British and all the others—swarming about Washington and Hollywood and the New York
Times
…?”
“
Our
paper is the New York
Herald Tribune
.” Cuneo chuckled. “You’d think that the
Times
, with a Jewish owner, would be helpful but Sulzberger is afraid of not seeming to be ‘even-handed,’ as he calls it, so we rely on Mrs. Reid and the
Tribune
to get our views to the people.”
“To the wealthy Anglophiles of New York, anyway—as Senator Borah would have said.”
Cuneo crossed himself, eyes to the ceiling. “Heaven forbid that we are so elitist. Anyway we have Walter Winchell and Drew for the great public. Walter’s column is in a thousand papers. That’s twelve hundred words or more a day, six days a week. Then there’s his Sunday radio broadcast, which I also help with. Millions hear us.”
“You do this for nothing?”
“I do it for the President. Not to mention the lawsuits my clients get themselves into which I have to get them out of. Drew’s the worst. Walter sounds fierce when on the attack but basically he’s an actor. Drew is a believer. Drew’s righteous. Drew’s a killer.”
Tim was impressed, the object of Cuneo’s exercise. But to what end? He asked; got an answer. “We need your help, that’s all.” Cuneo opened a briefcase on the banquette beside him. “Let’s see what your horoscope says. You don’t have to bother to give me your date and time of birth because I have it all here.” He was looking through a notebook. “Here we are. Sagittarius, Moon in the House of …” He muttered to himself. Then: “You will be unusually receptive to new ideas. Your native Sagittarian skepticism will quickly see through someone who is trying to influence you. That must be me.”