Here was Camelot as I saw it and described it to my friends. At breakfast one morning in April of 1962 I read in the Times that there was to be a dinner for the Nobel Prize winners. I said to my husband, Lionel, “Here we go again. Lenny Bernstein.” The story indicated that there were going to be guests in addition to the Nobel laureates. I concluded that that meant Lenny Bernstein and Julie Harris. What I was having, of course, was a terrible pang of jealousy, because these were the people who would be invited, and we would not. But, even as I was saying it, a quick wonderful thought ran through my head that perhaps we were going to be invited. I said nothing to Lionel about wishing that we had an invitation, and if he was suffering from a similar jealousy he hid it from me, too. And then one morning when the mail arrived, and Lionel asked me to come out to the hall, I could tell from his voice what was in the mail: a large square envelope marked in the corner “The White House.”
Actually, I was worried about the expense, but there was no question that we were going to accept. I had a strong, simple feeling about the invitation, and it struck a sympathetic chord in Lionel. My father had come to America from Poland when he was a boy of eighteen, without a penny and knowing no English. He peddled macaroons on the Staten Island Ferry while he learned the language, and now for his daughter to be invited to the White House—well, I owed him the acceptance of the invitation.
The invitation was for a Sunday night, April 29th, and it said black tie. This made it perfectly clear what Lionel would wear, but what would I wear? With our old-fashioned notions, we decided that I should wear the simplest possible short evening dress, black, if I could find one, and covered up, not bare. I set out to find it, and there wasn’t a short black evening dress in all New York. Then I called a salesgirl I knew at Hattie Carnegie and asked her what I could do. She was awfully pleasant and told me that she knew someone, Mac Weiss, who might have something for me at his shop. I went there, and I found not a short black evening dress at all but a black matte jersey dress with long tight sleeves. It was full-length, but I was shown how the trains could be cut off and it could be made into a short dress, which I could wear with short white kid gloves. The problem seemed to entrance them. In fact, at one point the salesgirl whispered, “Mrs. Auchincloss is right in the next fitting room at this moment.” Jackie’s mother, of course.
The dress was a slinky tight thing, very theatrical, and something told me not to buy it without consulting Lionel. So I asked them to hold it, and the next day I took Lionel down to look at it. He didn’t think it was at all the right thing. This troubled Mr. Weiss very badly, and he said, “I think I have another dress that you didn’t see,” and he brought out a simple black crêpe dress (that all my friends would be seeing for the next five years), with a little scarf attached to the shoulder which I could drop over my arms if I wanted them to be covered. And it made me look so thin—it was marvellous. It looked as if it had cost all of nineteen ninety-five, if you weren’t aware of the cut. It was two hundred and fifty dollars. Mr. Weiss kept telling me how absolutely perfect it was, superb. Lionel was beaming, too. So this was how it was done, and I thought that I was all set and now all I had to worry about were the accessories.
And then that evening I picked up the Times, which I hadn’t had a chance to read because I had been downtown shopping, and my eye lit on the social calendar of the Kennedys, and I saw that they were on their way to Palm Beach. They’re going to Palm Beach, I thought furiously, and I’m going to their party, and they won’t even be there. This impelled me to read the whole story, which said that they were going to be gone for ten days and then they would be back for the Nobel Prize winners’ dinner on the twenty-ninth. And included in the news story were two sentences that, miraculously, I read: a directive had just that day been issued by the social office of the White House that although the party was to be on the black-tie level for men it was on the white-tie level for ladies. The woman guests, that is, were to wear long gowns and long white gloves. I had just taken my new dress out of its box and cut off the price tag. Hung it in the closet. Made it mine. But what I had bought was dead wrong.
We had just one week left before the party when my then sister-in-law Edna dragged me to a shop on Forty-eighth Street. A nasty, vulgar saleswoman came forward to ask what I wanted. I said I was looking for a long evening dress, and she said that all the shop’s clothes were made to order. I hadn’t even the strength to say thank you when I heard Edna say, “Yes, of course, but we thought that perhaps at this time of year you might have some of your model dresses left which you’d be willing to sell.” The saleswoman examined her appraisingly. “Yes, we do,” she admitted. She disappeared for a few minutes and then brought out just the dress I had been looking for—an all-seasons dress, champagne-colored, made of moiré taffeta printed in soft orange and green flowers. I forced myself to ask “How much?” before trying it on. It was three hundred and ninety-five dollars, the saleswoman said, but since it was a model she might be able to do a little better on the price. Meanwhile, Edna was making gestures at me behind her back, and I knew just what she was trying to say, so I took a large gulp and murmured, “I hope you’ll be able to give me a special price on this, because I’m going to wear it at the White House.” The salesgirl didn’t blink an eye. She said, “Oh, then I’m sure we can do even better. Just try it on first.” I tried it on, and there were a few little things that needed altering. She disappeared for a few minutes and when she returned she said patriotically that the price would be two hundred and fifty dollars, including the alterations.
All I had left to do was to have some slippers dyed to match. Edna had a lovely old evening bag that she lent me. She also lent me a mink stole. And I bought long white kid gloves that cost twenty-two dollars.
When Lionel first got our invitation, we had thought we might spend the whole weekend in Washington and stay at a hotel or motel. But our friend Thelma Anderson reminded us that she had a sister who lived just outside Washington, and who would be delighted to have us use her house to dress in. We welcomed that money-saving suggestion.
The twenty-ninth at last arrived, and we went down to Washington on the eleven-o’clock train. Dinner was scheduled for eight o’clock that evening, and we figured that that would give us plenty of time to get to Thelma’s sister’s house to dress without a rush. On our way down to Penn Station, we stopped at the Tip Toe Inn to buy sandwiches, to avoid the expense of the dining car. Lionel wanted to buy chairs in the club car, but I wouldn’t let him. I was adamant: we would have a sleeper to come back in that night, but we would go down in a coach. So there we were, standing with a great big suitcase, in which were packed our evening clothes, and waiting for the gate to open, when suddenly a very seedy-looking man carrying a suitcase and a large raggedy bulging briefcase came up and asked, “Do you know where you get the eleven-o’clock train to Washington?” All of us did a doubletake. It was James Farrell.
Could there have been a more extraordinary sight? I thought of Yeats’s “Fifteen apparitions have I seen; / The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.” He was wearing a suit that I think was supposed to be brown, but it was so shabby that you could no longer tell its color. His necktie was under his ear and a button was missing from his shirtfront. Also, the shirt was filthy; he’d been wearing it for a week. I may be exaggerating a little, but I think his jacket was torn on the sleeve and that its buttons were hanging by a thread. He looked wild. We hadn’t seen him for ages, and it flashed through both our minds: My God, has he been invited to the White House, too? But an even worse thought was that we were going to have to ride all the way down to Washington with him, and it was going to be terrible. In fact, he’d already started to talk while we stood at the gate, and he was telling us that he’d begun Volume 19 in a series of twenty-five novels, not one of which had been published, and he quoted passages to us from the one he had just completed. In his bulging briefcase, he explained, he had all the royalty statements from his publishers. He felt that he was being very much cheated by the income-tax people, and he was going to Washington to take up the matter. I could hear Lionel heave a sigh of relief: he wasn’t going to the White House; he was going to the Treasury Department.
He looked insane, sober but insane, but he couldn’t have been sweeter. Well, this was what I got for not allowing Lionel to buy chairs in the club car. We were going to have to ride all the way to Washington with Jim Farrell! The gates finally opened, and Lionel and I started down the platform. We hadn’t, of course, said anything about where we were going in Washington. When we got to the first coach car, we turned toward it, and he looked at us, surprised. “Oh, don’t you have chairs?” Embarrassed, he explained that he was terribly sorry but he hadn’t been sleeping well lately and was very tired. He had taken a chair because it would give him a chance to rest. I could feel humiliation racing through every inch of my husband’s body. He was riding in a coach while this poor, bedraggled devil who looked as if he had not had a bed to sleep in for a year or a change in underwear for a month was travelling in a chair. But it was also a great relief; we wouldn’t have to talk to him.
On the train, I’d begun to have a headache. I was well fortified with pills: aspirin, Bufferin, codeine, and also some pink pills that had been given me by the English novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, the wife of C. P. Snow. We’d met at a dinner party, where I’d suddenly become ill and had to leave. She had followed me to the door and said, “You’re having an attack of migraine, aren’t you? I can tell. I’m vice-president of the British Migraine Association. Here!” And she thrust a couple of pills into my hand. Of course, only in England could there be a migraine association. I asked what the pills were, and she said that when you have the aura of a migraine you take the first pill and, twenty minutes later, if you’re not better you take a second pill. She had only two to spare. But they were marvellous, and really worked, and I had written to ask her to send me more. So on the train, when I got the aura, as she put it, I took one of them. As soon as I’d swallowed it, I got nervous: suppose I passed out in the middle of the dinner party? My headache was becoming quite severe, and I was alarmed because, if it followed its usual pattern, by eight o’clock I’d be very sick, and by nine I’d be throwing up. I dressed in agony. I was beginning to feel so sick and nervous that I couldn’t bear the idea of trying to get through a party.
I had learned from an acquaintance that protocol required us to arrive at the White House by ten minutes to eight. At Thelma’s sister Marilyn’s house, Lionel asked where he could call for a hired car. But Marilyn and her husband wouldn’t dream of letting us hire a car; they insisted that they themselves would drive us to the White House. It would be a forty-five-minute drive, and we protested vehemently, but they assured us that it would be fun for them, so at precisely ten minutes after seven we all piled into their station wagon, our host in his shirtsleeves, Marilyn in a housedress, the baby in the dirty play clothes she’d been wearing. The three of them got in the front of the car while Lionel and I arranged ourselves elegantly in the back. And I looked at Lionel and Lionel looked at me, and it was perfectly clear that the two of us were thinking the same thing: Arriving like this, we wouldn’t be allowed through the gate. Why couldn’t our driver at least put on a jacket?
Still, we sat back and relaxed, and it suddenly came to me that my headache was all gone, and almost for the first time that day it occurred to me that I might even enjoy the evening. It was dusk, the fountains were playing, with lights on them. It had been a warm week in Washington, and flowers had burst into bloom on the White House grounds, so that you saw masses of color in the lowering light. People were beginning to gather to watch what was going on. It was like nothing I had ever witnessed, and it made my heart pound with excitement.
We drove up to the gate, and there was a row of Army and Navy people. Lionel handed his pass to a guard, and he received it without the slightest flicker of expression. He just checked off our names on a list and said, turning to Marilyn’s husband, “Drive right up to the door.” There we said, “Thank you so much for everything,” and off they drove.
I took Lionel’s arm. It was plainly indicated what we were supposed to do; nobody needed to tell us. Very slowly we walked through the portico. The entrance was lined on both sides with functionaries. There were also a great many military people in attendance, in their beautiful uniforms, and heaps of photographers taking pictures of the guests as they arrived, not asking their names; the sorting out would be done later. They took everybody’s picture.
As we walked in, an aide came up and said, “The gentlemen please enter in that room, the ladies go to the dressing room, around to the right.” In the dressing room, there were several maids and racks and racks of clothes, the women’s wraps, and lavatories with mirrors, not unlike the dressing room on the mezzanine level of the Plaza hotel, in New York, but bigger. The moment I got in there, I knew it was going to be a wonderful party. There were two or three elderly women fixing their hair in front of the mirrors, and they beamed at me. One of them said, “Have you come far?” and I said, “From New York. Have you come far?” She replied that she had driven in the rain from Baltimore; I suppose it was from Johns Hopkins. They were wearing the most marvellous antique dresses, this little group of old ladies. One of them might have been eighty. She had on a taffeta dress with ruching around the neck and puffed sleeves. She looked exquisite, with beautiful jewelry that had probably been in her family forever. Nothing could have been a more wonderful introduction to the party than these women: they weren’t young, they weren’t smart—they were just lovely.
I came out of the dressing room, and there was Lionel, waiting for me. Immediately, an aide came up, introduced himself, and inquired, “May I ask your name?” When Lionel said, “Mr. and Mrs. Trilling,” he said promptly, “Of course. Mr. and Mrs. Lionel Trilling.” Obviously, he had memorized the entire guest list—I think there were about a hundred and eighty of us altogether—and he couldn’t have known in advance who was going to fall to him. Then he said to me, “Would you take my arm?” and he held out his arm while Lionel fell back and walked two or three paces behind us. As we moved along, he asked me, “Does your husband prefer to be introduced as Mr., Dr., or Professor?” “He prefers to be called Mr. Trilling,” I said. “Good,” he said, and added, “I’ll be your aide for the early part of the evening. You’ll be told everything you have to do, so you needn’t feel any constraint at all.”
While he was talking to me, I saw that perhaps five yards ahead of us another couple was being ministered to in the same comforting fashion. There must have been eighteen or twenty such aides, each in charge of eight to ten people. But there was no pressure of any kind. Just the contrary.
He led me to a table, and an attendant checked a list and handed him a little envelope, saying, “Mr. Trilling will be seated at Table 2. You, Mrs. Trilling, will be seated at Table 6. You’re both in the main dining room. This evening, we’re going to be using both dining rooms, the State Dining Room and the Blue Room. President Kennedy will be in the State Dining Room, where your tables are. Mrs. Kennedy will be in the Blue Room.” The pre-dinner reception was being held in the East Room, and at the door stood another attendant, with a microphone. Our aide went up to him and said, “Mr. and Mrs. Lionel Trilling,” and the aide at the door repeated into the microphone, “Mr. and Mrs. Lionel Trilling.” From then on, I kept catching the names of people who were arriving and being announced. I’d have loved to be standing quietly by myself, listening to the names and trying to put them together with the faces to which they belonged, but that wasn’t possible. My aide had returned and deposited us where Lionel and I belonged alphabetically, or near enough to it for easy correction. He took me up to Fredric March and introduced us. Like many accomplished actors, March had very smooth manners. He greeted me warmly. Then a kind of chain reaction got started in the reception room. One didn’t speak to anyone without introducing him or her to the person with whom one had just been speaking. It just seemed to happen automatically: we caught the procedure from the aides and carried it forward without being told to. It was the most enchanting performance, everybody introducing somebody to somebody else in the most charming way.
Immediately the room began to fill with waiters carrying huge trays loaded with everything that one could possibly desire to drink: Manhattans, Martinis, highballs, sherry, tomato juice, orange juice. There were no canapés—just drinks.
The room was now filling up with familiar names. Not familiar faces. I soon heard the attendant announce, “Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Schlesinger.” Arthur saw me and waved and came over. He greeted me and introduced his wife, but he didn’t seem relaxed and friendly, like everyone else. He appeared to be self-conscious, as if borne down by his official White House connection.
Meanwhile, out of the corner of my eye I had spotted Colonel John Glenn. He was talking to, of all people, Robert Frost, and there must have been six people huddled around them, trying to hear what they were saying. And then a little lady, just a wee thing, and the most enchanting-looking person, was being introduced to me—she looked to be about eighty-five, and her name was Mrs. Waterman. Later, I found out that her husband was in charge of the National Science Foundation. She said to me, “Oh, Mrs. Trilling, you’re literary. Is there anyone here I’m supposed to know?”
She had a charming birdlike way of speaking, and I said, “Well, I haven’t seen many writers, but that’s Katherine Anne Porter over there in the white brocade dress and the white hair and the white pearls.”
“Am I supposed to know her?” Mrs. Waterman inquired. “Because I don’t want to.”
I was dying for a cigarette, but I didn’t see any woman smoking, and very few men were smoking. My headache was gone, but I was still afraid to drink, because that might bring it back. I held a cocktail in my hand, but I didn’t dare touch it. A stupendous amount of liquor was flowing around. People felt so much at home that they were drinking just as they might at a cocktail party at the home of their closest friends. Bill Styron lit a cigarette, but I didn’t myself dare to, so he kept giving me puffs of his.
Then suddenly I heard over the loudspeaker the name of Mr. James Farrell, and, sure enough, there he was. I don’t know in whose charge he had been in those intervening hours since we had last seen him, but he was transformed. He had on an absolutely clean shirt, his suit was pressed and sparkling clean, every shirt stud was in place. He looked dreamy, and I felt horribly ashamed of us for not having wanted to tell him that we were going to the White House and asking whether that was where he was going, too. What was amazing was that he had had the delicacy not to ask us, for fear that we hadn’t been invited and would feel bad.
Jimmy Baldwin looked elegant in his evening clothes, and we just waved to each other across the room. I caught a glimpse of John Dos Passos in the reception room, but I didn’t see him again through the rest of the evening. With Frost, that about made up the literary contingent. I took note that Lionel was drinking an awful lot of Martinis. But he was obviously enjoying himself. Long before we were put into the receiving line and the President made his appearance, everybody was saying to everybody else, “Isn’t this a wonderful party?”
By now it must have been half past eight. Our aide explained that the President and Mrs. Kennedy were about to come in, and as soon as they did the receiving line would start moving forward. Everyone would be in alphabetical order, with the Nobel Prize winners first, and then the other guests. “Please don’t lose your places,” he urged. “That’s very important. The gentleman goes in front of the lady in the receiving line,” He turned to Lionel. “We mean that.”
At that moment, there was a great fanfare of trumpets—quite literally—and the band played “Hail to the Chief.” Then in marched the color guard, and I heard a voice say, “The President and Mrs. Kennedy,” and in they came, into sudden stillness. They didn’t come in slowly, or in any way regally. They moved almost hastily, as if they didn’t want to be especially noticed. It’s true that there had been the big fanfare for the entrance, but then, as individuals, they comported themselves with great modesty.
They had just come back from the Palm Beach vacation, and they were very suntanned. Jackie was a deep cocoa brown and she was wearing a sea-green chiffon dress, to the floor, but cut very simply except that it had one bare shoulder. She wore green slippers to match her dress and no jewelry at all except some earrings, which were the most beautiful shade of green. She was a hundred times more beautiful than any photograph had ever indicated.
In photographs, her head always looked too large. But it wasn’t at all that large when you saw her in real life. She didn’t have as bouffant a hairdo as I thought from her pictures, and she had a long and perfectly beautiful neck. Her dress really wasn’t cut very elaborately, but it had millions of pleats. Hers was a charming figure rather than a perfect one, and she carried her clothes exquisitely. The President was handsome and exuded energy—I could feel it even at my distance from him. And one thing I noticed right away: among the Nobel Prize winners he had apparently changed the alphabetical order, so that the line was headed by Mrs. George Marshall, the widow of General Marshall—of the Marshall Plan. She was followed by Mrs. Ernest Hemingway, who had on what I thought was the most beautiful and appropriate dress at the party. After all, it was less than a year since Hemingway’s death. She knew that she was going to be very much in the public eye. It was a black sheath, very tight to below her knees, where it went out in a flare, and the flared part had large crimson roses appliquéed on it—she was essentially in black but not in mourning. I should perhaps say here that I’d often seen pictures of her and had always thought she looked like a lady buyer, hard-bitten. But, actually, there was more tenderness in her face than I had expected; more pain. Her eyes were softer, more appealing, and the whole outline of her face was more blurred than was suggested in photographs.
The line began to move quite rapidly now, but people didn’t stop drinking until they came within a few feet of the President. Then they set down their drinks—there were lots of shelves and little tables around the sides of the room. There were a few chairs scattered about, but nobody used them; everyone was in motion. By the time Lionel and I got to the President, the room was, of course, almost empty. Lionel moved out ahead of me. He had already put out his hand while his name was being announced, so that he had the President’s hand in his and the President was saying, “It’s very nice to see you, sir.” when Lionel’s name fully got through to him.
“Oh, it’s you,” the President exclaimed. “I’m glad to see you.” Lionel beamed, of course, and said, “Thank you.” By this time, Mrs. Kennedy had her hand out and Lionel was taking it. And she said, “You know, I have a stepsister who won’t have one idea in her head unless you tell her it’s all right to have it. She never says anything unless you say it’s all right for her to say it.”
Lionel inquired who the stepsister was.
“Nina Auchincloss,” Mrs. Kennedy replied. “She was a student of yours.”
Lionel couldn’t place Nina Auchincloss, but he said, “That’s very nice of her.” But he didn’t stop there. I could see that he wasn’t being his usual shy self—he had had six Martinis, I’d been counting. And I thought, Oh, my God, what’s coming next? He was still holding Mrs. Kennedy’s hand. “Wait till I tell you what they said about you at Vassar,” he said, smiling at her.
She began to laugh. “What?”
“Never mind,” said Lionel. “Later, I’ll tell you later.”
At this point, the President dropped my hand and inquired of Lionel, “What did they say at Vassar?”
“Later,” Lionel repeated. I had myself now been moved on to Mrs. Kennedy, but I saw that both the President and Mrs. Kennedy were grinning; they were amused by Lionel.
I said, “Don’t worry. What they said was very nice.”
Mrs. Kennedy said, “Oh,” but she looked at me as if to ask where I had materialized from. What was I doing in her conversation with Lionel? Lionel and I moved together toward the dining room, and he said, “I’m going to die—I’ve never been so flattered in my whole life.”
In the dining room, we separated. I went to my Table 6, Lionel went to his Table 2. The tables were round, quite close to each other. The President’s table was in the center, and he had Mrs. Marshall on his right and Mrs. Hemingway on his left. Frost was at the President’s table, and so was Mrs. Smith, the President’s sister. While people were coming into the dining room, I had been able to look at the place cards at my table. I had Pierre Salinger on my right. On my left was a Dr. Stanley. On the other side of Dr. Stanley was a woman I’d been talking to in the reception room, a very charming and handsome woman with a great deal of social poise. Her name was Mrs. Stratton, and I think she was the wife of the president of M.I.T. I asked her if she had any idea who Dr. Stanley was, and she told me that he had done important work on viruses. She added that Mrs. Kerr, whose husband was president of the University of California, and who was also sitting at our table, would be able to tell me all about him. I looked at the cards and saw that sitting on the other side of Mrs. Kerr would be James Baldwin. That was a relief to me and apparently to him, too, because when he got to the table and saw me there he said, “Oh, you’re here. Thank God, a familiar face.”
The first thing Jimmy did was to look at the card next to him. The place was still empty. “Who is Mrs. Kerr?” he asked me. “Didn’t she write a book, ‘Please Don’t Eat the Daisies’?” I shook my head. “Wife of the president of the University of California.”
Soon Salinger came in, and Dr. Stanley, and we all sat until the President came in, and then we all stood up again. It was plain that he was trying not to draw too much attention to himself: he walked in rapidly and sat down right away, no airs about it.
Dr. Stanley picked up my card. I said, “You haven’t the vaguest idea who I am. You scientists don’t read.” He loved my introducing myself in that way. He spent the entire dinner trying to persuade me to stop smoking, telling me in horrendous detail about the cancer I was heading into, and how I was going to rot inch by inch. It was so relaxed in the dining room that I was able to smoke through the entire meal. Nearly everybody was smoking, including most of the women. But Dr. Stanley kept taking my cigarette out of my mouth.
At one moment, he said, “What am I doing this for? I haven’t been able to stop my own wife from smoking. Why am I trying to stop you? She’s so nervous it’s probably better for her to smoke than not to.” Of course, we were all tight. Everybody was tight.
Everybody at the table was having fun except the two of us on either side of Salinger. I must have launched fifty topics of talk, all of which fizzled out. Nothing we said to each other involved more than two sentences: my remark, his answer. Then we’d have to start all over again. Eventually, I found it interesting that it was so dull with him.
The dinner was delicious. The meal had been much delayed, yet the beef was absolutely perfect. The wines were French, and there was no end to the amount you could drink: you had barely set down your glass before it was filled again. With the dessert came champagne.
When the champagne was served, the President rose at his place and knocked on his glass. The dining room became instantly quiet while he made the tiniest bit of a speech. He said, “This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
He at once had the place in his hands; everyone adored it. He added a few other words and sat down. Coffee was served right at the table, and suddenly even Pierre Salinger became human. He said to me, “Cigars are moving slowly. If the President rises before they get to me, I won’t have one. But I know all these waiters, and I’m not worried—they’ll bring me a cigar.”
The President rose, and everyone else rose, too. He moved out of the room, stopping as he went to shake hands with friends as he chanced to see them. And then the old fraternization started all over again. People moved around talking to one another as they left the dining room, moving into the corridors, where strolling strings were playing. We had been instructed that there would be a short interval after the dinner, and that, after that, there would be a reading by Fredric March. But now we had about a half hour in which President and Mrs. Kennedy had retired—he had to catch his breath, and I guess she needed some time to herself as well. But the party continued on its own momentum.
Coming into the dining room we had run into Dr. and Mrs. J. Robert Oppenheimer. They were just ahead of us, and he turned and said, “You don’t know my wife, do you?” She was a lovely-looking woman. Lovely but agonized-looking. My heart ached for the two of them. It was such a nice gesture on the part of President Kennedy, wanting publicly to rehabilitate Oppenheimer after he had been treated as a security risk for nearly a decade. But his appearance was like that of a spectre, a memento mori. He carried himself with great dignity, but that only made it worse. I remembered having heard that his wife was an acute alcoholic and drug addict. What a strain it must have been for her, with so much riding on the evening for him and all that liquor around.
Everywhere I looked there were enormous vases of flowers. The White House was like a fairyland—everything so elegant, easy, and gay, and the colors soft and varied. Wherever there was a table or a shelf or a fireplace, there were magnificent flowers in soft arrangements.
My aide gave me his arm and said, “Wouldn’t you like to come into the East Room now and take your place? There’s to be a reading. I want you to have a good seat, so let’s go in now.” He seated us plunk in the center of the third row. The President and Mrs. Kennedy had already come in and were seated right in front of us, where we could see them. They were in armchairs; we were in little gold chairs. And there was Mrs. Marshall and Mrs. Hemingway and Robert Frost and Vice-President and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, all in the row in front of us with the President. Throughout the evening, no notice had been taken of Johnson’s entrance or his presence. I’d seen them, of course. Mrs. Johnson looked old and tired in that lively company. And Johnson himself had on the most awful dinner jacket. I think it was gray, and I don’t know what it was made of, but it seemed to shimmer, as if he were a master of ceremonies in some cheap night club. Bobby Kennedy and his wife and the President’s sister, Mrs. Smith, were also sitting in the front row just ahead of us. One of the things that struck me was Bobby Kennedy’s good looks. He was infinitely better-looking than the President, but he didn’t exude anything like his brother’s power. Everything in his appearance was more delicate, and he looked very young, like an undergraduate. The President’s face, on the other hand, radiated strength, power so compressed that you felt it was about to explode.
Fredric March read from three dead Nobel Prize winners, beginning with the introduction to Sinclair Lewis’s “Main Street.” Next came some excerpts from Marshall’s outline for what was to become his famous plan. Very handsome, very traditionally worded. The final reading was from Hemingway. March said, “I was going to read Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Killers,’ but Mrs. Hemingway felt that we were all of us too familiar with that, and that perhaps you would like to hear something that had been unpublished, so she went through her husband’s unpublished works and selected a chapter from an unpublished novel.”
This was intriguing, and he read it very well. But the chapter itself was so poor that one was pained for the man who had written it. When March finished, the President rose from his chair and walked over to Mrs. Hemingway; he virtually lifted her out of her seat and had her bow to the audience. She was having a tough time, poor woman, and I saw the President do something so nice. He squeezed her arm comfortingly. Then he went back to sit in his own place again.
During the reading, I had been sitting next to Katherine Anne Porter. She acted in the most annoying fashion. She fussed with her necklace, she fussed with her earrings, she fussed with every curl in her beautiful white hair. She had apparently spotted a woman who had kept her long gloves on, so she again put her own gloves on. Then she spotted a woman whose gloves were off and once more removed her own gloves. Then she saw someone who had only one glove on, and she copied that. In the meanwhile, she was telling me how her life was being ruined by success—she was so hounded by newspaper people that she couldn’t get any work done. What she needed that evening was the undeviating attention of a naval aide. She was used to being made much of by men; she must have felt rather frighteningly alone.
Everybody now stood up. No one actually rushed to the exit, but everyone sort of started to move in that direction. Lionel went over to talk to Robert Frost, but Lyndon Johnson moved in ahead of him, so Lionel waited. I stood at his side, waiting with him until Johnson had finished. After Lionel and Frost had talked for a moment, we moved toward the door. But just then I saw our aide approaching. “The President would like it very much if you and Mr. Trilling would join him upstairs,” he said. By this time, I felt as if anything could happen, and I was scarcely surprised. Hadn’t Lionel said that he’d tell him about Jackie at Vassar later? And it was only eleven o’clock—why should we go home? The party was just beginning.
Actually, I’ve never been a less important feature in our shared social life. I had nothing to do with this occasion except as Lionel’s wife. Obviously, the President and Mrs. Kennedy knew who Lionel was. Most educated people were acquainted with Lionel’s name, just as they knew the names of Katherine Anne Porter and James Baldwin. These were literary celebrities. But did they read the serious intellectual journals and know that I was a writer, too? I didn’t have to ponder the answer. It was no. The Styrons knew my work. So did Katherine Anne Porter and Farrell and Jimmy Baldwin. But neither of the Kennedys had ever heard of me, of that I’m almost certain. But I didn’t let myself dwell on that aspect of the evening. I was delighted for Lionel, and I was enjoying myself thoroughly.
As my migraine had disappeared, I had drunk several glasses of champagne. I had even sipped some of the wines at dinner. I hadn’t had six Martinis, like Lionel—Lionel couldn’t have been more pleasantly looped, perfect. Pretty soon, we were led into a large empty room, and the aide said, “This is the Oval Room. President Eisenhower worked here. The Kennedy’s don’t use it in that way; they use it for informal entertaining.” There was a sofa in the middle of the room and another at right angles to it, and there were lots of occasional chairs grouped around the sofas very attractively, with little tables and lamps. There were flowers everywhere. The aide who led me in picked out a chair for me. He said that I ought to sit in that chair because it was the color of my dress. I asked if I could smoke. He said, “Of course,” and he brought me an ashtray.
Immediately there sprang up before us, as if out of the ground, a waiter with a tray full of champagne glasses. I took a glass and then my aide said, “Just make yourself at home. The President will be here as soon as he’s free downstairs. Have a good time.” Lionel and I were now alone, sitting in the Oval Room of the White House, and we just looked at each other as though to say, “What in the world are we doing here?” We could scarcely talk to each other. We felt as if we were in a daydream.
At that moment, an aide came in with Rose Styron; a few paces behind them was Bill. They had the same mixed look of pleasure and bewilderment that we did. Rose and Bill struck me as being far more relaxed people than Lionel and I, but they weren’t finding it much easier to talk; the whole situation was so extraordinary.
Then suddenly several people were led in. Robert Frost came in with Mrs. Smith, Bobby Kennedy came in with his wife, Ethel. Then Mrs. Kennedy came in in a bit of a bustle. She was holding a glass of champagne in her left hand and she said, “Oh, hello.” Lionel had sat down on one of the sofas, and I was sitting in a velvet chair next to it. Totally ignoring the Kennedys, Mrs. Kennedy came straight across the room to Lionel. They didn’t count in her life, and she didn’t care who knew it. The men had of course risen when she came into the room, and Rose Styron and I got up as well. There was a wooden chair, sort of in back of the sofa, and she pulled it out—it was a little wooden armchair—and she said, “Every time Lyndon Johnson sits on this chair, he breaks it. He’s broken it three times so far. Now watch me. I’m going to sit on it, and, you’ll see, it won’t break under me. He doesn’t know how to sit.” She had brought the chair right next to Lionel and now she sat down on it, next to him.
“Now,” she looked up at Lionel as he sat down once more. “What did they say about me at Vassar?”
Lionel laughed and replied, “They said that you were a serious student. A very devoted student. And quite shy.”
Jackie repeated after him, “Shy. Yes, I am shy.”
Lionel said, “I’m shy, too.” She looked at him, and they both burst out laughing. She knew that he was teasing her, and she liked it. I heard her say then, “Do you know who was here tonight?” And they began talking, and the conversation between them continued for the rest of the evening. Jackie’s basic courtesy is sharply developed, and until a man came and sat down to talk specifically to me she was careful to try to guide some of her conversation with Lionel to include me. It’s learned courtesy, totally conscious, not imperilled by champagne. But, once I was engaged in a conversation of my own, she fully directed herself to Lionel and never once gave a sign of having any interest in anyone else.
Not long after Jackie came in, the President came in, and with him were the Under-Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. We were fourteen or fifteen people altogether, and I began to understand that having this gathering in the Oval Room, although it included the President’s family and some government people, was really Jackie’s personal part of the evening. She had done her duty as a hostess, gone through the whole official occasion, and now it was her turn to have fun. In fact, I somehow had the impression that these little gatherings upstairs had become a kind of routine after large formal dinners, the price she demanded for having played her public part as conscientiously as she did.
And I felt the Kennedys had to accept Jackie’s terms, because they realized that, for instance, the whole occasion we were having and the way the White House looked and how it ran were her doing—and this was not to mention the response of the public to her charm. She was their billion-dollar asset, and they were far too clever not to recognize it.
When Jackie first came into the room, she had pointed to a wooden rocker and said, “There’s one in every room in the house. They’re eyesores, aren’t they?” She was referring to the rocker that was ordered for the President by his woman physician for his bad back. Jackie called it the President’s health rocker and she said, “Do you know how much money is being made out of this? Do you know how many thousands of these rockers have been sold?”
At one moment, when there was a lull in the room and I thought that somebody ought to say something, I asked Jackie, “Did you have a good time on your trip?” I didn’t mean her Palm Beach trip, and she understood that I meant a previous tour that she had been on. She looked at me and began a little smile, her eyes twinkling. She said, “I had a lovely time,” and she said it in a tone that made it plain to me that she was repeating an official statement and that she hadn’t had a good time at all.
At another point, she said something fairly startling about Khrushchev. In Vienna, a year earlier, she sat next to him at a state banquet. “I was sick with nervousness,” she said. “I didn’t know what I could talk about with him, and I kept asking Jack, ‘What shall I say to him? What do I talk about?’ I kept sitting there wondering what would be an interesting subject of conversation, and I decided to talk about animals. I said, ‘I just love Russian dogs.’ I asked him to send me one, and he did. Jack was furious with me for giving him such a diplomatic advantage.” It was a marvellous story, but if it had got to the newspapers it would have been embarrassing for the President. “I still have that dog,” she said. “It’s around the White House grounds. But the problem is what to do with him. I want to mate him, but I haven’t another Russian dog to mate him with, so I’d have to mate him with an American dog. I’ve been working on it, and I’ve been told that it won’t take: a Russian dog and an American dog won’t mate.”
The President approached Lionel and pulled his chair—rocker—so close to him that they were really knee to knee.
“Well, what did they say about her at Vassar?” he asked Lionel.
Not at all awed, Lionel replied quietly, “They said that she was serious, a devoted student, a good student, shy.” Jackie was just sitting there, watching Lionel’s face.
“Shy, hmm,” said the President. Nobody laughed; they were speaking quietly. I had the impression that the President was not thinking at all about Jackie or whether she had been shy at Vassar. He was looking at Lionel very sharply indeed. In teasing the President’s wife, was he being impertinent to the President? Was he, in fact, that self-assured, and, if so, why? Was his report a literal report of what had been said to him about Jackie? From the answer to these questions the President would know how to place Lionel. All he said was “Linus Pauling was a lot of trouble today. He kept Caroline awake.” And he told the famous story about how Caroline couldn’t take her nap because of the noise on the picket line. “I don’t mind his picketing the White House, but why does he have to picket right under the nursery window and keep the children awake?
Then he got up from his rocker. He’d had his conversation with the Trillings, and now moved on to somebody else. He joined the group around Frost, where the members of his family were seated. Then, sure enough, he went to a corner with Bobby and Salinger and the Inter-American Affairs man. It was plain that they were talking shop, and that for him the party was over. Jackie, however, was still having her party.
I could hear that Jackie had started to talk to Lionel about D. H. Lawrence. She said, “Is it true that ‘The Rainbow’ is Lawrence’s best book?”
Lionel said, “Some people may think so. Myself, I think ‘Women in Love’ is better. What makes you think it’s ‘The Rainbow’?”
“I was reading Compton Mackenzie’s memoirs. He knew all of Lawrence’s work, and he said that he thought ‘The Rainbow’ was his best book.” She added quickly, “Oh, I’m not sure I have that right. I think he said it was ‘The Rainbow.’ Wait a minute.” She jumped up and ran to the next room, which seemed to be a library, returning with the book in her hand. She leafed through it and quickly found the place—she knew how to handle books, how to find what she wanted in them. “Here it is,” she said, and she read it aloud, and it was “The Rainbow” that Mackenzie had been praising. Lionel repeated that although he preferred “Women in Love” “The Rainbow” was a great novel, and they kept on talking about Lawrence and about other writers. Jackie spoke very openly and unpretentiously, including her stepsister Nina in her conversation—Lionel had said he hadn’t remembered her and wanted to be reminded. She spoke very charmingly, and said that she herself had wanted to audit one of Lionel’s classes. She said Nina had been so insistent about being a student of Lionel’s that she had almost made the family move to New York for just that reason. But Nina hadn’t been accepted as a student; she had just audited his classes. She had been getting more and more pregnant. As soon as the baby was born, she had it in mind to go to Columbia and audit courses with Lionel three times a week.
I think it was here that I asked her in what way they were stepsisters. She assured me that she could never explain to anybody how her family worked, that everybody in it was a stepsister or stepbrother to everybody else. “There have been so many marriages in every part of the family—at Christmas it’s a shambles. You don’t know whom you have to send a card to, you don’t know who your relatives really are.”
Through all of this she was very open, in a crisp, modern manner: very sure of herself and reliant on her own wit. But she must have made reference to her husband no fewer than a dozen times—how Jack had been very angry at her, how Jack had told her to stop reading in bed and put out the light. While Lionel was telling the President what they said about Jackie at Vassar, Jackie herself kept looking at her husband, but with a deliberately blank expression.
We somehow knew that the party was over. We wanted it to continue, you could see that. She and Lionel were getting on so splendidly—Lionel really liked her, and she really liked him. It was now twelve-thirty.
The President was standing, and we all rose to leave. We all went over to him and shook hands with him, and I found myself saying what a lovely party it had been, and thank you very much, just as I would to any ordinary host. I had already said good night to Mrs. Kennedy and told her what a charming party it had been. I heard Lionel say to her, “I think you deserve great credit for this evening, everybody had such a wonderful time.” She said, “You see, we used to have to come to the White House when Jack was a senator and the Eisenhowers were here. It was just unbearable. There would be Mamie in one chair and Ike in another. And on Mamie’s right side would be the guest of honor, male, and on Ike’s right side would be the guest of honor, female, and everybody stood, and there was nothing to drink. During that regime, there was never anything served to drink, and we made up our minds, when we came to the White House, that nobody was ever going to be as bored as that. We do try to make it a good party.”
So there we said good night at the door. When we told the President what a wonderful party it had been, he replied that it had been very lovely to have us. He said that in a very warm and personal way, but he was actually looking out the door. Jackie was at the party every moment of it, at least the upstairs part of it, and dying to go on some more. But he was tired and wanted to get to business. Or bed.
Bobby Kennedy led us to an elevator—I guess it was a private family elevator, very large, but not very sturdy-looking, and we all trooped into it. Bobby started to close the door, when suddenly Jackie and Jack Kennedy came down the hall to see us off. It was a bit of a squeeze with so many of us, but Bobby stayed at his post to run it. Jackie said, “Oh, Bob, you can’t crowd this many people into this elevator. Think of the headlines tomorrow morning, with all these distinguished people dead at the bottom of the shaft!”
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” Bobby replied. “Hold on Mr. Frost!” He closed the gate. At our last sight of Jackie, she was waving to us. The car went down, and when we got downstairs we were led by Bobby to another portico, where our wraps were waiting for us. They’d been put there while we were upstairs.
“Are you staying at a hotel in Washington?” Bobby asked me. I said that we were going back to New York by the late-night train. He looked confounded. “The train?” he repeated, as if I had just told him that we were journeying to New York by tandem bicycle. I assured him that I loved night trains, but he shook his head, unbelieving.
I don’t know how we got to the train station—I suppose they had a car waiting for us. We could have danced our way, Lionel and I were so giddy. In fact, we did dance into the train station—I remember that. I had my left arm raised, Lionel had his right arm raised, and he was holding my hand while my mink stole trailed from our enfolded fingers. It was a kind of minuet we performed the length of the Union Station all the way to our train and our compartment. ♦
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