The American Chronicle - Hollywood Part 26

"Tell him I can't get enough of Ben Turpin. He reminds me of the Senate ..."

"He reminds me of you, this morning, so undignified." Edith was placid. "Anyway, there was Ellen's old friend on the train in the station, so we did have an intimate talk, surrounded by a thousand curious voters. Then I hurried back here to arrange for lunch, and Woodrow followed me."

Caroline could see why Edith was less than pleased to divide the Biblical day of rest between a lady-friend of the first wife's and her husband's former mistress. Mary didn't add to Edith's joy when she said to Wilson, "Do you remember this dress?"

It helped even less when Wilson nodded and said, "You wore it in May of 1915, at the White House."

Edith raised her menu. "What," asked Edith in a voice of muted thunder, "is-or are-abalone?"

Fortunately, the President's pa.s.sion for movies now surpa.s.sed that of his ancient pa.s.sion for Mary, so Caroline gained innumerable points in Edith's eyes by telling as many Hollywood stories as she could think of. The President was particularly interested in what his son-in-law, McAdoo, had accomplished with United Artists.

During lunch, Tumulty would look in from the next room, and say, "Converts, sir," and Wilson would be obliged to go into the next room and shake hands with visiting delegations. Mary and Edith would then discuss the merits and demerits of California, a state that they had, finally, rejected for retirement as being too far away. Edith did not specify from what.

Finally, converts and lunch done with, they sat in the sitting room of the suite, and Mary described how persons unknown but suspected had ransacked her house and stolen letters from Wilson. "Which darling Caroline was offered and rejected, which is why I invited her here."

"Who offered them to you?" Edith turned to Caroline but her eyes never left the President's weary face.

"A journalist that we know. He wouldn't say how he'd got them. Journalists never do. I turned them down, of course."

"To think, poor Mary, you've had to go through all this for me." Wilson sighed.

"Well," said Edith, with an attempt at lightness, "where there's so much smoke there must be some fire."

"But surely you were not von Bernstorff's mistress." Mary's sudden savage riposte made it quite clear why Wilson had once delighted in her company. Before Edith had married Wilson, she had indeed known-how well?-the notorious German amba.s.sador.

Edith handled the a.s.sault with a liquid Southern charm that involved a simulated Negroid chuckle of delight followed by, "I declare, the stories that they invent about us are a lot more interesting than the movies."

Fortunately, Wilson had not noticed-or taken in-this exchange. "I've considered resigning," he suddenly said; and put his finger to his lips, as a not entirely mock warning that all this was secret.

"But you look so well." Mary was interested now in her own problems, and Caroline could see that a letter from the President to, perhaps, her landlord might be required.

"Not on grounds of health. On the League of Nations. If I have difficulties with the Senate, and I pray after this tour I won't but if I do, I shall propose that we all resign, the Vice President and I and the senators opposed, and that we then hold a national election to determine whether or not the League be accepted."

Caroline could not believe that the President was serious; but when she saw Edith's Buddha-like bobbing of the head, she realized that Wilson had entered a new and dangerous phase. "The governors are willing, we hear," said Edith. "They are the ones who must call the election, state by state."

"Then you'll have that parliamentary government you've always wanted." Mary allowed herself to be distracted, for the moment, by history.

Wilson smiled. "I hadn't thought of that. But I suppose that is what we'd be doing, going to the country, as the English say, and on a great issue rather than the usual politics. It would be such a pleasure to concentrate those bungalow-minds in the Senate on something that matters." Then Mary returned with gentle persistence to the financial problems of her son; and of the high cost of living in Los Angeles. Edith smiled and glowered at the same time.

Caroline was embarra.s.sed by the monotony of Mary's self-absorption. On the other hand, the President gazed at her raptly, as if she were still enchanting and he enchanted. Then Grayson entered. It was the end of the audience.

Edith rose. "You were so good to come see us," she said to Mary, who had just begun to describe the possibility of going into partnership with the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe, as a Los Angeles a.s.sociate.

Edith left the room, to get Mary's coat. Caroline moved-no, glided-to the window, to put as much distance as she could between the star-crossed couple. She tried not to listen, as she gazed toward Culver City set amongst so many aggressive onion fields whose flatness was abruptly broken by the colonnaded Southern-mansion-style studio of Thomas H. Ince, her first producer, whose callers were received not by the usual studio policeman but by a gracious Negro butler in full livery.

"What can I do?" Wilson's voice was low but not low enough for Caroline's sharp ears.

"You could help my son. In New York. Here. I've written his name and address."

"But what about you?"

"Such a pretty coat," said Edith; and Caroline turned to face the curious triangle. Farewells were made. But Wilson insisted on accompanying the ladies to the elevator. Edith remained behind, in all her bland immensity.

As the policeman held the lift door open, Mary suddenly recited, " 'With all my will, but much against my heart, we two now part.' " There were tears in Wilson's eyes as the two women entered the elevator; and the doors shut. In silence, Caroline and Mary rode down to the lobby. Next to the cashier's grille, Mary paused. "Do they know you here, dear?"

"I suppose so," said Emma Traxler, known to all.

"Could you help me cash just the tiniest check? I've been so busy working on your picture, and now, of course, it's Sunday. ..."

Emma Traxler obliged a reluctant cashier to cash the check. At least, the President had been spared the indignity of endorsing Mary Hulbert's check.

2.

THE VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES stared into Cicero's blank marble eyes while Burden sat back in his leather swivel chair, feet on his desk. "That," said Marshall, finally, "is about as good a likeness of old Bryan as I've ever seen."

Burden nodded gravely. It was an on-going source of joy to him that no one had ever recognized the life-size bust as being of Cicero. One and all thought it Bryan, Burden's political progenitor.

After one of the hottest summers in memory, autumn-had been hot, too; and now, in October, the leaves had not turned but simply burned and fallen and the Capitol looked chalky and bare on its brown hill.

Marshall sat beside the fire and lit a cigar that had cost rather more than the "good five-cent cigar" which he had once so memorably said the country needed. "You been to the other end lately?"

Thus they referred to the White House at the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Burden shook his head. "Tumulty won't even let me speak to Mrs. Wilson."

"It's been bad," said Marshall. "Now it's worse. The President's dying."

"Who told you?" Burden's amazement was not so much at the startling news as at the fact that anyone had been able to learn anything about what was going on behind the padlocked White House gates.

"I can't say. Tumulty says he'll get word to me. But doesn't. Grayson is a doctor, and they don't talk-except when they do. Mrs. Wilson is presidentess. ... And all they do is feed us the official line about how there was the nervous breakdown, whatever that is, on the train, and so they had to come whipping back to Washington. It sounds like he had some sort of stroke, which is why he can't appear in public. Now this morning they found him flat on the bathroom floor. It seems he's paralyzed and his kidneys don't work, and the sons-of-b.i.t.c.hes refuse to tell the country or me, the vice president, anything at all. What news I get is through the grape vine."

Although Burden personally liked Wilson, the matter was now beyond personality. It was not a man that was sick, but a political system that was paralyzed. "Have you talked to Lansing?"

"Not today. He's been running the Cabinet in an ad hoc way, and they all go on looking after their departments like they do anyway, but dear G.o.d, we've got a steel strike on our hands and a coal strike-and winter coming on-and there's martial law in Omaha, thanks to that n.i.g.g.e.r-lynching, and there's Lodge-"

"There's Lodge. If I were you, I'd collect Lansing and go to the White House and ask to see the President and if they say no, invoke the Const.i.tution and remove him from office until such time as he is able to exercise his duties." Burden's line was hard; and precise. The American government could not function without an executive despite the pretensions of peac.o.c.k-like senators.

"I just don't dare." Marshall looked forlorn. "Lansing mentioned the subject to Mrs. Wilson and she about bit his head off."

Burden thought how different things would be if he, and not Marshall, had been vice president. "How long can they string everybody along?"

"Who's to stop them? Do you realize," Marshall's cigar had gone out, "that he could die, and Grayson and Tumulty and the lady could go right on pretending he was just fine?"

"He still has to sign bills. Hitchc.o.c.k has got four of them right now, on his desk, including prohibition, and if he doesn't sign or veto them, they'll be the law in ten days."

"Christ, Burden. You know and I know that any one of our secretaries can sign our names just as good as we can."

The two men lapsed into silence. The first American regency had begun and there was nothing to be done about it as long as the President's wife and doctor said that he was competent. Meanwhile, the League, for which Wilson had given if not his life his health and probably sanity, could still be salvaged. Lodge had agreed to the principle of two leagues. One in the eastern hemisphere and one in the western, where the Monroe Doctrine roamed. In concert, the two would be stronger and less dangerous than one. Finally, as much as Lodge hated Wilson and all his works-the anti-League forces that he led proudly called themselves the Battalion of Death-Lodge was also an internationalist New England senator and he saw the folly of letting go so potential an instrument as a world league to be led by the United States; hence, his invention of an Augustus of the west and one of the east. But now there was no president to deal with, and his lawful successor sat helplessly staring into Burden's fireplace, a dollar cigar between his teeth.

It was not until November 17 that Burden and Hitchc.o.c.k were summoned to the White House. Hitchc.o.c.k had been once before and he warned Burden not to show surprise at what he saw.

"What about what I hear?"

Hitchc.o.c.k did not answer, as the White House gates were un-padlocked, and their long Packard drew up to the north portico. The day was cold and dry and there were, everywhere, dirty drifts of old snow, left over from the recent coastal blizzard which always coincided so neatly with coal miners' strikes. Currently, nearly four hundred thousand miners had refused to go back to work and their leader, John L. Lewis, publicly doubted if General Wood's men could dig enough coal with their bayonets to warm the nation.

Mrs. Wilson and Admiral Grayson were waiting for them in the upstairs hall. Each wore an incongruous smile; each looked as if he had not slept for a week. Otherwise, the usually busy corridor was like a hospital's terminal ward. No secretary sat at Miss Benson's desk, on which, Burden noted, Mrs. Wilson's handbag and knitting rested. Plainly, she spent a good deal of time at the desk, guarding the door. "We have wonderful news, gentlemen," said Mrs. Wilson. "He's in a wheelchair, and this afternoon we're going outside for the first time."

"The recovery has been astonishing, really astonishing," said Admiral Grayson.

"From what?" Burden was not feeling in the least like a courtier. Hitchc.o.c.k gave him a hard look but the conspirators were prepared for the questions.

"First, exhaustion from the tour. Then what we feared might be uremia. Then a prostate condition which has come and, with medication, gone."

"We wanted no operation, Woodrow and I, though some doctors did. Thank G.o.d, we didn't. Now he's on the mend." With a bright laugh, Mrs. Wilson led them into the bedroom.

The President was carefully arranged in a wheelchair in front of a window whose light put him in silhouette so that it was difficult to make out the features of the right side of his face, while the left was turned to the window. He wore a shawl from which he extended his right hand and, firmly, shook hands with each senator.

The President was completely unrecognizable. For one thing, he wore a long white beard that looked like a vaudevillian's prop. The normally lean face was now cadaverous; and the speech slightly slurred. The rumor was true, after all. Wilson's left side was paralyzed. Whatever his other problems, he had had a severe stroke. "I am not the picture of rude health," he said, with half a smile. The left side of the mouth, though turned away, could be seen to fall as the right went up. "But compared to what I was a few weeks ago, I am a boy again." He gestured with his right hand at Grayson, who, reluctantly, withdrew. To Burden's surprise, Edith sat nearby, taking notes on their conversation. What were the regents up to?

"We have had quite a few royal visitors." The President was deliberately chatty. "The Prince of Wales wanted to know which room his grandfather had slept in, that was back in Buchanan's time. I told him how his grandfather had escaped one night, through a window, to go to a party. He wanted to know which window." Wilson raised his right hand, almost airily, then let it fall into his lap. "Then the King and Queen of the Belgians returned our visit to them. I wore a sweater, thinking it less compromising than a dressing gown. The Queen told the press that a sweater was worn, which came out as 'torn,' depicting me as some sort of derelict, and a hundred good ladies have sent my wife b.a.l.l.s of wool to repair me." The head swivelled toward the senators. "I want the revised preamble to the treaty deleted. If it isn't, I'll pocket-veto the treaty, reservations and all."

"Then, sir, am I to instruct the senators of our party to vote against the treaty if the preamble stays?"

Wilson nodded. "Don't you see if I refuse to veto but don't accept the treaty with reservations-just put it in a drawer-Lodge can't say that I killed my own League?"

"But isn't that what you're doing?" Logic, no matter how exquisite, that rested upon a false hypothesis tended to annoy Burden.

"No." The voice of the history teacher was flat and cold. "It will be clear to the country when the Democratic senators vote against the treaty that the treaty no longer is what it was. Then when the Senate goes into recess, the public and the press will have the time to convince at least two-thirds of the senators that Lodge's game is simply partisan malice and not a reflection of those crowds I saw in the West, day after day, until ..." The voice stopped.

"Surely," said Burden, "some treaty is better than no treaty at this point ..."

"The President must take his medicine," said Mrs. Wilson. She was on her feet. The senators rose. Wilson extended his right hand to each man; again, the grasp was startlingly strong.

"Perhaps," said Hitchc.o.c.k, always tactless in Burden's eyes, "the time has come to hold out the olive branch."

"Let Lodge do that." The white-bearded old man looked to be carved from ice.

In the hallway, Mrs. Wilson turned to Hitchc.o.c.k. "I think you're right, Senator. I would accept any reservations to get this awful thing settled, so that he can get well again. But he said. 'Little girl,' " her obsidian-dark, narrow Indian eyes were bright with tears, " 'don't you desert me. I couldn't bear that. I have no moral right to accept any change in a paper that I have signed without giving all the other signers, even the Germans, the right to do the same thing. It's not that I will not accept: it is the nation's honor that is at stake.' "

Hitchc.o.c.k was visibly moved. Burden was, he hoped, invisibly enraged. "What does Colonel House advise?"

"I don't know. We've not seen him." This confirmed the rumor that House had been excluded from the President's councils. "I'm told he is in Washington. But our door is shut now, I'm afraid."

"Even to Lord Grey?" The British foreign secretary had arrived the previous month to a.s.sure everyone that His Majesty's Government would not strenuously object to Lodge's various reservations as long as there was, at the end, a world League of Nations. But the President would not see him because, according to Alice Longworth, whose gossip was always lurid but no less accurate for that, one of the British emba.s.sy aides had made an unforgivable joke about Mrs. Wilson (Question: "What did Mrs. Galt do when the President proposed to her?" Answer: "She fell out of bed"), and though Mrs. Wilson had demanded the aide's dismissal, Lord Grey had said no, and now his lordship was being punished and the door was shut to him as well as to Colonel House.

"The Prince of Wales brought up the subject! Imagine involving a boy in such a matter! We only saw him because his parents had been so nice to us when we arrived in the middle of their Christmas holidays. Anyway, we owe nothing to Lord Grey, quite the contrary." A bell rang from the bedroom.

"Don't go," she said, and hurried into the sickroom.

"Let's talk to the Vice President." Burden was hard.

"I did. He won't make a move. You know how they keep in touch with him?" Hitchc.o.c.k was now whispering. "Tumulty tells this friend of his on the Baltimore Sun what's going on here and he tells Marshall."

"Then maybe we'll have to go to law to get these people out." Burden was amazed at his own anger and perfect lack of compa.s.sion. Either the nation was serious or it was not. Either there was a functioning president or there was a dangerous absence that could not be filled by a loyal wife and a naval doctor.

"But he's not disabled. He vetoed the Volstead Act. He's out of bed ..."

The loyal wife returned. "The President says that Democrats are to vote against the treaty but instead of saying that they are defeating it, they are only nullifying it."

On that note, the Minority Leader of the Senate and his deputy departed. Burden saw nothing but disaster ahead; and a Republican president the next year.

3.

JESS AND THE d.u.c.h.eSS SAT WITH THE McLEANS in the Senate gallery. Once again all Washington had a.s.sembled to see the Battalion of Death crush the President and the League of Nations. Below them, W.G. waved to the d.u.c.h.ess as senators streamed onto the floor. In fact, the entire Senate would be present to hear Lodge present his committee's report. Then, after a discussion, the League would be put to a vote. W.G. had already been asked by Lodge to open the debate for the Republican side in support of the revised League which then the Democrats would, confusingly, vote to nullify.

"Warren's very nervous," said the d.u.c.h.ess to Evalyn McLean. "He's been practicing for days in front of the mirror."

"I thought he just made it up as he goes along." Evalyn was now very like her old self; on the other hand, Ned was sober, a sign of some new development in his character, or liver.

Jess looked about the crowded gallery. The self-styled Colonel of the Battalion of Death, Alice Longworth, was accompanied by Ruth Hanna McCormick, daughter to Mark Hanna, wife to Medill McCormick, recently elected senator from Illinois, young and aggressive and ambitious, and brother to Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. Medill was going to be president one day, everyone said, including Alice, who doted on his wife, a lady as fiercely partisan as she. The two women held court at the end of the row. A number of senators cl.u.s.tered about Alice, who was like that woman who knitted beside the guillotine in one of Jess's favorite movies. Whenever she dropped a st.i.tch, she said kill, kill, kill.

Jess had actually heard Mrs. Longworth call Senator Lodge "Senator Wobbly" because he had been intent on establishing some sort of non-Wilsonian league. Meanwhile, whenever any senator dared suggest that the magnificent Theodore Roosevelt had ever so much as dreamed of a league, she would send him a stern note from the gallery. Alice had been chosen by Heaven and herself to be the keeper of the Roosevelt flame as well as the promoter of the Roosevelt heir, General Leonard Wood, the progressive Republican candidate who had so recently delighted the country by breaking up strikes with troops in an all-out war against what he called "radicalism," to which Jess could only say "amen." But Daugherty thought General Wood would fizzle out. When he did, the party would turn to W.G. Thus far, W.G. had been noncommittal.

There was a stir in the chamber as the Vice President sauntered through the swinging doors and climbed the steps to the high throne, and muttered something to the parliamentarian who was never far from his side. Then Thomas R. Marshall brought down his gavel hard. The Senate was in session, and even Alice Longworth was stilled.

Senator Lodge, more than ever like a b.u.mblebee gone white from too much-presidential pollen?-delivered the Foreign Relations Committee report on the treaty, with fourteen reservations, one for each of Wilson's famous Fourteen Points. Then Senator Harding rose to endorse the committee's hard work.

Jess thought W.G., as always, magnificent. He used all six of his famous gestures in the most natural way. The voice had enormous power. The arguments, whether good or not, thrilled Jess and the gallery. Even Alice Longworth rose and cheered him when he proclaimed, "It is my deliberate conviction that the League of Nations Covenant as negotiated at Paris either creates a super-government of the nations which enter it or it will prove the colossal disappointment of the ages. I cannot believe this republic ought to sanction it in either case."

Only the Vice President's threat to clear the gallery brought to an end this thrilling outburst. Those in favor of the League seemed half-hearted, to say the least. Burden Day was as eloquent as Harding but received no applause because he favored the original League as approved by President Wilson at Paris, and not the one that Lodge had so skillfully re-created. Day also suggested that a compromise in the form of two leagues might be acceptable to everyone, but this was received in uncomprehending silence.

As the hours pa.s.sed, Jess grew wearier and wearier, but the d.u.c.h.ess would not budge until the thing was over. At shortly before eleven in the evening the mellifluous Senator Underwood, a rival to Hitchc.o.c.k for the minority leadership, proposed an unconditional resolution to ratification.

The Vice President then asked for a vote; and the President's league was briskly defeated at the request of the President, who would not accept any of Lodge's handiwork. Then Lodge, master now in his own house, asked for a vote on Wilson's own treaty, without reservations. Since all the Republicans save one voted against the League, the war between Lodge and Wilson was over; and Lodge was the victor.

As the gallery cheered, the d.u.c.h.ess rose and applauded the Senate as if she had just watched the curtain fall on a particularly satisfying play. Then she and Jess pushed their way through the mob to the rotunda, where Harding was waiting for them.

"We've just had an invitation," he said.

"You go. I'm going home." The d.u.c.h.ess was firm. "My ankles are killing me."