Wife's Story

Living quietly in a comfortable brick house on Washington's S Street for the past 18 years, drawing a $5,000 yearly pension from the Government and occasionally entertaining a few friends at bridge, has been a buxom dowager of 66 who once set the U. S. on its ear. That was in the fall of 1915 when as Edith Boiling Galt, handsome, middle-aged widow of a Washington jeweler, she consented to marry 58-year-old Thomas Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the U. S. This week Mrs. Edith Boiling galt Wilson once more made news when she published a big, chatty, contentious 360-page autobiography, My Memoir.*

For contention, which started when Satevepost recently serialized excerpts from her story, Widow Wilson furnished plenty of material. Friends of Woodrow Wilson's faithful Irish Secretary Joseph Patrick Tumulty, now a high-powered Washington lobbyist, hotly dispute Mrs. Wilson's accounts that he 1) tried to get Wilson interested in the since exploded story that Warren Gamaliel Harding had Negro blood; 2) faked a Wilson endorsement of James Middleton Cox for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1924. And, though by U. S. etiquette a President's wife is usually as sacred as a President, in the Washington smartchat The Senator Helen Essary, wife of the Baltimore Sun's longtime Washington Correspondent Jesse Frederick Essary, coolly observed: "History has marked Woodrow Wilson as a hero. The intimate story of his public and personal . . . life should not have been written by a frivolous wife."

Some of Widow Wilson's stories which last week had Washington gossiping:

> The courtship of the third President of the U. S. to woo and win in the White House.* began when he met Mrs. Galt, who was brought to the White House one day by the President's Cousin Helen Bones. They had a laugh together over her muddy shoes, his disheveled golf suit. Later she joined the family circle when Woodrow Wilson read aloud, went for automobile rides with him and Miss Bones. Barely two months later when the President proposed marriage, she was so surprised that she blurted: "Oh, you can't love me, for you don't really know me; and it is less than a year since your wife died." Said Woodrow Wilson: "Little girl, in this place time is not measured by weeks, or months, or years, but by deep human experiences."

>Sober Woodrow Wilson liked to put on a record in the Oval Room after dinner and practice a jig step, envied minstrel dancers because they "took on no more at their hearts than they could kick off at their heels." Another diversion of the 28th President of the U. S.: after long White House receptions he "loved to get upstairs and twist his face about. . . . He could make his ears move and elongate his face or broaden it in a perfectly ludicrous way."

> Puzzled by the nervousness with which famed Artist John Singer Sargent undertook a portrait of her husband, Mrs. Wilson found that Sargent had been talking to Henry Cabot Lodge, who had told him that the portrait "presented a great opportunity for the artist to serve his Party." Reason: Sargent's skill in finding the animal counterparts of human beings, "thus reveal some hidden beastly trait."

> Two celebrities whom Mrs. Wilson did not warm to were Queen Marie of Rumania, who referred to her "passionate" daughter Ileana as "my love child," and Britain's Margot Asquith, who struck "matches as I have seen certain men do, on their own anatomy." > Even before Woodrow Wilson broke with Secretary of State Lansing and Colonel House, Mrs. Wilson was convinced that both were disloyal. When she called House a "jellyfish" for making concessions at the Peace Conference during Wilson's absence, Woodrow Wilson answered: "Well, God made jellyfish, so, as Shakespeare said about a man, therefore let him pass, and don't be too hard on House."

> When Mrs. Wilson "in desperation" asked her husband to accept the Hitchcock reservations to the Treaty of Versailles in order to get it ratified by the Senate and have "this awful thing settled," he replied: "Little girl, don't you desert me. . . . Better a thousand times to go down fighting than to dip your colours to dishonorable compromise."

>After the stroke that paralyzed Woodrow Wilson's left side, ended his nationwide speaking tour for the League, left him an invalid for the rest of his life, he was visited by a Senate subcommittee, ostensibly to discuss a Mexican treaty, actually to decide on his fitness to continue in office. Leader was New Mexico's Albert B. ("Teapot Dome") Fall, who entered the room "looking like a regular Uriah Heap, 'washing his hands with invisible soap in imperceptible water.' " Said Senator Fall: "Well, Mr. President, we have all been praying for you." Said the President: "Which way, Senator?"

* Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50) * First, John Tyler; Second, Grover Cleveland.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.