The President's Lady
(See Cover) If U.S. Presidents could be plucked from every walnut tree, complete with silk hat, inaugural speech, and one year's salary absolutely tax free, 999,999 out of a million women would hesitate a long, long time before getting one for themselves.* Even little girls seem to regard the White House with extreme caution. While small boys consistently plan to become President when they grow up, few junior misses waste any time at all plotting to become Presidents' wives. The giddy human female seldom loses her grip on reality. The life of a First Lady is not easy.
Washington has changed immeasurably since 1800, when Abigail Adams left the comforts of Philadelphia to become the first mistress of the presidential mansion, to endure mud streets, the "lies and falsehoods of ... electioneering," and to keep 13 fireplaces going all day "or sleep in wet and dampness." But little more than a year ago, Bess Truman echoed Abigail's discontent. "This is a terrible life," she said. "We don't have any privacy at all. I'll be glad when we get back to Independence and can live like human beings."
This is not to suggest that either Abigail or Bess, or any of the 26 Presidents' wives of the years between, have been completely insensate to the privileges and perquisites of their position, or the bracing effects of power and applause. A few White House wives have enjoyed such heady successes that they left the capital only with the utmost reluctance. But the price of occupancy is always high. Last week, while still technically a private citizen, Mamie Eisenhower was discovering that even public adulation can be an overpowering, if flattering, experience.
The Deluge. Ever since Election Day, Mrs. Eisenhower has been staying close to home--the residency at 60 Morningside Drive which Ike occupied as president of Columbia University. But she has not been idle. She has been deluged with (and has made valiant attempts to answer) from 400 to 700 letters a day.
After inauguration day next week, Mrs. Eisenhower's life will grow even more limited. She will not be able to shop or visit a museum without drawing crowds. If she wishes to attend the theater, any manager in Washington will keep her intentions secret, smuggle her into a seat just before the curtain, and get her out ahead of the crowd. But she will always create a stir. The Secret Service guards, who took her under surveillance when Ike was nominated, will be omnipresent--they will lurk in the next room even if she is lunching at the home of an old friend. She will seldom be out of the news. If she buys a dog, spanks one of her grandchildren, is bitten by a snake or develops a taste for yoghurt, the world will want to chatter about it.
Rewards & Prerogatives. Only time can tell whether the rewards and prerogatives of her new life will compensate for its restrictions and demands. But there will be many prerogatives. If she wishes to travel, airlines, railroads or steamship lines will produce space for her at the ring of a telephone, and hold up schedules with harried smiles if she is late. The President's DC-6 Independence will be hers to command. Hair stylists and dress designers will scramble to serve her, even though Mamie sticks steadily to her bangs, and, despite owning a few Paris gowns, is a great one for ordering little $17.50 dresses and $16.95 hats from department stores. (Last month, with what seemed like a rather heady air, the New York Dress Institute announced that she was one of the world's twelve best-dressed women.) She will have to share a part of the White House with the public -- tourists swarm through its public rooms from 10 to 12 o'clock, five days a week, twelve months of the year --but she will fall heir to comforts & conveniences such as no incoming President's wife has enjoyed since the founding of the Republic.
Dishwashers & Antiques. Reconstruc tion of the 54-room presidential mansion has wiped away the rats, the cockroaches, the sagging floors, the drafts and faulty plumbing which made life miserable for First Ladies of other administrations. The house now boasts a white and stainless-steel electric kitchen in which meals for the largest banquet can be prepared, three automatic dishwashers, a laundry, silk-smooth parquet floors, three elevators, 16 bathrooms, and new paint, new cur- tains, new draperies, as well as its price less old antiques and paintings.
In taking over the great house this month, Mrs. Eisenhower will be assisted by a present complement of 64 (full staff: 72) servants, most of them old retainers, wise in the ways of Washington. If she abandons her lifelong zeal for running a house and never voices a command,, the house will run well. But if she wants to order every meal, redecorate any or all of 35 upstairs rooms (her favorite colors: rose and pale green), shift Lincoln's famed 7-ft. bed, or plant geraniums in the bathtubs, she has every right to do so.*
The Social Whirl. She will inherit a rigid and taxing social schedule into which she will be initiated at once. She must appear, smiling as befits a public darling, at not one but two inaugural balls. Her costume, however, will be far less regal than that of President Tyler's second wife, "the Rose of Long Island," who received on a dais, wearing a crownlike headdress of bugles: Mamie's glittering, wide-skirted inaugural gown, designed by Nettie Rosenstein and purchased from Texas' Neiman-Marcus, is of pale rose poult-de-soie, bespangled by 2,000 rhinestones in varying shades of pink. Mrs. Eisenhower's junior partners as official Washington hostesses are the wives of Cabinet officers. Mrs. John Foster Dulles has been ill--but most of the other ladies were trying on gowns for the inaugural ball and were photographed in their favorites last week (see cuts).
During next winter's White House social season Mamie must hold, at the barest minimum, six state dinners--at which as many as 100 formally clad guests are seated in the State Dining Room--as well as big, formal evening receptions for the Cabinet, the diplomatic corps, the judiciary, Congress, officials of federal departments and agencies and the armed forces.
Mamie is a woman who has always liked small, informal parties and the company of old friends. Henceforth, she will also entertain humanity in the mass--hundreds and often thousands of people are invited to White House garden parties, and the First Lady greets them all. As soon as she is established, the ladies of Washington will begin driving to the northwest gate of the White House to drop calling cards. From then on, the President's wife shuffles and sorts, picks and rejects, and entertains the worthiest (and the luckiest) at an endless succession of afternoon teas and receptions.
It is a prospect which has driven many another new First Lady to attacks of the vapors and an addiction to smelling salts. But life in the White House is what a woman can make it, and politics, too can be fun. Dolley Madison did not hesitate to use the "President's palace" as a stage from which she dominated Washington society, set styles, started fads, charmed and captivated the great men of the U.S. and the diplomats of the world, and held endless, glittering levees, dinners and receptions.
The Other Ladies. Dolley was not the only First Lady to leave her mark on the capital. Stately Elizabeth Kortright Monroe startled society by putting her daughter in pantalets, painted and dressed her self to the hilt (though she was a grand mother), ran the White House like a Eu- ropean court, weathering a series of female squabbles which would have sunk a lesser social frigate. "Lemonade Lucy" Hayes drew masculine scorn for refusing to serve wine. But she had an enthusiastic following, and not on temperance grounds alone. Women throughout the nation, especially that group now classified under the generic name of Clubwomen, thought she was wonderful.
Like everything else in American life, the First Lady's job has become more institutionalized in this generation. As a result, Mrs. Eisenhower will have less scope than her distant predecessors. Even so, she may, if she chooses, cut more swath than the last eight First Ladies.
The White House has not been truly "social" since the day of the first Roosevelts -- who brought money, social position and gusto to Washington and, with unabashed swank, dressed White House servants in their family livery.
Most Washington hostesses of proper vintage remember Mrs. Grace Coolidge as the woman who was most to be admired during the years after Mrs. T. R. Her quiet charm put all at ease -- a considerable feat, since Silent Cal sometimes had a servant rub Vaseline into the presidential hair while he ate breakfast, once ordered a toupee painted on the Red Room portrait of bald John Adams, and often almost paralyzed guests with his wordlessness. The Herbert Hoovers spent a great deal of money on entertainment, but their era was one of work and worry. Eleanor Roosevelt had little interest in purely social affairs. Mrs. Truman has done far more quiet entertaining than is realized; the Washington ladies rate her performance highly.
Great Expectations. As inauguration day grew near last week, however, hundreds of Washingtonians had high hopes for a change not only in the capital's political atmosphere but in that of the White House itself; Mamie Eisenhower is fondly expected to touch off a social renaissance and to lend a new warmth to the affairs of the presidency.
At first glance, it might seem that these well-wishers are doing the next First Lady an unkindness. She is not strong; she suf fers from a heart murmur which makes her hesitate before stairs, and in the past fell prey, for some time, to a disturbance of the inner ear which had a minor but annoying effect on her equilibrium. Last summer she made it clear to her friends that she would have been delighted, if fate allowed, to spend the coming years at the 189-acre farm near Gettysburg, Pa. which she and Ike bought in 1950.
She has never attempted to play the grande dame. During World War II, she was ailing and lived quietly at Washing ton's Wardman Park Hotel. Her social attributes are amiability, a gift for small talk, an ability to put people at ease and to draw them out. She can talk to total strangers as if they were old friends. But the Eisenhower campaign of 1952 demonstrated that Mamie also has a tremendous ability to rise to occasions and an almost startling gift for communicating her charm to the public. Some dubious Ike supporters thought. Mamie might be a drawback to the general--but Mamie turned out to be one of the greatest assets of Ike's campaign.
Rocky Mountain Belle. Her essential character and outlook were formed as the daughter of a well-to-do family in Denver, back in the comfortable years before World War I. Her father, bulky, hearty John Sheldon Doud, had retired as an Iowa meat packer at the gratifying age of 36, had moved his family west, built a massive, three-story brick house on Denver's Lafayette Street, and settled down to enjoy life with his four daughters* and a snorting series of early automobiles.
Mamie was a belle and a leading spirit even as a little girl. "When the rest of us were still getting kicked in the shins by boys," recalls Mrs. Eileen Archibold, a girlhood friend, "one of them gave Mamie a snakeskin. It was a real honor." Mamie made regular Saturday streetcar pilgrimages to the Orpheum Theater to drink in vaudeville performances by Blossom Seeley, De Wolf Hopper, Eva Tanguay, Harry Lauder and other such glamorous figures. She "dressed up" in adult finery at every opportunity. Boys swarmed around the Doud house, and Mamie fed 'them cookies and Welch's grape juice, and allowed them to play at a pool table in a basement game room; as she grew older, they took her dancing . . . and dancing . . . and dancing.
Army Wife. Mamie was bright, but she was no student. She sighed with relief when she was through at Miss Wolcott's, a Denver finishing school, and could turn to the real and fascinating business of her young life: ruling her string of beaux. Then, on a family winter vacation in San Antonio, she met 2nd Lieut. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nine months later, at 19, she was married. She went for a honeymoon visit with Eisenhower's parents in Abilene, Kans., had her marriage's first bitter quarrel -- after Dwight refused, in flat tones, to come home until he had broken even in an all-night poker game. Soon after, she found herself keeping house in a two-room flat at Fort Sam Houston.
It was the beginning of Mamie's real education -- and of a rambling, catch-as-catch-can existence which only an Army wife who remembers the appropriations drought between the two world wars could really appreciate. The cubbyhole at Fort Sam was only the first of some 20 different quarters which Mamie has occupied in the decades since; she learned to clean, decorate, move out; to clean and decorate again; to pay bills and dress on Army pay ; and to catch yet another train.
Sometimes it was wonderful. There was Paris after World War I, when "everyone" came to the Eisenhowers' apartment on the Rue d'Auteuil to have a drink, sing old songs, laugh, and refight the war, and when the nearby Seine bridge was known as "Pont Mamie." But there was also Panama in 1922. Mamie had just lost her three-year-old son, "Little Icky," and was expecting her second. She found herself living amid the damp, stifling tropical heat in an ancient and stilt-supported house. There were bats in the rafters, and tarantulas crept out of cracks in the floor. She learned to know a lot of worlds: Washington, the Army schools, the rainy Northwest. In 1936, when Ike served as assistant to General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines, Mamie found herself living amid rococo splendor in Manila. The next hop took her to an apartment in San Francisco.
Marnes-la-Coquette. During World War II, she just sat tight, played mah-jongg, and kept out of the newspapers. As wife of the president of Columbia University, she did the sensible thing, and acted since she was a stranger to the academic world -- as if she were on some unfamiliar Army post. But at Marnes-la-Coquette, the 14-room French mansion which the Eisen howers occupied when Ike commanded SHAPE, Mamie served a unique appren ticeship for life in the White House.
When 14 French interior decorators swept down to redo its rooms, Mamie remained unawed, and directed their efforts with a firm hand. The results were applauded even by the French. So were her efforts as chatelaine and hostess. At Marnes-la-Coquette, as always, Mamie entertained her old friends as if they were all still young, usually ended up playing the piano while they sang. One New Year's Eve she produced hog jowl and black-eyed peas for a staff dinner: they would, she assured her guests, bring good luck for the coming year. She also entertained scores of military leaders and notables in less colloquial fashion.
Canasta & the Queen. During her tour in Paris she traveled in England, Luxembourg, Sweden, Norway, Holland, Belgium and Denmark. Prime Minister Clement Attlee was her dinner partner at a banquet in London; she lunched with Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard at The Hague and chatted about canasta with her royal hostess. She met Norway's King Haakon in Oslo, saw the British royal family several times in Britain.
After such a background, it seems doubtful that Mamie will be very much awed, although she might still be a little puzzled, by the vast, restless human conglomerate which is Washington society. In a sense it is composed of three rough segments, two of which are continually melting and running and dripping names into each other's cocktail parties and one of which is so deeply buried beneath the cool loam of self-esteem that it is generally all but invisible.
Segment One is official society: Senators, Cabinet members, foreign diplomats, Supreme Court Justices and other officials of Government, each of whom is granted a brass check of social importance when he takes office and generally must surrender it when he leaves. As First Lady, Mamie gets the biggest brass check of all and would rule unchallenged over officialdom if she served boiled dandelion stems at state dinners and introduced roller skating at state receptions.
The Remarkable Covey. Segment Two is composed of the capital's remarkable covey of rich lady climbers and clingers-who capitalize on the fact that Washington is a city almost without nightclubs, theaters or good restaurants. They lure big names by the dozen through the simple promise of good food and entertainment and by plainly implying that no social debt is incurred in accepting. In recent years, most of them, by the very nature of their guests, have been "Democratic" hostesses; last week their faces were turned toward Mamie like diamond-studded sunflowers swiveling east at dawn in search of warmth and sustenance.
Mrs. Eisenhower has given no indication at all as to how she will react to these odd political heliotropes. If she wishes, she may create new "Republican" hostesses simply by conferring favor. She may give the old models new luster by the same process. Though even a -. direct snub would hardly kill such hardy and well-rooted plants in the Washington of 1953, few of them seemed to be taking any chances.
Segment Three of Washington society is the only segment which Segment Three acknowledges. It is composed of the old Washington families, or "Cave Dwellers." Its leaders--generally Republican, generally of advanced age--are inclined to look upon the Eisenhowers as people come to rescue them after 20 years of darkness and horrid sounds. But they will want to look sharply at the deliverers before giving complete approval. The interest in Segment Three is mainly speleological.
Mrs. Eisenhower's principal social drive will not lead her into the exclusive orbit of any of these groups. For years her social mainspring has been this: she thinks Ike is wonderful, and she likes to have people around who think Ike is wonderful. Out of this could come a vast program of political entertaining, not only of Washingtonians, but of visitors from near& far.
On inauguration day there will be few U.S. citizens who will not wish her well--and few who will not hope, however vaguely, to drop in on her at the White House themselves some day.
*One notable exception: Mary Todd Lincoln, who said: "He is to become President of the U.S. one day; if I had not thought so, I would never have married him, for you can see he is not pretty." * The furniture, wallpaper, draperies and paintings in the five main public rooms of the new-White House were approved by the Fine Arts Commission. Presidential families, by general agreement, abide by its decision. But if a President's wife insists on rearranging the furniture, she may do so despite any protests by the commission, Congress or the public. * Two of Mamie's sisters, Eleanor and Eda May, died while in their teens; the third, Mrs. Frances ("Mike") Moore, is the wife of an air transport executive in Washington.
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