Malicious Wit

Alice Roosevelt Longworth 1884-1980

She was 17 when she first went to live in the White House in 1901, and they called her Princess Alice, and she, as she later recalled, "looked upon the world as my oyster." When a visiting notable whose dignity had been offended by Princess Alice's sprightly interruptions asked her father whether he could not control his daughter, Theodore Roosevelt gave him a stern answer. "I can do one of two things," he said. "I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both."

When Alice Roosevelt Longworth died last week at 96, Washington remembered her as a woman of great charm and elegance. It remembered her glittering marriage to House Speaker Nicholas Longworth and her years as the capital's reigning grande dame. But most of all it remembered the malicious wit that prompted her to keep in her upstairs sitting room a pillow embroidered with the message, "If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me."

Mrs. Longworth may indeed have been the most caustic critic of Washington celebrities in her own long lifetime. A sampler:

Of Calvin Coolidge: "He looked as if he had been weaned on a pickle."*

Of Franklin D. Roosevelt: "One-third mush and two-thirds Eleanor."*

Of Thomas E. Dewey: "How can the Republican Party nominate a man who looks like the bridegroom on a wedding cake?"*

Of Wendell Willkie: "He has sprung from the grass roots of the country clubs of America."

To Senator Joseph McCarthy, who made the mistake of calling her Alice: "The policeman and the trashman may call me Alice. You cannot."

To Lyndon Johnson, who complained that her wide-brimmed hat made her hard to kiss: "That's why I wear it."

Of the statement that she herself was the nearest thing to royalty: "Oh, pish! Utter nonsense!"

Of herself: "A likable old hag."

*She did not claim to have invented these anonymous gems but did give them wide currency.

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