Hollywood by Gore Vidal Read Free Book Online Page A

happening,” said Caroline, the editor. “The President’s busy arming those ships that you willful men in the Senate said he shouldn’t.” Although the celebrated American Constitution was a perfect mystery to Caroline, this did seem wrong. “How can he?” She turned to Burden.
    “Oh, he can, if he wants to. He can call it ‘military necessity,’ the way Lincoln did.”
    “Lincoln! War!” Mrs. Bingham was ecstatic. “I wasn’t born then, of course,” she lied. “But I’ve always wanted to live through a war. I mean
a real one
, not like the Spanish nonsense.”
    “I suppose that’s all that anyone ever wants to do.” Caroline was not well-pleased. “Live through it.”
4
    James Burden Day walked up the steps to the north portico of the White House, where he was greeted by an usher who led him across the entrance hall to the small electric elevator. “Mrs. Wilson will be waiting for you in the upstairs hall. The President’s in bed. The chill stays with him.”
    Burden was struck by the calm of the White House. There was no sign of emergency. A few politicians could be seen, showing friends the state apartments. Of course, the executive offices were in a separate wing to the west of the mansion, and although telephones never ceased to ring in the offices, there was, as yet, none of that tension which he remembered from the days of McKinley and the Spanish war, not to mention the tremendous bustle of the Roosevelt era when children and their ponies were to be seenindoors as well as out, and the President gave the impression of presiding simultaneously in every room with a maximum of joyous noise.
    The Wilson White House was like the President himself: scholarly, remote, and somewhat lady-like. The President had been entirely devoted to his first wife. Now he was besotted by her successor. He was easily the most uxorious of the recent presidents; he also had the fewest friends. Ill-at-ease with men, Wilson preferred the company of women, particularly of his three daughters, gracious replicas of himself, ranging from the sad plainness of the spinster Margaret, who wanted to be a singer, to the dim beauty of Eleanor, married to the secretary of the Treasury, William G. McAdoo, to the equine-featured Jessie, married to one Francis B. Sayre.
    The elevator stopped. The glass-panelled door opened. Burden found himself in the familiar upstairs corridor that ran the length of the building from west to east. In the old days, the President’s offices had been at the east end and the living quarters at the west, with the oval sitting room as a sort of no-man’s-land at dead center. But Theodore Roosevelt’s family had been big; ambitious, too. He had added the executive wing to the mansion, while converting the entire second floor for himself and his family: successors, too, of course.
    The wife of the most despised of his two despised successors stood opposite the elevator, waiting for Burden. Edith Boiling Galt Wilson was a large, full-breasted woman whose wide face contained small regular features, reflecting the Indian blood that she had inherited, she claimed, from Pocahontas. The smile was truly charming. “Senator Day! Now tell me the absolute truth. Did the usher refer to me as Mrs. Wilson or as the First Lady?”
    “I think he said ‘Mrs. Wilson.’ ”
    “Oh, good! I hate ‘First Lady’ so! It sounds like something out of vaudeville, with Weber and Fields and me as Lillie Langtry.”
    Burden was aware that she was the focal point of a heavy jasmine scent that ebbed and flowed in her wake as she led him to the end of the hall where a desk with two telephones had been placed beneath a great fanlight window that looked out on the executive offices to the west and the State War and Navy Building to the north. At the desk sat Edith’s social secretary, Edith Benham, an admiral’s daughter who had replaced the magnificent Belle Hagner, a queen of the Aboriginal City, and secretary to the first Mrs.