Bad Girls, or a Tale of Two Cousins

Even though, alas, I have returned to the grindstone (mostly - I still sneak home for the occasional nap; I'm finding that a wan expression and a faraway look can get me almost anything I want, now that I'm an Established Invalid), I don't want you to think I've given up all the habits of leisure that I enjoyed this spring.  For example, I've just finished doing something I rarely do, reading a recently published book.

Birthday Girl: Yankee Princess

Let's wish a very happy 129th birthday to a woman of extraordinary longevity and vivid personality, someone who through sheer force of character dominated the social life of the American capital (and occupied a significant place in the national imagination) from the middle of the Edwardian era right on through the depths of the Carter administration.

Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth was, in no particular order, a beauty, a wit, a presidential daughter, a political animal, a woman of her time and class, a difficult wife and mother, a crashing snob, a Republican, a feminist (if of a very peculiar kind), a devoted grandmother, a tormentor of presidents and first ladies no matter whether she was related to them, a fashion sensation, a Bull Moose, a survivor, an author, a White House bride, a fierce egalitarian, a prototypical mass-media craze, an aphorist, a Democrat, an activist against racism, and a hell of a hostess, operating out of an Embassy Row townhouse of supreme eccentricity and luxe.  She was the embodiment of the Whitmanesque virtue of contradicting oneself, and so without question a quintessentially American personage.

She is one of my favorite people, for a great many reasons, from her remarkable adventures in Japan and China when dispatched on a quasi-official international tour by President Daddy in 1907, to her serenely mischievous dotage, when she surrounded herself in her mid-'90s with a young and admiring circle of acolytes.  She shone in many ways, through many decades, but rarely more brightly than when she informed the egregious Senator Joe McCarthy, after he declared that he had decided to call her by her first name, "Senator McCarthy, you are not going to call me Alice. The trashman and the policeman on my block call me Alice, but you may not."

She's someone I do hope the current presidential daughters have firmly in mind.  I would hate to see them turn into pale copies of Margaret Truman or the Bush II twins, and certainly when it comes to role models, it's hard to imagine anyone bettering her example...

White House Woman

On this Presidents' Day, let's spend a moment considering the remarkable lady we find here looking quite uncharacteristically benign.  She is, you see, someone rather special in the annals of the American presidency, having been the goad and gadfly of our fearless leaders for the better part of the twentieth Century:  Alice Roosevelt Longworth. 

She started with McKinley (she regarded "the President and poor frail little Mrs. McKinley as if they were two usurping cuckoos" at the inauguration that saw her own father seated as vice president, and she admitted, after his assassination, to the slightest twinge of guilt at having hoped so ardently for his death) and ran straight on through Roosevelts Teddy, her father ("I can be President of the United States or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both," quoth he), and Franklin, her cousin ("nine parts mush and one part Eleanor," quoth she), and ending up with Carter, whom she considered an over-earnest bore and refused to meet. 

She wowed the Dowager Empress of China in 1905 (and therein lies a tale or ten, not to mention gifts of enough fine brocade to keep her in evening gowns for the better part of fifty years), and she was still wowing them 70 years later - her last public appearance was at the official celebration of the Bicentennial.  She played at politics, voting more by instinct than party, and she had, it seems, from start to finish and despite some of the inevitable setbacks and missteps, a fairly marvelous time of it all.  I hope that the current White House daughters give her a thought or two as they head into what we must hope will be their second term - she's a far better role model, heaven knows, than those dreary Bush twins or the dreaded Nixon sisters.  Maybe we'll find them, come 2015 or so, raising a little discreet hell in her memory...

Alice Blue

Alice Roosevelt Longworth! The only White House daughter who's really ever had any style. Forget the lamentable Bush twins, perish the thought of the dowdy Johnson daughters (despite whichever one it was dating George Hamilton), never you mind a thought about Margaret Truman with her singing and bad novels... Oh, I suppose Chelsea had her charms, but they weren't a patch on the international sensation that was Teddy Roosevelt's little girl 'round about 1908:

haughty!

Her wedding was one of the first big Washington media circuses; she got diamonds from Edward VII and pearls from the Dowager Empress of China (whom she'd visited a year or two before, taking away as gifts on that occasion enough bolts of fine silk to outfit her well into her eighties), and sufficient year's supplies of this and that from America's manufacturers to put Star Jones to shame.

And she could clearly work a train!

Sadly, the groom - although fetching enough in his own right in his little moustache -turned out to be something of a stick, and it might not have been the happiest of unions. She went through a dour period as a Washington socialite between the Wars...

It was an era that flattered no one...

Before emerging into what turned out to be a gloriously extended dotage. She lived well into her nineties, gleefully showing up for White House functions, having a very public crush on JFK, and torturing the Nixons, who thought she was making fun of them (she was; Eleanor had the same problem).

To quote her father: Dee-lightful!

Alice will always have a place in my heart, if only for the embroidered sofa cushion that decorated her Massachusetts Avenue drawing room, saying:

If you don't have anything nice to say about somebody, come sit here by me!