It was a chance encounter he would treasure for the rest of his life and a date he would long remember: January 4, 1904. He had recently returned from a month-long stay in Japan to conclude his eighteen-month travel and decided to attend a dance at the Hotel Somerset in Boston. It was there that he saw “a lovely creature” who, he was told, had also just returned from Japan. He knew that could be a point of common interest and asked a friend to introduce him to the young lady. But his friend became preoccupied, and so Joe Grew turned to another friend and asked him to make the introduction.
To his surprise, the friend brought him to a different woman: Alice de Vermandois Perry, a tall, vivacious twenty-year-old beauty with long dark hair. As it turned out, Alice too had just returned from Japan. Not yet endowed with diplomatic skills, the twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate blurted out, “I didn’t intend to meet you!” Quick-witted and assertive, Alice responded in kind, but the two nonetheless agreed to dance. The other woman (Maya Lindsley) was quickly forgotten, and for young Joe, the chase was on. There were further dates as well as notes and flowers delivered by Suzuki, Joe’s Japanese valet, and it appeared that the couple was moving toward marriage.
It would be a union well suited to Joe’s background. Alice possessed impeccable family credentials. Her father was Thomas Sergeant Perry. He was not only an educator and prolific writer in his own right; he was also the grandson of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, the famous naval commander of the early nineteenth century whose brother was Commodore Matthew C. Perry, the naval commander who engineered the 1854 treaty that opened Japan to trade with the West. Alice’s mother was Lilla Cabot Perry, the renowned impressionist painter whose friendship with Claude Monet had been spawned by the many summers that Lilla and her family had spent in Giverny, France, as Monet’s neighbor.
Joe was living with a family in Tours, France, some months after meeting Alice when he learned that he had gotten the job as a clerk in the Cairo embassy. He returned immediately to Boston and proposed to Alice before making the trip to Cairo. He returned to Boston later in the year, and they were married on October 7, 1905.
Joe and Alice’s life together had an inauspicious start when the ship carrying their wedding presents to Cairo was lost in a storm off the Barbary Coast. Matters took another, more serious turn for the worse shortly after Joe and Alice arrived in Mexico City in September 1906. Alice had just given birth to their daughter Edith in Giverny, where Alice was staying with her parents. Before too long, Alice was stricken with a near fatal condition that defied diagnosis but that left her partially paralyzed and required that she be immediately transported to Boston for treatment. She eventually recovered most but not all of her physical functions. There was nothing that could be done to restore the dexterity in her hands, and Alice was forced to abandon any hope of continuing to play the piano, one of her many passions.
The source of Alice’s condition was never determined, but it was the impetus for Joe receiving a new assignment. It was apparently believed that the high altitude of Mexico City contributed to Alice’s condition (and in later years she was diagnosed with Meniere’s Disease, which can cause a person to lose his or her balance, especially at high altitudes). Whatever the cause of Alice’s condition, the Grews were relocated to St. Petersburg in May 1907. Their daughter Lilla was born there in November 1907, followed by Anita in Berlin in 1909, and then Elsie in Vienna in 1912.
Joe and Alice formed a tight-knit circle with their children, giving them nicknames and lavishing time on their development and activities. For her part, Alice would read them stories in French from the time they were little girls. Joe encouraged their involvement in sports and would later follow Anita in a rowboat in 1931 when she swam nineteen miles from the mouth of the Black Sea through the Bosporus, which separates the Asian portion of Turkey from the European portion of Turkey. In time, the family circle included Maria Langer—whom the family called “Mizzie”—a short, slightly plump girl whom Alice originally hired as a seamstress in Vienna but who soon assumed many other roles, including help with the children. Mizzie would remain with the Grews for the rest of her life, and, in later years she would tell the children and grandchildren how touched she was by the many courtesies the Ambassador showed her—opening the door for her, carrying her luggage, and otherwise treating her like a daughter.
Alice was devoted to the children, but Joe remained her first priority. When war came to Europe in 1914, she rented a house in Boston and sometimes left the children there with Mizzie and a governess to visit Joe in Berlin (meaning that Alice would have to sail through the submarine-infested waters of the North Atlantic).
In later years, the family would spend time in Hancock, a quaint community in southern New Hampshire. The Perry family had purchased land there to build homes for family members. Joe and Alice were given a particular plot that they used to build a home they affectionately called the “cottage.” Before the Pearl Harbor attack, the Grews would often return there when Joe was granted leave. But the bond among family members remained strong wherever they were. Joe referenced that bond in a 1941 letter to Tippy, their nickname for Lilla, who was then living with her husband Jay Pierrepont Moffat in Canada, where he was the American minister. “[W]e are so blessed in our family closeness,” said the doting father, “and so much more than the often more or less conventional love that exists between members of some families that we can be happy even in absence.”
It was a way of life that seemed to give them all untold pleasure. But none of that could forestall tragedy. Edith (nicknamed “Didi”) died at the age of seventeen in the spring of 1924 after contracting scarlet fever during a school trip to Venice. Joe was in Boston (on his way to Washington to become Under Secretary of State). The event hit him hard, but Alice was particularly devastated. Years later, one family member would say that Alice never “really recovered” and that, to offset the pain, she “very much spoiled” Elsie, the youngest daughter.
Despite that loss, Alice remained a vital part of Joe’s professional life. Although she had little formal education because of her parents’ travels, Alice was a well-informed woman of many strong opinions that she was willing, if not eager, to share with her husband. And he was willing to listen. “I am so built,” Joe explained in a letter to Elsie a few months before the Pearl Harbor attack (when she was living in Chile with her husband Cecil Lyon, a Foreign Service officer), “that I like to discuss such problems with Mummy, and she often gives me very sound advice on which I often act. I very seldom send an important letter or telegram without consulting her.…”
On occasion, Alice could take undue advantage of her husband’s deference. There was the time in the summer of 1939 when Grew was interviewing Marshall Green, a Groton alumnus and recent Yale graduate, about becoming the Ambassador’s next private secretary. The two men were sitting in the library of the Grew home on Woodland Drive in the Northwest section of Washington. Grew was on leave from the Embassy, and he and Alice were spending part of the summer in the nation’s capital. At one point in the conversation, a woman’s voice penetrated the wall, saying, “Whom are you speaking to, Joe dear?”
“I’m speaking to Marshall Green.”
“Who is he, for heaven’s sake?”
“He’s interested in being my private secretary,” Joe replied.
“Oh.”
Grew resumed the conversation but was soon interrupted again by the woman’s voice.
“Ask him, Joe, if he plays bridge.”
The question may have startled Green, but it did not surprise Grew. He knew that bridge was one of his wife’s passions. Grew asked the question, and Green responded, “I’m crazy about bridge, Mr. Ambassador.”
Joe turned to the wall and said, “He’s crazy about bridge, Alice.”
That brought an immediate response from beyond the wall. “Well, take him, Joe,” said Alice. “Take him, and let’s get it over with.”
So Marshall Green traveled to Tokyo in October to become the Ambassador’s private secretary, where he often played bridge with Alice. But Green proved to be invaluable to Grew as well. When the young man left Tokyo in April 1941, the Ambassador praised Green as “a splendid type of virile young American, energetic, wry, graceful in movement and direct in manner, sometimes to the extent of bluntness, with curly red hair and a profile like a classic Greek, keen minded and thoroughly intelligent.”
Joe may have accepted Alice’s role in his decision-making process, but her involvement drew criticism from others. “Grew is a nice fellow,” James Gerard, the American ambassador to Germany, wrote to Colonel House in May 1916, “but he is entirely under his wife’s influence, and she affects his judgment.” But Joe’s reliance on Alice did have limits. He wanted to hear her opinions, but he also wanted his decisions to be based on fact rather than emotion. As he explained in a 1941 letter to his friend and colleague Bill Castle, “[O]ne of the things I most abhor in life is a heated argument when any and every argument can and ought to be conducted with pure objectivity. It has taken me the better part of forty years to get that point across to my dear wife, but I’ve succeeded at last.”
Still, there was no denying that, whatever the circumstance, Alice was a lively figure. As one relative observed, “She knew how to do a good conversation and keep the balls up in the air.” Bob Fearey, Marshall Green’s successor as Grew’s private secretary in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack, remembered that she was also “a formidable adversary in repartee.” One incident in particular remained clear in Fearey’s recollection. The Grews were entertaining Sir Robert Craigie, the British ambassador, and his wife, Lady Craigie, at the Embassy residence. Neither of the Grews liked Lady Craigie (Joe saying in his diary in May 1941 that Lady Craigie is “utterly nasty” and that Alice “simply shudders to come into contact with the woman”). But Craigie and Grew were confidants and often shared information, especially as Japan’s relations with the United States and Great Britain deteriorated in the final months of 1941. Given that relationship, the two couples often socialized together. On this particular occasion, the Grews decided to show a movie after dinner. But the projector (being operated by Fearey) broke down in the middle of a reel. “Isn’t it unfortunate, my dear,” said Lady Craigie to Alice, “that that machine of yours is always breaking down?” Without skipping a beat, Alice responded, “Yes, my dear, but isn’t it fortunate that we have no important guests tonight?”
That quickness, that ability to seize the initiative when necessary, was evidenced elsewhere, and on one occasion, it resulted in the arrest of a German spy during World War II. On a spring day in 1944, Alice was on a train traveling from New York City to Washington and sitting at a table in the dining car with some strangers. When the train made an unexpected lurch, the coffee cup of a man wearing a British uniform tipped over and spilled coffee on Alice. The man cried out in German, “Ach! Mein Gott!” Alice spoke German and was immediately suspicious that a British soldier would make a spontaneous exclamation in German. She made her suspicions known to the conductor, and, when the train arrived in Union Station, FBI agents took the British “soldier” into custody and later advised Alice that the man “was one of the most dangerous of German spies.”
Alice’s assertive personality served her well in the Embassy. Joe could oversee the professional staff, but Alice was there to make sure the Embassy functioned well. Dress codes, compliance with protocol, and other routine matters generally fell within her jurisdiction, and she did not hesitate to exercise the authority that came with that responsibility. “She was one of the Foreign Service’s difficult wives,” said one family member. “She was a little bit dictatorial in that role” and “was sometimes hard on the wives, particularly of other Foreign Service people.” Lispen Crocker agreed, telling her mother in one letter that Alice had a “ferocious reputation on three continents.” Cynthia Bowers, Henri Smith-Hutton’s daughter, shared that view. “She wasn’t as likeable or as charming as Mr. Grew,” said Bowers. “And she and my mother didn’t hit it off, only because my mother was also very opinionated.”
Still, Alice could be very gracious and forgiving. Bob Fearey saw evidence of that when the Embassy personnel were interned on the Embassy compound after the Pearl Harbor attack. All sixty-five members of the staff (many of whom previously lived outside the Embassy compound) were crowded into the residence and the Chancery, with offices being used as bedrooms. Cleaning clothes was a challenge because the Embassy did not have a washing machine—or so everyone thought. But then Fearey found an old machine in the residence attic, brought it down to the Chancery basement, and advised everyone to bring their laundry down at nine o’clock each morning. One day, Alice brought down her treasured white silk curtains. Fearey placed them in the machine, not realizing that one staff member’s black socks were still inside. Alice handled the mishap with cool composure. “[A]fter recovering from the shock,” said Fearey, “[she] was kind enough to say that grey had always been her favorite color.”
In all of this, Alice appears to have had few bad habits, but one of them was certainly cigarettes. Even in her later years, relatives would say they could not remember a time when she was not carrying a long cigarette holder in her hand with a lit cigarette. But Alice paid the price for that indulgence. The smoking darkened her teeth and probably contributed to the several heart attacks she experienced, including some before the Pearl Harbor attack. She ultimately succumbed to a heart attack in 1959.
Long before then, she had agreed to return to Tokyo with her husband for a new and hopefully fulfilling experience. They left Ankara on March 3, 1932, for Istanbul and the cruise to the United States. After a short visit at home, they traveled to Chicago, where they boarded the Overland Limited on May 14, 1932, for the train ride to San Francisco. They then journeyed to Japan on the SS President Coolidge.