Just returned from New York. Bizarre assignment. Feeley has lost his mind.
—JOURNAL, OCT. 7, 1991
On Friday, October 4, I was woken by the White House operator at 5:30 a.m. and told the President wanted to see me at 6:15 in the Oval. It had been a long time since I had received such a summons. Obviously, it was important. I wondered if it involved national security. I enjoyed very much working for the First Lady, but I missed the old West Wing and its headier concerns, its moods, its crises, its air of excitement, of puissance.
When I arrived, he was in his pajamas behind the desk, smoking and drinking coffee. He was wearing his commander-in-chief frown. I knew right away it was national security. Perhaps the Bermuda situation had exploded.
“Jane and the kids fine?” he asked with a smile that resembled a squinting into harsh sunlight. I decided not to remind him that my wife, whom he had known for almost thirteen years, was named Joan.
“Couldn’t be better,” I said brightly, despite the hour. “She sends her best.”
“Good,” he said through clenched teeth. “She’s a good woman, Jane. Ought to bring her around here more often.”
I also saw no point in reminding him that he had last spoken to her four days ago at a reception for East Bloc diplomats.
“She’s a great admirer of yours,” I forced myself to say. This was excruciating.
“Yes. Well, you give her my best.”
“I certainly will.” I was earnestly hoping the President would get to the point. Had I been woken out of a warm bed at 5:30 a.m. for small talk about my wife, whose name is not Jane?
“Things aren’t going so well,” he said.
I nodded. “The Congress is being difficult.”
He shook his head. “No. Upstairs.”
“Oh.” It was the first time he had brought up the matter of the First Marriage. “Well, you’ve been working hard. I think she misses you.”
“She could be more affectionate, you know.”
Tread lightly here, Wadlough, I said to myself. I found myself looking at my shoes. I said, “Perhaps if you could carve out a little quality time. Say on weekends.”
“She’s got her friends on weekends. They’re up there all the time. You know what the Secret Service has code-named Billy and Onanopoulos? Peacock. Peacock and Petunia.
“Jesus,” he said. “I thought I was in Istanbul. These caftans they wear all the time. What would Ike say?”
I agreed it was best the former President was no longer around to see it.
“I don’t see why they can’t wear ordinary clothes.”
I said I did not understand either.
“Lleland thinks they’re bad for my image,” he said.
I said so I gathered.
“He thinks I shouldn’t have them at Camp David anymore. But Jessie loves them. So what the hell.”
So—that swine Lleland had not been acting on presidential authority when he told me to ban them from the White House. Probably I should have told the President about it. But looking at him, chain-smoking in his pajamas at 6:30 in the morning, lonely for the wife he loved, despised by the Congress, held in historically low regard by the American people, I decided not to burden him with it. As much as I loathed Bamford Lleland, the President had made him his chief of staff and relied on him, trusted him. Let it go, Wadlough, my better nature urged me. And so I made my disastrous decision.
“I’ve been busier’n a cat shooting peach pits trying to keep from getting eaten alive by those hypocrites”—he waved in the direction of the Capitol—“and I may have been a little inattentive lately. So I understand about her wanting some company weekends. We’ve had a few—disagreements, you might say. But we’ll survive.”
Two days later I was working feverishly on arrangements for the First Lady’s appearance at the Festival of Hydrangeas when Mrs. Metz told me Colin Socks of the New York Post was on the phone. I promptly told her I did not take calls from that scandal sheet, and went back to work.
Half an hour later Joan was on the phone. She was agitated.
“What’s wrong, my dumpling?” I asked.
She said she had just received a call from Socks. I was livid. He had told her he had urgent need of speaking to me, and had told her, darkly, that it would be to my “advantage” to return his call.
“Are you in trouble, Herbert?” she asked. It broke my heart. I reassured her all was well. How dare that sensation-mongering yellow journalist call my wife at home! She had been in the midst of baking a pound cake and it had come out too heavy. I boiled.
I called Socks and gave him a large piece of my mind. But lecturing an Australian journalist is like trying to house-train a wombat.
Straightaway he got to the point. Was there anything to the “rumor” of a “relationship” between Billy Angullas-Villanueva and myself?
If he had asked me whether I had strangled my own dear mother, my reaction would not have been different. I was unable to speak.
“You there?” The voice seemed to come from another dimension.
I shook my head and pulled myself together.
“Now you listen to me, Socks,” I said. “If I so much as hear one nanogram more of this revolting canard, I’ll see to it you’re deported back to that penal colony you came from and put to work mucking out sheep stalls for the rest of your life.”
He seemed delighted. “Fantastic,” he said. “You’ll have me thrown out of the country?”
“This conversation is concluded,” I said. I hung up; then stared at the walls for twenty minutes.
Presently I was aware of Mrs. Metz, as if through a fog.
“Mr. Wadlough? Mr. Wadlough?”
After reassuring her that my pallid demeanor was the result of not having slept much the previous night, I picked up the phone and said to the Signal operator, “Get me Mr. Feeley.” I stared at the ceiling. The President was in Gary, Indiana, that day.
Three or four minutes later there was the crackling on the line that meant an airborne patch to Air Force One. A voice said, “This is Frigatebird, Crown. Go ahead.” The Signal operator said, “Mr. Wadlough, I have Mr. Feeley. Be advised this is a radio call and there is no privacy.” I was glad for the reminder; I’m sure the Russian Embassy would have been delighted to know of the wretched business.
“Herb, what’s happening?” came a cheerful voice.
“Never mind that! I’ve just had a call from the New York Post wanting to know”—had to be careful—“about a certain rumor.”
“Yeah?”
I reminded him, as obliquely as I could, of our little talk and his brainstorm about planting the rumor about Mr. Angullas-Villanueva and Lleland.
“Well, they think it’s me. Me!”
There was a pause. “Son of a bitch. They got to us first!” He started laughing.
“That is not funny,” I said. “This is horrible.”
“Hang on,” he said. “Don’t do anything until I get back.”
“Roger,” I said miserably.
I was waiting for him in his office when he returned. I’d been unable to concentrate on the Festival of Hydrangeas. He came in trailing secretaries and pieces of paper. After he shut the door, he said, “I’ve got it all figured out.”
“What,” I said, “what do we do?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t tell me ‘nothing.’ This isn’t ‘nothing.’ This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me! What about Joan!” I put my head in my hands.
“Listen,” he said, “the Post isn’t going to print it—I’m almost sure—so we just ignore it.”
“But—”
“Think like the enemy. They want you to deny it. And the second you deny it, everyone knows it’s true.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. What if there are press queries?”
“Queries?” He began to laugh. “Queries!”
“Dammit, man!” I said.
The next day at 12:14 p.m. I was in New York City, sitting in a booth at a restaurant called Mortimer’s, waiting for the arrival of Mr. Ramon “Billy” Angullas-Villanueva, fretting over Festival of Hydrangeas details.
I had claimed a bad cold, put on one of the wretched disguises left over from my trips with Marvin, and come to New York aboard a commercial aircraft—my first commercial flight in years.
I had come to warn Mr. Angullas-Villanueva of this scurrilous campaign of Lleland’s against me—and him. Lleland was obviously out to kill two birds with one stone. The faintest whiff of scandal would mean the end for me at the White House, and the end of Mr. Angullas-Villanueva’s visits there as well.
I had told Mr. Angullas-Villanueva I needed to speak to him on an utterly confidential basis and asked him to meet me in a “quiet, out-of-the-way place.” He had suggested Mortimer’s, which I now realized cast some doubt on the man’s sense of discretion. Mortimer’s, in the heart of the upper East Side of Manhattan, was clearly an “in” restaurant. I did not recognize the people there by name, but they seemed very much “in,” the kind who used to be seen at the White House during the Reagan administration.
I had worn my red tartan plaid jacket, the one I wear only on weekends. It was a bit on the loud side, but I assumed it would allow me to blend in with the chic New York set. Oddly, the maître d’ had looked at it with an unmistakably condescending air. I resolved to tip him only ten percent.
I had been seated in a table in the rear—at least Mr. Angullas-Villanueva had some discretion—where it was dark. With my glasses on, it was difficult to see.
Presently I heard the distinctive stentorian voice.
“Jerbert! My God, what a horror you look!”
• • •
Because of my inability to see clearly, I was caught unawares by the hug and the kiss he planted on me. I am not in principle against physical expressions of affection between men; but even with Father I shook hands, and I am uncomfortable being kissed by other than my wife, Joan, or my daughter, Joan. Or by my mother and sister, Ernestine.
I let him do the ordering, inasmuch as he was obviously familiar with Mortimer’s cuisine. He also, I might add, seemed familiar with the waiters. An unfortunate moment arose when he introduced me to one of them as the man who “run de whole Hwhite House.” It was necessary to remind him of my desire not to be recognized.
Mr. Angullas-Villanueva’s neck kept periscoping every time someone walked in, and it also became necessary to restrain him from introducing me to a half-dozen fashionable acquaintances of his.
“But you must,” he reproved me. “He practically run de Met.”
I ate my “paillard” of veal—an unadorned but reasonably edible fillet of overpriced meat—and listened to his soliloquies on the beau monde of New York. He was an exuberant conversationalist, and I surrendered in silence to his narratives, feeling so awkward about presenting my own. But at length it could not be deferred any longer, and with a great heaviness of soul I plunged in.
“A rather indelicate situation has arisen,” I said.
Immediately he interrupted. “I lave indelicate thituation!” he said.
Then try this one on for size, I thought. I then told him about my call from Socks.
“It’s too divine!” he said.
I had not counted on this.
“You’re not … upset?”
“I cannot wait to tell everyone! They will tell to me, ‘My God, Billy, what taste you jave!’ ” He gripped my arm. “No, Jerbert, I’m sorry. I don’t mean it against you. But it’s so—” He began laughing again. “They are so dreary in Washington. So serious.”
With that he summoned “Johann,” our waiter, and told him to bring anise. I confess I was so shell-shocked by now that I actually drank the unpleasant liquor set in front of me. (It tasted of licorice.)
With considerable heaviness of heart, I brought the subject around to the President’s problem. I explained that naturally the President would place no credence in the rumor, but that I felt it essential he absent himself from the White House for a few months until things had quieted down. He listened, and nodded.
“Jerb,” he said, “you are right. We cannot go on as before. But we will always jave de memories, yes?” He put his hand on my arm and winked.
I attempted a laugh, but really the whole business was very unsettling. Outside the restaurant he gave me another kiss—on both cheeks this time. (I believe this is the European custom; and I would point out that on the Continent, men kiss all the time.) My stomach finally quieted down for the first time in twenty-four hours on the shuttle flight back to our nation’s capital.