To the New Owners, page 15
If you pin John and Phil down, they will explain the reasons fishing can be less than successful. They name outside forces beyond their control. They will tell you about how the worst time to fish on the Vineyard is in August, because that is when the fish flee for colder waters. They talk about how dinner parties scheduled during a rising tide with a full moon are a waste of a rising tide and a full moon. They talk about calibrations in water temperature and the cruel, conniving nature of a bad wind. They get misty-eyed as they audition their flies, wondering which would work best: the Lefty’s Deceivers or the clouser minnows and perhaps surf candy. Blue and white? Red and white? All white?
The one time they caught a twenty-pound striped bass keeper, Phil and John arrived back at the house at close to midnight. Everyone was ready to hit the sack except them, with Phil prepping the fish on the deck and John firing up the grill. I was sated and sleepy but did my best to inquire, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, if I could perhaps have a small bite, knowing the answer could only be yes.
Phil, the fisherman, kind of, sort of, maybe.
A few years back, the Associated Press ran a story with the headline “Fly Fishing Gets Women’s Touch,” which became the subject of that night’s dinner conversation. The article quoted president of the American Fly Fishers Trade Association:
“Fly fishing has this stigma of being a cigar-smoking, good-old-boys-type club. It would be great to change that image.”
Phil: “What did the story say? Women like fly-fishing. Well, why not? I’m not surprised. I’ve known about this for years.” Pause. “Fly-fishing is perfect for women.”
Perfect, Phil? How so?
He started to say fly-fishing is perfect for women because they can do it in bare feet.
“Have you,” we asked him, “heard of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem?”
“The Equal Rights Amendment?”
“Or seen Thelma and Louise?”
Pausing ever so slightly, waving his hand to dismiss any previous remarks, he took it from the top:
“Really, fly-fishing is a sport that requires precision, attention to detail, and patience. Men get so macho about it. They throw the line too hard as if the skill is strength, not motion. Men think it’s like slamming a tennis racket.”
We all then enjoyed the dinner Phil had prepared with:
Admirable precision.
Scrupulous attention to detail.
Lots of patience.
And a ton of garlic.
Phil, the kitchen god.
Chapter Eleven
What Kay Graham Brought to
the Table
During the summer from 1989 until her death in 2001, we had an annual rendezvous with Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post who in July and August was also the doyenne of Martha’s Vineyard, slim in her summer slacks, words spoken with a touch of well-bred lockjaw, presiding over events at her magnificent property called Mohu.
Shortly after arriving on the island, my husband and I would receive a letter on expensive thick blue paper, signed by Liz Hylton, Mrs. Graham’s personal assistant:
Dear Maddy and John,
I am beginning to feel like your pen pal.
Mrs. Graham asks if she might tempt you to come to lunch on Saturday or Sunday (if you have someone with whom you can leave your children). It would be you and your houseguests, Mrs. Graham, Henry Kissinger (and Nancy K. if she can come at the last minute), Senator William Cohen of Maine, and (national security adviser Lieutenant General) Brent Scowcroft. One o’clock whichever day works best for you.
The document would be hand-delivered by a member of Mrs. Graham’s staff, who drove the dirt road, up and back. At that time, the house had no phone, and we all took pride in the faux ruggedness of corresponding in such an old-fashioned, Jane Austen way.
My favorite part of the letter will always be the parenthetical aside: if you have someone with whom you can leave your children. The notion of taking our children at that time in their lives to such a gathering gave rise to awkward scenarios: my son discussing firecrackers and his latest soccer cleats with Kissinger or my daughter insisting on everyone doing the hokey-pokey.
We sent our regrets and found another time to see each other.
I have never been certain what “Mohu” stands for. Perhaps Mohu is an old Wampanoag term for something earthbound and nature-worshipping, involving still skies and seagulls and salt air, though it could also have had a secondary meaning along the lines of “a really excellent real estate investment.” The story goes that Mrs. Graham purchased the 218-acre estate in Lambert’s Cove in 1972 at the behest of newspaper editor Henry Beetle Hough, who wanted to keep the property out of the hands of developers. The house—with views of the water, furniture covered in white, and round tables for dining that seated up to ten guests—felt like the set of a Katharine Hepburn movie, one in which the heroine shows verbal spunk and athletic grace in equal measure. At the entrance was a stack of straw hats for guests to borrow as a shield against the sun in the event that lunch or drinks were on the patio. Mrs. Graham’s way of receiving company was reminiscent of a long-ago time that was very elegant and is very gone. She stood at five feet nine inches tall, a height that underscored her natural grace. Before dinner she served simple drinks and hors d’oeuvres in the French style, kept to a discrete minimum, never anything showy or loudly caloric, no Bahama Mamas and no vat of guacamole and sour cream with a jolly name like “piranha dip.” If you arrived at Mohu before everyone else, you might be treated to a gabfest about the upcoming guests: who was overrated, who was sleeping with whom, who was a drama queen (“She can turn the simple act of boiling an egg into a three-act play”), and who was the real deal, possessing true talent that never dims. Punctuality paid off.
Our first invitation from Mrs. Graham was verbal and offhand, issued at a memorial service in June 1989 for a former Washington Post editor, Howard Simons.
Simons was an underrated player in the Watergate saga. He had been working as night editor on a desultory Friday to Saturday overnight shift on June 17, 1972, in the nation’s capital when two disconnected, seemingly comic events attracted Simons’s attention: the robbery at the Watergate of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters by five men wearing surgical gloves, including one who said he worked for the CIA, who were arrested at 2:30 a.m., and a car crash into someone’s house while two people were making love on a sofa. The next day, Simons reported to Mrs. Graham, and at the time they both chuckled, having no reason to disagree with Ron Ziegler, President Nixon’s press secretary, who dismissed the robbery as a “third-rate burglary attempt,” warning that “certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is.”
Later, Mrs. Graham wrote, “None of us, of course, had any idea how far the story would stretch; the beginning—once the laughter died down—all seemed so farcical.”
I was taken aback by her request (“You must call when you get to the island and we will find a time to get together”) but felt an obligation to honor it. None of us ever feels as if we know all the rules to a good life, but surely one is that if someone you admire on the scale that I admired Mrs. Graham says you must call, you do. As a publisher, Mrs. Graham had gone mano a mano with the Nixon White House and had subjected herself to threats and ridicule, including bizarre comments from the then attorney general John Mitchell, who said, “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer.”
For many of the years that we knew her, we witnessed a decline in her physical capabilities, mostly due to a bad hip that halted her gait and eroded her usually spirited game of tennis. Eventually, hip replacement gave her a new lease.
We knew she was working on her memoir and it seemed to be taking an uncomfortably long time to complete. When Personal History finally appeared in 1997, to the tune of 625 pages long, I remember feeling relieved—relieved that it was done and also relieved, after I read it, that it was written in the style of the best memoirs, with no regard to inflating the author’s virtues and with all due diligence in recording the more vulnerable moments. In college, depressed, she confessed to wearing the same sweater every day for a year.
Personal History has an air of detached dignity, as if the author is beyond currying favor or proving points. She sacrifices the latest gossip for the long view. Her audience appears not to be her children or even her grandchildren, but descendants yet to be born, who might want to know what it was like when their great-great-great-grandmother was running the world.
Mrs. Graham combined power in public space with vulnerability in the private sector. She inherited the helm at the Post from her handsome, charismatic husband who drank, was verbally abusive, went on buying binges, and at one point threatened to run off with his mistress, taking his majority share in the Washington Post Company with him. He shot himself in the head at their country house.
A longtime fan of memoirs, I have often pondered the difference between them and autobiography. In the end, to my way of thinking, autobiographies tend to encompass the full span of a life and are usually written by people who occupy some kind of public space: ex-presidents, ambassadors, heads of the Federal Reserve. Memoirs are written by less obviously eminent sorts. Generals write autobiographies; foot soldiers write memoirs. Personal History is unusual in that it is both an autobiography and a memoir because its author is both a general and a foot soldier. Mrs. Graham was at the center of history as a major publisher, often referred to in her heyday as the most powerful woman in the world, and also at its outskirts: a single woman bringing up four children on her own.
Having had the job of publisher thrust upon her, she writes: “I had very little idea of what I was supposed to be doing, so I set out to learn. What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes, and step off the edge.”
In her book she said that one of the biggest regrets of her life occurred on the day after her husband’s funeral, when, in a daze, she continued with a plan to sail on a yacht in Istanbul that had been chartered by her mother, traveling to Europe with her daughter, Lally, and sending two of her sons, Bill and Steve, back to camp and her son Don back to his summer job.
That decision may have been right for me, but it was so wrong for Bill and Steve and even for Don—so wrong that I wonder how I could have made it. Would my younger boys have been better off going too? Would it have been better if I’d stayed home for them? This is, for me, the most painful thing to look back on. It’s hard to remake decisions and even harder to rethink nondecisions. Sometimes you don’t really decide, you just move forward, and that is what I did—moved forward blindly and mindlessly into a new and unknown life.
As for taking over the Post, she always underplayed what it must have been like to walk that gangplank: “The surprise was that I landed on my feet.”
And so once a summer, when we saw each other, alternating houses, it was always a thrill but also unnerving. I would always fret about what to serve. She would have been chagrinned to learn that I felt so . . . discombobulated. In her manner she conveyed the fiction that we were on an even playing field, hostess-wise, which would have been true if only I had my own full-time French chef, gifts of dish sets from world leaders, and guests who ran countries on a routine basis. One time I served grilled swordfish from John’s Fish Market, assured by Sandy that it had been harpooned rather than long-lined. That way, the fish comes out of the water alive, which makes the meat fresher and firmer. This environmentally sound way of catching the fish jacks up the flavor but inflates the price. My sole culinary intrusion was to gussy it up with the sheerest membrane of store-bought mayonnaise to seal in the flavor before putting it on the grill. I am a minimalist when it comes to local food.
When Mrs. Graham insisted that I share my recipe with her chef, I was so embarrassed that I had not concocted some kind of fancy rémoulade that I pretended to be one of those secret-hoarding cooks, and I said I would be happy to exchange the information for, oh, say, the identity of Deep Throat.
“My dear,” she said in her low, cultured voice, “you drive a hard bargain.”
The next time we served her lobster, the delicacy for which today’s diners nearly abase themselves, but which was so plentiful in the nineteenth century that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as an act of humane legislation, passed a bill forbidding the feeding of lobster to prison inmates, at least not for all three meals a day. The theory behind serving lobster to Mrs. Graham was that it automatically makes hierarchies vanish, what with the infantilizing bibs and the projectile juices and the debate over whether the yucky parts are edible, not to mention the sound effects: the pounding, the cracking, the slurps, the satisfied sighs.
That night we talked about life in Washington.
As a guest, Nancy Doherty, wrote afterward, “We learned some interesting facts. She voted for George Bush the first, Bobby Kennedy once reduced her to tears, she thinks Teddy needs to clean up his act big-time, and she eats lobster with admirable gusto . . . in short, she is one of the most impressive icons we’ve ever spent an evening with.”
I always felt stumped when it came to hostess gifts for Mrs. Graham. The usual bottle of wine or tea towels or soap seemed all wrong, especially considering the competition, such as when her brother-in-law Senator Bob Graham visited from Florida, bringing not only avocados and key limes from the Sunshine State, but also the news that he might run for national office.
In certain circles, I deduced, the ultimate hostess gift is Presidential Buzz.
When I praised the colorfully painted plates on which dinner was served, she said, “Those were from the king of Jordan. He visited here and afterward sent a huge crate of dishes.”
Another pricey-looking keepsake: “Oh, I have Princess Di to thank for that. What a lovely young woman.”
My offerings were more humble.
When water shoes first came out, I gave her a pair (she seemed delighted), and on another occasion I brought her a stack of memoirs, including my two standbys, This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff and A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, because I thought reading them might help her with her own memoir. Unlike writers working in other genres, who often shy away from reading the competition lest they borrow its rhythms or fall prey to disabling feelings of inferiority about their own work in comparison, memoir writers usually read far and wide in the field, with a cunning eye not only for content, but also in order to have an interior conversation about what they have read in order to explore how one’s own life compares with the one being described.
In the 1990s, when the Clintons started showing up on the Vineyard with increasing frequency, Mrs. Graham was constantly asked whether she would be entertaining them. Her response never varied. It was airy and self-protective: “I have no plans at the moment. I take my orders from Vernon”—Vernon being Vernon Jordan, Bill Clinton’s confidant and golfing buddy. (Jordan and his wife had a custom of going to Mrs. Graham’s for dinner on their first night on the island every summer, no matter how late, as a way of sounding a certain gong.) She found it amusing that the very people who were the first to decry the “dreadful commotion” a presidential visit inevitably stirs were also the ones to lobby most boldly for an invitation to her dinners in his honor.
John’s parents were among the invitees. Thanks to Lydia, we have in the log a diagram of the seating arrangement at one such gathering and this 1993 account:
We’ve had delightful visits and fun with the Clintons at Kay Graham’s, Jackie Onassis at her beach, and old friends at our house and around the island. As Maddy likes the details, here are a few on the dinner with the President and Mrs. Clinton. Both Nick and I enjoyed both Clintons. We came away from dinner especially impressed with HRC, feeling with her intelligence, wit, and warmth she could easily be president herself. Maybe she will be.
The topics we covered at Mrs. Graham’s non-presidential dinners included the ardor of traveling by steamship to the island. Ron Rappaport, the attorney then representing the Steamship Authority, defended a recent wave of cancellations of the ferry due to bad weather.
Mrs. Graham looked up, puzzled: “Ron! If you can’t reverse an act of God, what kind of lawyer are you?”
In some ways all this clever talk and good food were just a cover, because there was something else about Mrs. Graham that made these yearly visits stand out, and it was her obvious desire to connect in part because my husband and I were the same age as her children, more or less, three of whom we met at her house over the years, and our children were the same ages as her grandchildren. I feel the invitations emanated from an admirable impulse to mix it up, to go beyond one’s own age group.
In the end, my debt of gratitude to her extended beyond our summertime socializing. At one point when I was struggling over whether I should write about the family I grew up in, Mrs. Graham was supportive. I explained that my mother had been widowed and her life was led in the shadow of the future she never had.
“Your mother raised six children on her own?”
She paused, lowering her eyelids as if to look as much inward as outward.
She spoke softly.
“Believe me. That’s a story.”
The last time I saw Mrs. Graham was at a reading at Politics & Prose in Washington. The bookstore owners were eager that she be seated in a comfortable chair, but she acted embarrassed, as the last thing she wanted to do was appear enthroned. Afterward, she joined me and my sister Jacqueline (reporting for USA Today), Washington Times editor Hank Pearson, Post veteran Athelia Knight, and others at a restaurant that we chose for its close location so as to minimize the amount of walking Mrs. Graham would have to do. Her pace was slow, but she resisted being led by the elbow. I remember glancing down at the sidewalk and noticing her shoes, sleek pumps pretty enough to verge on the impractical. What I liked about her shoes was their defiance: an emblem in honor of the glad girl she must once have been. The restaurant proved too loud and the dinner passed too quickly, and when I walked Mrs. Graham out to her car and to the driver who awaited her, we vowed to see each other soon, in early August, on the Vineyard. A few weeks later, in July 2001, she fell down and lost consciousness at a business meeting out in Sun Valley, Idaho. She died several days later.
