IF HERMAN BROWN was the behind-the-scenes force in the Tenth Congressional District, the public force was the district's influential daily newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman.*
The American-Statesman's owner did not share Brown's immunity to flattery. His susceptibility, in fact, was acute.
Charles E. Marsh, who had earned a Phi Beta Kappa key at the University of Oklahoma while working his way through college stoking furnaces, had made money early—while still in his twenties, he had purchased, for a few hundred dollars, a small North Dakota newspaper, had promptly sold it to the Scripps-Howard chain for $10,000, and, with a partner, E. S. Fentress, had headed for Texas to create a chain of his own. And he had made it fast. By 1930, either alone or in partnership with Fentress, he owned newspapers not only in Austin but in fourteen other Texas cities, and in another dozen cities in other states. Thanks to his guarantee of Sid Richardson's bank loans, he was Richardson's partner in some of the most profitable oil wells in West Texas, and the sole owner of other profitable wells of his own. And in Austin, he owned the streetcar franchise and the largest single bloc of stock in the Capital National Bank, as well as vast tracts of real estate. Having made money, he liked to play the patron with it. A tall man—six-feet-three—he had the broad, high forehead and the beaked nose of a Roman emperor, and a manner to match. Tips to headwaiters were dispensed with a gesture reminiscent of a king tossing coins to subjects. Gifts were on an imperial scale: the newspaper he gave to a young reporter as a "tip" was only a weekly, but he was almost as generous with a profitable daily, selling the Orlando (Florida) Sentinel to Martin Andersen for what Andersen says was "nothing down and at a price which enabled the paper to be paid out over a comparatively short number of years." Richardson was only one of many young wildcatters he bankrolled. The dividends he wanted from his munificence were gratitude and deference: he wanted to be not only the patron but the seer; "he always had to be the pontificator, the center of attention," Welly Hopkins says, adding, in words echoed by other men who knew Charles Marsh, "he was the most arrogant man I ever met."
Lyndon Johnson, meeting him for the first time in May, 1937, just after arriving in Washington as a newly elected Congressman, gave him what he wanted. Says Marsh's secretary: "The first thing I noticed about [Johnson] was his availability. Whenever [Marsh] would ask Lyndon to come by for a drink, no matter that Lyndon was a busy man, he would always come. He was always available on short notice." The second thing she noticed was his acquiescence. If Marsh wanted to talk, Johnson—seemingly, at least—wanted to listen, and to agree. Marsh liked to pontificate; Johnson drank in what he was saying, and told him how perceptive he was. Marsh liked to give advice; Johnson not only seemed to be accepting it, he asked for more. Marsh had become fascinated by politics; he wanted to feel he was on the inside of that exciting game. Johnson made him feel he was. Marsh may have been a genuine expert in some fields, but politics was not, in Johnson's opinion, one of them. Among themselves, he and his real political advisors—Wirtz, Corcoran—laughed at Marsh as an amateur. But no one would have guessed Johnson's feelings from seeing him and Marsh together. He asked Marsh for advice on political strategy, asked him what he should say in speeches—let Marsh write speeches for him, and didn't let Marsh know that these speeches were not delivered. And, always, in soliciting and listening to Marsh's opinions, "he was," Marsh's secretary says, "very deferential. Very, very deferential. I saw a young man who wanted to be on good terms with an older man, and was absolutely determined to be on good terms with him."
And he was. His first conversations with Marsh had taken place in Marsh's Washington townhouse, or in the suite in the Mayflower Hotel that Marsh used as an office. Now Marsh invited the young Congressman and his shy wife to his country home for the weekend, and in the Autumn of 1937, Lyndon Johnson, accompanied by Lady Bird, drove for the first time to Longlea.
"LONGLEA," set on a thousand acres in the northern Virginia hunt country, was named for the eighteenth-century Sussex manor house on which it was modeled, but it could have been named for its setting. The roads toward it, toward its blue-slate roof and its great chimneys that rose above the soft Virginia hills, led across long, rolling meadows, and the meadows before it were nothing to the meadow behind it. The broad flagstone terrace at the rear of Longlea—a terrace 110 feet long—was bordered by a low stone parapet. Beyond the parapet, the land dropped steeply down to a narrow river. And beyond the river, before the first of the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a vast, empty meadow (or "lea") stretched on for miles. But, however appropriate the name, knowledgeable visitors to the Charles Marsh estate did not refer to it by that name. They called it "Alice's Place."
Alice Glass was from a country town—sleepy Marlin, Texas—but she was never a country girl. She had been twenty years old when, six years before, she had come to Austin as secretary to her local legislator. Some smalltown girls brought to the capital as legislators' secretaries became, in its wide-open atmosphere, their mistresses as well, but Alice Glass was not destined for a mere legislator. "Austin had never seen anything like her," one recalls. She stood, graceful and slender, just a shade under six feet tall in her bare feet, and despite her height, her features were delicate, her creamy-white face dominated by big, sparkling blue eyes and framed in long hair. "It was blond, with a red overlay," says Frank C. Oltorf, Brown & Root's Washington lobbyist and a considerable connoisseur of women. "Usually it was long enough so that she could sit on it, and it shimmered and gleamed like nothing you ever saw."
Bearing as well as beauty impressed. "There was something about the way she walked and sat that was elegant and aloof," Oltorf says. "And with her height, and that creamy skin and that incredible hair, she looked like a Viking princess." Legislators attracted to her at the roaring parties at the Driskill Hotel had sensed quickly that they had no chance with her—and they were right. Charles Marsh had lived in Austin then, in a colonnaded mansion on Enfield Road; at the Driskill parties, he held himself disdainfully aloof, as befitted a man who could make legislators or break them. On the same night in 1931 on which he met Alice Glass, they became lovers; within weeks, Marsh, forty-four, left his wife and children and took her East. He lavished jewels on her—not only a quarter-of-a-million-dollar necklace of perfect emeralds, but earrings of emeralds and diamonds and rubies. "The first time she came back to Marlin and walked down the street in her New York clothes and her jewels, women came running out of the shops to stare at her," recalls her cousin, Alice, who was also from Marlin. And in Washington and New York, too, men—and women—stared at Alice Glass as they stared at her in Texas. "Sometimes when she walked into a restaurant," says another man who knew her, "between those emeralds and her height and that red-gold hair, the place would go completely silent."
And Longlea was her place. She had designed it, asking the architects to model it on the Sussex country home she had seen when Marsh had taken her to England, working with the architects herself for months to modify its design, softening the massiveness of the long stone structure, for example, by setting one wing at a slight angle away from the front, enlarging the windows because she loved sunlight, insisting that the house be faced entirely with the native Virginia beige fieldstone of which she could see outcroppings in the meadows below; told there were no longer stonemasons of sufficient skill to handle the detail work she wanted, she scoured small, isolated towns in the Blue Ridge Mountains until she found two elderly master masons, long retired, who agreed, for money and her smile, to take on one last job. She furnished it herself, with Monets and Renoirs and a forty-foot-long Aubusson rug that cost Marsh, even at Depression bargain prices, $75,000. And she had designed the life at Longlea, which was, because she loved the outdoors, an outdoor life. She organized a hunt—the Hazelmere Hunt, named after Longlea's river, the Hazel—and even on weekends on which no hunt was held, horses were always ready in Longlea's stable, and there would be morning gallops; as Alice took the fences ("The only thing Texas about Alice was her riding," a friend says. "She could really ride!"), the little black derby she wore while riding would sometimes fall off, and the hair pinned beneath it would stream out behind her, a bright red-gold banner in the soft green Virginia hills. Warm afternoons would be spent around a pool (built, since Alice liked to swim in a natural setting and in clear, cold water, entirely out of native stone in a tree-shaded hollow); as Alice sat in her bathing suit with her hair, wet and glistening, falling behind her, her guests would try to keep from staring too obviously at her long, slender legs.
The focus of life at Longlea was not its magnificent interior but the terrace behind it. Breakfast would be served on that broad, long expanse of flagstone, as the morning sun slowly burned away the mist from the great meadow and the mountains behind it. In the evenings, after dinner, it was on the terrace that guests would sit, watching the mist form and the mountains turn purple in the twilight. Life at Longlea was as elegant as its designer. Champagne was her favorite drink, and champagne was served with breakfast—champagne breakfasts with that incredible view—and, always, with dessert at dinner, dinners under glittering chandeliers imported from France. Served by her favorite waiter: the most distinguished of the Stork Club's headwaiters was a former Prussian cavalryman, Rudolf Kollinger; at Alice's request, Marsh had hired him to be major domo at Longlea—even though, to entice Kollinger to private service, Marsh had had to hire as well not only his wife but his mistress. Witty herself, Alice loved brilliant talk, and at Longlea the conversation was as sparkling as the champagne, for she filled the house with politicians and intellectuals—Henry Wallace and Helen Fuller and Walter Lippmann—mixing Potomac and professors in a brilliant weekend salon. She had wanted to create her own world at Longlea—she had wanted a thousand acres, she said, because she "didn't want any neighbors in hearing distance"—and she had succeeded. "Alice Glass was the most elegant woman I ever met," says Oltorf. "And Longlea was the most elegant home I ever stayed in." Arnold Genthe, the noted New York society photographer, who for years came regularly to Longlea, first as a guest and then to practice his profession—to spend day after day taking pictures of Alice because, he said, she was the "most beautiful woman" he had ever seen—asked that his ashes be buried at Longlea after he died because it was the "most beautiful place" he had ever seen.
ALTHOUGH ALICE GLASS resembled a Southern belle—an exceptionally tall and lovely Southern belle—her friends knew that appearances were deceiving.
"She was a free spirit—very independent—in an era when women weren't that way," says her sister, Mary Louise. She didn't believe in marriage, and she had refused to marry Marsh, even though she had borne him two children. (Her sole concession to convention was made to spare the feelings of her parents in Marlin. She wrote them that she had married an English nobleman named Manners. Visitors from Texas would be told that "Lord Manners" was "away" in England on business; she would finally announce that he had been killed fighting for the Loyalists in Spain, and would thereby become a respectable "widow.") And, possessed of brains as well as beauty, she did not, like many Southern girls, try to hide the fact that she was as intelligent as the men she was talking to. She expected them to listen to her opinions as she listened to theirs—and if one was reluctant to do so, she could make him regret that reluctance. A concert pianist from New York, who had monopolized the dinner conversation one evening at Long-lea, was gratified, after dinner, to hear one of his recordings playing on the terrace phonograph. As he and the other guests sat there listening, however, Alice suddenly walked over and switched off the machine. "That's the nice thing about having someone on a record," she said. "You can turn him off." Men who listened to her opinions found them worth listening to; Wallace liked to try out his more visionary proposals on Alice, because, he said, "She seems to be the only person with enough imagination to know what I'm talking about." And men with a more political turn of mind found Alice worth talking politics with (Herman Brown was moved to say she had "quite a bit of horse sense—for a girl"), except that her politics contained what to practical men was a rather unfortunate streak of idealism.
"Above everything else," says her sister, "Alice was an idealist." She admired politicians who, in her view, tried to "help people," and detested those who were interested solely in their own advancement, or, worse, in using public office to make money. She herself wanted very badly to help people. "She had a very particular view of the kind of place the world should be," her sister says, "and she was willing to do anything she had to do to make things come out right for people who were in trouble. She was the kind of person who understood very well that she couldn't do much to help—Alice could be very realistic—but she was also the kind of person who wasn't willing not to do anything because she couldn't do it all. She felt you had to try."
IT WAS ALICE'S "IDEALISM"—her desire to "help people"—that first drew her to Lyndon Johnson. In 1937, people in trouble included European Jews. Attending the Salzburg music festival that year, she and Charles made a side trip to hear a speech by Adolf Hitler, and thereafter they understood, earlier than most Americans, how serious a threat he was. When she returned home, she began making money available to help Jews who were fleeing Hitler, and she made Longlea a way station for these refugees when they arrived in the United States; guests sat entranced on the long terrace listening to the stories of their escapes. Max Graf, who at the time of his escape had been one of Vienna's leading music critics and a professor at the Vienna Conservatory, told one evening how he had been afraid to make his true feelings known until his last day in Vienna. On that day, however, when he was leaving his office for the last time, his visa and other necessary papers safely in his breast pocket, a colleague had given him the Nazi salute and said, "Heil, Hitler!" "Heil, Beethoven!" Graf had replied.
One of these refugees was a promising young conductor from Vienna, twenty-five-year-old Erich Leinsdorf, whom Charles and Alice had met in Europe; Leinsdorf was to recall vividly his first meeting with the towering, "immensely rich" couple—the "impressive man" and his consort, "she too quite tall and very handsome." After he had completed an engagement with the Metropolitan Opera in 1938, they invited him to "spend as much time as I wanted" at Longlea, "a large farm, dominated by a magnificent house … a great house with eighteen servants, over whom a German butler and his wife, a superlative cook, held sway." Leinsdorf was relaxing there ("There was a constant stream of guests. … The accents were new, the lavish and easy life with martinis served at eleven in the morning was new … the eighteen black servants were new—I just sat goggle-eyed") when, he recalls, he suddenly remembered, "with a terrific shock," that he had received no reply to his application, submitted months before, for an extension of his temporary visa—and that the visa would expire in just eight days.
When he told his hosts his problem, Alice, who had met Johnson only a few times, suggested that Charles have the young Congressman from Austin try to help.
The next day—a Sunday—Marsh drove Leinsdorf to Washington, and they went to Marsh's suite at the Mayflower, to which Johnson had been summoned ("A lanky young man appeared. He treated Charles with the informal courtesy behooving a youngster toward an older man to whom he is in debt"). He listened "impassively" to Leinsdorf's problem, but on Monday telephoned to say he had begun solving it. The Immigration Department had in fact rejected Leinsdorf's application, but, he told the conductor, due to some clerical oversight the rejection had not been mailed—and this oversight had allowed him to obtain what Leinsdorf describes as "a welcome breathing space." Leinsdorf recalls Johnson saying that he had "exerted his pressure to have the customary phrase 'You have seven days to leave the United States' changed to 'You have six months.'"
The next step, Johnson explained, was to have Leinsdorf's status changed to "permanent resident"—a change which could be accomplished only if he went abroad and returned as a regular immigrant. Johnson arranged for him to go to Cuba, and provided all the necessary documents for his return to the United States. To ensure that there would be no slip-up, he telephoned the United States Consul in Havana to make certain that his quota of Austrian immigrants had not yet been exhausted, and that Leinsdorf would be included in it. "It all went like clockwork," Leinsdorf says.
Marsh was impressed by Johnson's efficiency. Alice was impressed by something else. The young Congressman had brought Leinsdorf's documents to Longlea personally, and had brought with him also a letter to the Consul in Havana. The letter said, Leinsdorf recalls (no copy has been found), "that the United States had a holy mission to provide a peaceful haven for musical geniuses nervously exhausted from persecution and racial bias"; it was, he says, a "moving piece." It had been written by a member of Johnson's staff (probably the gifted Latimer), but it was Johnson who, without mentioning that fact, read it—in a quiet, eloquent voice—that evening on the terrace. The listeners, including Alice, were moved.
As Johnson began coming to Longlea more frequently, she was moved by further manifestations of what she considered the same spirit.
Those stories about the poverty of the people from whom he came—the people of the Texas Hill Country—those stories, told so eloquently, that could bring a hush even to a Washington dinner party, were dramatic indeed told in the stillness of a Longlea evening, and so was his determination to help his people, to bring them the dams and federal programs that would change their lives. Alice Glass, who wanted to help people, believed that Lyndon Johnson shared the same desire. She believed that he was unlike the other politicians who came to Longlea, and whose conversation revealed, before a weekend was over, that their only interest was personal advancement. She believed that she had finally met a politician who was not constantly scheming on behalf of his ambition, a politician whose dreams were for others rather than for himself. Listening to his stories of how he was getting the dams built and the programs implemented, she came to believe, moreover, that he possessed not only the desire but the ability to help people. She told her sister that she felt the young Congressman had limitless potential; recalls Mary Louise: "She thought he was a young man who was going to save the world." And she admired also what she considered his indifference not only to political but to financial advancement. The talk surrounding the immensely wealthy man with whom she lived dealt largely with money, particularly when their guests were close friends like Herman and George Brown. "She was just sick of money, money, money," her sister says. Johnson, with his seeming total lack of interest in the subject, was a refreshing change.
AT FIRST, her relationship to Johnson was that of patroness to protégé. Although he was three years older than she—at the time of the Leinsdorf episode, he was twenty-nine, Alice twenty-six—she, so widely traveled and read, so sophisticated in dress and taste, seemed much more worldly than this man from Texas. He fostered this impression. "He was always asking her for advice," her sister says. She had such perfect taste in clothes, he said; he wanted to ask her what to do about the way his long, skinny wrists stuck out of his sleeves. (She told him that he should have his shirts custom-made, and should wear French cuffs so that if attention was drawn to his wrists, they would look elegant rather than awkward; it was at this time that his lifelong fascination with cufflinks began.) He told her he didn't like the way he looked in photographs; she noticed that one side of his face—the left—photographed much better than the right; for the rest of his life, he would try to allow only the left side to be seen in photographs. He said he realized he didn't know anything about literature and wanted to learn; she read him poetry. "Her favorite was Edna St. Vincent Millay," her sister says; "when she read Millay, you could see Alice in the poetry." She tried to improve his table manners—for a while, he even stopped gulping down his food. She proved his patroness—a very useful patroness—even in politics; when Johnson and Herman Brown seemed on the "collision course" over the condemnation of Brown's real estate, it was she who said to Marsh one night: "Why don't you fix things up between them? Why don't you suggest that they compromise—give Herman the dam and let Lyndon have the land?"—thereby suggesting the compromise that ended the threat to Johnson's political career.
But the relationship changed. Her cousin, Alice, with whom she had grown up in Marlin, now married to Welly Hopkins and living in Washington, was her closest friend. Sometime late in 1938 or early in 1939, Alice Glass told her cousin that she and Lyndon were lovers, and had been for some months. When her sister, Mary Louise Glass, arrived in Washington later in 1939 to become one of Marsh's secretaries, Alice told her, too, and Mary Louise would have known anyway; her offices—first in the Mayflower Hotel and then in the Allies Inn—were right down the hall from the apartments Marsh maintained in those hotels, and she could not help being aware that during Marsh's frequent absences from Washington, Lyndon and Alice spent many afternoons alone together in those apartments. And, more and more, Lyndon and Alice were together at Longlea. On some of his visits to Longlea, Johnson came with Lady Bird, but frequently he would come alone; "he would leave her on weekends, weekend after weekend …," Mary Louise says. "Sometimes Charles would be there—and sometimes Charles wouldn't be there." Johnson had become very much at home at the estate; alone among the guests, he would take off his shirt in the sun on the terrace—"He had this very white skin, but he was always sunning," Mary Louise says—would lead the horseplay at the swimming pool with boundless enthusiasm, and when, on the long terrace in the evenings, the far-off mountains vanishing in the purple mist, Alice put records on the phonograph, he was always the first to jump up and dance.
ATTEMPTING TO ANALYZE why Alice was attracted to Lyndon Johnson, the best friend and the sister who were her two confidantes say that part of the attraction was "idealism"—the beliefs and selflessness which he expressed to her—and that part of the attraction was sexual. Marsh, Mary Louise says, was "much older" than Alice—he had turned fifty in 1937, when Alice was twenty-six—and, she says, "that was part of the problem. My sister liked men." Moreover, they felt that Johnson, for all his physical awkwardness and social gaucheries, his outsized ears and nose, was a very attractive man, because of what Alice Hopkins calls that "very beautiful" white skin, because of his eyes, which were, she says, "very expressive," because of his hands—demonstrating with her own hands how Johnson was always touching, hugging, patting, she says, "His hands were very loving"—and, most of all, because of the fierce, dynamic energy he exuded. "It was," she concludes, "his animation that made him good-looking." Whatever the combination of reasons, the attraction, they say, was deep. "Lyndon was the love of Alice's life," Mrs. Hopkins says. "My sister was mad for Lyndon—absolutely mad for him," Mary Louise says.
Alice Glass believed that her passion was reciprocated. According to her intimates, she told them that Johnson and she had discussed marriage. In that era, a divorced man would be effectively barred from a political career, but, she said, he had told her that he would get a divorce anyway. He had several job offers as a corporate lobbyist in Washington, and he had, she said, promised to accept one of these. Whether or not this was true, the handful of men and women who were aware of her relationship with Lyndon Johnson—including men and women who were to know Johnson over a long period of time—agree that this relationship was different from other extramarital affairs in which he was to be a participant. His conduct at Longlea was striking. One of them, seeing Lyndon and Alice together for the first time, says he could hardly believe his eyes. As Alice sat reading Millay in her quiet, throaty voice, he recalls, Johnson sat silent, not saying a word, just drinking in the beautiful woman with the book in her hands. "I don't believe that Lyndon ever held still for listening to poetry from anyone else," he says. And although Johnson generally ate, even at Washington dinner parties, as he had always eaten—scooping up heaping forkfuls of food and cramming them into his wide-open mouth—at Longlea he made an effort, the first such effort these men and women had ever seen him make, to eat in a more normal manner.
There were, in addition, other telling indications of the strength of Lyndon Johnson's passion for Alice Glass. One is the fact that his love affair with her juts out of the landscape of his life as one of the few episodes in it and perhaps the only one that ran counter to his personal ambition. Charles Marsh, as owner of the only district-wide organ of public opinion, was perhaps the individual in Johnson's congressional district most important to his continuation in office. His love affair with Marsh's lover was, in the words of a man familiar with the relationship, "taking one hell of a chance." And, this man adds, "Knowing Lyndon, I could hardly believe he was taking a chance like that. It just didn't fit in with the Lyndon Johnson I knew. In my opinion, that was the only time—the only time—in Lyndon Johnson's whole life that he was pulled off the course he had set for himself."
Johnson, moreover, was silent about the physical side of their relationship.
In later years, such delicacy would not be one of his more striking characteristics. Displaying the same coarseness that, at college, had led him to exhibit his penis and call it "Jumbo," he would show no reticence whatever about the most intimate details of extramarital relationships. His descriptions of his amours were not only exhibitionistic but boastful; particularly with cronies, he would seem almost to need to make other men acknowledge his sexual prowess. There was, seemingly, no aspect of an afternoon in bed—not even the most intimate details of a partner's anatomy—that he did not consider grist for his vivid storytelling ability.
About the physical aspect of his relationship with Alice Glass, he spoke not at all. About her, he was as reticent as a young man in love.
BUT IF HIS RELATIONSHIP with Alice Glass in some respects "didn't fit in" with the rest of Lyndon Johnson's life, in other respects it fit in snugly—emphasizing familiar traits.
His gift for secrecy, for example, had never been more strikingly displayed.
Charles Marsh did not learn of the affair; the lord of Longlea was deeply in love with the woman for whom he had built it, and was more anxious than ever to marry her. "He was asking her and asking her and asking her to marry him," her sister says. But whereas her resistance to the proposal had seemed once to be weakening, now she was adamant. "She wouldn't marry Marsh after she met Lyndon," Mary Louise says. "She wanted to marry Lyndon." Those of the regulars at Longlea who did know dreaded the day when Marsh would find out. His temper was so monumental, his pride so intense, that these younger people, who were somewhat in awe of him, couldn't imagine what his reaction would be when he discovered the truth. And they felt that discovery was inevitable. "They went to great lengths to deceive him," Mary Louise says. "It was all so undercover. But sometimes I would be sitting there when the three of them [Charles, Alice and Lyndon] were together, and I would just be"—and here Mary Louise covers her ears with her hands to demonstrate, figuratively, the way she was inwardly bracing herself for the explosion she was sure must come.
But it didn't come. So guardedly did the two lovers act that even Alice's best friend had not known the truth until Alice told her. "They were unbelievably discreet," Mrs. Hopkins notes. "They were never seen together" in public, and when they were together at Longlea, "they were so discreet" that, she says, no one could have guessed that they were lovers. Until Alice told her, she says, "I had seen them both many times at Longlea, and I never knew." Says Mary Louise: "Nothing showed. Nothing at all."
What did "show," in fact, would have tended to disarm even the most suspicious of men. During his weekends at Longlea, Lyndon Johnson not only displayed his gift for secrecy, he displayed another gift; his capacity for the cultivation of an older man who was important to him, with utter disregard of his true feelings.
He was still at Marsh's beck and call; on scores of occasions like the Sunday on which Marsh brought Leinsdorf to Washington, all Marsh had to do was summon him, and he was there—willing, anxious, eager to be of service. He still agreed fulsomely with Marsh's political analyses and prognostications on world affairs, and was the first to point out that Charles had been right again on some prediction. He still asked Marsh for advice—and was so grateful when Charles gave it that the older man gave more and more. Harold Young, who had watched Johnson "play" many an older man, felt he had never played one better that he did Charles Marsh; never, he felt, had Johnson been more "humble," more the "great flatterer."
Marsh had to be away from Washington frequently on business, but these trips did not interrupt the courtship of the older man by the younger, for he continued it by telegram, wiring Marsh in New York or Chicago or Baltimore to ask for advice: "NEED VISIT WITH YOU. WIRE WHERE CAN REACH YOU OR CALL ME AT HOME TONIGHT"; on another occasion, when Johnson was planning to go to Texas, he wrote the publisher, "I do hope you will be back this way before we leave. I need the inspiration and stimulant that a couple of hours with you always gives me." Or he would give congratulations to Marsh on his perspicacity; on December 15, 1939, for example, while Marsh was checking on business investments in New York, he received a telegram from Johnson in Washington which stated: "SOME INTERESTING AND RATHER AMUSING DEVELOPMENTS HERE YESTERDAY WHICH CONFIRMED A PREDICTION YOU MADE IN AUGUST."
Marsh's response was all Johnson could have wished. To his telegrams requesting advice came back telegrams giving it—advice on how to place an ad in country newspapers so that it would receive prominent display, for example ("MERELY ENCLOSE A CHECK FOR $20.00. … I DO NOT THINK YOU WILL FIND THAT ANY OF THEM WILL RETURN THE CHANGE…"). When Marsh felt that Johnson needed advice in more detail than was feasible for a telegram, an "Extra Rush!" wire would tell the Congressman: "SUGGEST YOU TELEPHONE COLLECT … TONIGHT." And sometimes he felt Johnson needed advice in person—"ARRIVE WASHINGTON SEVEN FORTY-FIVE TUESDAY MORNING IF PLANE ON TIME WOULD BE PLEASED HAVE BREAKFAST WITH YOU MAYFLOWER HOTEL." The advice was on personal as well as political matters, and it reveals not only the paternal feeling Marsh had toward Johnson, but his total ignorance of the relationship between Johnson and Alice; some of the advice, in view of that relationship, can be read with a certain feeling of irony. On April 9, 1940, during a period when the affair between Lyndon and Alice was at its most torrid, Marsh, who had left Longlea the previous evening on a business trip, telegraphed Johnson: "I DID NOT LIKE THE WAY YOU LOOKED LAST NIGHT. YOU WERE NOT WELL SHAVED. PLAY AS MUCH GOLF AS POSSIBLE WITH ALICE. …"
Marsh became, in fact, more and more fond of the young man he considered his protégé. Sometimes, lonely on his travels around the country, he would be moved to telegraph Johnson his affection; from the Stevens Hotel in Chicago, he wired Johnson on September 16, 1940: "DEAR LYNDON: WAKING UP THIS MORNING WITH A GREAT DISTASTE FOR MID-WEST SENATORS, I FOUND IT MORE PLEASANT TO WRITE YOU A NOTE."
Marsh's increasing fondness for Johnson disturbed Alice more and more; her own inclination would have been to reveal the truth to Marsh; she had agreed to wait until the time was ripe, but she felt there was something more dishonorable than she had bargained for in the situation as it was evolving. But Johnson seemed to find it completely feasible to have the relationship he wanted not only with the man's mistress but with the man.
And he proved to be right. His discretion gave him rewards. During the same years in which he was making love to the woman Marsh loved, Marsh was giving him more than advice and affection.
He was concerned with Lyndon's financial future because he had noticed that, despite his $10,000-per-year Congressman's salary, Johnson was always short of cash. The publisher saw that Lyndon was worried about money, and he didn't want Lyndon to worry about money: a great future lay ahead of him, and he should be freed from sordid cares. In 1939, therefore, Marsh took his first step toward placing Johnson on a sounder financial footing. With his gift for making money on a grand scale, he had seen, several years before, how to make it in Austin. Standing on a hill above the small but growing city, he had forecast the direction in which most of its growth would occur, and had promptly purchased large tracts of land there. Now the land was worth considerably more than he had paid for it, but Marsh said he would sell Johnson a nineteen-acre tract for the same price he had paid: $12,000. "It was a marvelous buy, and we knew it," Lady Bird says. She borrowed the money from her father, Brown & Root chipped in by building a road out to the land, and by grading and landscaping it—and, for the first time, the Johnsons owned property.
The older man helped the younger man not only financially but politically. Although he owned so many newspapers, Marsh's interest in them was financial rather than journalistic. "Charles just had newspapers to make money with them," says Mary Louise Glass, his secretary. "Making money did not require editorial quality, and there was no concern with that." On the rare occasions on which some local issue or individual captured Marsh's interest and led him to formulate a position on it, he wanted the position expressed not only on the editorial page but—without regard to journalistic ethics—in the news columns. And he left no doubt as to the precise nature of the position he wished taken; making a rare call to the paper's editor (he usually talked only to "the business people," Mary Louise says), he would bark unequivocal instructions over the telephone. And after Lyndon Johnson became his protégé, the instructions to Charles E. Green, editor of the Austin American-Statesman, often concerned Lyndon Johnson. Marsh would sometimes dictate pro-Johnson editorials—and articles—himself. His newspapers took one position that was particularly pleasing to Johnson: that no one run against him in the next election. As early as January, 1938, an American-Statesman editorial, lauding Johnson's work on the LCRA and other projects, said that he "ought … to be unopposed, and thus freed of the burden of a campaign, so as to give his undivided time to his services in the session that will run almost until primary election day." This theme was echoed by American-Statesman reporters. Wrote one, in the paper's "Town Talk" column, "I had a nice visit with Cong. Johnson. He looks tired, but I suppose any man who has done as much for his district in the short time that Johnson has, should be tired. Fortunately, I don't think there's anyone in his district foolish enough to announce against him. So that will give him some rest." Potential opponents realized that in 1938, Johnson would have not only overwhelming financial support, but enthusiastic press support.
THE REACTION of the audience—Mary Louise Glass, Welly and Alice Hopkins, and others—to the drama, the drama that Mary Louise calls "Charles and Alice and Lyndon," being played out before them, month after month, against the beautiful setting of Longlea (without, of course, the knowledge of one of the three leads), varies from person to person, and their reactions are colored by their attachment to one or another of the participants.
An unequivocal opinion is obtainable from another observer, who has asked not to be quoted by name. This observer's opinion is colored by the fact that she had reason to be keenly aware, more keenly aware than the other watchers, of a detail almost never mentioned by the others: the fact that not only the principals but two little children of whom Charles Marsh was very fond, and who were very much attached to their father, would be affected by the drama's denouement.
Watching Lyndon Johnson fawn over the children's father when he was present, knowing all the time that Johnson was sleeping with their mother when he was absent; watching Johnson praise the older man to his face, knowing all the time that behind his back he was taking from him the woman he loved; seeing how unshakably deferential, how utterly humble, he was in playing upon Marsh's affections, this observer, a lover of Charles Dickens, was reminded forcefully of a character in David Copperfield—a character who, she felt, lacked only a Southern drawl to be Lyndon Johnson in the flesh. "Every time I looked at Lyndon," she says, "I saw a Uriah Heep from Texas."
AND WHAT of the other person who had a stake in the drama—a person so lightly regarded by the spectators that most of them all but ignore her when they talk of it?
Lady Bird Johnson was easy to ignore.
Her husband insisted that she wear makeup and high heels, and, more and more, she did so, but he could not, except on rare occasions, force her to wear dresses of any but the dullest colors, and her appearance was still drab. And nothing, it seemed, could ease her terrible shyness.
During her husband's campaign for Congress, she had been, as always, pleasant and uncomplaining in serving hot meals to him and his aides at all hours of the night; men who worked for him had come to accept as a matter of course a warm, welcoming smile at the door, no matter when they arrived. But when, occasionally, someone—someone who didn't know her well—raised, however gingerly, the possibility that she herself might campaign, the very suggestion that she might have to face an audience and speak brought such panic to the face of this woman who had once prayed for smallpox so that she wouldn't have to speak at her high-school graduation ceremony that the suggestion was always quickly dropped. Following the campaign, an Austin women's organization had held a party in honor of the wife of the new Congressman; she had been able to avoid making a speech at the party, but she could not avoid standing in a receiving line—and while she had shaken hands and chatted with the strangers filing by, she had done it with so obvious an effort that her friends winced inwardly as they watched; the bright smile on her face had been as rigid as if it had been set in stone. At Longlea, with so many brilliant raconteurs only too anxious to hold the stage, no such effort was required; she was able to sit for hours, just listening, absolutely silent. And, of course, often Lady Bird was not at Longlea. As 1938 became 1939 and 1939 became 1940, with increasing frequency Lyndon Johnson would arrive alone, having left her back in Washington. Sometimes, in fact, he would have dispatched her to Texas. It was necessary for the Johnsons' car, filled with household possessions, to be driven back and forth at the start and finish of each congressional session, and, often, Johnson had her make the 1,600-mile trip to Austin accompanied by the wife of one of his aides, saying that he had to stay behind in Washington on business; later, he would fly down. "For years," Lady Bird would say, "my idea of being rich was having enough linens and pots and pans to have a set in each place, and not have to lug them back and forth."
The attitude of the Longlea "regulars" was, of course, influenced by the attitude her husband displayed toward her: the brusqueness of the orders he gave her, insisting they be instantly obeyed; the short shrift he accorded her infrequent, timid comments. Seeing that in her relationship with Lyndon, her opinion didn't count, they gave it little consideration themselves. Marsh, in fact, seems to have been in some doubt as to her name; he was constantly referring to her as "Lyndon's wife." To Alice's adoring sister and her best friend, moreover, she was an obstacle to Alice's happiness, and when they did discuss her, there was more than a hint of mockery in their voices; says Alice Hopkins: "Everybody was trying to be nice to her, but she was just … out of place." And the attitude of the regulars was influenced also by the attitude she herself displayed; Lady Bird Johnson herself appears to have felt that she was out of place at Longlea. Decades later, describing the estate to the author, she said: "My eyes were just out on stems. They would have interesting people from the world of art and literature and politics. It was the closest I ever came to a salon in my life. … There was a dinner table with ever so much crystal and silver. …" She appears to have felt herself that she had little to contribute to the scintillating conversation there; she felt that her host, for example, not only "looked like a Roman emperor" but was "one of the most fascinating men I have ever met. He knew all sorts of things. He went all over Europe, he went to Salzburg and places like that. … He was the first one who introduced Lyndon to the danger of Hitler. … I think he saw a Nazi rally. He made my blood run cold. But he also made us see why the German people would be for him [Hitler]—that they would be respected and all." She appears, in fact, to have felt keenly the contrast between herself and her hostess: "I remember Alice in a series of long and elegant dresses, and me in—well, much less elegant," she says. In a voice with a trace of heroine-worship, she notes that they had known each other slightly years before in Austin when she was a University of Texas undergraduate and Alice was working in the Capitol, and even then, Lady Bird says, "she was quite an intellectual girl and, you felt, destined for more exciting things than being a legislator's secretary." And then, when "we saw them again in Washington, she was even prettier, and just dressed so beautifully. She was very tall, and elegant—really beautiful, in a sort of Amazonian way." Once, during a Marsh discourse on the Hitler threat, her admiration for Alice moved her to a rare attempt at a witticism—"Maybe Alice can help us fight him," she said. "She's so tall and blond she looks like a Valkyrie"—an attempt which was, of course, ignored.
Had they been more observant, however, the Longlea regulars might have noticed qualities in the drab woman as well as in the elegant one. During the loud arguments to which she sat quietly listening, books would be mentioned; Lady Bird would, on her return to Washington, check those books out of the public library—check them out and read them. Because of Marsh's preoccupation with Hitler, she checked out a copy of Mein Kampf, read it—and learned it. She never attempted to talk about it at Longlea, even though when Hitler's theories were discussed thereafter, she was aware that, while Marsh knew what he was talking about, no one else in the room did—except her. And she read other books, too; one Summer is still remembered by the Longlea regulars as the "Summer that Lady Bird read War and Peace." They snickered at the way she carried the big book with her everywhere—even though, by the end of the Summer, she had finished it, and, because she felt there was something to be gained by a rereading, had promptly begun at the beginning to read it through again.
And there were other qualities—which the regulars note, even though they don't realize the significance of what they are saying. Alice Hopkins, while saying that "She was just … out of place," says immediately thereafter that "If everyone was just trying to be nice to her," she would be nice right back, calm and gracious—"She was self-contained." Even Alice's sister noticed that there was something "quite remarkable in her self-discipline—the things she made herself do. She was forever working" not only on her reading, but on her figure—she had always been "dumpy," but now the extra weight came off, and stayed off.
AND SOME of the Longlea regulars even began, after a while, to wonder if there were not still greater depths to the "self-discipline" of Lady Bird Johnson.
"Of course" Lady Bird must have known of her husband's affair with Alice Glass, Frank Oltorf says. "Oh, I'm sure she did." Why else, the regulars point out, would she think that her husband was going—without her—on so many weekends to Longlea when, as she could easily have determined, Charles Marsh was not at home? Says Mary Louise: "The thing I could never understand was how she stood it. Lyndon would leave her on weekends, weekend after weekend, just leave her home. I wouldn't have stood it for a minute."
But stand it she did. "We were all together a lot—Lyndon and Lady Bird and Charles and Alice," Mary Louise says. "And Lady Bird never said a word. She showed nothing, nothing at all."
THE PASSION eventually faded from Johnson's relationship with Alice Glass. She married Charles Marsh, but quickly divorced him, and married several times thereafter. "She never got over Lyndon," Alice Hopkins says. But the relationship itself survived; even when he was a Senator, Lyndon Johnson would still occasionally dismiss his chauffeur for the day and drive his huge limousine the ninety miles to Longlea; the friendship was ended only by the Vietnam War, which Alice considered one of history's horrors. By 1967, she referred to Johnson, in a letter she wrote Oltorf, in bitter terms. And later she told friends that she had burned love letters that Johnson had written her—because she didn't want her granddaughter to know she had ever been associated with the man responsible for Vietnam.
*The American was the morning edition, the Statesman the afternoon; on Saturday and Sunday, they were published as a single newspaper, the American-Statesman.