Hollywood Read Online Free PDF Page A

tactician for whom the blush was an evasionary tactic like that of the sea-squid which could spread a cloud of ink all round itself and thus vanish in order to chart a new course. “Naturally, I do it for Franklin. We must keep on the right side of Congress, and they all go to Mrs. Bingham’s.”
    “Except this week. They’ve adjourned. I told her not to bother, but she has mortal longings. She hungers now for the diplomats who stay, and for the Administration, which never leaves town, the way they used to.”
    “They can’t. Not now. Not with ‘Preparedness.’ ” Eleanor frowned. “Do you think we’ll go into the war?”
    “That was
my
editorial. Yesterday. Yes, I do.”
    “I thought it was your brother’s. He’s been so … eager to have us go in.”
    “Well, now I’m eager, too.” Caroline found herself staring at a bust of Napoleon, a gift from her original mentor in the newspaper business, William Randolph Hearst, whose gifts, like his life, tended toward the inappropriate but were no less revealing for that.
    “The young men all are.” Eleanor undid the button to her right glove; soon she would be shaking hands, graciously, like her uncle, but with far less noise. “I mean the ones in the Administration, like Franklin and Bill Phillips. I’m rather more—Don’t tell anyone.” She regarded Caroline anxiously, and Caroline found her charmingly innocent, since no one of sound mind would confide in a newspaper publisher. But Caroline nodded sympathetically, as she always did whenever President Wilson pretended to confide in her;
he
was not innocent, of course, just self-absorbed and so, at times, tactically obtuse. “Well, personally, secretly, I rather like the way Mr. Bryan resigned as secretary of state.”
    “Peace at any price?”
    “Almost. Yes. Aren’t you?”
    “Almost. No.” Caroline was brisk. “It is too late, thanks to Herr Zimmermann’s telegram. Even Mlle. Souvestre would favor war.”
    “Yes. That went too far. So discouraging. I suppose I’m getting used to the idea now. But when Mr. Bryan resigned as secretary, I thought him very brave. I’m not a pacifist, of course. I can’t be. Franklin would be furious. He’s getting to be just like Uncle Ted. War at any price. Now, thanks to Mr. Zimmermann …” Eleanor gazed forlornly at her schedule.
    At first, both Caroline and the Anglophile Blaise thought the telegram was an invention of the British; as a result, humiliatingly, the
Tribune
was one of the last newspapers to record this shocking affront—and shock it certainly was—to the American people. Yet when the President requested congressional permission to arm American ships, the request had been filibustered to death on the Senate floor: and the Congress had then adjourned on March 3, leaving the nation’s business unfinished.
    On March 5, the President had taken his second oath of office in a simple ceremony at the White House to which neither Blaise nor Caroline had been invited. But then the President was vindictive not only in the large necessary things but in the small insignificant ones as well. To Caroline this was perfect proof of his greatness, since every major political figure that she had known was equally dedicated to disinterested revenge.
    Jacques, the lesser half of a couple from Martinique, appeared in the doorway. “The car is here, madam.”
    Caroline rose while Eleanor perversely buttoned the glove that she had just unbuttoned. The process would now have to be repeated once they were in company. There was something compulsive about the younger woman’s energy that Caroline found both touching and mysterious. But then the dread—and for Caroline, if not for all the world, charming—Uncle Theodore had set inordinately high standards of activity, ranging from every sort of fidget in a room to mad dashes up and down the Amazon in order to slaughter any animal or bird that dared place itself in his path. Happily, the women of the family had