part I
remained at home helping as I could with the house work and taking care of my precious darling.
_72_
On the afternoon of June 8, 1922, Elizabeth, my sister, had gone downtown and Elizabeth Ann and I were alone in the apartment. I had been taking a bath and had gone into my bedroom for something, and when I came back to the bathroom I found the baby had locked herself in. She was always at my heels, but I did not know that she ever even so much as touched the lock on the door. As the door could be opened only from the inside, and as the baby could not open it, I became frantic. She was then only two-and-a-half years old.
I called in to her, telling her what to do to release the lock, but it was a difficult one to turn, more easily locked than unlocked. There was a note of fear in the tiny voice when she inquired “How do I do it?” I called down from the back porch to the lady who lived on the first floor and she suggested that I call the fire department. I put the call in immediately. Between the time the baby had locked herself in and the time the fire department arrived, I played “post office” with her, sitting outside the door on the floor and pushing innumerable envelopes, papers, blotters, etc., under the door which she in turn would push back with a giggle. I had quieted her and that quieted me somewhat.
Evidently the fire department didn’t often have calls to rescue babies who had locked themselves in bathrooms, and the fire chief was quite annoyed. However, they hoisted the ladder, and a fireman climbed through the open bathroom window, unlocked the door, and allowed a very calm and undisturbed Elizabeth Ann to walk forth.
This proved to be too unusual a thing for the ubiquitous newspaper reporters to pass up, and within ten minutes after the rescue the doorbell rang. _The Chicago Tribune_ wished to take my picture and that of the baby together! Yes, perhaps right there before the bathroom door would be the best, the reporter said.
I was so nervous that the possibility of any publicity frightened me because I knew what Mr. Harding would say. I refused flatly to allow them to take any pictures at all. “All right, madam, then we’ll make up our own story!” the reporter threw back at me as I closed the door upon him. I opened it again and called him back, explained that I had been ill and that things like that made me very nervous. In the end he promised not to make a great ado about it in _his_ paper, but Elizabeth, my sister, came up the stairs almost simultaneously with another more persistent reporter, from the Hearst headquarters. “They want my picture and the baby’s” I cried hysterically. Elizabeth turned calmly to the reporter. “Can’t you come back in the morning?” she smiled, after she had learned what it was all about. They consented. Elizabeth promised that they might snap the baby’s picture alone if they would return in the morning. And so it was.
I have the picture clipping which appeared in the Hearst daily on June 9, 1922; it is headed, “FIRELESS RESCUE.” It shows the side of the apartment building, with ladder, faked in pen and ink, against the apartment, and a child’s arms extended from the window above toward the rescuing fireman. Below is a good-sized picture of Elizabeth Ann Willits, a very excellent likeness of her, quite Harding-like.
_73_
My baby was ill. As I try to recall now the exact time of her illness my memory fails me--even to the month. But the memory of the terror of that experience shall stay with me forever.
I had not been home long from a sojourn in the hospital, where I had a slight throat operation, when I began to notice that Elizabeth Ann was not as lively as usual. Then one morning I looked at her closely. Her eyes drooped unnaturally. The circles under her eyes, too, which are a Harding facial characteristic, were darker than usual, and she dragged her dolls and books through the hall with listlessness.
Scott was still abroad and Elizabeth and I were alone with the baby in the apartment at that time. How can I forget how I hung upon every word that fell from Dr. Barbour’s lips, every expression that crossed his face when he came to see Elizabeth Ann! To this day I do not know what Elizabeth Ann’s trouble was. I doubt if I asked Dr. Barbour at that time. I was a coward. I felt her life was in my doctor’s hands and I looked to him. But whatever the trouble, it was serious. She slept most of the time--a heavy, dead sleep from which she seemed scarcely able to open her eyes. Each hour, when medicine time came, I prayed she would swallow the liquid, and when she opened her eyes I demanded of her sharply that she take it. It was like nothing that I have ever known--that sickness of my child. I held her in my arms. Her lips were dry, almost colorless, it seemed. Her eyes always closed. The doctor had ordered that her chest be covered with a white paste-like stuff and then swathed in flannels. She submitted to this treatment with closed eyes and a limpness of body that sent my heart racing with terror. All day I would lie beside her. Often when I awoke in the middle of the night she would be talking. I knew the fever made her talk aloud. God! What days those were! I myself was such an invalid that through the day Elizabeth, my sister, alternately tended me and the baby. But like nervous people, I felt improved as evening came on, and this made it possible for me to care for Elizabeth Ann through the night while my sister slept.
What joy to watch her recover! What sweet pain in my heart to see her sit up in a chair! What gratitude I felt to Dr. Barbour for his excellent ministry! And how often I sobbed myself to sleep, out of sheer thankfulness to God for sparing her to me! And, as a normal two-and-a-half does not require many weeks to regain lost baby plumpness and pink cheeks, soon Elizabeth Ann was opening sparkling eyes in the morning and closing play-tired ones at night. Elizabeth and I would stand over her crib. We needed not the spoken word to read the great relief and gratitude in each other’s eyes.
_74_
When I was a child, even before I had reached the age of ten, my flights of imagination in picturing my future self always took one of two directions--toward being an actress or a writer. It was said of my mother that she possessed considerable dramatic ability when she was a girl, and I know my father wrote extremely well. Neither mother nor father realized the glories of these talents developed, except in amateur, local settings. Doubtless, mother’s Quaker grandmother, with whom she lived a great deal of the time, would have thrown up her hands in holy horror at the mere mention of a stage career for her granddaughter, Mary Lee Williams. So this love of the drama took with my mother an entirely safe form, and she became known among her friends and the townspeople as a monologuist of more than usual ability.
I am frank to say that the dramatic appeal of my own life-play, which had passed the climactic stage with Elizabeth Ann’s entrance into the world, greatly appeased the instinctive hunger for self-expression which I likely inherited from my mother, and indeed I was finding the drama in which I held the center of the stage to be fast developing into a tragedy. A tragedy because it was failing--yea, had failed--to provide the satisfying denouement which I had looked forward to with hopeful heart at the rise of the curtain. This sense of unfinishment had begun to prey upon my mind even before our baby came, but I had banished it rather successfully with the full buoyancy of my nature and had clung to visionary hopes and to Mr. Harding’s oft-repeated statement to me that in his “sober judgment” he felt that our relationship was “predestined.” And surely, I thought, predestination would naturally slate lovers for the perfect fulfillment of their desire in every direction.
But Life, stark with dire realities, confronted me now, and the romantic illusions upon which I had fed were meeting with pitiful destruction on many sides. Enforced separation from my beloved, submission to an arrangement whereby I forfeited the glory of being known as my own child’s mother, and continued ill-health, sufficed to precipitate the unhappy disillusionments I was experiencing. And the process of introspection and introversion constantly indulged, more pronouncedly after a visit to Washington, seemed sometimes to leave me momentarily in a terrifying state of inability to think at all, so intensely _did_ I think.
It was this state of mentality which inclined me again to consider the stage, and I began anew to see in it an outlet for “suppressed emotions.” I had in the fall of 1920 succumbed to an advertisement and taken some desultory instructions from a man who had his studio in the Auditorium Building in Chicago, but it had seemed for many reasons an unworthwhile investment and I had given it up. Now I pondered it seriously. To live another’s vicissitudinous experiences might, I thought, take my mind from my own mind and prove an emotional boon.
A very dear friend of mine, who knew the whole of my story, listened sympathetically to these arguments and agreed it might help enormously to relieve me both mentally and physically. She took me to see a friend of hers who had long been a leader in the motion picture world, but, after hearing from him and his wife that they would prefer to see their daughter “scrub floors in the Boston Store” (that being considered a low-priced department store in Chicago) than to enter upon a career in the movies, I felt less inclined to view it with approval myself, and this in spite of the fact that the motion picture magnate cordially volunteered to allow me to act in the next film he produced, and offered a camera test to see whether or not I screened well.
[Illustration]
Still harboring a hope that this character of activity might benefit me, and feeling disinclined to return to secretarial work, and, moreover, firmly convinced that I ought not to remain at my sister Elizabeth’s entirely unemployed except for my preferred occupation of being with and caring for our darling baby, I took my problem in early June, 1922, down to Washington and laid it before Mr. Harding.
I remember how he smiled, the smile of an indulgent parent to a spoiled child perhaps, when he said, “Why, sure! Go on! I think that would be fine!” smiling at my tearful attempt to explain what must to him have seemed like a wild idea. “_Then_ I’ll become a movie fan!” he added merrily, having only been twice to the movies in Washington, he told me. He said he was sure I could do as well as any actress he had ever seen(!), and he also said he could understand how the partial outdoor activity might do me good.
However, later on he wrote me, almost upon the heels of my departure from Washington, asking me _not_ to consider going either into the movies or on the stage, saying he had thought it over and was “afraid” of it. No doubt he was thinking of possible publicity and ultimate exposure. At any rate, I gave up the idea altogether and have never been so tempted since. How I could have thought it possible to undergo the hardships to which even the moderately successful screen or stage artist is subjected--the rehearsals, travel, hours, etc.--is incomprehensible to me now, when I remember that I was then making two trips a week to the South Side to Dr. Barbour who was administering iron hypodermics, and who even found it necessary to recommend that I spend about half of my time in bed.
_75_
It was upon the occasion of this last-named visit to the White House that I showed Mr. Harding the picture of Elizabeth Ann’s “rescue” which had appeared in the Hearst paper in Chicago. I remember we were sitting at his desk, and I can just see his face twitch and the impatient gestures of his hands as he laid the picture upon his desk.
“Oh, Nan, _why_ did you allow it? Why _did_ you allow it?” he exclaimed over and over. I failed to see why it should cause him so _much_ distress, and said so frankly. However, I told him in the same breath that I tried to stop them. I wondered as I looked with him again at the picture whether the headlines immediately above, which referred to another column and read, “INTIMATE CHAT AT WHITE HOUSE,” added to his disconcertion in seeing his daughter’s picture below. When I asked him he did not reply; he only shook his head, his expression betraying the perturbation he felt.
However, he had the happy ability to come out of things, and he picked up the picture and looked at it again. This time he studied it and a slow smile lit his face. It was Warren Harding, the man, the father, who spoke next.
“Really, Nan, she’s much like you!” he said softly, as he folded up the picture and handed it back to me. “Oh, darling, she’s much more like _you_!” I insisted. “Why, just look at her _eyes_!” I exclaimed, holding the picture up again for us both to look at. He smiled and nodded acknowledgment of the resemblance so strikingly caught by the Hearst cameraman. “Well, if she’s as sweet a baby as her mother is a woman....” Mr. Harding concluded, leaving his desk and walking over to the leather couch, where he was evidently not intending to sit alone.
This was on Sunday morning. A tall vase with pink roses stood upon his desk, in memory of his mother. Mr. Harding himself was dressed for church, and, as we dropped down together upon the couch he asked me suddenly, as though it had just occurred to him, if I would care to attend his church that morning. “Have Tim Slade drop you off there,” he suggested, when I told him Tim was waiting for me outside with his car. I was delighted. Mr. Harding seemed to be, too. We could at least be in the same building for another hour!
We talked, as usual, of many things and he urged me to tell him everything of interest that had happened to me since he last saw me. Somehow it really was like bringing the outside world inside the prison bars to the one shut in; he seemed so happy to hear of my doings. I remember so well how back in ’17 or ’18 I used to relate to him my experiences, usually after we had retired and I could lie close in his arms, and, when I suddenly realized I had been talking steadily for quite some time I would interrupt myself and apologize, and he would say so adorably, “Why, Nan, I _love_ to listen to you!” Here in the White House our time was limited, and I gradually learned that if I wanted to touch upon all topics I must jot them down upon a card, and scratch them off the list as I spoke of them to Mr. Harding. Which I invariably did. I told him at this time of a diary I had begun--it was to contain accounts of my visits to him in the White House, as well as the many little cunning things Elizabeth Ann was saying those days in her sweet baby way. Again Mr. Harding shook his head. “Oh, dearie, you _mustn’t_ keep such a book around. You must destroy it as soon as you return to Chicago. Promise, Nan, that you will destroy it immediately!” I promised readily, though, of course, presented healthy arguments to disparage such a program. “Why, honey, I paid $11 for that book at Dutton’s in New York last fall, and I have it almost over half full now. I didn’t think you’d mind a diary!” But he pleaded with me to keep nothing around, in my trunk or elsewhere, that would be evidence of our relationship, and, of course, I said I would not from then on. I felt hurt about having to destroy the pages of that beautiful lavender diary. I have retained the cover and the blank pages that were left. I remember writing him after I returned to Chicago, and telling him that it had been destroyed and that now there existed nothing that could be taken as evidence of our dearness to each other--nothing save my first letters from him, my autographed picture of him, and my Harding book of newspaper clippings to which he never seemed to object because the material was public anyway.
We talked about the baby, about his cousins, the Weseners, who lived scarcely half a block from Elizabeth’s and many things, all hurried discussions, but still discussions. Then Mr. Harding stood up to take me in his arms.
“Honestly, darling,” I exclaimed as I held out my hand for him to pull me to my feet, “You are the best looking thing that I have ever seen!” His smile was the smile of the little snapshot I have of him, the smile he knew I so adored, the smile our daughter gives me occasionally which stirs me so deeply and moves me to tears, it is so sweetly reminiscent of her father’s smile. “Well, dearie,” he replied, “_that’s_ something I just can’t help, you know!” And then for a brief space of time--all too brief--we became oblivious to our surroundings, to his identity as President of the United States, and to all the world. “Why don’t you tell me you love me, Nan darling,” he coaxed, and I told him over and over again, as I had told him a thousand times, “I love you, darling Warren Harding, I love you.”
In low tones Mr. Harding told me again how he dreamed of having me all night with him, which prompted my usual query, “How is Mrs. Harding now?” He lifted his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders and replied in the usual way, “Oh, all right!” There was, as I have said, always a certain deprecatory attitude which he seemed to reserve for Mrs. Harding. I remember in one of my very early letters to him back in 1917, I expressed some concern over the possible greetings he might have for his legal wife when he met her again after his absences from home, and in his reply letter he had written, “You need give yourself no concern over that, sweetheart. My kiss for her is most perfunctory, I can assure you!” Indeed, I have often thought with the pardonable vanity of one who is conscious ever of priority in her sweetheart’s thoughts, that likely Mrs. Harding was, as Mr. Harding had stated to me concerning another woman whom we both knew, as safe with him “as though she were in jail, Nan!” And I think his affectional interest in his wife had ceased long, long before Mr. Harding and I met in New York in 1917.
These mental dips back into the recent past occurred as he touched upon possible plans on Mrs. Harding’s part which would make possible for us a night together somewhere in Washington. It seemed to me he did not even value her casual companionship. As we sat there that morning on his couch in his private office, I expressed a wish that instead of going to church we might go off somewhere to be alone. “Gee, I do, too, dearie!” was his enthusiastic rejoinder. “Will Mrs. Harding go to church with you?” I inquired. He nodded. “Yes, and I have another appointment this morning before church, and am fifteen minutes late for it now!” I arose. I’m sure that he, too, had forgotten that he was the President of the United States.
He walked over to his desk and selected a lovely pink rosebud for me. Then he unlocked his private drawer and took out the bills he wanted to give me--mainly the money due Elizabeth and Scott for our baby’s care. I had tried hard not to complain too much of arrangements then existent in view of the fact that Elizabeth, the baby, and I, were living happily together then, but these partings always stirred up the feeling of incompleteness, and made me long intensely for a happy fulfillment with him whom I loved. I felt the urge to say to him that we _must_ make a change, rescind existing plans for the future, allow me the happy restitution of motherhood, frankly acknowledged, and solve a problem that was becoming growingly more complicated and difficult of permanent solution.... But I only kissed him back in purest passion, and to his query, “Are you happy, dearie?” I whispered “Yes!” against a soft lapel.
When I joined Tim Slade outside in his handsome car my eyes were still wet and I fondled the pink rosebud reminiscently. Tim asked me if I cared to drive, and I said yes, but that I intended to go to Mr. Harding’s church later on. He directed the chauffeur to take us out along the river, and Tim and I talked. Tim knew so many things of interest to me then because they had a direct bearing upon the President and his tremendous problems, and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to him.
Our drive lasted too long, for I was unable to secure a front-row balcony-seat, from where Mr. Harding had told me I might see best all over the church. However, I found one three or four rows back and could look over the balcony and down upon the fast-whitening head of the President. It was all strongly reminiscent of the early days in Marion when I, as a child, was wont to go anywhere and everywhere just to be close to my hero. For a whole precious hour my eyes were riveted upon him, and I was unspeakably happy just to look at him. My heart was full of tears. If only I could have him forever--even at a distance like this--just to worship him! I loved him so.
The official car stood outside the church and I hastened down so that I might watch him pass out. He did not see me, because I had to be careful, as he had instructed, that Mrs. Harding did not see me, but I watched him nevertheless from a point of safe vantage. Then I walked slowly back to my hotel, had luncheon, and went to a movie, where I sat through two shows in order to see twice the news event which pictured my darling welcoming delegates, from somewhere, on the White House lawn. Mr. Harding always seemed to know which was the best train to take out of Washington, no matter whether I might be returning west or east, and he had that time told me of a very good train for Chicago which I could get if I wanted to wait until late that afternoon or early evening. That was why I filled in my time going to a movie, when I more naturally would have hastened to leave the city which held him after his disappointing statement that he could not see me again that visit.
[Illustration: The White House in Summer]
[Illustration: The White House in Winter]
_76_
It was July 5th, 1922, when I next saw President Harding, about a month after the visit which I have just related. But this time I saw him along with thousands and thousands of others. The occasion was the 100th anniversary of the founding of the city of Marion, Ohio, his home town and mine.
I went down to Marion from Chicago on the night of the 3rd, arriving about 7:00 on the morning of the Fourth. Every family in Marion had crowded homes, “filled up” with extra guests, for it was reported that Marion accommodated about 50,000 extra people for that homecoming event. Inasmuch as I had advised no one of my coming, I was obliged, even with a host of friends living in Marion, to go to a hotel, and I secured a room there only through my knowing the wife of that particular hotel proprietor.
President Harding spoke at the Marion Fairgrounds on the afternoon of the 5th. I drove up to the grounds with Mrs. John Fairbanks, of whom I have spoken before. She had been Annabel Mouser, my chum, daughter of former Congressman Grant E. Mouser, the then Judge of the Common Pleas Court. She and the others in the car, seeming indifferent as to whether or not they heard Mr. Harding, threw themselves down upon the green while I alone went over nearer the grandstand to listen to his speech. Annabel Fairbanks always treated with pretended disdain my adoration of Mr. Harding and his sister Daisy.
“Oh, you and your Hardings weary me!” she said, “Go on over; we’ll wait right here for you.”
It seemed to me always that Mr. Harding was more than human. In my Harding