Alice Roosevelt Longworth

...Now, if only Kate would return our calls...

...One wishes that she had chosen to enrich her chronicle with more historical background that might have offered flesh and fiber to the times—as opposed to the life—of the subject...

...Felsenthal presumes carried on a brief affair with Longworth, at roughly the same time she was lustily supporting the isolationist, right-wing America First Movement...

...She mercilessly hectors her only child, even informing her that she is illegitimate on the eve of her wedding...

...The star is the quintessential Hepburn character, crusty, independent, and gloriously Brock Yates is a columnist for the Washington Post Magazine...

...Acting as wonderful foils through all this glittering foolishness will be her two wimpy cousins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and dowdy wallflower Eleanor—those sissies from the fusty Hyde Park wing of the family who would not only bore one to death but would betray their class by defecting to the hated, unwashed Democrats...

...She never held a job, other than to briefly compose a failed newspaper column in the thirties (while the hated Eleanor ascended to new heights of celebrity with her syndicated ramblings called "My Day") and a wooden autobiography barren of her iridescent wit...

...I have an appetite for being entertained...

...Felsenthal produces no evidence that 2009 Massachusetts Avenue was the scene of secret alliances or parleys that in any way altered the course of history...

...On her ninetieth birthday she confessed, "I'm a hedonist...

...Alice will marry the drunken, womanizing, eminently untalented Congressman Nick Longworth of Cincinnati, but the union will be doomed from the day the nuptials are performed in the White House...

...Her accuracy is difficult to fault, considering her plethora of sources, although it should be noted that one anecdote attributed to Alice's husband may be apocryphal...

...Moreover, why, in the fashion of the emperor's clothes, did so many movers and shakers consider her imprimatur so crucial...

...No missile crisis was disarmed, no grand legislative program was conceived, no daring political scheme was devised, so far as we can tell, during the endless, gaseous sessions that unfolded with the deft choreography of this towering yet oddly hollow figure...

...W orking from the personal recollections of the grande dame, as well as the prolific correspondence from the Roosevelt family, Mrs...

...Her memory will flash back to the very moment when her mother—as well as her paternal grandmother—died in the same New York mansion two days after her birth...

...In many ways she remains a rather pathetic symbol of the disintegration of the great Hudson River dynasties that controlled so much of the nation's fortunes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...

...Yes, this is the story of a wonderfully colorful and profligate rich-bitch who, thanks to good luck and a dollop of good genes, dallied with the mighty...

...Longworth is said to have stroked the same spot and mused, "So it does...

...Felsenthal pulls no punches in documenting that our heroine, for all her glittering presence in the drawing room and the bedroom, has the compassion of a Mafia hit man...

...Her salvation would be to become the Grande Dame of Washington society, not a social-climbing hostess-with-themostest, like Pearl Mesta, but as the keeper of the most exclusive coffee-klatch in the history of the city...

...She will become the haughty, spoiled, elegantly shocking darling of the masses, the lady for whom such tunes as "Alice Blue Gown," and "Alice, Where Art Thou" were composed and who gathered crowds that would rival any attracted by Princess Diana...

...Throughout her life she was a lightning rod for the powerful, but remained curiously inert in her own right...

...One thinks of Madame de Stael, the powerful eighteenth-century political maven whose social connections perALICE ROOSEVELT LONGWORTH Carol Felsenthal/G.P...

...Theywill both flagrantly defy the rites, with the lovely Alice carrying on such a steamy romance with powerful, hard-knuckled Senator William E. Borah of Idaho, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, that it results in the birth of her only child, Paulina...

...She was blindly loyal to him and his causes as a young woman, yet his demise is dismissed in but a few paragraphs and we are doomed to puzzle how this trauma affected not only her public life but the carnivorous relationship with her only offspring...

...For decades an invitation to Alice Longworth's tiny, chatty, candlelit dinners packed the social cachet of a Cabinet appointment...

...Troops had to be called out to control the celebrants following her wedding, which was front-page material for months prior to the ceremony...

...Mrs...

...She was the perfect aristocrat to confirm the suspicions of the masses...

...Better yet, it is a story of epic qualities spanning nearly a century of American history, centered on the great and near-great of the Washington political scene...

...In her youth she delighted in referring to the prissy, mother-smothered FDR as "Feather Duster" and throughout his presidency insisted on calling him "Franklin" in public...

...The cuckolded gentleman is reported to have risen up behind Longworth at a public function, rubbed Longworth's famous bald pate, and observed that it felt exactly like his wife's bottom...

...Longworth's story has a certain epic quality, even if her role is one of a peripatetic busybody rather than a prime mover...

...By limiting communication to her own salon, she was little more than an elegant talk show host for the Washington elite...

...The decline of the Roosevelts was considerably more gentle, ending with the elevation of Eleanor to Democratic party sainthood prior to her death in 1962...

...Felsenthal is inclined to play the role of court stenographer, laying down only the facts as reported by eyewitnesses and offering a modicum of her own insights...

...When she espoused causes, she invariably ended up on the losing side, i.e., her father's stillborn Bull Moose Party...

...She will recall the stormy relationship with her father, the peripatetic Teddy, who essentially ignored her during her childhood as he stormed up various hills, including San Juan and the one which dominates the District of Columbia...

...Here the richness of the character reveals itself, because Alice Longworth is no beleaguered Camille or doughty Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm...

...One also notes that the author at one point places a character "outside Bavaria" which, presumably, is either Austria, Baden-Wiirtemberg, or Czechoslovakia...

...With a little Hollywood hyperbole this could be major box office...

...We'll do the whole thing as a retrospective, with the imperious Ms...

...But first rights will have to be obtained from Mrs...

...It was all downhill from there, our heroine's windy free-for-alls notwithstanding...

...While Alice Roosevelt Long-worth will at best be recalled by a mere footnote in the history books, the sheer scope of time in which she lived, and the circle of the rich and powerful in which she endlessly circulated, creates a riveting spectacle seemingly ready-made for the big screen...

...Felsenthal has constructed a workmanlike portrait of an interesting bit player on the Washington scene...

...The protagonist will be Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the eldest daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, and the proprietress of the longest-running salon forthe gadflies, egomaniacs, poseurs, and political piranhas who polluted the nation's capital for five decades (and for no less than ten presidencies, Coolidge through Carter...

...Carol Felsenthal, the author of a carefully researched and candidly critical biography on the lady in question...

...She will be the beautiful young lady who scandalizes Washington with her public smoking, intemperate drinking, hotrod driving, and her defiant sexuality...

...It is a tale with boffo box-office potential, involving deliciously colorful celebrities, international power struggles, sleazy sexual peccadilloes, poignant family dramas, and enough drawing-room wit and brittle wisdom to keep the Algonquin Round Table levitating for days on end...

...Her youth will be outrageous...

...Hepburn holding forth in her charmingly seedy, memento-packed townhouse at 2009 Massachusetts Avenue, NW...

...Aside from the obvious benefits accruing from an evening of stimulating conversation, a session at the Longworth table seems to have been highly over-rated...

...This story is also attributed to dramatist Marc Connelly while seated at the Algonquin Round Table...

...and assorted literati and entertainers...

...It was the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Fishes, Schuylers, and of course the Roosevelts who dominated the Wall Street-Washington axis throughout that lurid period (the Vanderbilts frittered away their strength, mindlessly squandering the Commodores millions while energizing the scandal sheets and managing, in a fit of social conscience, to invent the game of contract bridge...

...Despite her vaunted skills as a conversationalist, she refused to speak in public and her prose was notably constricted...

...To be sure, such efforts can often descend into the realm of pop psychology, but in this case more personal analysis, even as raw, unlettered speculation, would have been welcomed...

...Moreover, we are left dangling in a few spots, as in the death of Teddy Roosevelt, a man who exerted enormous influence over his daughter...

...aristocratic on the surface, but in reality as vulnerable and earthy as a Back Bay charwoman...

...Isn't it strange how that upsets some people...

...We'll call it "American Princess," presuming that Danielle Steel or Judith Krantz or Jackie Collins haven't already kicked out a potboiler with the same title for the secretarial set...

...her tedious support of Robert Taft for President and her sanction of Joseph McCarthy...

...Putnam's Sons/$19.95 Brock Yates SARKES TARZIAN INC WRCB KTVN WITS WGTC WAJI CORPORATE OFFICE 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 mitted her to challenge, aggravate, and inspire men like Talleyrand and Napoleon, or even of Gertrude Stein ("the mama of dada" according to Clifton Fadiman), whose patronizing of the so-called Lost Generation is the stuff of legend...

...These women, unlike Long-worth, were activists within their own spheres of influence, as opposed to our heroine, who relished her role as the operator of a patrician cock-fight: tossing the roosters into the ring and enjoying the battle without ever being sullied by the blood...

...This failing would ultimately leave her alone, widowed both as mistress and wife and without Paulina, who died—surely a suicide—from an overdose of drugs...

...But detail without perspective can trivialize the most dramatic of epics, and surely Mrs...

...It does not upset, so much as puzzle...

...Her legendary extravagances were said to involve a $50,000 annual clothes budget—a number that would surely impress even Jackie 0—and, following a particularly gluttonous trip to China, an associate composed a poem about her titled "Alice in Plunderland...

...How could a woman with such breeding, intelligence, and connections within the inner circles of power have been so impotent...

...Great men and women groveled to gain the honor of being among the anointed: Republicans, Democrats, ossified conservatives, fulminating New Dealers, Fascists, Communists, tweedy academics, lusty, dirty-fingernailed labor leaders (like John L. Lewis, whom Mrs...

...Still, the decline and fall of this great American family, as represented by the lady in question, is the stuff of wonderful drama...

...the America First Movement...

...but this is a niggling oversight in a volume that seems to have been prepared with a monk-like attention to detail...

...Nick Longworth, as Speaker of the House, was carrying on a liaison with the wife of a fellow congressman...