Chapter VIII: Part 8

Mr. Harding had always encouraged me to write as much as possible, praising me for my letters which I wrote to him and which he said were the most graphic letters he had ever read. He used to tell me how he kept them under lock and key until he had absorbed every line of them, often taking them to the Senate Chamber, where he so often wrote to me, sitting apart from the other senators. “I am writing to you within hearing of epoch-making speeches,” or “I am writing near the scene of important legislative events,” he often said in his letters to me. And the knowledge that he had so often expressed what seemed to me was genuine pride in my writing encouraged me more than anything to strive for a certain goal that year at Columbia--that goal being a fair mark of excellence, of course.

_68_

In October of that year, 1921, I went again to Washington. I do not remember at which hotel I stopped on each occasion, but on my various visits to Washington I have stopped at the Raleigh, New Ebbitt, Harrington, New Willard, Capitol Park, and, I think, at the Washington.

It seems to me it was upon this visit that Mr. Ferguson, another secret service man, met me at the station with his Ford coupe. I do not remember very distinctly whether it was after or before my conference with the President that Mr. Ferguson asked if I would like to occupy some of my time by driving. I thanked him and he took me for a drive out along the Potomac. He seemed curious about me and endeavored to “draw me out.” It gave me the keenest pleasure to pretend to misunderstand his questions and to be naively ignorant of the motive behind them. I am sure he must have despaired of being enlightened as to my identity, even though the President had given him my correct name.

I told Mr. Harding at that time that I felt he was very foolish to allow anyone but Tim Slade to meet me. I voiced my own faith in Tim’s trustworthiness and put it up to him direct.

“Don’t you _trust_ Tim Slade, sweetheart?” I inquired.

I remember right where Mr. Harding stood, beside his desk, when I asked him this. He shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows as he answered, “Oh, measurably!” He told me he had tried to get Tim on that occasion, but he was either busy or out of the city--probably out of the city, for it always seemed to me Tim was at my beck and call, and I am sure he must have been more so at the President’s. But I managed to convince Mr. Harding that every new man he sent to me was just “one more,” and he agreed we might better stick to Tim. “I like Slade all right,” he conceded when I pressed him for an opinion. In fact, as time went on, I was sure an element of affection in Mr. Harding’s attitude toward the man who was our confidential intermediary. In any event, that was the one and only time that Mr. Ferguson met me in Washington, although he did come on one occasion to Chicago with some money when the President was unable to secure Tim Slade’s services. Tim himself reminded me of this in one of the many talks we have had during the past two years.

The President listened eagerly to the latest news I had received from my sister Elizabeth concerning our child, and upon these visits to Washington I would invariably take with me pencilled scratches from Elizabeth Ann, these constituting the “letters” she would occasionally send to me. Naturally the enthusiasm with which I began these recitals ended in tears for me, for I could not talk long with her father about her without crying. And Mr. Harding’s eyes would grow heavy with sadness as he turned the conversation into other channels and pulled out a ready handkerchief to dry my eyes. He would try so hard to bring a smile to my face!

“What did you say to Woodrow Wilson that made him laugh when he rode with you the day of your inauguration?” I inquired of him upon one such occasion of weeping.

“Why, dearie, I don’t know! Did I make him laugh?” he asked, himself deeply amused at my query. I told him he must have done so because it was in the papers. He smiled whimsically, seeming to get quite a kick out of my credulity as to the accuracy of newspaper accounts.

Mr. Harding wanted to know whether I liked my work, and intimated that he either had already spoken to another steel man who was a friend of his or he intended to speak to him--J. Leonard Replogle. I know Mr. Harding played golf with Mr. Replogle and two other men some time that fall on Long Island. But I did not encourage him to use his influence in getting me into another permanent position, for my movements were too uncertain those days.

During that visit I asked Mr. Harding if I might be taken through the rooms in the White House. We discussed the possibility of my running into Mrs. Harding, and Mr. Harding said it was possible, though not probable. It didn’t seem to worry him, and I was confident I could handle such a situation, anyway. The only time I had met Mrs. Harding, since the time back in 1915, when I went to their home on Mt. Vernon Avenue in Marion to congratulate Mr. Harding upon his election to the United States Senate, was one day in Chicago shortly after Mr. Harding’s nomination for the Presidency. I had a friend with me who was interested to meet Mrs. Harding and we waited in the Florentine Room of the Congress Hotel, where we knew Mrs. Harding intended coming to hold a brief reception. I was entirely at ease with her when she finally made her appearance. And, if I may be permitted to so assume without seeming presumptuous, there was in her manner toward me almost an affection as I took her arm and led her over to where my friend stood who wished to meet her. And so, there in the White House, I felt entirely free from any apprehensions regarding Mrs. Harding’s attitude toward me should we meet there.

“Sure, go along, Nan, and see the place!” said Mr. Harding when I was ready to leave, or rather when he told me it was time for me to go. As I look back upon that visit now, it is as though he might have said to me, “Sure, visitors are allowed to go through the prison! Go along!” for as a prison he soon regarded the White House.

That was the first time Mr. Harding had seen my squirrel coat and he remarked that it was very beautiful. “But, Nan, darling, do be careful! How in the world do you explain these expensive-looking things?” I assured him I had not been approached for any explanations and I was sure I could handle the situation if I were. As a matter of fact, later on, when I went to school at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, I did feel obliged to make certain explanations, and I simply named my sister as the donor of all things beyond reasonable possibility of my own acquirement.

And so this particular visit ended with Mr. Ferguson, of the secret service, taking me through the White House reception rooms, the private dining-room, and many others which I was told were usually barred from public view. We made our exit by the entrance which is on the left of the portico as one enters the White House.

_69_

I was growingly introspective those days and especially after a trip to the White House. I would ponder morbidly a future, four years of which (Mr. Harding’s presidential years) seemed unalterably mapped out beyond hope of change, wherein I seemed to be shut out from the happiness I so longed to share with the two people I loved more than all else. I was selfish to the point of forgetting that the man down in Washington whom I loved and who loved me, as he kept writing me, “more than the world,” was also bearing a burden of loneliness such as he never dreamed would be his lot. So far he had not complained to me, though I felt the presence of much unrest and unhappiness even as early as the visits I made to him that fall. His was an attitude of constant hopefulness; mine of constant regret for the conditions of our entire situation.

Already I could not measure the regret I was experiencing as a result of the steps I had permitted to be taken in order to protect Elizabeth Ann “legally,” that she might have a name and home. After all, would I not have to undo all this when I revealed to her her real identity, which I certainly expected to do? What, then, would be the good of having provided her with a protection which was utterly false fundamentally, notwithstanding the fact that I could not doubt the kindly intentions of my sister and her husband? Where was the justice of a law which would deprive a mother, worthy to be a mother, of her child simply because that child was born a “love-child”? Should not all children be love-children? But were they? I remember once a girl friend of mine said to me when I charged her with insincerity in her marriage, “Well, you _know_, Nan, a woman _has_ to marry if she wants to have children!” She herself was no more in love with her husband than with the telephone pole outside her very beautiful home, and was in truth later on divorced. But she had “protected” her child! Mr. Harding was not free to offer me such protection, though he loved me, avowedly before God, far more than he had ever loved any other woman.

I have often wondered whether I would have been tempted to act in defiance of social conventions in taking my child openly myself, had her father been a man of lesser rank. I only know that during the period of which I am speaking, within the early months of Mr. Harding’s presidency, I was rebelling with all my heart at the situation as it existed, blame for which seemed to rest upon “the law.” Only my daily work and conscientious efforts to make good in my journalistic course at Columbia kept me from being unfair to everyone and upsetting a legalized regime.

And my rebellion was as fiercely directed against the law as it affected Mr. Harding as it was against the law as it affected myself. His attention to and love for little children during his tenure of office as President was marked sufficiently to prove, even to one who preferred to doubt, the sincerity in his heart when he voiced to me his longing just “to hold little girls.” Bless him! By all the laws of God and man certainly Warren G. Harding was entitled to nurture this spring of hidden father-love! Other little girls he could fondle openly, but his own dear child he dared not acknowledge, nor bestow upon her the love he felt, before a narrow-minded and censorious public.

In my Harding book of clippings I have a most appealing photograph which was published, I think, in _The New York Times_. It shows Mr. Harding holding a little girl in one arm and the little girl’s dog in the other, and a picture more expressive of his feelings I have never seen; I think this particular child is the daughter of Edward B. McLean--unfortunately, I have cut away the inscription below the picture. Another half-tone is inscribed, “A proud daughter of New England is kissed by the President of the United States, at Crawford Notch, New Hampshire,” and shows Mr. Harding holding close a shy little girl, his face buried in what seems to be the fur of the child’s coat. Another pictures Mr. Harding with Norma and Levett Sweig of New York, who, according to the words below the picture “were tickled pink” when they asked the President to pose with them at the White House and he agreed. All of these children look to be about three years old. Still another picture shows Mr. Harding leaning far out of his executive office window to buy Christmas seals from a little girl whose name is Sally Le Fevre, and, the paper says, she “was greeted by a real Harding smile.” Even up in Alaska this love for children was evidenced, and I have a picture which shows Mr. Harding shaking hands with school children, the two in this picture also being little girls. I have other pictures of Mr. Harding with groups of children, and one where he is shown (_The Saturday Evening Post_ of July 2, 1921) with two boys; but for the most part he chose to show his preferment for girls, and very naturally so, since his own and only child was a little girl.

Enrico Caruso, so another clipping goes, was struck with the likeness Mr. Harding bore to George Washington, and, with his deft artistry, took a picture of Mr. Harding and touched it up so that the resemblance to Washington is marked. But the heading above the picture which reads, “Harding becomes Father of Country,” struck a note of deep longing in my heart, for my yearning was not that he be known as the Father of His Country, but that I might proudly say to the world, “He is the father of my child!”

Thus the longing to claim Elizabeth Ann as mine battled with the tortuous plans already existent, and regret for past steps and worry over future ones were my constant mental companions. It is very possible that out of this bitterness was born my prayer for strength to ultimately set right a grossly wrong condition. Though at that time little did I know of the pathways of suffering my feet would tread before I could bring myself to claim the child of Warren G. Harding as mine before the world! This I now do in this book, _The President’s Daughter_.

_70_

Scott Willits, my brother-in-law, planned to sail for Europe the latter part of January or the first of February of 1922 to study with Professor Otakar Sevcik, whose music colony is in Czechoslovakia, near Prague, where I think he is head of the Music Department in the Conservatory. Shortly before his arrival in New York (my sister Elizabeth and the baby accompanying him East) I made another trip to the White House.

If I am not mistaken, I was to first meet Tim Slade in a waiting room which is on the left as you enter the executive offices. Evidently the imposing-looking doorman in uniform who stands inside the entrance to the offices had been advised of my coming, for I was immediately conducted to the waiting-room. I observed with great interest a portrait of Mr. Harding which stood in one corner of this room, obviously unfinished. And I was examining the portrait when a gentleman, unknown to me, entered. He was a foreigner in appearance, and, I thought to myself, probably the artist in the case. It occurred to me at the same time that he might have been persuaded to come in and obtain what information he could with regard to my identity and the nature of my visit to the President, for he had been standing with the reporters who, as usual, were lined up just outside the President’s door.

The foreign gentleman spoke. “I think I have seen you somewhere,” he said. Utterly stupid, I thought. “I’m sure I have seen you in Los Angeles. Have I not?” he inquired with an ingratiating smile.

“Oh, very likely,” I answered him, going on with my inspection of the unfinished portrait of Mr. Harding. I have never been West of Chicago.

My tone must have conveyed sarcasm, because he ceased abruptly and turned with me to the portrait. I informed him frankly that the artist had given our President a very weak chin, and I think I made other uncomplimentary remarks about the painting which I discovered was actually his own work. I have often wondered since where that particular portrait hangs. I am sure my suggestions, if the artist followed them, have improved it immensely!

I had received an announcement from Tim Slade, a printed card which informed me that he had been made manager of a brokerage firm in Washington. I went there to see him, before meeting him at the White House later. I remember distinctly how I cried when Tim told me how they were “putting it over” on “the Chief,” as he often called Mr. Harding. He said it was a pity, and Mr. Harding ought to know some of the crooked work that was going on all around him. Of course my tendency then was to cry at the least little thing, I was so nervous. (I remember glancing out of the large window in Tim’s office--I called him Mr. Slade during those days, but have called him Tim for the past two years--and commenting upon the beauty of a car which he said was his.) And I determined to say to Mr. Harding upon my visit just what Tim had said to me. It didn’t seem possible that those around my darling sweetheart would dream of taking advantage of him--but, anyway, I thought I would say something to him about it. I felt confident that if I just told him that some of his associates were getting the best of him that he could immediately stop it!

So, after my friend the artist had left me, and Tim Slade had piloted me through certain difficult rooms into the President’s private office, I said to Mr. Harding, almost immediately after the door had been closed, “Sweetheart, Tim Slade says they are doing things behind your back down here to hurt you....” He smiled to note the concern registered in my every feature, and said, “Say, you darling, don’t you worry about _me_!” implying that I had enough to do to attend to my own thoughts and problems. “I’m all right,” he added, and smiled broadly to see the look of relief that must have passed across my face. I said I really couldn’t see what anyone _could_ do to “double-cross” a _President_, but I did wish he would be watchful. It may have been this time that he told me that he was surrounded by friends, and knowing what a true and loyal friend Warren Harding was it seemed reasonable to believe that he would inspire in others equally loyal friendship toward himself.

I had with me some character sketches which I had written in my course at Columbia University, one of them about his very own self, and which my professor had read aloud to our class. I put the rather bulky package of manuscript in his hands with a request that he read the contents when he found time. “Found time!” he agreed was a good expression. “Gee, Nan, they watch every move I make. Why, I even have to steal the time I take to write to you.” I said I thought it was perfectly horrible, and I wished to goodness he were out of it. And a full year had not yet elapsed since he went into office! The months seemed fettered with some ball and chain, so slow they moved.

Of course we talked of Elizabeth Ann and I told him that I thought I had made a terrible mistake in allowing our baby girl to be adopted, even as much as I adored Elizabeth my sister. And again he told me how he would love, if he were free to do it, to take Elizabeth Ann and “make her a real Harding.” And the wistfulness of his smile when he said this was precious to me.

_71_

Enroute to New York, Scott Willits, my brother-in-law, my sister Elizabeth and Elizabeth Ann, stopped in Washington. They went almost immediately to the office of Mrs. Heber Herbert Votaw, youngest sister of President Harding whose husband, Heber Herbert Votaw, had been appointed by Mr. Harding as Superintendent of Prisons. Mrs. Votaw was prominent in welfare work of some kind. Mrs. Votaw, or Carrie Harding as you may recall, was my sister’s favorite among the Harding sisters back home in Marion. In her office they were introduced to Colonel Forbes who, my sister told me, took quite a fancy to Elizabeth Ann. Mrs. Votaw entertained them at the Senate Dining-Room for luncheon, where, Elizabeth said, Vice-President Coolidge sat across from them at the next table. In the afternoon Mrs. Votaw took them through the White House, and, Elizabeth said, voiced her regret that her brother, the President, was attending a conference. Otherwise, Mrs. Votaw told them, they might have gone in to see him. And also otherwise, I have often thought wistfully, he might have seen his own little daughter whom he never once saw in the almost four years she had been living at the time he passed on in San Francisco. A queer topsy-turvy set of circumstances--the President’s own sister escorting the President’s own child, unknown to her as such, through his home and grounds!

I almost devoured Elizabeth Ann when she landed with Scott and Elizabeth in New York. She was but two-and-a-half, and the best-natured child imaginable. I shall never forget how she became sleepy during our gaddings, and actually walked along the street so asleep that the sympathetic interest of pedestrians was drawn to her. I would take her on my lap every chance I got, hugging her to me, and worshipping the little face which bore to me such a pathetic resemblance to her father. And, oh, the joy of taking her to bed with me, and of doing the little things for her which she told me in her baby way she wanted done--her back rubbed or her “pidda” fixed this or that way. I think there is nothing comparable to the pleasure it gives a mother to wait upon her baby, though in the extreme it may possibly be poor training for the child.

Scott sailed for Bremen on the _America_ (1922) and I gave up my work at Columbia, having completed the first semester with a B grade, and returned with Elizabeth and the baby to Chicago to remain the year Scott was to be abroad. That spring and summer I resumed my treatments with Dr. Barbour and in the fall, feeling much stronger, sought a suitable secretarial position. I did some part-time work during that summer, but for the most 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.

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.

_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 book I have the following clipping from a March 4, 1921, paper, the day of his inauguration:

“The sun struck the inaugural stand in such a manner as to make his head appear in a halo. It was so marked that there was comment on it from the crowd.”

He was, to me, almost divine. I remember once, in 1920, the first time he came out to see me at my sister Elizabeth’s (6103 Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago) in June of that year, that we were “talking things over,” I on his lap. My elbow accidentally struck his ribs. “Ouch, dearie!” he exclaimed. I apologized and asked if I had hurt him. “No, you just poked me in the ribs!” he laughed. “Ribs!” I echoed, “Have _you those things_?” I shall never forget his low laugh as he hugged me.

It seemed to me I had never heard Warren Harding speak so feelingly as on that afternoon when he addressed his home town people and the great throng of visitors who had come from miles over the country to hear him. I well remember how he ended his speech, with a quotation from a piece my mother often used to recite. It was the concluding verse of Will Carleton’s poem, “The First Settler’s Story,” and goes:

“Boys flying kites haul in their white-winged birds,
But you can’t do that way when you’re flying words.
Thoughts unexpressed may sometimes fall back dead,
But God Himself can’t kill ’em, once they’re said!”

He must have been inspired by knowledge of all the gossip that had surrounded his campaign, and I wondered, standing there in the bright sun, bare-headed, again adoring my hero from afar, how there could live one who would open his lips unkindly about Warren Gamaliel Harding!

In front of me stood Lois Archbold, as I shall call her, a neighbor and former teacher of mine. She had been a life-long friend of our family and my sister Elizabeth and I had each experienced the school girl “crush” on her which we usually developed upon our teachers. She and her sister were probably as strong Democrats as lived in Marion, and I was surprised to see Lois there in view of all the severe things I had been told by Miss Harding had passed her lips during the recent campaign--things so unkind that even Daisy Harding, who had up to that time been a friend of Miss Archbold and her sister, and had accepted their politics good-naturedly, ceased to speak to both of them on the street. And even I had been tempted to follow suit when I was in Marion in November of 1920 and Daisy had repeated to me these things when I went to visit with her during her luncheon hour at the high school or at her home.

Miss Harding had told me how her brother Warren had been instrumental in helping the Archbold sisters to better positions, and she had related how he had jocosely inquired of them on the morning of the Presidential election which way they intended to vote! Politics never stood in Mr. Harding’s way where friendship was concerned. Still, both the Archbold sisters had been frank to sponsor the cause of James M. Cox, Democratic candidate for President in 1920, and there is every reason to believe that they cast their votes for him. And now to see Lois Archbold right in front of me listening to Mr. Harding speak! I was amazed.

There was all about me the sound of clearing of throats and blowing of noses, and my own eyes were wet when Mr. Harding ceased speaking. But you may be sure it was by far the greatest surprise I had received for a long time to behold Lois Archbold’s eyes streaming with tears when she, unconscious of my presence in the immediate crowd, turned to walk away. It was to me only another triumph for my beloved Warren.

_77_

When we returned to Judge Mouser’s the judge was sitting on the porch, and his remark to his wife was, “Dell, one of us ought to go over to Dr. Harding’s and say how-do-you-do to President and Mrs. Harding.” Dr. Harding was the President’s father. His home was the social headquarters for the presidential party. After considerable discussion, Mrs. Mouser decided she herself would go and convey the Judge’s compliments to the President and his wife.

“But you must come along with me, Nan,” she said turning to me.

I insisted I did not care to go, fearing Mr. Harding might disapprove for some reason, but Mrs. Mouser naturally could not see why I objected to going.

“You adore Mr. Harding so, Nan, and always have, so I can’t see why you object to going over--it’s just a matter of form, anyway.” So it did seem up to me to accompany her and in the end I consented.

Annabel, or else young Mrs. Grant Mouser (I have forgotten which), drove us over but would not go in with us.