Books: Princess Alice

CROWDED HOURS—Alice Roosevelt Longworth—Scribner ($3).

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, now 49, two years a widow, and connected by no bond save a distant cousinship and her agile, pleasantly sarcastic mind to the present occupants of the national spotlight, occupied for ten or maybe 20 years a position in the U. S. comparable to Edward of Wales’s position in England. “Princess Alice” was no empty title and neither is Crowded Hours. She had just had time to learn her p’s and q’s from governesses and her strenuous widowed father and lovable stepmother when her father became in extremely rapid succession Police Commissioner of New York, Governor, Vice President and President. Thoroughly extroverted, more than good-looking, quick of wit, tongue and action, she made of her position all that a smart girl should have. Her story told now, not obviously aided by the diary which persons of her generation and breeding always kept, has an insouciant vitality interesting to contemplate in a day dominated by her equally insouciant kinsman and his oppositely constituted entourage of social workers.

Without saying so, Princess Alice knows that she was deliciously spoiled. Her hours were crowded with fun from the moment she heard President McKinley was shot. An amateur psychologist, she recognizes the primitive satisfaction it gave her to know that her adored father was released from the “comic obscurity” lately immortalized in Vice President Throttlebottom. She was unexcited when, at an Adirondack camp, she heard that McKinley was dead. She did not see her father again until that Autumn. But then “it was pretty thrilling to be going to Washington with a presidential parent to live in the White House!”

Not yet a debutante, she enjoyed sliding down White House stairs on trays with the younger brood quite as much as “playing up” when company came. She christened a German Imperial yacht and remembers the late Prince Henry of Prussia extremely well. She gladly wangled for a hardwood floor for the East Room with chin-bearded Uncle Joe Cannon (she hated the crash they put down there on the mustard-colored carpet for dances). She visited Havana, New Orleans, Puerto Rico, Chicago (where John McCutcheon cartooned the people gaping at her at the horse show). She smoked cigarets, carried whiskey flasks in her gloves to dinner parties for the bored young men and in general attracted such newspaper attention that her father wrote her scorchingly about it. (She burned his letter after a New London boat race party.) And then, after a trip to the Orient with Secretary of War William Howard Taft, she married smart Nicholas Longworth, the 37-year-old Ohio Congressman who was to become even more publicly beloved than herself.

Familiar as the sagacious young sideline sitter in subsequent presidential administrations, as the mother of Paulina Longworth, as a friend of Ruth Hanna McCormick, as an intimate of the brighter present-day group of Washington correspondents and literati, Princess Alice remains freshly interesting for new facts that she casually reveals about herself.

Frazier’s Golden Bough is one of her favorite books. She compares presidential nominations and elections to the story of the King of the Wood at Nemi—and still loves the great game of politics.

She still reads “here & there” in the Bible every day.

Leprosy terrified her, from the Biblical descriptions.

She was fat as a child, and wore leg braces for several years, “an orthopedic case.”

To her, Warren Gamaliel Harding was “just a slob.”

She can write, viz.: “Squadron A in their smart uniforms formed in the narrow street to escort the Vice-President-elect to the Capitol. We decided that their mounts had been hired in Washington for the occasion, probably taken from coal wagons, as they showed a tendency to back onto the sidewalk. . . .

“I had not been back long before Nick and I decided that we were engaged and that we might as well announce our engagement, as the papers were daily doing it for us. I remember that I felt shy and self-conscious about telling the family that we were engaged. I had the perfectly unwarranted feeling that they might be ‘sentimental’ about it. I put off telling for a long time. Finally, one evening I followed Mother into her bathroom, and told her the news while she was brushing her teeth, so that she should have a moment to think before she said anything. Nick, meanwhile, with great formality was announcing it to Father in the study. . . .

“King Edward sent a snuff box of blue and gold enamel with his miniature on it. The Kaiser sent a bracelet set with a miniature of himself, a smaller twin of the one he had given me for christening the Meteor. The only difference was in the uniform that he had on, and that the gold was lighter and the diamonds around the miniature smaller in the one that I got for getting married. The present from the King of Italy was a mosaic table, so large and heavy that I have never been able to use it in any of the rather small houses that I have lived in. … The Empress Dowager sent me an enchanting series of gifts. There were eight rolls of brocade of different colors brocaded in a gold that never tarnishes, with the shu sign, the Chinese sign of longevity, worked into the design. I have used some of it for dresses. They never wear out, so when they have seen a few years’ service, I put them away and after an interval bring them out again and have them made over. She also sent me two rings, a pair of earrings, some white jade, a white fox coat, and an ermine coat. The Chinese had a very proper idea of gifts!” And a bit of really ancient history: “. . . Instead of saying nothing and letting Nick go to the dinner, I told him the horrid news of the seating, whereat he promptly said he would not go, that he was very glad to get out of the despised dry dinner, using as an excuse ‘the slight’ to the foreign ladies. The next day he had a large lunch party in the Speaker’s dining room of the House, and made a good story about how he had managed to dodge doing what he did not wish to do. Within less than three hours he, the Meyers, and I were being called up by the Press and the whole ridiculous episode was attributed to my having ‘taken a stand’ against the pretensions of Charlie Curtis and Mrs. Gann.

“Of course, obviously, there never was any row; any one who knew me was aware that rank and conventionality were things I always fled from and shirked. I could not very well tell the true story—that Nick had seized a straw to avoid a dry dinner. … I used to get letters demanding how I could be so snobbish as to ‘snub Mrs. Gann’ and others saying ‘stick to your guns.’ The first time she and I were seen in public together in the Senate gallery, the rustle in the press gallery across the way was like leaves in an Autumn wind. And I really think a great many people never believed that Charlie Curtis and Dolly Gann were just as good friends of mine as they had always been.”