Excerpt

A Duty to Perform

The man was dead, that much was certain. But an hour ago – maybe a little more, maybe a little less, it’s hard to say, there were no reliable accounts – the man was alive. Ill, but he was definitely alive. He’d been sitting up in his bed in room 8064 at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel eating solid food, talking and laughing, clearly enjoying listening to his wife as she read aloud an article about him in the Saturday Evening Post. And now, an hour or so later, he was dead. Not only dead but embalmed, rouged, powdered, laid-out-in-a-casket-wearing-a-white-robe dead.
Everyone who was with him in his room at the time of his passing agreed on one thing: he’d died of a heart attack. Or was it angina? Or perhaps it was a stroke? Cerebral thrombosis? An acute coronary artery occlusion? Bronchial pneumonia? Apoplexy? Maybe it was all of those things, combined and compounded by the ptomaine poisoning that he may, or may not, have contracted from that plate of buttered crabmeat he may, or may not, have eaten a few days earlier. While it was hard to say exactly how he died one thing was for certain: there was no doubting that it had something to do with his heart.

The man’s death, though an unexpected shock, was not surprising. Or rather it was surprising because his health had been improving – even though he had been complaining of excruciating abdominal pains and violent cramps for days and despite the fact that his blood pressure was consistently above 175. Still, there was no doubting that his spirits had never been brighter – even though he had been brooding and despondent as of late and, when he did speak, he often spoke morbidly. Still, the man had just proclaimed earlier that day that it had been “his best day in over a week” – even though he looked weak and exhausted, and his complexion was pale and sallow.

At least everyone who was in the room when he passed agreed on one thing: that the time of the man’s death was at 7 p.m. on August 2nd, 1923. Or maybe it was 7:20 or 7:35. Then again, maybe nobody had been in the room when he died. Except for Dr. Charles Sawyer, the man’s hometown friend and personal physician. Sawyer was there. He said that he had been there at the man’s bedside, taking his pulse. Or was he only patting his hand? Dr. Joel Boone, the other physician who administered to the man, said that that was untrue; that Sawyer hadn’t been there at all, that the patient was alone and already dead by the time that he (Boone) had entered the suite. Then there were the others who claimed that it was Boone who wasn’t there; that he’d already left to have dinner with a friend when the man died.
Miss Ruth Powderly, one of the two attending nurses, she was there – as well as the man’s wife of course – she had just been reading a magazine article to him. But, it was odd, right after Miss Powderly mentioned to the man how well he looked a shudder seemed to pass over his frame and he gave a sudden twitch and was still. That’s when the wife bolted out of the room in order to find help – even though there were two nurses in the room at the time. But then, someone said that one of the two nurses wasn’t in the room at the time after all; that she’d left to get a glass of water so that the man could take his medication.

The obituary in The New York Times the next day said that the man’s wife had rushed out of the room calling for both Dr. Boone and Dr. Sawyer to “come quick,” and that both men had reached the man just moments before he passed away. Then again, the Times also said that one of the first people to reach the man’s bedside wasn’t a physician at all, but a very prominent person and one of the man’s closest friends. He was a man named Herbert. The paper went on to say that as Herbert entered the suite the man was still alive but that “life was ebbing fast.” Herbert later said that Sawyer had indeed been in the room, lying across the foot of the bed. Then, after Herbert left – with “tears running down his cheeks” – the Times says that another prominent man, a man named James, entered the bedroom and that James stayed for a short while and that, after his visit, he was “inarticulate.” The article goes on to say that some other notable people came by after that, but by that time the man had passed away.

So the man was dead, that much was certain. But what had killed him and when did he die? And who was there – or not – when he passed away? Of course, a lot of this could be easily resolved after the autopsy – only the man’s wife said that there would be no autopsy. She was most adamant about that. The man was dead and she said that, now that he was dead, she “had a duty to perform” and that she “must bear up” and so, baring any unforeseen circumstances, the man’s body (as stated earlier, already embalmed at the hotel by N. Gray & Company) would be loaded onto a special train and go steaming its way back to Washington, D.C. by 7 o’clock the next morning.

As bizarre and befuddling and as contradictory as all of this was, what makes this story even stranger is the fact that the man named Herbert was Secretary of Commerce and future President Herbert Hoover; the man named James was James “Sunny Jim” Rolph, the mayor of San Francisco and the dead man in question was Warren Gamaliel Harding, the 29th President of the United States.

PART ONE: DWINDLING DAYS

February 1923 – May 1923

“Harding should not be pleaded for nor abused on the precarious ground of his administration. He is not a superman like Roosevelt or Wilson, he never pretended to be, and he should not be judged according to such lofty standards. He is important and successful as the embodiment of the American idea of humanity exhaled by homely virtues into the highest eminence. He is the actuality of the schoolboy notion that anybody has a chance to be President.”

– TIME Magazine
Saturday, March 10th 1923

The Strains of Office

The President was standing, hunched over his desk in the Oval Office. His broad face was twisted and strained; his silvery hair mussed and askew. He laid the palms of both of his hands flat on the desktop for balance. His breathing was heavy and labored, coming in strangled gasps. His skin was hot and his heart was racing and a skim of perspiration was forming on his forehead and trickling down to his thick lips.
“Oh God…” he moaned.

For the past few months his health, and the demands of the office, had been a heavy burden on his shoulders and had exhausted much of his strength. He was still recuperating from a severe bout of abdominal angina, which had been misdiagnosed as influenza, that had felled and sapped him of his energy over the winter, and now he was hearing the whispers and rumors of scandal that were swirling about Washington like loose papers in the wind: tales of bribery, graft, malfeasance and corruption that threatened to bring him and his entire administration crashing down, toppling in disgrace. Charges had been leveled at his Secretary of the Interior as far back as April of ‘22, charges which had mandated his recent resignation and, while one congressional investigation into the Justice Department in January had lead to naught, what was being said about his Attorney General was just as damning, if not worse. The President was in desperate need of relief and release.

“Oh God… Oh God…” His massive shoulders twitched and shook; his knees buckled and he closed his eyes and allowed them to roll back in his head. “Oh God… I believe that I’m about… to…”
He was interrupted by the abrupt sound of insistent knocking on the closed door of his outer office. President Warren G. Harding scowled as he turned to look in its direction. “What the devil is it, Christian?” he barked.
George Christian, the President’s personal secretary, spoke from the other side of the closed door. “It’s Mrs. Harding,” he said. His voice was full of urgency and alarm. “She is on her way.”

Harding quickly threw himself off of the pretty young blonde woman who was bent over across his desk and stuffed the tails of his shirt inside his tweed trousers. Then he jerked them up to his waist and slipped the suspenders over his shoulders. The pretty young blonde woman slid off of the President’s desk – the same desk once used by President Teddy Roosevelt and the exact same one where he had signed the Pure Food and Drug Act – and smoothed her short skirt back down across her apple-shaped bottom. As was the custom among many of the “new breed” of women of the “Jazz Age,” she did not wear any undergarments. The girl then rearranged her shift and fluffed her short-bobbed hair and allowed President Harding to take her by the elbow and escort her quickly across the room and out of the office, via a secret exit. Seconds later the door to the Oval Office flew open and Florence Harding, the First Lady, hurried in. She looked pensive.
“Wurr’n,” Florence Harding said, “I must speak with you at once.” Florence took a seat behind the President’s desk. She looked very comfortable there. “ I have just had the most unsettling consultation with Madame Marcia; I believe that we must leave Washington at once.”

Harding gave a tight-lipped smiled and reached for a cigar from the mahogany box he kept on his desk. He carefully clipped the cap with a penknife and then placed it between his lips. This wasn’t the first time that his wife – whom he referred to as “Duchess” and, when he was feeling especially sentimental, “Flossie” – had come to him with tales of foreboding from the famed clairvoyant. The first time had been three years earlier, in February of 1920, when he was still a senator from Ohio considering a run for the presidency. Madame Marcia had told her that while his election was “in the stars” so was a prophecy of doom: “He will never live out his term,” she had warned her. “His death will be sudden, peculiar, violent… death by poison!” While Harding thought at the time that the prediction was rude, it was harmless. But Florence put a lot of stock in things like crystal balls and omens and astrology and so he feigned interest in the subject and in Madame Marcia.

Florence had first become interested in the occult when she was a young girl back in Ohio. That was where she first saw the good fortune hex signs that were scrawled on the sides of the barns belonging to Dutch farmers. Over the years she had taken this curiosity to extreme heights and had become more and more immersed in astrology and all things supernatural – so much so that she had even begun to base many of her life decisions and actions on what the stars foretold, and on the words of psychic readers such as Madame Marcia Champney. After all, she was the fortune-teller to the Washington, D.C. elite. Florence had even taken to advising Warren on what actions he should take as President, all rooted on the alignment of the constellations and the mysteries of toad innards. While Harding didn’t know a star sign from a road sign, and cared even less, he thought it all a harmless enough preoccupation and he quickly learned that, in order to keep peace in his household, he had to at least tolerate Flossie’s predilection for prediction.

“What does Marcia say?” he said as he flicked a wooden match against the sole of his shoe and touched the fire to his stogie, puffing until it began to smolder and smoke.
“She says that death is stalking the very air here.”
He took a puff on his cigar and then stifled a phlegmatic cough. He was still not fully recovered from the flu. Florence cut him a disapproving look.
“Really Wurr’n, must you? You know that Doc said it was too soon for you to begin smoking again.”
“Doc also said that it was good alleviator for my stress,’ he replied, sending a smoke ring sailing to the ceiling.
“Stress? What on earth do you have to be stressed about?”
“Well Duchess, I am the President of the United States.”

Florence was about to make a pithy remark, but she held her tongue. She couldn’t help but notice how much Warren (or “Wurr’n” as she was prone to pronounce it) had aged over the past sixteen months and she was worried. His hair, while always the color of mercury, was perceptibly grayer than before, and the dark rings around his puffy eyes told of sleepless nights filled with dread and worry. She didn’t realize it, but he had a lot to worry about. His friends and associates, men he’d placed in high government positions, men that he had placed his utmost faith in, were coming under attack, having the vilest of accusations flung at them.
Albert Bacon Fall, his Secretary of the Interior, had just recently resigned his position and was facing allegations of criminal malfeasance. It all involved some sort of underhanded dealings regarding the drilling rights to two U.S. Naval oil reserves, one in Elk Hills, California and another one called Teapot Dome in Nevada. The accusations were that Fall had given the drilling rights to a couple of major oil companies (Mammoth Oil and the Pan-American Company) without conducting the mandatory practice of open competitive bidding. Or something like that, Harding’s mind tended to cloud over when issues got too complicated.
Then there was Harry Daugherty, his Attorney General and former campaign manager. Daugherty had just had his name come up in connection to some “irregularities” going on in the Veterans’ Bureau. It seemed that some two hundred million dollars had gone astray. And then there was the matter of Charles R. Forbes. Forbes, who was the Director of the Veterans’ Bureau (and a personal favorite of Florence’s, in fact Forbes owed his job to Florence), had just “resigned” a few days earlier. In actuality, Harding had forced Forbes to write a letter of resignation upon learning the full scope of the scandal and he then demanded that Forbes leave the country until things quieted down. In actuality Harding had very nearly throttled the man to death in the Red Room after learning of the scandal, screaming: “You yellow rat! You double-crossing bastard!”
The news of Forbes’ disgrace had shaken poor Florence to her roots. After all, Charlie Forbes had been the man that she’d personally entrusted with the care and responsibility of “her boys”, the veterans of World War I, and the realization that he had not only raided the Bureau’s coffers but had been selling hospital supplies – not surpluses mind you, but supplies that were desperately needed by the hospitals – at bargain basement rates… Well, it very nearly killed her. As far as Harding went, a little graft here and there didn’t unduly bother him – as long as people were reasonable about it and did not embarrass him – but what Forbes had done was unpardonable.
Adding to Harding’s misery were the rumblings that he was hearing about a man named Jesse W. Smith who was receiving kickbacks from the sale of bonded whiskey to bootleggers. Jesse Smith bothered Harding on several levels, not the least of which was the fact that he was a childhood friend of Harry Daugherty’s who had followed him to Washington and had assumed a mantel of power that far exceeded his station. The truth was he had no station. Although he did have a desk at the Department of Justice, and apparently wielded considerable influence, he was a Minister without portfolio who held no official title or position – other than being Daugherty’s flunky, his personal assistant and, rumor had it, his lover. Harding discounted that last bit as idle gossip (after all Daugherty was a married man, although his wife remained in Ohio for some reason or other, and Smith was only recently divorced). Still, for whatever reason, they did share lodgings at the Wardman Park Hotel and, apparently, kept a very cozy home there complete with a pink taffeta bedroom.
While Harding didn’t care for Smith on a personal basis (he thought the man to be a sycophantic toady and an ingratiating crawler of the n-th degree) Florence adored the man. He was frequently her “gentleman escort” at the boring political functions and frilly society do’s that Harding didn’t want to attend – often even picking out her trousseaus beforehand and then engaging in hot gossip and idle tittle-tattle with her – but he was fast becoming a problem. Despite the fact that Smith had served his purposes in the past (namely delivering blackmail payoffs to Harding’s mistresses), when Harding learned that Smith had been arranging for the paroles of convicts without his knowledge or approval (and apparently for a price), then Harding knew that he had to take some kind of action. He told Daugherty that he wanted Jesse Smith “out of Washington” as soon as possible. That not only meant on a train back to Ohio but also out of the inner loop, out of favor and out of a job. He knew that Smith would take it hard – as would the Duchess – but something had to be by God done. After all, the man didn’t even technically work for his administration, and the last thing he needed was for that little jacksnipe’s transgression to spill over and taint his re-election chances.

“Doc believes that I should take a little relaxation, he…” Harding paused for a moment: a shaft of late afternoon sun had caught his eye as it pierced the winter clouds and fell upon his wife. He regarded her in the soft yellow light: she is not a beautiful woman, he thought as he studied her large frame and the lines and angles of her stern face, but then she wasn’t exactly ugly either. Nor was she what you’d call pretty she was… pleasant looking. In a homely “plain Jane” manish sort of way that is. Unlike his many girlfriends and mistresses, Florence wasn’t the obvious type – the ones who got wolf whistles and whiplash-educing second looks from men on the street – she was more the type that was usually described as having “a wonderful personality” and being “so clever” – which she was. And as Harding considered the features of his wife’s face – a face that he had now gazed upon nearly every day for the past thirty-two years – he realized just how much, and how deeply, he admired her. And loved her too, in his own shruggish way.
If only…
Florence was neither his lover nor the mother of his children, and the child that she did have, he was not the father of. They didn’t speak of that very often, nor of the (publicly withheld) fact that she was a grandmother. Together they had no family – except for Laddie Boy, their Airedale, who was as fine and as faithful a friend to Harding as could ever be: as was Florence too, naturally. The Duchess was his “partner” and his “best pal”; the woman who had had faith in him from the start; the woman who had encouraged and cajoled the naturally lazy Harding in all of his endeavors, from the running of his hometown newspaper, The Marion Daily Star, to the running for United States Senate and, eventually, the Presidency.
If only…
Florence was a contradiction: a woman who championed women’s suffrage while, at the same time, she embraced the traditional roles of women by emphasizing her skills as a cook and housekeeper. She was a serious-minded woman who petitioned for animal welfare and the plight of World War I veterans (her boys) and who also enjoyed wearing the latest fashions, going to the motion pictures and listening to that new music they called jazz. She was a proudly independent female who did not wear a wedding ring, as she felt it detracted from her own accomplishments, and who insisted on being called “Florence Kling Harding” (maiden name included) by the press.
She was also a politically savvy woman who acted as her husband’s main political advisor; who sat in on cabinet meetings and suggested political appointees (such as Forbes, Harding hastened to remember). She was also a progressive woman, with a startlingly modern mind, who had seen the political possibilities of the fledgling new technologies early on and so had encouraged the use of newsreel, radio and telemarketing to help get her “Wurr’n” elected president. She had harnessed the power of Hollywood by openly cultivating – and thus inventing – the celebrity endorsement. Al Jolson, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and dozens of other stars of stage and screen – as well as luminaries such as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford – all put their star power behind the Harding presidential election campaign, the first ever campaign to use such tactics.
If only…
Although Florence was the engine that drove the vehicle, Harding couldn’t help but feel he had been cheated a little. After all, he had received a lot good-natured ribbing from his friends in Ohio (and no doubt a good many in D.C., although behind his back) for having married such a… “handsome”… woman some five years his senior, and he had had to endure an untold amount jests and japes about “who wore the pants in the family.” Of course, Harding had no illusions at all as to the answer to that question, he knew exactly who wore the pants and, truth be told, he was glad to be shed of the responsibility, if only she weren’t always so upfront about it. Florence had once publicly proclaimed: “I should know what’s best for the President, I put him in the White House” and while it pained Harding to hear her say it, he did not correct her. No doubt about it, Harding thought, Florence was a wonder: headstrong and self-assured and intelligent and a splendid confidant – why, she was only the best pal in the whole world, he thought.
If only… she looked more like Theda Bara.

-end-

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