7

WIVES

After the Senate hearings, Bullitt went back to Maine to catch trout and had no regrets about his scandalous revelations. In a private letter to Nancy Astor, the American woman who later became the first female member of the British Parliament, Bullitt explained the reasons for his resignation using lofty arguments not dissimilar to Wilson’s rhetoric: “I am not at all surprised that you were horrified by my testimony. Yet I am certain that if you had been in my place you would have done just what I did—only more. . . . I knew well that if I did give a full account of the Russian business I would be hated bitterly. . . . I knew that I should throw away [the] chance of a normal, advancing political career—such as most of your friends will have.” Lying to the Senate was as unacceptable to him as lying under oath to the court, he wrote. Still, Astor was appalled by Bullitt’s testimony.¹

Retracing Bullitt’s unorthodox path begs the same question that he asked himself: Are we right to put faith in those who lie about the past, cheat in the present, and are confused by the future? Philip Kerr, a mutual friend of Astor and Bullitt, did not correct his boss, British prime minister Lloyd George, when Lloyd George told the House of Commons he had heard nothing about secret negotiations with the Bolsheviks. The prime minister lied as if under oath, and Kerr knew it. As Lloyd George’s personal secretary, Kerr had helped Bullitt prepare his mission, for which he had received Lloyd George’s approval. Kerr went on to have a “normal, advancing” career and later became the British ambassador to the United States and a member of the House of Lords.

Bullitt’s testimony did not entirely destroy his career: he returned to public service thirteen years after this event. Still, Bullitt’s early resignation was so unusual for a public figure that it surprised even his brother. An experienced surgeon who spent years collecting and publishing Bill’s letters, Orville Bullitt later wrote that Bill was an “idealist with a strong feeling for the romantic [who] liked to dramatize his purpose.”² Bill’s first biographer, Orville understood that his brother’s idealist feelings and dramatic foresights were by far more rewarding than those of his friends and enemies with more conventional careers.

Bullitt tried and failed to find consolation in his wife, Ernesta—“a striking beauty with dark hair, brilliant eyes, and a slender figure,” as Orville described her.³ After Bullitt’s resignation, the couple bought an apple farm near Ashville, Massachusetts. They refurbished the attic into a large living room and added a few bedrooms in the old barn. For a while, they socialized happily and arranged musical parties for their friends. In 1923 they divorced. Bill passionately wanted a child, but Ernesta miscarried. They had other problems, which Bullitt portrayed in his novel It’s Not Done. In the novel the wife of the protagonist, a cold but sociable beauty, has lost interest in her husband. The conflict is damaging to both husband and wife, but in the novel the couple finds their way to reconciliation, unlike Ernesta and Bill.

Divorce in their social circle was rare. Ernesta’s good conduct was beyond doubt, but Bill’s reputation became even more scandalous. While the protagonist of It’s Not Done was painfully faithful to his wife, Bullitt often sought and easily found the company of women, usually those of high society. His talent for friendship applied to women as well as men: his love affairs, short and long, often turned into friendships that lasted for decades.

In 1922 Bullitt began an affair with Eleanor Medill Patterson, one of the richest American heiresses, known as Cissy. Their relationship was short-lived; Bill was almost ten years younger than Cissy and was still married to Ernesta. Yet Cissy wrote that Bill was the most attractive of the men she met, “at least to me.”⁴ They both were considering writing novels. Her novel, Glass Houses, was published in February 1926, a little before Bullitt’s novel, It’s Not Done; both works drew upon their relationship. They also shared an unusual interest in Russia. Cissy’s second novel, Fall Flight (1928), depicted the royal court and high society of St. Petersburg. She also wrote for newspapers; her Chicago family, the Medills, owned a significant portion of the American press.

In the early twentieth century, Washington, DC, entertained the gossip about the “three Graces” who reigned at the balls of the capital: Alice Roosevelt, Cissy Patterson, and Marguerite Cassini. Alice was the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt; Marguerite was the daughter of Count Arthur Cassini, the ambassador of the Russian Empire to the United States; Cissy was the heiress of the Medill family, one of the wealthiest families in the country. Her life story was quite unusual and no less cosmopolitan than Bullitt’s. In 1904 she married, against the wishes of her parents, the Polish-Russian count Joseph Gizycki (1867–1926). The count proposed in St. Petersburg, where Cissy was visiting her uncle Robert McCormick, the US ambassador to Russia. Gizycki was a Russian officer and the owner of two vast, mortgaged estates in Ukraine—“halfway from Warsaw to Odessa,” as Americans situated them.⁵ After her wedding, Cissy, like all American women who married foreigners before 1922, was deprived of her American citizenship and became a Russian subject. The Gizyckis remained at their Ukrainian estate in Volyn until the autumn of 1905, when they moved to Vienna because of popular unrest and cholera epidemics in Ukraine. They had a daughter, and both loved horse races and hunting in the grand English style. After four years of marital life, Gizycki beat her, and Cissy ran away bleeding. The count did not give Cissy access to their daughter until President Taft wrote a touching letter to Nicholas II, asking him to intervene. Appealing to the Austrian judge, Gizycki demanded compensation of four hundred thousand rubles; in the end, he gave their child to Cissy in exchange for a regular subsidy from her parents.

Tall, red-haired, with a pale face and widely set eyes, Cissy Patterson looked as though she had stepped out of a John Singer Sargent or Valentin Serov painting. Her excellent figure, poisonous wit, and wicked reputation were magnetic. After her miserable years in Ukraine, Cissy was still proud to own a black pearl necklace that had belonged to the tsar’s niece, Irina Yusupova (whose husband, Felix, succeeded in murdering Rasputin). In fact, Cissy’s life was always complicated. For a while she was in love with her cousin, Medil McCormick, who entered therapy with Karl Jung at his Swiss clinic in March 1909. Jung also counseled her then. Later, she had an affair with Johann von Berstorff, the German ambassador to the United States (1908–1917), and they continued seeing each other even after the United States entered the First World War (Bullitt depicts a similar love story on the edge of espionage in It’s Not Done). A little later, Cissy had an affair with Nicholas Longworth, the husband of her friend Alice Roosevelt (Longworth later became the Speaker of the House of Representatives). Cissy’s affair with Bullitt followed all this. There were rumors that Bill even proposed marriage to her but was refused. Another rumor suggests their relationship was periodically renewed, even after Bill’s second marriage.

Their extensive correspondence, as Bullitt preserved it, sounds businesslike. Cissy Patterson took ownership of the Washington Herald in 1930, becoming the only woman in America to be the chief editor of a major newspaper. Unlike Bill, Cissy was an opponent of America’s involvement in the Second World War. She attacked Bullitt for pulling Roosevelt into the war, both in her private letters and in public in her newspaper. Later, in the early 1940s, Roosevelt suspected that Bullitt used his friendship with Patterson to discredit a rival. This could be true: Bullitt used women, and the newspapers called Cissy the most powerful woman in America.

In December 1923 Bullitt married Louise Bryant, the widow of John Reed. The choice was extraordinary. Louise was six years older than Bill but he didn’t know it; she lied about her age. He understood all too well, however, that Louise belonged to a different world. The daughter of a Pittsburgh miner, Louise grew up in Nevada and graduated from the University of Oregon, where she wrote a thesis in American history. She went on to teach in a modest school in a California town and was connected to the women’s suffrage movement. Orville Bullitt remembered Louise as a woman of extraordinary talent and beauty; he mentioned her “large luminous eyes.”⁶ Still, the marriage of Bill and Louise was incredible.

Louise had been married twice before, first briefly and then, famously, to John Reed. “As American as apple pie,” as Bertram Wolfe put it, Reed had just graduated from Harvard, where he created the Socialist Club together with his classmate Walter Lippmann and competed with another classmate, T.S. Eliot.⁷ Jack, as his friends called him, lived in Greenwich Village, worked for his father’s friend the journalist Lincoln Steffens, and was entertained by the lioness of Village society, Mabel Dodge (a millionaire’s widow, eight years older than Reed, she was his lover for a while). Jack published in the monthly Metropolitan, where his stories about the Mexican Revolution appeared beside the latest works by Kipling and Conrad; the magazine touted Reed as the “American Kipling.” He later worked for the journal of the extreme left, The Masses, whose editor, Max Eastman, would go on to become the translator and literary agent of Trotsky. Through The Masses, Reed met Louise Bryant, an enthusiastic reader and radical activist. The couple lived a bohemian life; almost immediately, Louise developed a whirlwind affair with Eugene O’Neill, later a famous playwright. But they practiced free love, and the couple married in August 1916.

Eastman wanted a correspondent in revolutionary Russia. In the summer of 1917 he raised money for such a mission from Wall Street capitalists; Jack and Louise both went to Petrograd. He wrote for The Masses about the hunger in Russia and the helplessness of the Provisional Government. She interviewed leaders from Kerensky to Trotsky and was intensely interested in the women of revolution: the “grandmother of the Russian Revolution” Breshkovskaya, already well known in America; the rebellious Spiridonova; and the seductive Kollontai. In November, Jack and Louise witnessed the occupation of the Winter Palace in Petrograd, which marked the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution. Reed became close to Trotsky, worked in the People’s Commissariat of the Enlightenment, and gave a memorable speech at the Second All-Russian Congress of the Soviets, in which he promised the Bolsheviks the support of American workers. In January 1918 Trotsky appointed Reed to be Soviet consul in New York. Both hoped that the United States would speedily recognize the Bolshevik government, but this would not happen until fifteen years later.

Back in America Jack and Louise each wrote a book about their revolutionary experience: Jack’s was called Ten Days That Shook the World, Louise’s was called Six Red Months in Russia. Both books were successful but did not bring in much income. However, between their apartment in Greenwich Village and their farm in Croton-on-Hudson, they lived a comfortable life. Louise brought back furs, shawls, and high boots from Russia; she loved to dress brightly and exotically—they called it the “Russian style” in Manhattan. The ascetic Emma Goldman, the star of the American left, remarked that Louise was not a Communist herself, she only slept with a Communist.⁸

Reed helped create the Communist Labor Party of America, which was meant to be very different from the Communist Party of America, its rival for official recognition by the Bolsheviks. In the spring of 1920 Reed again sailed to Russia in hopes of securing recognition of his party by the Communist International. The Comintern not only agreed with his arguments but also donated 102 diamonds to Reed’s Communist Labor Party. Carrying these diamonds, a false passport, and Lenin’s preface to the new edition of the Ten Days, Reid was arrested in Finland. Some New York newspapers reported his execution (later, they denied it). Jack spent three months in solitary confinement before he was released to Petrograd. He wrote to tell Louise that he was dying and begged her to come. Amazingly, she did, also carrying forged documents. From the United States, she first sailed to Sweden and then to Murmansk, which was still occupied by the Allies. There, she crossed the front line and, miraculously, arrived safely in Petrograd. By then, however, Jack was on his way to Baku, where he was to take part in the Bolshevik Congress of the Peoples of the East. “There is nothing that Uncle Sam gives for free. He comes with a sack of oats in one hand and with a whip in another hand. Who believes in his promises pays with blood,” he said in Baku.⁹ While there, Reed got into a conflict with a ruthless leader of the Comintern, Grigory Zinoviev. Later, Bullitt—likely relying on what Louise told him—wrote that during this last month of his life, Reed was severely disappointed with the Comintern and the Bolsheviks. He also contracted typhus and returned to Moscow sick.

Louise found Jack in Moscow on September 15, 1920. A month later, he died in her arms, a hero of the American and international Left. Reed was buried in the Kremlin wall with unprecedented honors and remains the only American interred there. “Courage” was the key word in the stories about the young, prosperous man who told the world about the Russian Revolution, and his wife who stayed with him in life and death. Very few had learned of Reed’s conflict with Zinoviev and his disillusionment with the Soviets; Reed’s biographers were mostly sympathetic to the Left and did not trust this allegation.¹⁰

After Jack’s death Louise remained in Moscow, where she cabled reports to the American newspapers almost daily. In 1921 she made a pilgrimage to the Soviet East—like Jack had done before her, but with more success. For two months she traveled through the Kazakh steppes and Turkestan, interviewing the activists, observing the life of local women, and cabling her reports to America. She was the only Western journalist to visit those places in the early 1920s. In Central Asia Louise began an affair with Enver Pasha, an Ottoman officer who had masterminded the Armenian genocide and now advocated an alliance between Bolshevism and Islam; a year after their short romance he was killed in battle with Red Army cavalry.

In the spring of 1921 Louise returned to America. This was no simple matter, given that the State Department knew she had left the country under a false name and passport. The following year she again sailed to Moscow to collect material for her new book, Mirrors of Moscow, which featured an interview with Felix Dzerzhinsky, organizer of the Soviet apparatus of terror.¹¹

In 1922 Max Eastman, editor of The Masses and Louise’s employer, followed her to Moscow. After spending two years in revolutionary Russia, he wrote a romantic travelogue, Love and Revolution, and married Elena Krylenko, the sister of the future chief prosecutor of the Moscow show trials, Nikolai Krylenko. Upon his return to the United States, Eastman published Lenin’s Testament, in which Lenin named Trotsky his heir and severely criticized Stalin. In the 1930s, Eastman had been working as Trotsky’s literary agent and translator. He and Elena were living happily in New York while her brother was busy accusing his hapless, tortured victims of Trotskyism, high treason, and contacts with foreigners. As one might expect, Nikolai Krylenko was arrested in 1938 and, after a ten-minute trial, executed. One might also expect that his Trotskyite brother-in-law, Max Eastman, gradually became disappointed in Marxism and, like Bullitt, turned into a Cold War hawk.

“President Roosevelt, Jack Reed and I—we are of the same blood,” Bullitt told a journalist in 1933. The tragic fate of Jack Reed had a particular meaning for Bullitt. Witnessing the Russian Revolution and dying a heroic death in Moscow had turned Reed into a hero of the Left, a model of courage and determination. Going to Moscow, meeting Lenin, and trying to stop Russia’s catastrophe, Bullitt could have hoped to win Jack Reed’s friendship, or even to surpass Reed’s writings with real deeds. But Bullitt’s Russian mission failed, and Reed’s death ended their short-lived rivalry. The two men were often mentioned together by their contemporaries, and sometimes these comments suggest that Bullitt felt inferior around Reed, something that was unusual for Bullitt. His brother quoted Bullitt writing in February 1918: “I wish I could see Russia with as simple an eye as Reed. I am unable to win through the welter of conflicting reports about the Bolsheviks to anything like a solid conviction.” Immediately after this citation, Orville Bullitt wrote: “During his entire life Bill never had a sense of inferiority in his personal relations.”¹²

John Reed was emblematic of the generation electrified by the First World War. When Kennan compared Bullitt to these peers he listed several outstanding persons who also met “frustrated and sometimes tragic end[s].”¹³ Though all were frustrated at some points, and some eventually committed suicide, they all lived to old age. Only Reed’s death was truly tragic, a heroic death of a young man who fought for his ideas in a distant land and sacrificed himself for a foreign people.

In It’s Not Done, Bullitt ascribes Louise’s features to a French woman with whom young Corsey, the protagonist of the novel, shares moments of passion. They soon part, and she gives birth to their son, who grows up to be a socialist agitator and sounds a lot like Reed. At the end of the novel, this son is arrested for inciting a strike, and Corsey and his friends bail him out from the American jail, as in real life Bullitt and his friends bailed out George Andreychin (see Chapter 9). But even after saving his son from prison, Corsey cannot bring himself to feel close to him. The whole novel feels like the author’s reflection on a feeling of inferiority, as he grapples with the new generation of Americans, who might prefer Jack Reed to Bill Bullitt.

Harold Stearns, an American who lived for years at the expense of his countrymen in Paris (he is believed to be the prototype for Harvey Stone in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises), said of Bullitt: “Bill was intelligent, friendly, rich—yet sometimes he made me uncomfortable, and I think it was what used to be a curious inferiority complex. I mean, Bill envied what he couldn’t have been, even had he tried, for he had too much money . . .—that is, a Bohemian.”¹⁴ Did Bill really have such a complex, and did this inferiority underlie his complicated feeling toward Jack Reed? Some mutual friends explained Bullitt’s second marriage this way.

Bullitt married Louise Bryant three years after Reed’s death. Ernesta did not give her consent for this divorce for a long time, so Bill and Louise lived in sin in Istanbul. By the time Ernesta agreed to divorce Bill, Louise was pregnant, and the wedding ceremony was held in secret. Louise was collecting material for a book about the new Turkey. She was particularly interested in the status of women and the role of religion. As in Russia, Louise solicited meetings with top officials: the woman who had interviewed Lenin and Mussolini wished to secure an interview with Ataturk. The couple rented an old sixteenth-century mansion on the Bosporus with fresco ceilings; they seemed happy. A visiting friend, the American sculptor George Biddle, described their relationship as a “passionate love affair.” He wrote that they definitely had common interests—for example, both were “very serious about Russia.”¹⁵ Despite all this, Biddle did not believe the couple was fit for family life. “Bill’s friends always discounted much of what he said; at most, fifty percent of it could not be taken seriously,” he said of Bullitt. As for Louise, Biddle knew that “Jack Reed was the real love of Louise’s life, and she talked a lot about Jack. Instead of minding it, Bill seemed to make Reed his love mystique, too.”¹⁶ George’s brother, Francis Biddle, the future attorney general, would later handle the couple’s divorce.

Loyal to the “love mystique” of Jack Reed, theirs was an ideological marriage. Although Louise’s charm, talent, and radicalism were beyond doubt, the fact that she was Reed’s widow was important to Bullitt. Marrying the widow of an American insider of the Russian Revolution, Bullitt symbolically brought Reed back to life, gave them both the opportunity for a new friendship. Bullitt’s second marriage did not bring him money or connections, but it did move him to the center of the international Left. The Bullitts’ views at this moment were markedly different from what Reed had believed in 1920, however. Since the Paris Peace Conference, Bullitt saw the moderate Left as the only force that could prevent catastrophe in postwar Europe. In political terms, Louise remained to the left of Bill, particularly where women’s rights were concerned. This unusual family adopted the memory of Jack Reed and worshiped Lincoln Steffens as a common, symbolic father. But they were not more radical or more bohemian than their Parisian contemporaries, who included F. Scott Fitzgerald with his wife, Zelda, Ernest Hemingway, Harold Stearns, and their drinking buddies.

A few years prior, in Istanbul, Hemingway had unsuccessfully courted Louise and gossiped about her in his letters from Paris. Together, their circle enjoyed the cheap Paris and its distance from Prohibition-era America. On Sundays, the Bullitts served lunch in their chic apartment, with their Basque chef and Albanian barman catering to their guests. With his typical anti-Semitism, Hemingway wrote about Bullitt as a half-Jew, though the two men regularly played tennis and attended horse races together nonetheless.¹⁷ Bill was an expert in horses and made the right bets, which impressed Hemingway. The Bullitts had much in common with the Fitzgeralds. The husbands wrote novels that would compete on the American market. The wives, both southerners and journalists, were brilliant, but both contracted serious and unusual diseases quite early on. If Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby could be read as a novel about Bullitt, Tender Is the Night could be read as a novel about Bryant (in fact, it is a precise clinical history of Zelda Fitzgerald). Despite all this, Fitzgerald and Bullitt became neither friends nor foes. Bullitt was a stranger to modernist experiments, Fitzgerald’s specialty. But Bullitt eagerly socialized with fashionable artists; in 1931, he traveled across France together with Henri Matisse.¹⁸

In Istanbul, Bill and Louise had adopted a child, ten-year-old Refik, the son of a noble Turkish family whose parents had been killed in the war. He lived with them in Paris and, at some point, impressed Hemingway with his ability to throw knives. He would go on to attend school in Massachusetts—he grew up American. After Refik’s adoption, the couple conceived their daughter, Anna, who was born in February 1924 in Paris. Lincoln Steffens came to be with the couple at her birth.

In 1928 Louise Bryant fell ill with a strange disease. Painful swellings developed under the skin on various parts of her body. Surgically removed, they tended to reappear. The condition, known as Dercum disease, is still incurable. Louise drank more and more often. Doctors explained that this was a side effect of the disease, but alcoholism was common among the Americans who sought adventure in Paris. Various doctors, including the Philadelphian Francis Dercum himself, treated Louise, but her condition only worsened. Louise and Bill often quarreled, torturing each other with mutual jealousy.

They lived together for about six years. Winters they spent in a rented apartment in Paris, summers at Bullitt’s farm in Ashville. The farm had horses; Bill was a good horseman and particularly loved jumping. In the fall of 1926, he fell from his horse and blamed the fall on his unconscious death wish, which he had read about in psychoanalytic books. In a letter to a friend, he wrote that because of this fall, he had realized that only Sigmund Freud could help him.¹⁹ His conflicts with Louise were probably another motivation for his desire for analysis. Thus, Bullitt visited Freud in Vienna the same winter. To his delight, he learned that the famous Viennese professor remembered his name from the time of the Treaty of Versailles.

Psychoanalytic ideas were then becoming increasingly popular among American intellectuals. Bullitt’s left-wing friend Max Eastman, the former editor of The Masses who became Trotsky’s translator, wrote that Freud was his teacher “in many things” and his “Father Confessor.” Eastman also visited Freud in 1926 and found him “smaller” than he thought, “slender-limbed, and more feminine.” They talked about the unconscious and about America, which inadvertently brought them to the First World War: “You should not have gone into war at all,” said Freud. “Your Woodrow Wilson was the silliest fool of the century, if not of all centuries.” Eastman thought that Freud was “both a scientist and demonologist,” but he did not tell him that, nor did Bullitt. Freud charmed these young American visitors; their experiences were very distant from his, but he knew how to challenge and inspire them. He wanted Eastman, who was busy writing about Russia, to write about America, and even suggested the title for a future book: The Miscarriage of American Civilization.²⁰ Freud’s initial approach to Bullitt was very similar.

After several consultations, Bill decided that Freud’s psychoanalytic method would help him settle his relationship with Louise. In a letter dated February 19, 1928, sent to Louise who was in the sanatorium in Baden-Baden, Bill outlined a detailed plan of treatment: “You have a neurosis which is just as definite a disease as appendicitis. And you have Dercum’s disease. That you will finish off at Baden. The neurosis you will get rid of with Freud. There is in my mind not the slightest doubt but that you will be entirely well by next autumn. . . . When you get rid of your neuroses you will want me, I am absolutely sure.”²¹

Bullitt still hoped to save their marriage, but he could not hide his anxiety. He wanted to help Louise, but Freud would start with himself. Those who knew him offered alternative explanations for this analysis. Sculptor George Biddle said that “Bullitt’s phobias were many and powerful.” Writer Vincent Sheean believed that Freud treated Bullitt in “a very long analysis” that dealt with “Bill’s intricate muddle of complexities and silliness.”²²

On December 7, 1928, Bill sent a long letter to Louise: “For some reason or other, you seem to need tension and disputes and explanations. It is no good. Particularly by mail. I would have much preferred to have been hit by a taxi [the] night before rather than have received your telegram.” In the telegram in question, Louise accused Bill of dining with a certain young woman—“Rami”—too often; Bill responded by using psychoanalytic language that seems to be his primary means of private communication in this period.

Unfortunately, I am still so dependent on you emotionally that you can destroy me. And you always do. Perhaps you take as your model the disputes you imagine took place between your father and your mother when you were a small child. Next time please try to remember that I am neither your father nor your mother. . . . It is all really dumb and makes me more than ever realize that the only salvation for me is to achieve indifference. Nothing on earth could be harder for me to do than that, but you make it absolutely necessary. I cannot endure the business of feeling very close to you and then having you bang me over the head. You always bang me on the head, so the only answer is not to feel close to you. Perhaps, fundamentally, that would suit you much better.²³

Bullitt loved good manners, and one could imagine that he did suffer from his wife’s alcoholism and bursts of jealousy. His therapy with Freud, if there was a therapy, was short-term; Bullitt was satisfied and wished Louise would undergo the same treatment: “I would have nothing more to do with your analysis than you had to do with mine. . . . He only takes two persons in summer and it would be an extraordinary piece of luck if he should be willing to take you. He would only do it because he really likes you and myself.” He really hoped Freud would help, and he wished Louise to want the same thing. “You may be sure that he will refuse unless he is certain that he can cure you and that you need the analysis profoundly.” Louise was concerned that Freud would be prejudiced against her, and in response Bullitt wrote her: “I used to say to Freud that you were the most normal person I had ever known.” He was trying to convince her that “the drinking is just a symptom—it is not at the bottom of the neurosis.” He could not absolve himself from this therapy, but he tried and tried: “I can’t help you to find the baby experiences and you cannot find them by yourself. Freud can help you to find them, but it will be your own intelligence and your own will that will do the work. I am enormously glad that at least you will go and talk to him.”²⁴

Louise postponed her visit to Freud, but Bullitt continued trying to persuade her. His main argument was Freud’s success with his own analysis. On April 6, 1929, Bill wrote to Louise: “perhaps in a very few days with Freud you might get down to something immensely useful. After all it only took me about two days to discover that Ernesta represented Jack [Reed] and to lose all neurotic feeling about her. You might discover the root of your feeling about drink just as quickly.” This striking confession reveals how Freud understood what drove Bullitt from one failed marriage to another. His identification with John Reed—his role model, the former husband of his wife, and the source of his feelings of inferiority—was the center of his therapy with Freud. One need not be a psychoanalyst to discern the identification and substitution that determined Bullitt’s marriage to Reed’s widow. Indeed, that’s how their strange marriage was understood everywhere, from conservative Philadelphia to leftist New York and to drunken American Paris. Louise and Bill openly discussed their feelings for Jack, their memory of him, and his impact on their lives. But judging from this letter, Freud took a more radical step: he discerned Reed’s influence in Bullitt’s marriage to Ernesta. According to Freud, Ernesta also “represented” Jack to Bill, and this identification was the source of Bullitt’s “neurotic” desire. Sculptor George Biddle detected “love mystique” in Bullitt’s feelings toward Reed; Freud saw in Bill’s passion for his male friend, the hero and victim of the revolution, both ideological and erotic dimensions. Bullitt claimed that this interpretation helped him to get rid of his “neurotic feeling” toward Ernesta: from this we know that Bullitt agreed with Freud’s idea and that Bryant was aware of it.

Bill’s passion for the cold aristocratic Ernesta did not vanish after his marriage to the temperamental, exotic Louise. His novel, It’s Not Done, portrays this situation in detail: the protagonist, also a journalist and diplomat, cannot act on his unrequited longing for his beautiful but cold-hearted wife. Louise’s friend Kitty Cannell, whom Bullitt sometimes took out for dinners in Paris together with Louise, said that Bullitt’s actual problem was impotence, and this problem brought him to Freud. “Another thing,” Connell said, was that Louise was a feminist, and “the marriage itself began to seem hollow to her. I began to feel that she thought of it as a threat to her identity. Perhaps that was why she fantasized [about] Jack even more obsessively.”²⁵ This sounds more plausible than impotence: Louise fought for her independence from Bill, and both of them thought about Jack obsessively. Freud’s interpretation focused on the importance of an idealized image of Reed, as a rival and internalized mediator, in Bullitt’s world. Perhaps Freud talked to Bullitt about a latent homoerotic desire and explored how this desire contributed to the destruction of his first marriage, shaped his second marriage, and was now threatening to destroy it. Discussions of this latent desire and its manifestations left a perceptible imprint on Freud and Bullitt’s joint work on Wilson’s biography.

Freud’s meeting with Louise Bryant was finally scheduled for April 23, 1929. According to the plan, Freud and Bryant would meet several times and then agree on the duration of the treatment. Bullitt would pay the expenses. On April 16, Louise sent a letter to Bill from Baden-Baden; she had talked to Freud, and she was going to travel to Vienna and asked Bill to send her money. But then the correspondence breaks off; she probably never did go to visit Freud after all.

For Bill, Louise’s failure to comply with his plan for psychoanalysis was the last straw. In September they met in New York, but Louise was so drunk that he checked her into the hospital. While she was there, Bullitt perused her private letters and found her correspondence with the sculptor Gwendolyn Le Gallienne, which alluded to a homosexual relationship between the two women. In December 1929, while Louise was again in the Baden-Baden sanatorium, Bill began divorce proceedings in Philadelphia, accusing his wife of lesbianism. His archived testimony blames Louise for alcoholism, sexual “perversion,” and for having a detrimental influence on their daughter. The court, chaired by Francis Biddle, awarded Bill a divorce and gave him full custody of his daughter, Anna. Bullitt wrote to Louise to inform her of the court’s decision, writing that it was “a horrible defeat, the worst defeat I have ever had in my life. But it is a defeat and we won’t make matters better by closing our eyes to the fact.”²⁶ She long suspected him of hiring a detective to follow her; he denied it.

Bullitt never married again. An elegant bachelor, he had multiple relations with women after the divorce. He did not see Louise and did not allow her to see Anna. For the rest of her life, he regularly sent her money. For a while, Louise openly lived in Paris with Gwendolyn Le Gallienne, setting new standards of bohemian life. The two separated a year later, in 1931, after Louise accused Gwen of trying to poison her. She was constantly looking for a chance to see her daughter, but Bill would not allow visits.

Louise’s last passion was, strikingly, piloting airplanes: she took lessons, learned to fly and used to fly alone, without an instructor, over Paris. She began many literary ideas and projects but soon stopped working on all of them except the one most important to her: the biography of Jack Reed. But again, Bill turned out to be an obstacle: the relevant documents were in his possession, and he did not wish to deliver them. Still, the last years of Louise’s life were dedicated to her return to Reed. In 1934 a Marxist graduate of Harvard, Granville Hicks, began to work on Reed’s biography.²⁷ Louise helped him but also suspected him of informing on her. John Reed’s memory was inspiring and divisive to the end.