Joan Didion - Democracy

THE woman to whom Jack Lovett was married from 1945 until 1952 described his occupation, whenever during the course of their marriage she applied for a charge account or filled out the forms for a new gynecologist or telephone or gas connection, as “army officer.” In fact Carla Lovett made a convincing army wife, a druggist’s daughter from San Jose who was comfortable shopping at the commissary and spending large parts of her day at the officers’ club swimming pool, indifferent to her surroundings, passive in bad climates. Fort Hood and Georgetown and Manila and Schofield Barracks were the same to Carla Lovett, particularly after a drink or two.

The woman to whom Jack Lovett was married from 1962 until 1964 was a Honolulu divorcee named Betty Bennett, a woman who lived only a few doors from Janet and Dick Ziegler on Kahala beach and with whom Janet Ziegler occasionally played bridge and discussed shopping trips to the mainland. Betty Bennett had received the Kahala house as part of the settlement from her first husband, and continued to live in it during and after her marriage to Jack Lovett, an eighteen-month crossed connection that left little impression on either of them. When Betty Bennett filed for her divorce from Jack Lovett (I say “her” divorce reflexively, I suppose because Betty Bennett was a woman who applied the possessive pronoun reflexively, as in “my house,” “my 450-SL,” “my wedding lunch”) she described his occupation as “aircraft executive.” According to Jack Lovett’s visa applications in 1975 he was a businessman. According to Jack Lovett’s business cards in 1975 he was a consultant in international development.

According to Jack Lovett himself he was someone who had “various irons in the fire.”

Someone who kept “the usual balls in the air.”

Someone who did “a little business here and there.”

Someone who did what he could.

Anyone who did any reporting at all during the middle and late sixties and early seventies was apt to have run into Jack Lovett. He was a good contact. He knew a lot of things. After I finished my first novel and left Vogue and started reporting I actually ran into him quite a bit, most often in Honolulu but occasionally in one or another transit lounge or American embassy, and perhaps because he identified me as a friend of Inez Victor’s he seemed to exempt me from his instinctive distrust of reporters. I am not saying that he ever told me anything he did not want me to know. I am saying only that we talked, and once in a while we even talked about Inez Victor. I recall one such conversation in 1971 in Honolulu and another in 1973, on a Garuda 727 that had jammed its landing gear and was in the process of dumping its fuel over the South China Sea. Jack Lovett told me for example that he considered Inez “one of the most noble” women he had ever met. I remember this specifically because the word “noble” seemed from another era, and as such surprising, and mildly amusing.

He never told me exactly what it was he did, nor would I have asked. Exactly what Jack Lovett did was tacitly understood by most people who knew him, but not discussed. Had he been listed in Who’s Who , which he was not, even the most casual reader of his entry could have pieced together a certain pattern, discerned the traces of what intelligence people call “interest.” Such an entry would have revealed odd overlapping dates, unusual posts at unusual times. There would have been the assignment to Vientiane, the missions to Haiti, Quebec, Rawalpindi. There would have been the associations with companies providing air courier service, air cargo service, aircraft parts; companies with telephone numbers that began “800” and addresses that were post-office boxes in Miami, Honolulu, Palo Alto. There would have been blank spots. The military career would have seemed erratic, off track.

Finally, such an entry would have been starred, indicating that the subject had supplied no information, for Jack Lovett supplied information only when he saw the chance, however remote, of getting information in return. When he registered at a hotel he gave as his address one or another of those post-office boxes in Miami, Honolulu, Palo Alto. The apartment he kept in Honolulu, a one-bedroom rental near Ala Moana in a building inhabited mostly by call girls, was leased in the name “Mid-Pacific Development.” It was possible to see this tendency to obscure even the most inconsequential information as a professional reflex, but it was also possible to see it as something more basic, a temperamental secretiveness, a reticence that had not so much derived from Jack Lovett’s occupation as led him to it. I recall a story I heard in 1973 or 1974 from a UPI photographer who had run into Jack Lovett in a Hong Kong restaurant, an upstairs place in the Wanchai district where the customers kept their bottles in a cupboard above the cash register. Jack Lovett’s bottle was on his table, a quart of Johnnie Walker Black, but the name taped on the label, in his own handwriting, was “J. LOCKHART.” “You don’t want your name on too many bottles around town,” Jack Lovett reportedly said when the photographer mentioned the tape on the label. This was a man who for more than twenty years had maintained a grave attraction to a woman whose every move was photographed.

In this context I always see Inez Victor as she looked on a piece of WNBC film showing a party on the St. Regis Roof given by the governor of New York; some kind of afternoon party, a wedding or a christening or an anniversary, nominally private but heavily covered by the press. On this piece of film, which was made and first shown on March 18, 1975, one week exactly before Paul Christian fired the shots that set this series of events in motion, Inez Victor can be seen dancing with Harry Victor. She is wearing a navy-blue silk dress and a shiny dark straw hat with red cherries. “Marvelous,” she is heard to say repeatedly on the clip.

“Marvelous day.”

“You look marvelous.”

“Marvelous to be here.”

“Clear space for the senator,” a young man in a dark suit and a rep tie keeps saying. There are several such young men in the background, all carrying clipboards. This one seems only marginally aware of Inez Victor, and his clipboard collides a number of times with her quilted shoulder bag. “Senator Victor is here as the governor’s guest, give him some room please. ”

“—Taking a more active role,” a young woman with a microphone repeats.

“—Senator here as the governor’s guest, please no interviews, that’s all, that’s it, hold it.”

The band segues into “Isn’t It Romantic.”

“Hold two elevators,” another of the young men says.

“I’m just a private citizen,” Harry Victor says.

“Marvelous,” Inez Victor says.

I first saw this clip not when it was first shown but some months later, at the time Jack Lovett was in the news, when, for the two or three days it took the story of their connection to develop and play out, Inez Victor could be seen dancing on the St. Regis Roof perhaps half a dozen times between five P.M. and midnight.

LET me establish Inez Victor.

Born, as you know, Inez Christian in the Territory of Hawaii on the first day of January, 1935.

Known locally as Dwight Christian’s niece.

Cissy Christian’s granddaughter.

Paul Christian’s daughter, of course, but Paul Christian was usually in Cuernavaca or Tangier or sailing a 12.9-meter Trintella-class ketch through the Marquesas and did not get mentioned as often as his mother and his brother. Carol Christian’s daughter as well, but Carol Christian had materialized from the mainland and vanished back to the mainland, a kind of famous story in that part of the world, a novel in her own right, but not the one I have in mind.