A Very Private Woman by Nina Burleigh

Author:Nina Burleigh [Burleigh, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-57417-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-10-21T04:00:00+00:00

Unlike Anne Truitt, after her own divorce Mary did not abandon hope of finding happiness with a man of her generation. On the contrary, she was sometimes irresponsible in her relationships with them. “Mary was bad,” said one close friend, simply, of her behavior with men.55 She hurt people. Some of her wildness may have been a reaction against Cord’s infidelities. And perhaps, having been hurt deeply herself by her own failed marriage and the death of her son, she rebelled by inflicting emotional pain. The full extent of her affairs with men, married or single, is something unofficial Washington gossiped about after her death and most likely exaggerated. In the absence of her diary the real facts are unavailable. She told Noland that after her divorce and before her long affair with him she had dated a teacher at her son’s school and a television journalist. Several friends said she had an affair with Jim Truitt, her best friend’s husband, and that Anne learned of the relationship only after Mary’s death. Jim Truitt was openly entranced by Mary and came to think of her as his spiritual twin, someone he believed he could communicate with even after death.

Men adored Mary but did not know what to make of her. One ex-lover rather ungratefully called her “a starfucker.” To some, she was that classic female type, the “collector” of men, a woman who attached herself to men who were rising in politics or the arts in order to gain power herself. But her friends regarded her affairs as something she did for her own fulfillment, not to gain any political or social cachet. “We thought of her as an independent, free spirit in a way, having left Cord and then shacking up with Ken,” said one Georgetown friend. “She was not a feminist. She was much too seductive and fond of men. She was very fond of the men. I don’t think gender entered into her consciousness at all. She didn’t have the cause in mind at all.”56

No feminist, she was no golddigger, either. Mary Meyer was an American aristocrat with funds from her mother and alimony from her ex-husband. Firmly ensconced in Georgetown society, she didn’t need men for social ascension or financial support. But men were her teachers and they brought her into places women didn’t enter on their own, from the jazz clubs of black Washington to the Oval Office of the White House. She also genuinely enjoyed their company and attention. She studied them the way a scientist or a connoisseur would, and became known to her friends as an astute and humorous observer of the meaning behind peculiar male behavior. Anne Truitt described Mary as “an acute judge of masculine character.”57

One man who assumed the role of teacher and admirer was LSD guru Timothy Leary. On a spring afternoon in 1962 Leary was working in his office at Harvard’s psychology department, where he had been conducting tests of hallucinogenic mushrooms on himself and his graduate students for several years.

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