A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [134]
“I have my heart set on making Frank a sensible, domestic American wife,” Cleveland wrote Mary. His main concern was preserving Frances’s sweet nature, he said, and he would be very displeased to hear her referred to as First Lady because it might give her “notions.” “But I think she is pretty level-headed.”
Cleveland ended his letter by asking Mary to “think of all these things and let me know how they strike you.” He may have been a control freak who stewed over the most inconsequential details of the wedding, but he was sensible enough to realize that he needed a woman’s perspective.
Three weeks later, Cleveland settled on a wedding date, writing Mary, “It looks as if Frank would reach New York about the 28th of May, stay there a few days, and then come here and be married the next day or the day of her arrival—say the 2d or 3d of June. Have the ceremony at 7 o’clock, with no one present but the two families; have a dinner immediately after the ceremony.”
As matrimonial rumors swept the nation, Cleveland grew incensed over how the newspapers were intimating that Frances had found a father figure in Grover Cleveland, a man to replace her father who had fallen. And the president must have squirmed when he read the analysis of a socialite quoted in the Washington Post who claimed to have inside knowledge of the romance:
“To him she was nothing but a child; he watched her develop and . . . become the beautiful woman she is, and yet only in a dim, unconscious way realized that the little thing whom he had at one time carried in his arms was now a woman, with a woman’s heart and a woman’s love.”
Once again, reporters were looking into his personal affairs, except now, his fiancée’s had become the target of relentless snooping. Nothing outrageous was uncovered—Frances was only twenty-one and had an unblemished history. But from Cleveland’s point of view, the reporting was unbearably intrusive—a repeat of the Maria Halpin scandal. One profile he found exceptionally impertinent claimed that during recess in high school, Frances enjoyed the company of boys more than girls. And at Wells College, Frances had to be “admonished” about the “perfidious” nature of young men who had only one thing on their minds. Her failed engagement to Charles Townsend also came under scrutiny. Cleveland referred to newsmen sniffing around Buffalo as a “dirty gang” and said he loathed them all.
“I have changed my ideas entirely in regard to the wedding,” he informed Mary. “I am decidedly of the opinion now that the affair should be more quiet even than at first contemplated.” A grand wedding was not going to happen, Cleveland said, because he didn’t “care to gratify” the newspapers.
“I am very indignant at the way Frank has been treated and mean to give the ‘gang’ as little chance at us hereafter as possible.”
At around four o’clock, a cluster of correspondents were strolling up to the White House when President Cleveland’s low-hung Victorian coach came trotting by. There sat the president, wearing a black silk hat, with Lamont next to him, off on their regular afternoon jaunt around Washington. The correspondents doffed their hats, and Cleveland lifted his in acknowledgment. No newsman dared ask whether the reports of his engagement to Ms. Folsom were true. To do so would have risked banishment from the White House, where access meant everything. Reported the New York Times, “No one here seemed to think there was any ground of possibility for such a match.” Ms. Folsom, said the Times, was a “mere schoolgirl.” The Washington Post also expressed incredulity. It quoted a Buffalo gentleman as saying that Cleveland was “such a stickler for propriety,” there was not a chance in the world he would marry