A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [166]
“The Cleveland pew was third in front of ours,” recalled Jean Davis. “The broad back of the ex-president had long been familiar to me. So now his place was taken by a younger, less corpulent man, with shiny black hair, who wore a shepherd’s plaid suit to church in an era when we were accustomed to gentlemen who dressed in Sunday morning formality.” Another source of umbrage for Jean Davis was the unpleasant realization that Preston had failed to correct his profile in Who’s Who in America that erroneously identified him as a professor of archeology at Princeton, when his only association with the university was that of alumnus. Another ingredient of Preston’s quirky character was that he was fond of crocheting. Needlework was a pastime he shared with Frances; the moment she’d pull out her knitting, Preston would reach for his crochet. A man’s man in the Grover Cleveland mode Preston was not.
Preston stepped into his new social life with ease. Two weeks after he’d resigned from Wells College, he was at Frances’s side when Esther Cleveland presented herself to society. President Taft feted the couple at a White House dinner. (Frances held back tears when they were shown the Blue Room, where she had married Grover Cleveland nearly thirty years before.)
Frances’s wedding to Preston took place on February 10, 1913, at the home of Princeton University’s president. It was a small affair, nothing like her White House wedding, with only a handful of guests present, including her servants. Frances walked into the main drawing room wearing a white silk gown and carrying a bouquet of her favorite flower, white Killarney roses. Preston’s father gave her away. The 10:30 a.m. ceremony, followed by a wedding breakfast, had been so hurriedly arranged that Frances’s son, Richard, a student at Phillips Andover Academy, could not make it in time. The three other Cleveland children were in attendance, though it seemed to Jean Davis that a brick wall of antipathy had been erected between Preston and his youngest stepson, nine-year-old Francis.
The reason that had been given for the hasty ceremony was said to be the groom’s physical condition; he was reported by Frances to be “very ill,” ordered by his doctor to spend the winter in Florida for reasons of health. However, several of the guests could not help but notice how nimbly he ducked under a shower of rice when he slid his lean six-foot frame into Grover Cleveland’s old steel-grey motor car and drove off with Frances. His bearing, according to one observer, didn’t seem to be “that of a man who needed to go to Florida for his health.”
After Frances remarried, she took up the cause of ensuring President Cleveland’s place in history and devoted the rest of her life to it. She was the keeper of the flame, standing guard over her late husband’s papers and granting access to them only to those historians in the academic establishment who could assure her of their devotion to the man’s greatness.
The first authorized biography, Recollections of Grover Cleveland , by George F. Parker, was published in 1909, the year after Cleveland’s death. Parker had been a loyal political aide who Cleveland had appointed U.S. consul in Birmingham, England. Every word of his book was written with reverence and regard for the late president. According to Parker, Cleveland was “a good and pure man in his private and domestic life.” Like all hagiographies, Parker’s Recollections offered a one-dimensional portrait of the man. How did Parker deal with the Maria Halpin scandal? He ignored it. Even so, Frances, who had been granted complete editorial control of the book, found some things in it that she didn’t appreciate.
“I went over his book before it was published,” Frances confided to her late husband’s private secretary,