Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [48]
By the summer of 1922, less than eighteen months after he had taken office, the pressures of his position were wearing on Warren Gamaliel Harding. He began to drink whisky at official meetings. The appalled president of the Rail Workers Union described Harding as being too drunk to negotiate during talks at the White House. Harding confessed to a friend that he had no appetite for the exercise of power and would rather be a diplomat than president—although he added, pathetically, “probably I should be a very poor ambassador.”
Florence was also affected by the strained atmosphere. Her health, which had been fragile for many years, declined rapidly in September 1922 and she relied ever more heavily on the quackish and eccentric homeopath “Doc” Sawyer whom she and Warren had brought with them to Washington from Marion. While she was convalescing she summoned the popular psychologist Emile Coué to the White House and daily repeated his mantra: “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”
The First Lady also requisitioned the Department of Justice agent Gaston Means to act as her spy and messenger. Bemoaning Harding’s blindness “to the faults of his friends,” she said that her role was to shield and guard him. Means said that she asked him to investigate Attorney-General Harry Daugherty, Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, Secretary of War John Weeks—and Nan Britton, a young woman from Marion whose childhood crush on Harding had developed into a passionate adult affair.
Means thought little of his new employer, calling the First Lady paranoid, desperate, deluded and—perhaps most cut tingly of all, for the rigidly elegant Florence—overdressed. He said she was increasingly dependent on the advice of a string of astrologers and psychics; the secret duties she required of him included retrieving indiscreet letters she had written to a fortune-teller he called Madame X. Means ridiculed Florence’s faith in Madame X’s declaration that she was a “child of destiny.”
Before Harding accepted the Republican candidacy another spiritualist, Madame Marcia, had predicted disaster and sudden death if he became President, and Florence was determined that she would protect her husband from this fate. It was typical of what William Allen White described as Harding’s “courtier thieves, Rasputins, drunkards, [and] harem favorites” that Madame Marcia also gave advice to Roxie Smith, Jess Smith’s estranged wife; that Gaston Means’s direct boss was Harry Daugherty—whom Mrs. Harding had asked Means to investigate; and that Florence’s links to both had been established through Evalyn McLean.
Charlie Forbes’s transgressions were the first to be made public. In February 1923 the Senate voted to investigate the “waste, extravagance, irregularities and mismanagement” at the Veterans’ Bureau. Harding refused to believe that his friend had betrayed his trust until Florence convinced him it was true. Then he summoned Forbes to the White House and almost throttled him, screaming, “You yellow rat! You double-crossing bastard!”
By the time the investigation began, Forbes had fled the country. His probably innocent legal adviser, Charles Cramer, shot himself in the head in his bathroom, either horrified at the crimes Forbes had committed or racked with guilt at his own complicity. The suicide note Cramer had left for the President disappeared; no investigation was ever made into his death. Forbes was fined $10,000 and imprisoned in a penitentiary for two years.
In May, attention turned to happy-go-lucky Jess Smith. He was excluded from the cozy poker evenings he had once so enjoyed in the White House and ordered to change his ways. Herbert Hoover thought Daugherty had warned Smith that he was on the point of being arrested. On 30 May, Smith was found with a bullet in his head at the home he shared with Daugherty. Although his death was presented as suicide, many people, including Gaston Means and Evalyn McLean, believed he had been silenced. Conveniently, none of his papers