Charles E Marsh, easily mistaken for Jesus.
If you live near deer, or chipmunks, you’ll be painfully aware that it is now tick season. If you’ve no experience with these insects, I’ll give you a hand: imagine a disgusting little parasite that looks like a dried scab when it’s hungry, and when it’s full, looks like a coffee bean but feels like a wilting grape. That squishiness comes from your cat’s blood (if not yours) and hundreds of little scab-babies.
Tick Season is the perfect time for a post on Charles Marsh. Charles Marsh was a Texas-based newspaperman. He owned several papers, and a host of other investments besides– Marsh was a millionaire in the 1930s and one of the richest men in the USA.
However, you won’t hear much about Marsh. Even amongst the circles of people interested in ‘deep politics’. Charles Marsh’s driving passion was to be a behind-the-scenes power-broker. He sought ways to get closer to power: he made sure his fleet of papers always supported FDR and even moved to Washington D.C. hoping to be accepted into Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inner circle. (Franklin was sponsored by New York interests.) Marsh’s attempts to break into FDR’s confidence are what put me onto him, because they lead to his championing a young Brit named Roald Dahl.
The Roosevelts were a funny bunch of people. Both Franklin and Eleanor were born into money and the sheltered environs of wealthy New England, which meant they knew that 1) everybody else was a sinner and 2) God was with them.
However, Franklin’s political support was not aristocratic; it was Wall Street. Elenor’s life was filled with similar contradictions: she was neither attractive nor well liked amongst her own set of people. She felt towards her ‘class’ much like Julia Child felt towards her set back in Pasadena— the bitterness of a woman who feels under-appreciated. So this odd couple were an odd mix of money, bitterness, adventurism, socialism and greed, all tied together under the pink bow of humanitarianism.
I’m telling you this because the castles we build in our minds dictate how attackers will lay siege. Charles Marsh was one such attacker; he lay siege to the Roosevelts by attaching himself to a handsome young man who flirted with an old cripple and his neglected wife.
Roald Dahl and another spook.
Roald Dahl, a British airman who’d been grounded for health reasons, was stationed in Washington D.C. in 1942 under the guise of a diplomatic attaché, but with a secret mission to undermine American political resistance to fighting closely alongside Britain. Dahl was personally selected for this mission by Harold Balfour, representative of the RAF in Churchill’s War Cabinet.
Gabriel Pascal and his sugar-daddy George Bernhard Shaw are in the middle. (1942– long past skinny-dipping days!)
Dahl got his introduction to the President and his wife through a Hollywood movie man named Gabriel Pascal, who broke into film by swimming nude for George Bernhard Shaw. (Dahl had met Pascal through an old family friend, Alfred Chenhalls– the guy against whom Dahl’s sisters locked their bedroom doors every night. Chenhalls got a job for Pascal through Leslie Howard.)
Leslie Howard and Alfred Chenhalls (the fat one).
The Roosevelts liked Pascal’s little friend so much that they ended up inviting Roald to their weekend retreats, where he satisfied the emotional needs of the aging couple and reported back to Churchill. The Roosevelts probably knew this snitching was going on, as they partnered so closely with William Stephenson, the British spy, to undermine their fellow Americans political opponents. That type of behavior used to be called treason, but I digress…
Pascal introduced Dahl to Charles Marsh also; Dahl’s connection to the Roosevelts is what drew Marsh to the young man. Marsh took Dahl under his wing in an intense mentor-protégé relationship: the older man would dole advice down to Roald, who would eagerly lap it up and entertain his host with bawdy jokes. In return, Marsh got a foot into exclusive salons courtesy of His Majesty’s Government. Marsh would provide intelligence to the British through Dahl. (Not always wittingly!)
So you can think of the FDR government as a wound on a deer, and men like Charles Marsh as the ticks who followed the smell of blood to likely feeding spots. But what’s it like inside a tick’s head?
Alice Glass, like Pascal, got her start swimming naked for her patron.
Marsh was a collector of people. He had a wife, but spent most of his time with his exquisite young mistress, Alice Glass. (Alice, a woman just as vicious as her sponsor, made it her mission to sleep with every man Marsh brought back to their Virginia estate.) Marsh would charm young male proteges like Dahl or Lyndon B Johnson. He used his money and media empire to collect people too, such as Indira Ghandi and Mother Theresa, who were both Marsh’s paid “agents” in India. Marsh was also a patron of artists, like sculptor Jacob Epstein.
How does one collect people? By sniffing out what they want and then promising to provide it (but never fulling delivering). Charles Marsh was an expert manipulator. I’ve written elsewhere about Roald Dahl’s emotional damage; Marsh filled Dahl’s need for powerful friends and a father figure. Roald hung on every word Marsh said, to the wonder of his British friends and family who, according to Donald Sturrock, found Marsh “pushy and patronizing” or “a terrible bully”.
Perhaps the most telling insight into Marsh’ character comes from this extract from Dahl’s authorized biography:
But there was a good reason for their [the Dahl family’s] animosity. When he [Charles Marsh] came to England in 1950, Marsh had almost driven Alfhild’s husband insane.
Leslie Hansen, Roald’s brother in law, was highly intelligent and unconventional. He drew cartoons and caricatures, but he was also mentally unstable… Despite, or perhaps because of his idiosyncrasies, Leslie had been completely absorbed into the Dahl family and they all felt protective of him. But he was quite unable to deal either with Charles Marsh’s quasi-religious philosophy or his overt generosity. As Roald put it, Charles “toppled an already wobbly brain clean over the precipice.” Hansen started to believe that Marsh was Jesus Christ returned to earth, and that he was his disciple. Roald was forced into the role of carer:
[Dahl quotation] “Every day he collapsed and jabbered and search the bible and saw portents and coincidences and said he was dying… Well it would have been OK for Charles to be JC and for Leslie to be St. Paul if the idea hadn’t driven him stark raving mad… It was as much as one could do to handle him and stop ourselves from being forced to send him to a lunatic asyulum… I spent hours and hours with him forcing him to realize that Marsh was not Jesus Christ , that he was an ordinary man, rather a good ordinary man nevertheless, who fornicated and joked and made merry just like everyone else… I then encouraged him to draw cartoons of Charles (a thing that would previously have been sacrilegious) and he became more cheerful… Truly, Claudia, it was a near thing and all pretty awful. The most awful thing of all being to hear the small child Astrid saying repeatedly, don’t cry daddy, we won’t leave you. Most pathetic thing I’ve every heard in my life. No-one of course cares very much about Leslie. But the terrors it reflected upon Alf and Astrid are very great.”
Roald eventually told the same Claudia, another Marsh mistress, that he blamed himself for encouraging Charles to visit the Dahls in England; he begged Charles not to return to their home in Amersham and to drop the “mystic bullshit”.
Part of Marsh’s act were extravagant displays of generosity to people that were useful to him: for instance, conspicuous investment in the Third World; sending vitamins to the malnourished constituents of rival European politicians; or supporting propaganda projects that powerful people aligned themselves with, such as Dahl’s RAF/Walt Disney effort with The Gremlins. All of these investments were under the guise of charity, of course.
Part of Disney’s Gremlins movie was to be shot at Alice Glass’ Virgina estate. Patriots, all!
Take a step back and admire Charles Marsh’s character: giving to the poor, starving people of war-torn Europe with irreproachable magnanimity, but then playing with weakest of his beneficiaries for his own amusement– to the point of driving Leslie mad. Marsh was not motivated by benevolence. Much like the Roosevelts, whose power he coveted, Marsh was God’s voice on earth, teaching the rest of us ‘goodness’, but with no real inner goodness himself.
Marsh’s hypocrisy is typical of the Yankee religious fanaticism that is broadcast over the megaphones at USAID, CNN, MSNBC… telling the rest of the world what’s right to think; a way of thinking that just happens to be highly profitable to those ‘Yankees’. This hypocrisy screams– yet it is endemic amongst our ‘intellectual’ class even now.
People like Marsh are so completely hypocritical that I wonder if there isn’t something wrong with them, some sort of cognitive deficiency of the type Joanna Ashmun described in her essay on narcissistic traits. Whatever their motivation, the ‘Charles Marsh’-style political manipulator has become so much a part of the Washington scene that they are now as American as the ticks on my cat’s back.
Keeps a home in the Washington Metro Area.
PS. Most of this information can be found in Jennet Conant’s The Irregulars or Sturrock’s book on Dahl.
