family—in the American sense in which society survives almost entirely on publicity. Even before the scandal which became known as Teapot Dome (after the quaintly named Wyoming town where a dome-shaped rock looked, to the pioneer settlers, a little like a teapot) and their involvement in it, the Dohenys disliked seeing their names or pictures in the paper, and tried to conduct their lives and businesses as discreetly and quietly as possible in the secluded and policed vastness of “Chester Place.” With Teapot Dome, however, all attempts at family privacy came abruptly to a halt. The mounting corruption of the Harding administration was dramatically punctuated by the President’s sudden death on August 2, 1923, while his wife was reading him a Saturday Evening Post article praising him. The cause of his death was said to have been some bad crab meat he had eaten on a trip to Alaska (though there was grisly speculation that he had been poisoned by a “friend”), and all the problems of his administration—of which Albert Fall’s activities were only a part—descended upon the shoulders of his taciturn successor in the White House, Calvin Coolidge.
