Margaret Truman Daniel, 83; actress-writer was only child of President Truman

Margaret Truman Daniel, the only child of the late President Harry S. Truman and his wife Bess, who forged serial careers as a concert singer, actress, high-profile wife and mother and prolific biographer and mystery novelist, died today. . She was 83. Daniel, the widow of former New York Times managing editor Clifton Daniel, died in Chicago following a brief illness, according to a statement from the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Mo. She had been residing in New York City but was recently moved to Chicago, where her eldest son Clifton Truman Daniel lives, and placed in an assisted living facility as her health deteriorated.

Arguably the first First Daughter subjected to the intrusive scrutiny of the burgeoning modern communications media, Daniel was a George Washington University coed when her father succeeded to the presidency at the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945. There were instant lessons in the perils of her unwanted political celebrity.

First, she set off something of a public relations food fight when she quietly instructed a waiter “No potatoes, please” and later commented that she drank tomato juice while dieting. The Potato Growers Assn. quickly lodged an official complaint and peppered the White House with protest letters. The Tomato Growers Assn. countered with a shower of letters of approval. Both groups waged a marketing war in national newspapers, magazines, radio and television, touting the nutrition value of their products.

Next, she was photographed wearing a scarf, and Women’s Wear Daily editorialized that Truman had damaged the millinery industry – a dispute quieted only after she wore a hat to another publicized event. Her hatted photo, in turn, set off protests from hairdressers.

Suddenly aware that what she said, what she did and how she looked would make her the most spotlighted White House offspring in history, she muted her comments and made sure her appearance in public was politically correct. As a young, single woman, she largely postponed dating to avoid false reports of pending engagements.

For seven years, she said later, her goal was to behave so that she wouldn’t “wind up with a bad headline.” In the process, she developed a lifelong disdain for Washington and privately came to refer to the White House as “the great white jail.”

What Mary Margaret Truman, the girl born and bred in Independence, Mo., would not mute, mollify or abandon was her quest – somewhat unusual for a well-to-do young woman of the mid-20th century – for a career.

First came singing.

Although she majored in history, she had taken voice lessons from childhood and was determined to make her name as a concert singer. From 1947 until 1954, she did sing operatic and classical selections at sold-out concerts across the country, receiving warm applause from affectionate (or politically toadying) audiences but frigidly cold comments from critics.

The late Washington Post critic Paul Hume famously got a scolding from President Truman when he wrote of her 1949 concert at Washington’s Constitution Hall, “Miss Truman is still too much of a vocal beginner to appear in public.”

A 1947 concert in Pittsburgh elicited similar criticism. “In one word, childish,” snapped the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph. And the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette echoed: “It is a pleasant, sweet voice, but it lacks volume and maturity. She sings with clarity and a certain amount of precision, but leaves a great deal to be desired in musicality.”

When Truman appeared the same year at the Hollywood Bowl along with legendary conductor Eugene Ormandy, 15,000 people applauded. But Albert Goldberg, then the music critic of the Los Angeles Times, cautioned: “Interpretatively, Miss Truman is not yet far beyond the student stage. Her main preoccupation at present is with technical problems and she is inclined to let the color and meaning of her songs shift for themselves.” He added that her voice “possesses promise” but required careful training. He also praised her poise in front of such a large audience, although Truman conceded a few months later that she “was so cold I didn’t think of being frightened.”

She told The Times long after her eight-year concert career ended, “I knew a lot of people came out of curiosity. But I always hoped they stayed because they liked it.”

Her friends thought the critics drove her away from singing, but Truman insisted she simply became more interested in acting.

She had appeared in high school and college stage productions and in a few radio programs for children. That limited experience, combined with encouragement from actress Helen Hayes, bankable name recognition and an able agent, won her a professional radio play debut opposite James Stewart in 1951.

Truman portrayed Stewart’s wife in an NBC adaptation of the 1950 motion picture comedy “The Jackpot,” starring Stewart and Barbara Hale. Asked to comment on his co-star’s work, Stewart later told The Times that she exhibited natural grace and charm in her performance and “didn’t fluff a line” adding sheepishly, “But I did.”

Truman was under contract to NBC and from 1954 to 1961, co-hosted “Authors in the News” and in 1955-56 co-hosted with Mike Wallace the radio program “Weekday.”

Her marriage to Daniel in 1956 and subsequent birth of their four sons sharply curtailed Truman’s acting career. But she continued to appear in summer stock productions and in 1965 hosted the CBS television program “International Hour.”

Thirty-two when she was married, she settled happily into the role of wife, mother and New York society matron–a happiness only slightly dimmed when she had to move back to Washington in the mid-1970s during her husband’s assignment as the New York Times’ Washington bureau chief.

But another career – one she never planned or prepared for at all – was gestating. That was writing. Ironically, the critics were kinder about the efforts of the untrained writer Margaret Truman than they had ever been about her carefully tutored efforts as a singer.

Writing, Truman once told an interviewer, was “the hardest and most exacting career I’ve ever had.”

Truman wrote her first book in self-defense. That was “Souvenir: Margaret Truman’s Own Story,” written with the help of Margaret Cousins and published in 1956. An unauthorized biography was planned, and she wanted to head it off by relating her own life in her own way.

That account of her Missouri childhood, life in the White House and as a concert singer was greeted by the New York Herald Tribune Book Review as “a gracefully written tale of an average American girl drawn by chance into the White House.”

After 13 years of focusing on her growing family, she published a second insider book on life at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, “White House Pets.”

Next came a book she really did want to do, the bestselling 1972 biography of her father, “Harry S. Truman.” Critics praised its homey personal insights to Truman as a family man and also its candor in relating such incidents as Winston Churchill telling Truman in 1952 he had considered him an inept successor to Roosevelt. The British statesman added, she wrote: “I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization.”

Truman wrote “Women of Courage” in 1976 about 12 admirable women she selected from Revolutionary to modern times, and dedicated it to her mother. A decade later, she wrote a rare biography of her mother, “Bess W. Truman,” a woman so private she burned most of her personal correspondence, leaving little information for historians to explore.In nonfiction, Truman also edited two volumes of her father’s letters and wrote the 1995 group biography, “First Ladies.”

The 17 mystery novels, which perhaps have afforded Truman her greatest fame second only to her stint as First Daughter, emerged almost by accident. In the late 1970s, she was working on a history of children who had lived in the White House, but lost interest. An avid reader of mystery novels, Truman happened to mention to her agent that she had an idea for a murder set in the White House.

The concept of a former resident concocting a murder story in that setting was irresistible. With the agent’s encouragement, “Murder in the White House” was completed and published in 1980.

Truman’s grandson Clifton Truman Daniel had his own wry explanation for why his mother turned to writing mystery novels, noting in his memoir: “My mother seems to have a strong opinion, often bad, of almost everyone in Washington. That’s why she writes those murder mysteries; so she can kill them all off, one at a time.”

Critical commentary on the first novel was lukewarm at best. “Margaret Truman is not a terrible writer,” commented The Times reviewer. “‘Murder in the White House’ exhibits a reasonable though hardly overwhelming command of the language, a fair-to-middling eye for character and an above-average notion of how to plot a mystery. Tolstoy is safe – so is Agatha Christie – but Truman has constructed a decent summer amusement.”

Nevertheless, readers embraced the book, making it a bestseller, and eagerly anticipated the “Capitol Crimes” series Truman began churning out at the rate of one a year.

Utilizing her familiarity with the lofty settings of government power and of the bureaucrats, diplomats, politicians and pundits who people Washington, Truman offered entertaining lessons about the federal government’s core. She also employed her training in historical research to fill in gaps in her personal knowledge and changes since her White House days – such as increased Secret Service protection and improvements at Camp David.Her informative titles each began with “Murder” and clued readers to the scene – Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court, the Smithsonian, Embassy Row, the FBI, Georgetown, the CIA, the Kennedy Center, the National Cathedral, the Pentagon, on the Potomac, at the National Gallery, in the House, at the Watergate, in the Library of Congress and in Foggy Bottom.

Critic Charles Champlin in reviewing Truman’s 1992 “Murder at the Pentagon,” for the Los Angeles Times commented that “the plotting indeed is satisfyingly convoluted and the large-scale resolution worthy of [Robert] Ludlum.” A Washington Post Book World reviewer added that Daniel “writes a lively Washington scene with the sure hand of one who knows her way around the streets, institutions, restaurants, watering holes, people and politics.”

Born on Feb. 17, 1924, Mary Margaret Truman was the doting and doted upon daughter of haberdasher Harry Truman and Elizabeth Virginia Wallace Truman. She began accompanying her father on campaign trips around the state at age 4, shaking hands and saying “how do you do.” Uninterested in dolls, she asked for an electric train for Christmas when she was eight. Instead, her parents gave her a baby grand piano.

She was only 10 when she first moved to Washington, D.C., after her father was elected senator. Uncertain of reelection, the Trumans lived in rented apartments for the six month annual Senate session, buying a house only after he won a second term in 1940. She attended the private girls’ school Gunston Hall and then George Washington University.

Her husband died in 2000, the same year their second son, William, was fatally struck by a car while crossing New York’s Park Avenue. She is survived by three sons, Clifton, Harrison and Thomas, and five grandchildren.

A memorial service is being planned at the Truman Library in Independence, Mo.