After the introduction and before his prepared remarks, Coolidge said to the membership, "Your President [referring to Noyes] has given you a perfect example of one of those rumors now current in Washington which is without any foundation."[86]
Coolidge often seemed uncomfortable among fashionable Washington society; when asked why he continued to attend so many of their dinner parties, he replied, "Got to eat somewhere."[87] Alice Roosevelt Longworth, a leading Republican wit, underscored Coolidge's silence and his dour personality: "When he wished he were elsewhere, he pursed his lips, folded his arms, and said nothing. He looked then precisely as though he had been weaned on a pickle."[88] Coolidge and his wife, Grace, who was a great baseball fan, once attended a Washington Senators game and sat through all nine innings without saying a word, except once when he asked her the time.[89]
As president, Coolidge's reputation as a quiet man continued. "The words of a President have an enormous weight," he would later write, "and ought not to be used indiscriminately."[90] Coolidge was aware of his stiff reputation; indeed, he cultivated it. 