by Nate Berkus
“This kitchen is her room,” Chris says, adding that he got some of the greatest lessons he’s ever learned in life in his mother’s Milwaukee kitchen. Her son may have traveled far from his beginnings, but even during his first years of professional success, Bettye Jean kept him grounded. When he got his investor’s license, Chris remembers calling her with the good news. To hear him tell it, his mom wasn’t entirely sure what an investor’s license was, but even if she had known, it wouldn’t have mattered. She did what mothers do: She invited him to come over for a home-cooked meal.
Bettye Jean isn’t the only person who stands watch over the kitchen. I noticed that Chris is a big fan of 1940s films—particularly the movies of Gable, Cagney, and Bogart—and I suggested we mount his favorite photos (his mom, his kids; his granddaughter, Brooke; as well as ones of him with Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith, Nelson Mandela, and Sidney Poitier) all in black and white.
The dining area off the kitchen is as sleek and inviting as the kitchen itself, and dominated by a heavy octagonal table made out of petrified wood. In one corner sits an Italian 1970s-era cabinet that doubles as a bar. I love this combination, particularly the counterbalance of heavy and light. The vintage lamp, a sliced geode, was popular in the 1960s and ’70s in Europe. I also like the balance of the family photos sitting on top of something so substantial, with the mirror-framed mirror hanging above it.
The clean, spare living room is pretty much ornamental—“You will never, ever see me walking on this carpet,” Chris says today with a laugh—a vintage sofa, and a 1970s Italian coffee table has a bronze base that mimics the edges of the doors. Two hand-carved chairs frame the black-marble fireplace.
And then there’s the entry. Chris keeps his favorite stuff in an antique hand- carved display cabinet with claw feet. Among his treasured possessions are two metal crosses. The Pope blessed one of them during a private visit to the Vatican, and the other is a primitive sculpture of Jesus on the verge of ascension. There’s also a pink seashell from a part of the Ghana coast known as “The Point of No Return,” where slave ships were loaded, and where the imprisoned human cargo had their last glimpse of home. “I’m not entirely sure how, but when I was visiting Africa, that little shell got stuck in my shoe,” Chris told me. “I said to myself, ‘This isn’t an accident, you are supposed to have that with you.’ ”
His all-time favorite piece is an image of a black hand against a white backdrop. It’s not just any hand, it is the handprint of Nelson Mandela. Inside the open palm is a shape that looks like the African continent. The piece is simple and striking, and it’s called The Hand of Africa. Chris traveled to South Africa for the first time more than a decade ago. His local hosts had made arrangements for him to meet Nelson Mandela, and when he finally came face-to-face with the South African president, Chris recalled, Mandela smiled, put out his hand, and said, “Welcome home, son.”
“I was 44 years old at the time,” Chris says. “I was a guy who grew up not knowing my real father. The first man in my life to show me any kind of real welcome—to say, in fact, ‘Welcome home, son’—was Nelson Mandela.”
Also on display in this case is a simple glass canister filled with soil. On a later visit to South Africa, Chris paid a call on Nelson and Winnie Mandela at home in the Johannesburg township of Soweto. Winnie told him that at the height of their anti-apartheid activities, they knew the government had bugged their house, so she and Nelson used to go out to the yard to talk privately. When the government took Mandela away, Winnie didn’t want to give government officials the satisfaction of hearing her cry, so she would go out to the yard to weep. “Her tears are in this soil,” Chris says. “I asked the gardener, ‘Can I have some of that dirt?’ The gardener probably thought I’d only take a handful. I took home eight pounds.”
As a man who’d ably fielded every curveball the world has thrown him, Chris was ready to make a clean break with the past and imagine a new home high above the city that he loves and that loves him back. He is on the road two hundred nights a year, so it’s no wonder that he seeks the solace of a night at home, a place that combines the sophistication of the Miles Davis music he worships; the taste of a meal on the banks of Lake Maggiore; the color, vibrancy, and joy of a South African street; the stillness of a summer afternoon; and the inspiring presence of the men and women who have shepherded Chris through the downs and ups of his remarkable life story. This home, his first, also has a power and charisma that mirror its larger-than-life owner, a man who says he wouldn’t swap a moment of his great big life for anything.
(Illustration Credit 8.1)
(Illustration Credit 8.2)
When I was a kid, there was no Will & Grace on TV, no movies about ordinary people who were gay, no books or billboards or magazine articles or anything else that simply said: You can love anybody who you want to love without fear or guilt or apology. And then along came a four-foot-seven-inch force of nature with a thick German accent and a Betty Rubble laugh who went by the name of Dr. Ruth, and suddenly for me and millions of others struggling to find their place in the world, it was a whole new ball game.
Dr. Ruth’s voice on the radio was like rain in the middle of the desert. Well, actually, it was like explicit, judgment-free guidance laced with compassion, humor, and some much-needed common sense. I would lay there in my twin bed on Sunday nights, listening as sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, in her no-nonsense yet incredibly brave way, gave everyone respect, acceptance, and permission to be exactly who they were. She was a very good friend to me long before I ever met her.
(Illustration Credit 8.5)
When you do finally get to meet the people you have admired from afar, they don’t always turn out to be who you hoped they’d be. But Dr. Ruth does not disappoint. She’s funny, frank, completely down to earth, and I think it’s safe to say that the woman who went on Letterman to extol the virtues of a good vibrator does not embarrass easily.
Yet when she told me she felt “stuck” and asked if I’d consider stopping by her apartment to give her a little free advice, she seemed a bit self-conscious. “I’ll do my best to clean up before you arrive,” she said, adding that if she didn’t do some serious pre-visit decluttering, I’d probably have her “admitted to Bellevue.” Then she hit me with a major caveat, “Oh, and you can only help me reorganize—you cannot tell me I have to get rid of anything. I just need you to say ‘Put this here and put that there.’ ”
There are those who might consider that kind of restriction to be a deal-breaker, but I’m not one of them, and Dr. Ruth knew it. She sensed she could trust me right off the bat because I clearly love a challenge, I obviously love her, and as you’re no doubt starting to realize, I’ve spent a long time thinking about the relationship between people and their things. This was my chance to figure out exactly how to marry living gracefully with a lifetime of collecting.
(Illustration Credit 8.7)
Dr. Ruth was waiting for me at the front door of the three-bedroom Upper West Side apartment that she’s called home for more than half a century. She wasn’t exaggerating about the need for crowd control; this is a woman who has lived a great big life, and she’s got the stuff to show for it. Her place is jammed with papers (she taught at both Princeton and Yale), books, Judaica, pictures, Hummel figures, pottery and ruins excavated from who-knows-how-many archaeological digs, teddy bears, an eclectic selection of porn (she calls it “erotica,” but hey, tomato/tomahto), an old-school cable box, a TV, several remotes that appear to be prehistoric, too many awards to count, and tchotchkes as far as the eye can see: the overwhelming ephemera from years of travel, reading, writing, lecturing, and, of course, teaching.
But the first thing that caught my eye was a redbrick dollhouse, much like the row houses that line Brahmsstrasse, a street in Frankfurt, Germany, where Dr. Ruth’s mother, Irma Hanauer, and her father, Julius Siegel, had lived with her grandmother, Selma Siegel, when she was born. Seeing it, I assume this very impressive dollhouse is for her grand
children. I’m wrong.
At the break of dawn on January 5, 1939, Karola Ruth Siegel, then a 10-year-old girl, was taken to a railroad station along with approximately one hundred other German Jewish kids bound for a children’s home (some would call it an “orphanage”) in Switzerland. She stood on the platform, determined not to break down as she said goodbye to her mother and her grandmother and everything that ever felt safe or normal, or like home. Her father was not there to see her off. Six weeks earlier, several men in shiny boots entered that small ground-floor apartment on Brahmsstrasse, and quietly insisted that he come with them. Karola stood at the window and watched as he was loaded into a truck filled with other men whose only crime was their Jewish faith and taken away. He looked back, waved, attempted a smile. She couldn’t know it at that moment, but it was the last time she would ever see her father.
“The dollhouse is for me. A friend made it,” she said. I took a closer look and noticed the tiny gold plaque engraved in regal cursive—“Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Sex Therapy”—hanging on its front door. The pieces of furniture inside were extraordinarily detailed reproductions, made between the two World Wars, and bought mostly in England. “You see, I grew up with no control over my life. At the Heiden home in Switzerland, the German Jewish children like me became the maids for the Swiss children. We cleaned their toilets, made their beds, scrubbed the floors, did all the laundry, helped them bathe.…” Dr. Ruth’s voice trailed off, as she gazed at the dollhouse.
“Being an only child in my parents’ house, I was always a little spoiled. I had roller skates and a wooden scooter and chocolates and a lot of love—I had thirteen different dolls.” Again she paused, lost in the memory. “I was allowed to take only one doll to Switzerland, and I ended up giving it to a little girl on the train; she was even younger than me and she couldn’t stop crying. Then I had none. But,” she went on, as she nudged a delicate chair up to a tiny table with her thumb, “now I can play with my dollhouse whenever I like and”—she brightened—“here I have control. Everything is exactly the way I want it to be in this house.”
(Illustration Credit 8.8)
I saw it as my job to try to bring that same sense of order to her apartment. But first I had to see the things that had meaning for her. The two of us set off on an impromptu hunt for buried treasure. Books were everywhere; they ran the gamut from The Art of Florence to The Art of Seduction with some Amos Oz and Jean Piaget (the renowned developmental psychologist was her professor when she studied at the Sorbonne) thrown in for good measure. Dr. Ruth is the author of thirty-four books herself, and as a result I am now the very enlightened owner of a signed copy of Sex for Dummies!
Our next stop was a miniature table resting by a pile of papers. “I have friends who used to have a gallery on Madison Avenue. And one day I saw this little table and I just fell in love with it—it’s three hundred years old. My friend sold it to me at a special price but then he said, ‘I want you to know that it has a crack in it.’ ” She traced its surface with her fingertip. “I said, ‘Listen, it’s three hundred years old, it can have a crack!’ ”
She also showed me a ridiculously tall hat made of glossy black feathers that looks almost sculptural. “Isn’t it fantastic! I gave a talk to 150 Jewish cadets at West Point. I didn’t take any money for the lecture. I did it to honor them. For me the Allies and the military are very important. If they hadn’t entered World War II, I wouldn’t be alive. The cadets gave this hat to me, I guess as a thank-you. My grandson couldn’t get over it.”
Wherever we turned there were photographs: Ruth with her children, with President Bill Clinton, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, with the Duke of Edinburgh; Ruth receiving her doctorate from Columbia University; Ruth dancing with Zubin Mehta; Ruth playing tennis; Ruth paddling in a kayak; Ruth dressed as Charlie Chaplin, surrounded by a family decked out in bumblebee costumes; and my personal favorite, Ruth with Sir Paul McCartney. “I’d never met him,” she told me, “but we were both at a Yale commencement ceremony—I think he was getting an honorary doctorate—and he recognized me. He said, ‘Ruthie!’ So I said, ‘Sing me a song!’ And he goes, ‘She loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah!’ I didn’t have a camera but there was an Associated Press person there, and that picture went all around the world.”
(Illustration Credit 8.10)
There were also a few more reminders from Ruth’s past: a certificate documenting the fact that she has been trained as a Swiss maid (“This way when I’m not Dr. Ruth anymore, I have a fallback,” she said with a laugh), and two luminous black-and-white portraits, one of Ruth’s mother and the other of her father.
(Illustration Credit 8.12)
“So you have nothing else from your life in Frankfurt?” I asked as we looked at the old-fashioned portraits of her parents. She hesitated. “I could only take one small suitcase to the children’s home. I wish I had brought more from the house, Sabbath candlesticks, a plate—anything. But I didn’t because I was sure that my parents would be coming to get me, and I’d have my life back again.” She went into her bedroom and returned with one small item in a plastic bag. “Because I gave my doll to that child, this is all that I managed to keep from our home.”
She handed me a washcloth, a nubby blue-and-white rectangular mitt that she’s cherished for nearly seventy-five years. I asked why she keeps it hidden away in a drawer in her bedroom, and she explained that she’s willing to talk about being orphaned by the Holocaust, but it’s not something she needs to have staring her in the face every single day. She will not be consumed by that experience.
I’m struck by a Marc Chagall piece, mystical and color-saturated. “This print is just a page from the Sotheby’s catalog,” she explained. “It didn’t cost me a thing but surrounding it with the elaborate frame gives it an expensive feeling.” I asked if she’s seen the famous stained-glass windows Chagall did in the late 1950s as a gift for Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center. “I’ve seen them,” she said. “But they didn’t exist when I was a patient at the hospital.” I had no idea she was ever a patient there. “Come sit down. I’ll tell you a story.”
“When the war was over and I turned 17, I left Switzerland,” Dr. Ruth began. “I moved to Israel, but German Jews were thought of as people who failed to see the writing on the wall. I think the fact that they didn’t get out when they should have was looked at as a weakness. Maybe that’s why they were so insistent that we change our ‘German’ names the moment we arrived. But denial is a funny thing—I couldn’t comprehend that my parents and grandmother were really gone. I was worried that if I invented a whole new name for myself, my family wouldn’t be able to find me. So I began using my middle name for my first name, and I took the ‘K’ of Karola as my middle initial. I made myself into Ruth K. Siegel. I also joined the Haganah,” she said with evident pride. “I learned how to take a machine gun apart and put it back together with my eyes closed. I learned how to use a hand grenade. And I learned how to shoot; I became an excellent marksman.”
This was all a little surreal for me, like finding out your grandma is part of Seal Team Six. “Anyway,” Dr. Ruth continued, “on June 4, 1948, I worked my regular surveillance shift, and then at about noon I returned to the youth hostel where I was living. I remember the date very clearly because it was my 20th birthday.
“I was in the lobby when the bomb exploded. Plaster was raining down from the ceiling, sirens were blaring, people were screaming, a soldier and two girls—one of them standing right next to me—were killed. I’d been struck by shrapnel all over my body, including a piece embedded in my neck, but my feet got the worst of it. The top of one foot was completely gone and I had multiple wounds just above both ankles. The surgeons were so good at Hadassah that they didn’t have to amputate.”
People tend to throw the word amazing around all the time—I’m guilty of it myself. But if I had to sum Dr. Ruth up in a single word, that would be the one. Not only has she survived tragedy after tragedy, she has somehow managed to keep her s
oul intact. Where a lot of people would have shut down, Dr. Ruth chose to embrace life. It’s no wonder she’s my favorite pleasure activist.
As if on cue, Dr. Ruth announced, “Now I will show you the only thing in my apartment of any real monetary value.” She disappeared for a minute, then returned with a magnificent diamond-encrusted gold turtle attached to a jeweled stand that in a more romantic era was used to seal letters with a wax insignia. It might be one of the most beautiful things that I’ve ever held in my hands. “I have turtles all over the apartment.” She points to a big glass turtle on a shelf, a turtle-shaped soup tureen, a scattering of ceramic, jade, enamel, wood, and metal turtles on various ledges and windowsills and side tables. “You see, Nate,” she said, “a turtle carries its house right on its back. It’s perfectly safe as long as it remains tucked away in its shell. But when a turtle wants to get anywhere, it has to take a risk—it has to stick its neck out in order to move forward.” She paused. “I believe in that image. It’s how I’ve always gotten by and it’s how I was able to talk about all the taboo subjects that nobody could ever seem to speak of.” It’s also how she joined the underground, found love, got an education, raised a family, and became a citizen of the world. She took the piece from me, looked at it, and beamed. “This little turtle is the story of my life.”