by Jessie Close
My parents enrolled me in the Catholic Sacré Coeur school, where I was the only white student. They wanted me to learn French fluently and thought that by throwing me into a French-speaking environment I would learn quickly. I told my parents that if they didn’t take me out of that school I would run away. Just as I thought things couldn’t get any worse, of course they did. My beloved Rocket was struck by a car and killed while walking on the same road where he used to follow me to the school bus. Granny Close wrote that blood had been coming from his mouth. I never forgave her for putting that image in my mind.
I was so distraught that my parents enrolled me in TASOK, the American School of Kinshasa, where most of the students were missionary kids, but I was still unhappy. I just didn’t fit in.
Although Tina and I now lived with our parents, my father remained as aloof as he always had been, a fact he later candidly admitted in his autobiography.
My work at the hospital and with the president… allowed little time with the family. I was more comfortable dealing with professional responsibilities than with the needs at home. Did I feel guilty about my family? Sometimes, but the weight and imperatives of my other responsibilities were effective guilt suppressors… Anyway, with little understanding of children or their problems, I felt useless as a father.
I hate to admit it, but I was afraid of him. He would yell at me for minor infractions, so I stayed out of his way and learned not to ask him anything. I’d use Mom to pitch questions; she knew his moods and the set of his jaw better than I did. Many days he was gone, traveling in a small plane that he piloted to villages to inspect clinics and treat patients. Those days were easier than when he was home.
Not long after we arrived in Africa, I developed what my father diagnosed as a chronic sinus condition. I had constant headaches, and my sinuses were a mess. Africa became a bit more tolerable after my brother, Sandy, arrived. At age thirteen, I met my first boyfriend at school, and we kissed. We kept it a secret. His father worked for the CIA, although everyone thought he was a shipping company executive. Because of my father’s close proximity to Mobutu, everyone suspected Dad of being a CIA operative, too. He always denied that, but I guess he would, so I’ll never know. A neighbor gave me a pet monkey with a blue face. I also acquired a chameleon, an owl, and a dog, Trooper.
Still, I wanted to go home. I remember one dreadful afternoon when I rode with my mom to the post office near the center of town. I wasn’t feeling well, so I stayed behind in the van when she went inside. Besides, I hated being stared at because we were white.
It was hot under the noon sun, so I slipped into the front seat. Our van’s windows were open, but there was no breeze to dry my whitish blond wisps of hair, which were glued to my forehead, held tightly there by stale sweat.
“Mam’selle! Mam’selle!” a young voice called.
A teenage boy, his teeth sparkling brightly in a wide grin, appeared outside the driver’s-side window.
“Oui?” I replied softly.
“Papier, mam’selle?” he asked, hoisting up a stack of newspapers for me to see.
“Non, merci,” I replied.
I noticed that his shirt, a rag, really, was unbuttoned and draped over his scrawny shoulders. His black skin was covered with dust, giving him a gray, cadaverous appearance. I glanced at his thin chest and looked downward at his bulging navel and the V of his exposed abdomen. His khaki shorts were ripped and fastened below his hips with a piece of twine. His shoeless feet were white with calluses and scars.
“Mam’selle, papier?” he repeated.
Before I could reply, he dropped below the window, out of sight, but resurfaced, the newspapers no longer in his hands.
“Mam’selle,” he said, smiling as he brazenly opened our van’s door.
“Non!” I shrieked, reaching too late for the handle.
He stepped into the opening and grabbed my right hand. “Papier, mam’selle?” he asked.
“Non! Je n’ai pas d’argent!” I declared. I tried to pull my hand out of his.
He dug his long, dirty fingernails, like fishhooks, into my skin, preventing me from pulling away.
“S’il vous plait,” I yelled. “Leave me alone!”
He freed my hand, which I immediately clenched into a fist because my palm stung. I thought I was rid of him, but he reached up and grabbed my left breast with his right hand.
“No!” I shouted, stunned. I tried to knock away his hand, but he knocked mine away instead and squeezed my breast hard again while lowering his left hand to my skirt. He tried to work it under the material, but I clenched my thighs together as tightly as I could and prevented him.
With a frantic shove, I pushed his hand off my breast and scooted backward on the van’s seat, kicking at him, causing him to back away. Lunging forward, I grabbed the van’s door, slamming it shut, and then darted into the backseat, taking refuge on the floor.
I opened my palm. Four crescents from his fingernails appeared, each bleeding.
The teenager circled the van, calling out, “Mam’selle!” Pressing his face against the glass, he peered into the backseat, staring at me. “Mam’selle, vien.”
I looked away.
As quickly as the teen had appeared, he vanished.
“Jess?” my mom called as she opened the driver’s-side door.
“Look what a boy did to my hand,” I said, offering up my palm.
She took my hand into hers and inspected the cuts. “How awful! What happened?”
I began to cry. “I couldn’t lock the doors. I don’t know how to lock the doors in this lousy van!”
I jerked my hand from her and closed it again.
“I’m sorry,” Mom said. “I didn’t know.”
I curled up on the backseat and pressed my hot and tear-stained cheek against its vinyl. Closing my eyes, I listened to my mom start the van and back it out of the parking space. I thought about Grandmother Moore’s yellow house in Greenwich, with its green lawns and stone walls that ran down into the field behind it. There were lilacs in the yard and freshly mowed grass.
With all my heart I wanted to go home.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I was soon on a flight back to the States with my very frustrated mother. After two and a half years in Africa I was being sent to live with my mother’s relatives in Connecticut. My parents were hoping that my health would improve, but I suspected that my trip home was also about my attitude. I had made it clear that I didn’t like Africa, and my parents had probably grown tired of my unhappiness.
Mom enrolled me in the Kathleen Laycock Country Day School for girls, about twenty miles north of Greenwich in a community called Westport. I was sent to live with the family of Mom’s second cousins. Kathleen Laycock was built on the former estate of R. T. Vanderbilt and boasted an enrollment of 250 girls of all ages along with thirty teachers.
Having been born into MRA’s cocoon of the Four Absolute Standards, I found myself at age fourteen living in a world just as foreign as the one I’d seen in Africa. Women wore makeup, adults smoked and swore, and my surrogate parents drank cocktails every night before dinner.
Years later, when we were adults, my siblings and I would decide that all of us should have spent time with a deprogrammer after we left Caux and before we were reintroduced to normal society. You don’t spend the first ten years of your life under the direction of strict MRA nannies while your parents are off doing God’s work without undergoing culture shock when you see how other families operate.
I didn’t get along well at my new home or in my new school. I spent a lot of time in the school infirmary. The nurse couldn’t find anything physically wrong with me; I just felt lousy and lifeless. I wasn’t doing well academically, either. It wasn’t because the schoolwork was difficult; I simply didn’t care or apply myself. I think part of my problem, besides being a teenager, was that I’d been berated in Caux by my MRA teachers for being, as one wrote in my report card, “too competitive.” The teacher chastised me fo
r not being an “obedient girl.” Within MRA, a good girl didn’t compete with boys. That teacher’s lecture was reinforced by MRA nannies and unintentionally by my own mother, who, I felt, had surrendered her own aspirations to assist my father and his work in Africa—to the point of abandoning us as children.
Living with my relatives soon became untenable, and my mother boarded another flight back to the States to deal with what was becoming known as “the Jessie problem.” I could almost hear my parents asking themselves, “What do we do with her now?”
Their solution was to move me back to Grandmother Moore’s house. I would finish the rest of the school year being chauffeured to classes and cared for by an MRA nanny, an older woman whose nickname was Tweedie. Before returning to Africa, Mom warned me that Tweedie had epilepsy and that if I caused her too much trouble, she might have a seizure and die.
In addition to my grandmother and me, there was Tweedie and Suza living in this big house. I moved back into the wing that my mom had added for a family of six. At night I would lie in my bed, listening to every creak and strange noise, painfully aware that I was isolated and alone. I wondered what my sisters and brother were doing. I felt unwanted by my parents. Every morning I would step out of my room and run as fast as I could, screaming, down the long green hall to the main house, where everyone else stayed. Monsters were after me, but if I screamed I would be all right.
Now that I was back home, I was reunited with Valentina Quinn, the youngest child of the Academy Award–winning actor Anthony Quinn and his first wife, Katherine DeMille, daughter of the legendary Cecil B. DeMille. I called my friend Valli. Her parents had been recruited by MRA, but unlike my mom and dad, Anthony Quinn had rebelled at becoming an MRA convert. His refusal had caused strains in his marriage, especially when Katherine had gone to be indoctrinated in Caux without him. That’s where I’d met Valli for the first time. We had gotten into trouble in Caux for pushing flowerpots off a windowsill—it was fun to see and hear them crash on the cement several floors below. Our MRA nannies had separated us and sent us to a so-called Four Table, which meant we each had to eat at a table with three adults, who grilled us about why we had broken the MRA’s Four Absolute Standards by being naughty. Ugh…
Valli’s mother moved her family back to California from Caux, and then everyone went to Italy, where Anthony was filming the 1961 movie Barabbas. During shooting, Anthony Quinn had a highly publicized affair with an Italian seamstress, whom he impregnated. Valli’s mom brought the kids back to the States, where she filed for divorce and eventually moved east.
I had a lot in common with Valli. Her two older sisters were off traveling with Up with People, the MRA singing group that toured college campuses and military bases. My sister Glenn was one of the group’s singer-songwriters. Valli also had a deeply troubled relationship with her famous father. The truth was that both of us were raising ourselves.
Occasionally I would have some contact with Glenn or my other siblings. I think all of them realized that I was drifting on my own. Sandy wrote a letter to our parents telling them that I needed to be with them, no matter how loudly I screamed the opposite. I didn’t know about it until years later. His pleas fell on deaf ears.
Without a strong parental figure to guide me, I began testing adult waters with my friends. Susie, a classmate from school, and I raided her parents’ liquor cabinet one night when her parents were out. There was another girl with us, and she got so drunk that she blacked out. We thought she might be dead, so we panicked and called Susie’s parents, who hurried home and telephoned the girl’s father. The girl’s mother blamed Susie and me and claimed that in addition to drinking, the two of us were smoking pot. At that point, I didn’t even know what marijuana was, but that would soon change.
I think alcohol affected me differently from the way it affected most young girls. It not only made me feel less inhibited and eased my painful shyness, it affected my brain. My thoughts seemed to slow down. I didn’t feel as if I had a jackrabbit jumping through my head.
I began smoking Tareyton cigarettes, too. Its commercials featured a smoker with a black eye who boasted, “Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.” It seemed so adult, and that slogan appealed to my rebellious streak. Smoking also seemed to soothe my brain.
Susie and I were both boy-crazy, and I quickly realized that boys were interested in me, too. I had long, naturally blond hair, and my boobs had become so enormous that my brother, Sandy, embarrassed me once when I’d been in Africa by asking how I managed to stand straight up without tipping over. I was five feet four inches tall, weighed 110 pounds, and when I bought my first bikini, I had to purchase a size 6 bottom for my hips and a size 8 for my breasts.
Susie was cute, too, with fiery red hair. I soon fell desperately in love with a townie from Westport named Greg. Susie and I would pile into a car with Greg and one of his friends and head to a local drive-in theater, where we would drink beer and make out for hours.
It was 1967, the so-called Summer of Love, and Susie and I thought of ourselves as rebels. We decided to see who could lose her virginity first. I won.
Greg and I had sex almost immediately after we’d met. I turned fifteen that summer. We used a contraceptive. Just the same, a part of me hoped I’d get pregnant. If I had a baby, I’d have someone who would love me for who I was. I would have my own family.
When the school year ended in the spring of 1968, my parents wanted me to spend the summer in Africa. I dug in my heels, because I didn’t want to leave Susie or Greg. A compromise was reached. Susie would come to the Congo with me for half the summer, and I would spend the rest of the summer with her family. The first thing Susie and I packed were our newly purchased Beatles records.
Susie wasn’t used to living in a paracommando camp that white girls couldn’t leave without an escort. After four weeks living with me, Susie confided that she’d never met parents as “stiff” and “appallingly uptight”—her words—as mine were. She said my father was self-engrossed and oddly disconnected from the rest of us. My parents, meanwhile, didn’t like Susie at all. They thought she was a bad influence on me. Her comments were the first to show me how others saw my parents and my family. We were different.
To me, my dad was totally preoccupied with his African adventure and my mother naturally supported him. She took a special interest in Tambu Kisoki, a teenager who was hired to help around our house, and began teaching him English. He was such a pleasant and enthusiastic student that my parents decided to informally adopt him and help pay for his continued education in the United States. Legally, he was not a Close, but emotionally he was quickly accepted.
Tambu and I were moving in opposite directions. I was becoming more removed from my family at a time when he joined it.
Susie and I lost contact in the fall, when we enrolled in different schools. Mom sent me to her alma mater, Rosemary Hall, where the teachers quickly discovered that I was not like the earlier Moore and Close family girls. I was told I had to repeat the ninth grade, which was humiliating and made me feel even more insecure and rebellious. Mom also decided that I should board at Rosemary Hall rather than live with my grandmother. Wanting to fit in, I developed a reputation for being the girl who would try anything. One night, someone suggested that we put our dorm mother’s cat down the laundry chute. “I’ll do it!” I volunteered.
In a short span, I’d started drinking, smoking cigarettes, having sex, and establishing a reputation as a rebel. I’d come a long way from being the reclusive tomboy wearing an army uniform and hunting imaginary Nazis with Rocket.
When the school year ended in the spring of 1969, my parents were told that I would not be welcomed back at Rosemary Hall for my sophomore year because of my grades and antics. Once again, Mom boarded a flight from the Congo, returning to the States to deal with the problem child.
Mom and Dad were not happy. Not only had I embarrassed myself by failing at Rosemary Hall, Mom also discovered that I had had sex. I w
as clearly out of control.
Having run out of ideas about how to control me from Africa, my parents decided to get me out of Greenwich before I did further damage. They legally surrendered their parental rights. I was being turned over to my oldest sister, Tina, who was now living in Pacific Palisades, outside Los Angeles.
Much like mine, Tina’s life had been scarred by MRA and restricted by my parents. She’d wanted to attend art school after graduating from Rosemary Hall and had been accepted at Parsons School of Design, but my father had dismissed a career in art as being impractical. He’d urged her to become a nurse. Uncertain what to do, Tina had returned to the Congo, doing odd jobs that our dad had arranged while she was living with them. Out of the blue, she had received a letter from Diarmid Campbell, a Scotsman thirteen years her senior who was in MRA. His sister had met Tina and had assured Diarmid that Tina would make a good wife. Diarmid’s proposal was a way for her to escape from Kinshasa and begin her own family, so Tina agreed to marry him and move to California.
I was used to being away from my parents, but giving Tina legal rights to me was something I didn’t understand. Anger toward them burned inside me, but on the other hand I looked forward to living without their interference and rules. As far as I was concerned I was still on my own; Tina didn’t have a clue.
I moved into my twenty-four-year-old sister’s two-bedroom bungalow and immediately began pestering her about getting my driver’s license. A few weeks after I settled in, Valli showed up on our doorstep. Her mother had grown weary of what she called “Greenwich snobbery and isolation” and had decided to move back to Los Angeles, too. She’d sent Valli ahead so that she could enroll at Palisades High School, which was two blocks away. Valli’s mom planned to follow and buy a house as soon as she sold their home in Greenwich.
Once again, Valli and I were bringing up ourselves.