Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  My grandmother was desperate to make her husband feel better. She figured it was high time she made Popsie that cozy dinner, or at least pretended she had. The morning of the Rockefeller party, she resolutely reentered the kitchen. This time Selma slopped onto the floor only a little of the gazpacho she was ferrying.

  “Now, I want you all to take the night off, and Mr. Burden and I will eat Steak Tartare when we return from cocktails at the Rockefellers’ this evening.”

  “Oui, Madame,” said Michel.

  “Oh, and, Michel,” said my grandmother with an embarrassed little brrfffttt, “would you mind dreadfully if we told Mr. Burden that I made the meal?”

  Michel smiled and bowed.

  Turning to me, she said, “Why don’t you come too? I’m sure there’ll be lots of nice young there.” I knew what “young” meant—anyone in the Social Register between the ages of ten and fifty. I said I’d go. I could tell she wanted to show me off, not because I was so great, but because that’s what summer people do with their progeny. Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham would have given half of his Hitler memorabilia to go, but my grandfather wasn’t having any of that. He never allowed himself to be seen in public with his third son; it was too humiliating.

  And out she went, leaving the staff flummoxed and preparations started for the various things that would have to accompany her masterpiece (including the masterpiece itself): a butter lettuce salad, some French bread, cheese, a crème caramel. The wine needed to be selected, the butter curled, the linens chosen, and the finger bowls set on trays with a leaf of verbena in each. Someone would have to serve the meal, then clear and wash up, and get the Mr. and Mrs. up the three little stairs and into their bedroom and draw their baths and make sure they didn’t drown in them and help them brush their teeth and get them in their pj’s and finally into bed. Night off, indeed.

  The three of us were dressed and ready to go at six. My grandfather could barely walk, but that didn’t stop him from driving. He shoved aside my urgent petition and, with a struggle that had me wondering how we were going to pry him out at the other end, managed to get himself behind the wheel of his 6.3-liter 300 SEL Mercedes—a car so powerful it was forever leaving coats of paint in its wake.

  The road to Seal Harbor is a twisty one that follows the curves of the shoreline. It was Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride over, but we made it, with my grandmother only shrieking, “Mercy! Bill, you’ll kill us!” twenty-six times. We missed the entrance to the Rockefeller estate because my grandfather was going about ninety, but he remedied that by executing a U-turn into oncoming traffic. (Shades of Uncle Bob! I screamed to myself.) As we were thundering up the long gravel driveway, I spotted the Secret Service checkpoint and told my grandfather to slow down, as in “Oh my God! Stop! Stop!” A long table had been placed across the driveway, making it impossible to continue on to the house without verification. Dark-suited agents were looking into all the cars and checking the occupants against a guest list.

  My grandfather wasn’t going for it. “Goddamn it!” he raged, spit flying. “This is outrageous, Peggy! Don’t they know who I am?” And he floored it.

  “Bi-illl—” my grandmother wailed, covering her eyes with one hand and with the other clawing a long tear in the leather upholstery.

  The agents realized what was happening. Quickly, they mobilized themselves in front of the table and withdrew their guns. One of them grabbed a bullhorn and bellowed at us to “HALT!”

  My grandfather didn’t hesitate for one second. We flew through the center of the table, smashing it to pieces and sending papers and operatives flying. I could have sworn I heard a couple of shots zing past us, and I started to pray. Oh God, please don’t let me die from a bullet defending a man who isn’t even vice president yet. I’ll miss orientation week at Cornell, and I’m sorry, Lord, but that’s when I’m intending to lose my virginity. You wouldn’t want me to die a virgin, now would you?

  The madman remained unfazed. He peeled around the corner, up a little hill and past a planting of ferns, and finally ground to a halt in a shower of pine needles and chipmunk body parts in front of the house, whereupon he lurched out of the car, and up the steps, and into a bear hug with the future vice president of the United States.

  We’ll Always Have Paris

  THERE WERE ACTUAL occasions when my grandfather made an attempt to honor me, like the impromptu lunch party he threw for my sixteenth birthday in the jungle-like humidity of the indoor pool in the country, where the menu featured Beluga, lobster, and Dom Perignon, and the guest list consisted of my best friend, the butler, and four of my teenaged cousins. Then there was the dinner dance at the New York apartment for my eighteenth, when my grandfather stood up to toast me and forgot my name.

  Another time, he magnanimously offered to bulletproof my car. Seeing as how it was a convertible, there didn’t seem much point, but my grandfather was seriously into bulletproofing. The windows and skylights of the rooms he personally frequented were installed with impenetrable metal blinds that went up and down and across at the touch of a switch. These provided hours of entertainment when we were little, and when we were older they became the ultimate party trick that no one, other than a Rockefeller, suspected. People would start screaming and diving under the Bertoia chairs when the shutters came rumbling down.

  When my grandfather’s behavior toward me turned philanthropic, I got nervous. Invariably it began with a call from Miss Pou. At some point my grandfather would interrupt from the extension where he’d been listening and bark out something like, Ever been to Tahiti? I’d say no, and he’d say, Well you’re going! and I’d say, Wow, really? When? And he’d say, Today. Then I’d tell him I had school or work or something and couldn’t possibly, and he’d say take it or leave it, and hang up the phone. He offered Hong Kong and an African safari with no forewarning, and always when he knew it was impossible for me to accept.

  The invitation to Paris was issued on a bone-chilling, overcast day in March. I was in my sophomore year at Cornell and hating every minute of Ithaca’s so-called spring. The phone was ringing when I walked into the cramped one-bedroom apartment I shared with my pre-law roommate.

  “Hi, darlin’,” Miss Pou said. “Your grandfather would like to know if you would like to go to—”

  “I’ll take it.”

  By the time he died, my grandfather had visited Paris ninety-eight times. It was my grandparents’ favorite city. I was there with them once before, when I was seventeen and doing my gap year at a gonzo finishing school in Florence, Italy, an institution that featured style over education. They had come over to see the spring fashion shows and were staying at the Ritz, where my grandfather retained an entire home-away-from-home wardrobe. My roommate and I were crashing with her sister, a California hippie who ran an American restaurant called Mother Earth’s Lost and Found, a sort of flower power subterranean café that specialized in oversized hamburgers and tabbouleh. I think I had maybe one shower the whole week we were there.

  We met up at the Givenchy show, where my grandparents had been justifiably horrified at my reinvention as a Californian free spirit, with frizzed-out hair, frayed bell-bottom jeans, batik coat, and platform boots that had me hitting the six-foot mark. By intermission I had to acknowledge my lapse in fashion judgment, and pledged to henceforth re-reinvent myself as a jeunesse dorée and wear navy cashmere cardigans over my shoulders, pale pink lipstick, and Hermès scarves. That idea lasted the twenty-four hours until I left Paris.

  When I told my mother that I was going to fly to Paris on the Concorde and get to stay at the American embassy, she was characteristically delighted for me.

  “Bitch,” she hissed, and hung up the phone.

  She called back a day later:

  “Well, I suppose it’s their choice if your decrepit grandparents want to spoil the bejesus out of you and waste thousands taking you to Paris.” I could hear the ice cubes tinkling in her glass. My mother hadn’t been anywhere other than downtown Boston since she’d thrown in
her lot with the contractor.

  “I’ll bring you back a Chanel suit,” I lied.

  “Huh!” she said, and hung up the phone.

  Luckily my fear of flying did not extend itself to supersonic travel.

  The best thing about taking the Boomer, aside from the head rush you got traveling at Mach 2, was that you never saw anyone but your fellow high rollers. No screaming babies or obese golfers on vacation. You went directly from the ultra-exclusive Concorde lounge, down a private escalator, and alors right onto the plane. No one even looked at your passport. It might as well have been Air Force One for all the attention they gave you, not to mention the free gifts, like sterling silver letter openers, Porthault hand towels, and pen sets.

  There were four of us: my grandparents, moi-même, and Juan, the handsome, if still inscrutable, Basque butler. I was a late reservation, so I was seated apart, next to a red-haired woman who ignored me as soon as she discovered I was neither famous nor French. Paul Newman was sitting two rows behind me, practically on my right shoulder, and without even trying I could see the hairs in Halston’s nose one row in front.

  The flight to Paris left early in the morning, so I was unprepared for the three-hour alcohol soak. As soon as the plane leveled off in outer space, flight attendants began serving aperitifs, and those jellied little truffle-decorated bateaus of this and that the French so love. Next came caviar, accompanied by champagne and iced vodka. I chose vodka, a wise decision at ten in the morning only if you intend to accost Paul Newman and not be embarrassed by your actions. Whenever Paul got up to use the head, I got up too, forcing him to squeeze past me with a full frontal rub. After the third time (I think he had prostate trouble) old Joanne was on to me, but I didn’t care. We’d progressed to the fish course and drinking white Burgundy, and I was gabbing away to my seatmate, who turned out to be an impresario named Regine. A Bordeaux followed with a filet de boeuf, and then petits fours, coffee, and Armagnac. By the time we landed in Paris, I was a lifetime member of the conglomerate of Regine’s nightclubs, even the one in Rio, and on the guest list at a bunch of weekend parties which, sadly, I would discover were all at Jimmy’s, a club that catered to lecherous old men, where they sized you up through a peephole even if your name was on the list, and then welcomed you in crocodile-style if you were remotely young and female, and had most of your teeth.

  The fact that my grandfather had brought me along at all should have apprised me of his internal state of affairs. Likewise that in lieu of the Ritz, he had chosen for us to stay at the American embassy residence, which is a privilege granted to all former ambassadors, and without a doubt the most masochistic thing my grandfather could have done since all he had ever wanted, and worked for, and paid for, was to be the US ambassador to France. For decades he had headed up the French-American Council. He was an authority on French art, French aviation, French defense, and French wine and food. He had honed his language skills to the point of fluency. He had been bitterly disappointed when he did not receive the nod after his ambassadorship to Belgium, which he felt had been merely the groundwork for the real thing, France. Oh, to have joined the illustrious ranks of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and Douglas Dillon. My grandfather had recently been offered Japan, but he’d petulantly turned it down; he continued to believe that France was his diplomatic destiny. A president would have to have been mad to appoint a man who was as mentally and physically competent as a bug on Raid to represent the country.

  The embassy residence in Paris is the former Hotel Pontalba, a nineteenth-century mansion built for a New Orleans heiress. It is located on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, on a beautiful courtyard set back from the busy street behind the original Visconti gatehouse. The graceful arched windows and formal gardens, Baccarat chandeliers and gold-leaf embellishments, inlaid marble floors and unrestrained ceilings, opulent reception rooms, the extraordinary art collection, even the Krug in the bedroom mini-fridge were nothing compared to the white-gloved marines who lined the sweeping stairways twenty-four seven. The ambassador’s wife had to have vetted them; they were like Chippendale dancers vogueing in military costume. Going up and down the stairs gave me serious palpitations.

  As we stepped into the small elevator to go up to our rooms, I saw my grandfather wince with envy at the luminous Milton Avery landscape hanging on one of its walls. It wasn’t for the actual painting; he already owned several Averys. It aroused a rare wave of sympathy in me. It was easy to forget that he had once been a cultural icon in the restricted world of his contemporaries. The Museum of Modern Art, the Air and Space Museum, those had been his pet projects and brainchildren. He had overseen much of MoMA’s expansion during the fifties and sixties, and remained a trustee after several terms as president. And he had been the one to convince Nixon to build the new Air and Space Museum to open on the nation’s bicentennial. Once the ultimate twentieth-century man, my grandfather had become outmoded on this, the cusp of the next. He’d had a great run, from the edge of the Edwardian era, to the Atomic, but he was no longer a viable source of energy. The boards he still sat on didn’t have the heart to throw him off.

  Saddest of all, there was no one to hand the hard-fought reins to.

  His four sons had disappointed him cruelly. My father’s suicide would be something he could never make his peace with. The warmth and the intellectual bond between them were evident from the letters they’d written back and forth to each other about cars and motors and more cars, and foreign policy, and the children and the newspaper and upcoming holidays, and all the normal stuff that fathers and sons confer on.

  His second-born, also dead, had disillusioned him differently. Robert had made a beeline for as radically different a life from his father’s as he could have. The army, a simple teacher’s existence, closeted homosexuality; and then to get whacked by a truck that he could have seen coming from a mile away?

  Hamilton was a perpetual thorn in his side, and if he acknowledged him at all, it was as the author of a book my grandfather had contracted someone to ghostwrite for him during the late sixties.

  Ordway had initially made his father proud. But after attending Harvard, and then the business school, he had continued his obsession with the police, and established a foundation that gave money to the families of officers killed in the line of duty. This laudable act provided him with a tax deduction and a steady flow of plaques and medals and certificates, with which he covered the walls of his apartment. This in turn led to an obsessive, countrywide pursuit of honorary sheriff appointments that became so prolific, Ordway had to purchase the apartment next door just to get more wall space for his shrine. He rarely left his two apartments now. A prostitute visited him once a week, and the rest of the time he sat around in a manic-depressive cocoon, consuming prescription drugs and watching the porn movies he had his secretary or bodyguard go out and rent.

  Total washout.

  The Madness of King William began in earnest the morning after we arrived. My grandfather placed a call to New York as soon as he awoke. “Miss Pou!” he said excitedly. “I’ve just seen the new Mercedes W124 and it’s superb, absolutely first-rate! Order four for the houses, and I want one delivered to the embassy residence by noon. Of course I mean today! I intend to use it while I’m in Paris. Edward can have it afterwards. Nonsense. Of course you can get a license at thirteen! Have Heidi take the next plane to Stuttgart, and pick one up and deliver it to the embassy by lunchtime. I want to go to Versailles. Hire a driver as well.” He paused. “Oh, very well, then have her get it here in time to take us to dinner. And while you’re at it, order one for yourself. And for Heidi. That will be all.” (Transatlantic click.)

  So there we were, on our way to Versailles for an ultra-exclusive private tour to be conducted by a strange woman who had lived her entire life in the palace and claimed to have been born ninety-something years prior, almost to the day, on the floor of the Passage du Midi. And yes, we were in our gleaming new Mercedes, which poor Heidi, Miss Pou�
�s co-secretary, had managed to drive in record time, and without incident, from the factory showroom in Stuttgart, into Paris, arriving during Friday evening rush hour, the experience of which actually cracked her famous Swiss composure and nearly gave her a nervous breakdown. I was sitting up front with the driver, which was far worse than riding shotgun with George the Nazi, because this guy maybe got through one bar of soap a decade. He kept flicking his mustard-colored eyes over my legs.

  The tour was not what I would call a complete success. Certainly we gained access to all manner of off-limit salons and chambres de lits,and there’s no place on earth as magnificent as Versailles, but I can never again think of the Sun King’s Hall of Mirrors any way other than in terms of how long it takes a person with Parkinson’s to travel down it. Likewise, the Opéra, though exquisite, will forever remind me of my grandmother’s sustained, if melodious, passing of air during the climax of our tour guide’s reenactment of a scene from Molière’s Malade Imaginaire.

  At least the sorest loser in the history of international diplomacy was enjoying his psychotropic drugs. My grandfather scoured Paris for available Monet water lily paintings and ordered the embassy staff around as if he were Sinatra. In public he was the archetypal crass American tourist he so despised, snapping his fingers and shouting at waiters: “On-core doo van!! Je voo-ray luh captain im meed eee at uh man!” Both my grandparents were fluent in French, but they might as well have been speaking the dialect of Dixie for all the trouble they took with their pronunciation.