On a table, still in that photo, I see the ice bucket, cocktail shaker, and bottles of gin and vermouth for preprandial martinis, always part of my parents’ evenings. And behind them is my father’s watercolor box, with him wherever he went. Over the mantel is the monster trout that had taken my father forever to land — he’d named the springhole where he’d hooked it “Turtle,” unable to imagine a fish so strong. I see the door leading to the kitchen, where Louis Duane, the guide who was my very favorite person for years, was probably starting the fire in the ancient iron stove so it would be ready for my father to make one of his special dishes, adding lettuce, onions, bacon, and cream to a silver can of baby Lesueur peas. With boiled potatoes and corned beef hash or fresh trout, we’d have a feast, in a very different mode from our usual meals that were cooked and served by chef and butler. How delighted I was to be able to wash the dishes, using water I’d carried from the lake, heated in the stove, and poured into a dishpan with a bit of soap. Seldom did I feel so useful. Seldom did I have such precious times with my father and mother — and Louis as a bonus.
Of course, fishing with them was also a special treat. After practicing with matchsticks and borrowed rods, the time finally came to actually cast a real fly for a real fish. I’ll always remember the early morning hush as we canoed upstream toward the springhole, mist over the water, the rising sun casting a rosy glow. Suddenly, there was a beaver, swimming toward his house with a big branch in his mouth until he saw us and dove, flapping his broad tail hard on the water. And there, around the bend, a graceful deer bowing her head to drink, then, startled, running toward the woods with her white flag up. Once a bear swam across our bow, huge and black as it climbed out and lumbered off. Big blue herons, white egrets, mallards, and kingfishers, too. As we started to fish, my parents’ flies flew straight and true, landing with scarcely a ripple, while mine, at first, made a big fuss and scared the fish away. No one complained, though, even when I “caught the bushes,” and in time I improved. How I loved to watch one of them catch a fish! My mother’s dry fly floated on top of the water, and she’d pull it jerkily across the still water until suddenly, with a big splashy gulp, the trout came right out of the stream after it. Then came the struggle, the leaps clear out of the water of the glistening speckled beauty, who’d sometimes shake free and dive deep, free again. More often, Mother would raise the tip of her rod skillfully and hold him firm, bringing him close and closer until Lou would scoop him into the net.
Golden days, vividly re-created when I look at that photo of my father.
Until I was fourteen, my family lived in Aiken, South Carolina, in Joye Cottage, the house my great-grandfather, William C. Whitney, had bought and enlarged. Aiken was then a small village with a “winter colony” of northerners — “Dam’ Yankees” as the locals said — whose income allowed them to live comfortably in a beautiful place far from city problems. When his father died, my grandfather Harry Payne Whitney inherited the house, and after he died in 1930, Gertrude gave it to her daughter Flora. My parents considered carefully the implications of my mother’s life as a child: rushing from place to place, going to school when it suited Gertrude’s and Harry’s schedules, with one caretaker succeeding another and little consistent care, and they opted for a different way. This was to give their children the stability and continuity necessary for a beneficial life, while the adults could be satisfied as well. Aiken provided everything they wanted — it was a perfect place to ride, shoot, play golf, tennis, and bridge, and to bring up their children in a protected, healthy ambiance.
For us, Aiken was in many ways a paradise. We had a home that both spread out and embraced us, a climate that allowed us to ride every day, horses we adored, a small fine school, and few but good friends. My sister Pam gave the flavor in that memorial book compiled after Flora’s death:
“Growing up Mum’s daughter was great fun — never dull. We all moved a lot: in the winter to Aiken, where all the boys attended Aiken Preparatory School. But there was no school for the girls at the beginning of our years there. So, Mum and three of her friends started one — in our squash court!
“This traveling was an intricate business; we took all the dogs, canaries, and other pets, such as goats, all the children — we were four — nurses, a maid or two, the chauffeur, the cars. When we went to Aiken we took all the horses and all the household and sometimes ponycarts and buggies.”
My brother Leverett and I weren’t really part of Pam’s and Whitty’s fun. Being older, they had a “gang” of friends and rushed about the village in an independent way we never could. Lev and I felt distanced from our parents much as our mother and grandmother had, although I believe that they really tried to spend time with us. But our parents were so caught up in their own lives. Their friends! Their activities! Our strict British nannies loved us, and we were attached to them, too, but we always wanted more of our parents than we got. Is this a universal, unalterable situation?
How I longed, as a child, to confide in my mother! Perhaps I didn’t know how to capture her attention. Whitty was handsome, funny, a marvelous athlete with a dozen close pals. Pam was clever, beautiful, and bold, with many friends and admirers. Chubby and solemn (until my ‘teens, when I thinned out and became more self-assured), I grew to fear rejection; Mum might turn away, or laugh, or answer the telephone. Still, I took every chance I could to be with her. When the time came, though, it was Pam, not my mother, on a carefully planned buggy ride behind her high-stepping hackney ponies, who instructed me about the “birds and the bees.” A few years after that, when Mum wanted to discuss birth control and sex with me before my marriage, I felt too embarrassed to respond. The moment had passed. When our relationship became close, as it did still later, it was nourished by the Museum, and never reached the intimacy she and my sister had maintained.
About 1940, when I was twelve, my mother first took me to the Museum. Just going to New York with her was special. To begin with, I had her all to myself.
Describing how she was then, I realize that my memories are intertwined with photographs, blended with her own stories and those of others, and mixed with later images, so my picture is the inevitable composite.
Flora Whitney Miller was beautiful right up to her death at almost eighty-nine. “Look at her lovely face, with no wrinkles,” my father used to say with pride. Her carefully coiffed hair never turned completely white. Her huge hazel eyes were fringed with long eyelashes below abundant eyebrows.
Mum lavishly powdered her upturned nose, rouged her cheekbones, and wore bright lipstick on her wide mouth. She smelled deliciously of Chanel. Her room, her whole house, was fragrant with the fresh flowers that still live in my father’s many evocative watercolors.
Her laugh was infectious. The men who visited our homes seemed wildly in love with her. No one, though, more so than my courtly and humorous father. Slim, elegantly dressed in his tailor-made double-breasted jackets, he wore horn-rim glasses behind which his blue eyes danced. His use of language was meticulous — when I called a basin a “sink,” or curtains “drapes,” he made satiric verses and watercolors to tease me. Sometimes, after predinner martinis and good wine with the roast, at dinner’s end he liked to sing: “In the Wintertime, In the Valley Green” or
When I walked along the Bois de Boulogne,
With an independent air,
You could hear the girls declare,
He must be a millionaire
You could hear them sigh
And hope to die
And turn and wink the other eye
At the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo!
Loud cheers from us all.
Despite a painful hip, my father was a wonderful dancer, in the style of his old friend, Fred Astaire.
“Cully” was also known for the funny verses any number of people and events inspired him to write and illustrate. After his death, we had his book of “Jingles” reproduced, so his descendants could also know and appreciate this aspect of him.
Often about ladies, they’d surely be considered politically incorrect today. For instance, while on board the France in 1963, he wrote this jingle and accompanied it with a graphic illustration:
I’m awfully sick of women in pants
Whatever they’re filled with —
Fannies or ants
(There must be hundreds on the France)
And most of them make me look askance.
But whether it’s ass or whether it’s skance
I still hate women in tight stretch pants.
In Paris, in 1965, he drew a picture of a doctor throwing up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. It illustrated this ditty, written after their old friend “Chip” Bohlen, then ambassador to “The Court of Charles de Gaulle,” as Cully called it, had dined with them:
Everything in France, I find, is very much de Gaulle.
Politically, of course, but that just isn’t all.
One finds thus Gaulloise cigarettes
His face on boxes of alumettes.
And when I had an awful pain
The French “doc” said he would explain
With that his face grew sad and sadder —
He broke the news —
C’est de Gaulle bladder.
“My dearest bug,” Cully would say to Flora, “how is your sniffle today?” Then, looking at me, “Your mother is extraordinary, you know. She’s curious about everything! What an interest in life she has! You’ll never know anyone who appreciates things so much.”
And that was true.
“Nooooo!” she would exclaim, as one of her beaux — Carnes or Tim or Bruce — would describe an adventure they’d embroidered for her, just to see her wide-eyed amazement. “I don’t believe it!” Or, much later, I’d show off my new baby: “Oooooh!” she’d say, “Darling, how delicious, the cunningest baby ever.”
My father’s appreciation of her, though, gave her the solid base she needed, a setting enabling her to expand and blossom. He was actually the more outgoing of the two. It was he the servants adored, he who had many close friends, he who arranged his and my mother’s trips and parties.
There was anger, too. I well recall its sound.
Raised voices, mingled with the tinkling of ice. Angry voices. Before dinner, after dinner, words knifing through the silence of hurt feelings. Although I couldn’t bear it, I sat there, watching, listening, learning to swallow anger rather than to risk the pain of confrontation. What did they fight about? My mother usually started it, I think. Some small resentment, some forgetfulness or mistake in planning, nothing much. But those martinis released underlying devils, swelled whatever emotions bubbled under their smooth masks and idyllic lives.
All gone, the next day. Except for the residue in the being of a child.
At a time when, according to Popular Mechanics, trailering was so in vogue that we were on the way to becoming “a nation of nomads,” my father bought “Romanyrye,” the sleek Art Deco sleep-in trailer in which they traveled all around the country, once as far as New Orleans. He had it fitted to their taste — elegant! When it arrived in Aiken, he wrote in “The Log of the Romanyrye”:
October 17, 1934. Much excitement on part of population of Aiken. … had cocktails served on board, much to amusement of the Wilds and Elsie Mead who dined with us.
October 18. Most of day spent in loading equipment on board. Went to boys’ school and took Whitty, Pam, and some of their friends for a ride.
October 19. Left Aiken, en route New York.
Cully’s paintings hung all over my parents’ homes, especially in Aiken. Instead of the usual ancestral portrait in the living room, on the long wall over the bar stretched a large, fine oil of a young man, “J. D.” In those long-ago days when segregation was institutionalized in the South by “Colored” or “White Only” signs on water fountains and movie house entrances, when public schools and churches, life itself, were racially segregated, to render a major portrayal of a “colored” man who worked as a “dove boy” for my father when he went hunting indicated an unusually open mind. Full-length, handsome, J. D. stands in a corn field, his head held high. My father had captured J. D.’s dignity.
A pair of smaller paintings on the side walls showed Cully’s humor. One, The Night Before, all in browns. A whiskey bottle. A decanter. A half-empty glass. The other, Blue Morning, held an assortment of blue bottles: Alka-Seltzer, Milk of Magnesia, an eyecup, a water glass with a measuring spoon.
My father was always painting, whether in a New York school — where he seemed to be the best artist, an inspiration for the whole class — in his studio in Aiken, in the Adirondacks, or in Hobe Sound, Florida, where he wintered later in his life and always kept by his side a watercolor pad and paintbox.
In Aiken, his studio was in the “Spooky Wing,” as we called those otherwise unoccupied, dark, and scary rooms. You got to them down a long, wide red-carpeted flight of stairs — exactly how I still picture the entrance to hell. The room you eventually reached opened onto the garden and pool, and I can still see my father there in my mind’s eye, wearing a long white coat like a doctor’s, holding his palette, brushes bristling in his hand, emitting delicious smells of oil paint and turpentine. Swimming or playing in the garden, my brother and I knew we mustn’t disturb him — but I doubt we could have, so focused was our father on his canvas.
In the Adirondacks, he used a log cabin way uphill from our noisy, child-filled camp, which we didn’t visit unless invited. Then, he’d arrange a picnic; how many photos we have of Daddy cooking hamburgers and steaks over the wood fire outside his cabin, all of us gathered around, sitting on the cabin porch, or toasting marshmallows over the embers as loons called wildly and the moon rose over the lake, while someone told the terrifying ghost story, the “Windigo.” But peeking inside the little cabin where we didn’t go, I saw an easel, brushes, canvases, pads of Arches paper, an old smock hanging on a hook. Another life.
Later, during the first years I was married, he took me to his class in New York, where sweet Hungarian portraitist Maria de Kammerer counted on him to infuse her students with ambition and fire. Despite my lack of talent, I loved the experience of dabbing thick, sensuous oil paints on a canvas, loved seeing my father in his true element. He delighted in the models she provided, and the company, too, since he had no circle of artists in his day-to-day life in Aiken. His paintings weren’t the kind a museum would show. Not “significant” in terms of our society, not unique in style, only in the sensitivity he brought his subjects — lovely evocations of nature, people, flowers, still lives, Adirondack scenes, the rooms our family inhabited. Again and again, he painted Flora — sunbathing, fishing in the Adirondacks, doing a double-crostic in their Paris garden. When my brother Lev’s first wife, Ava, Cully’s voluptuous daughter-in-law — a favorite subject — posed naked for him, we were conventionally, ridiculously appalled. But Cully was inspired by beauty, everywhere he found it. Especially, and always, by the nude female body.
In Hobe Sound, my father did watercolors in a house by the Inland Waterway where every room was a studio, where every wall was enlivened by his images: an exuberant yellow hibiscus fills a page, a boat passes below the lawn, rooms in Aiken or New York spring to life, one can almost smell a vase of roses. In one watercolor, I’m sitting in a bathing suit by their pool, and looking at it I feel almost right there, as I was in 1972, writing a paper on abnormal psychology for college, the year Daddy died at eighty-five.
I have his hands: small, square, with soft little nails lacking my sister’s and my mother’s half-moons. I wished for long and graceful hands with hard nails shaped like almonds and painted scarlet, like theirs, and like my grandmother’s, whose right hand cast in bronze sits on a table in our bedroom, looking, I imagined, like that of an artist. But today my squat hands please me. They remind me of my father and they reinforce my sense of him as an artist.
His paintings were the first I remember. To me, they revealed the importance of art, and showed me, by his examp
le, the commitment that is the essence of an artist. My father’s love of painting has infused my love for art all my life. My grandmother may be the source of my specific involvement in the Whitney, and for my feelings about the Museum, but from my father I absorbed the deep sense of art, its centrality to the artist, its abiding, fulfilling joy.
As I grew older, I became inwardly critical of my father’s lack of ambition, because he didn’t have big exhibitions or big sales of his paintings. I thought he was wasting his great talent, frittering it away in socializing, drinking, traveling. Never giving himself the chance to become a great artist, never concentrating on his painting above all else.
My faultfinding was, I fear, the typical arrogance of youth. My father was full of joy much of the time, more than almost anyone else I’ve ever known, and in full measure he gave that joy to others. He did this personally and socially and also in his paintings. They are enchanting, lovely expressions of his life. I wish I had realized long ago, and had told him in time, how much he had inspired me, how watching him had given me a profound sense of the meaning of art, of being an artist.
My mother’s immense charm made her the glowing center of any gathering, a magnet for friends, family, and the “beaux” who seemed accepted members of our household. Several doctors appeared instantly whenever she had a cold, or the faintest twinge, and she sat happily in bed while they fussed over her. Russian count Elia Tolstoy spent Christmases with us in Aiken, entertaining us with tales of adventure, always starting in foreboding words with his escape from the “Reds,” “When I in Gobi Desert …” My sister and brother called him “Count Tallstory.” My first “crush” was on Ronnie Bodley, the English writer who’d been a beau of both my mother and grandmother, whose little mustache and very British accent captivated my best friend, Marianna Mead, and me. We would prepare his breakfast tray with little vases of Mum’s favorite lilies of the valley, and hover, waiting for his slightest attention. We learned the hard lesson of unrequited love early. An architect adored Flora. A gifted decorator. A brilliant publisher. And others, until nearly the end of her life. When they were both in their mid-eighties, Harlan Miller, one of her first beaux, and also her last, wrote on a card accompanying a bunch of birthday flowers,
The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made Page 9