He was frugal and restless, and expanded his empire by buying real estate and, later, railroad lines, which he combined to create the New York Central Railroad. When he died in 1877, he had amassed one of the greatest fortunes of his time, worth more than one hundred million dollars, which today would be equal to about two billion.
My mother’s father, Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, was Cornelius’s great-great-grandson. When he turned twenty-one he inherited millions of dollars from a family trust, but Reginald had none of Cornelius’s work ethic. Reginald liked horses, gambling, and drinking. He died in 1925 of cirrhosis of the liver. He was just forty-five, and my mother was fifteen months old.
My grandmother Gloria Morgan was Reginald’s second wife, having married him two years before his death. She was eighteen when she gave birth to my mom, and was completely unprepared to be a widow or a parent.
Like many children born into wealthy families at that time, my mother was taken care of by a governess. Her name was Emma Keislich, but my mother called her “Dodo.” She was the most important person in my mother’s young life.
“YOU DON’T GROW UP MISSING WHAT YOU NEVER HAD, BUT THROUGHOUT LIFE THERE IS HOVERING OVER YOU AN INESCAPABLE LONGING FOR SOMETHING YOU NEVER HAD.”
—Susan Sontag
As a child, you generally aren’t aware that your family is different from any other. You have no frame of reference. It is only later that you learn your upbringing was not the same as everybody else’s.
My father died when I was fifteen months old. I have no memory of him, and never missed him until I came to know that it was unusual for a child not to have a father. He remains, as he always has been, a photograph in a picture frame. Growing up, I was passionately curious about him, but no one except Dodo ever mentioned his name.
She told me he was “a darling,” and that he loved horses. But that was about it. Did he love me? I never dared ask, and she never said.
Later, in my twenties, she handed me a sapphire ring, claiming that my father had given it to her when I was an infant with the instructions “Keep it and give it to Gloria when she grows up, because she’s going to like jewelry.”
Well, he was right about that.
I was thrilled. It was a message from him. A long-awaited sign that he did love me. But the story seemed odd, unlikely somehow. When I finally took the ring to be insured, I was told it was not a real sapphire.
My father was an alcoholic. Perhaps, in an expansive moment, inspired by the sentimental impulse of a cloudy fantasy, he had reached out to Dodo and given her the ring. But if so, where had it come from?
I said nothing to Dodo. The ring may have been from my father, but it also may have been a kindly gesture on her part, a way to prove that I once had a father who cared about me.
When your father and I were living in the house on Sixty-Seventh Street, shortly after you were born, we were robbed, and the ring was stolen along with the rest of my jewelry. I never saw it again.
You used to quote a writer, Mary Gordon, who said, “A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe.”
For a long time I didn’t understand what that meant or how it related to you. Now I do understand, and I think it’s true of fatherless boys as well. I certainly think it applies to me.
When you lose a parent at an early age, you lose the fantasy of childhood. The veil is lifted. You learn that bad things happen and that no amount of crying or hugging will make them all right. Nothing is safe, and all things are possible: good things, beautiful things, but ugly and harmful things, too.
We both learned this lesson in different ways when we were ten years old: you with the custody case that thrust you into the headlines, and me with my father’s death. The person I was and the person I was meant to be are very different from the person I became after his death, a change I think you experienced after the custody case as well.
After my father’s death, I retreated into myself, and when I emerged, I had changed. I was more quiet, and serious. I’d become an observer of the world around me instead of a participant in it. Nothing has ever felt safe since.
“I suspect that being fatherless leaves a woman with a taste for the fanatical, having grown unsheltered, having never seen in the familiar flesh the embodiment of the ancient image of authority, a fatherless girl can be satisfied only with the heroic, the desperate, the extreme. A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe.”
That is the full quote from Mary Gordon’s novel The Company of Women, and when I came across it, I knew it to be the foundation of my life. It explained countless actions I’d taken thoughtlessly. Unbeknownst to me, my life decisions had been based on this principle. Even now that my eyes have been opened, they still are.
For a long time I couldn’t identify the impact of my father’s absence; it’s taken me years to see it, but now it is all so clear. Looking back, I see time and time again that decisions I made, impulses I followed, and the kind of men I was attracted to all stemmed from my not having a father.
I used to imagine that my father had left me a letter, or a series of letters that would be delivered at key junctures of my life. I still hold out hope that one will show up.
It’s interesting that you fantasized that he had written you a letter. For a long time I have had the same fantasy, that I would receive a letter from my dad. It may sound silly, but I still think about it every time I see a stack of mail waiting for me to go through, and it always makes me sad.
I hold on to the hope that there is a note from him somewhere out there that will reveal all the things I want to know about him, all the things I wish he’d had time to tell me.
Several months ago, I sent you a copy of a public radio interview he gave in 1976. It had been restored and posted online by Clocktower Radio.
It was so strange to sit in my office at work and suddenly hear his voice coming through the speaker on my desk. It was the first time I had heard it since I was ten years old. He didn’t sound like I remembered, and I wouldn’t have recognized his voice if I hadn’t known it was him. He was talking about me and Carter and the close relationship he shared with us. I couldn’t help but wonder what he would think of me now, and what it would be like to have a father still.
He was alive for only a fraction of my life, and yet there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of him and miss him. The feelings of loss remain so sharp, and I still feel a twinge of anger toward him for dying, the irrational anger of a ten-year-old boy who suddenly learns that anything can happen and nothing is safe.
Although you lost your dad when you were so young, you did have him as the major influence in your life until you were ten. It’s said that even though our brains do not fully develop until we are in our early twenties, the first seven years of our lives are crucial for influencing future development. Your dad gave you a firm base and a sense of the familial bonds he experienced from birth.
It was a gift I could never give you, as I didn’t have this. I was not bound to any place or person. What I do have are little souvenirs of my past: my father’s cigarette case, my mother’s brush, and family photographs in frames. This is the only evidence I have that I did in fact belong to a family, though I so often felt like an imposter.
I point these items out to you now when you come to visit because it is my way of telling you part of my history and because I often wish Dodo, Naney, and others had revealed more things to me in this way. Everyone’s life is a story, and these things are part of the story—my story and your story, too, because you are my son.
As I write this, I can see a photograph of my father, this man I never knew, in a silver frame on my desk. I have more than once written him a letter and imagined I would stuff it in a bottle, seal it tight, then walk down a few blocks to the East River and twirl it fiercely around my head before hurling it into the rushing water.
OH DAD, POOR DAD, MAMMA’S HUNG YOU IN THE CLOSET AND I’M FEELIN’ SO SAD
—The tit
le of a play by Arthur Kopit
Daddy,
How strange it feels to write that word. I am, after all, writing to a stranger. You departed when I was fifteen months old, not that you had anything to say about it—I’m well aware of that. Still, off you went, leaving only a photograph for me “to tell my troubles to,” as Irving Berlin says in the song. What consolation is that? Your demeanor in the picture is that of a stranger gingerly holding a porcelain infant, afraid it might break.
Am I being unfair? No doubt, but that photograph is the only tangible evidence I have to hang on to when I try to vent my frustrations. I am angry that your absence almost from my birth left me foundering this way and that, a ship without rudder or sail, not knowing where to seek safety.
Whoever is reading this letter: You may take it for granted, but not everyone is blessed with a dad—or a mom, for that matter. Although I may sound pissed off at my father, the truth of the matter is that I am crazy about the idea of him and spent a lot of my time growing up fantasizing about how much he would have loved me. Over the years, I have tried to prove it by getting much older men to fall in love with me.
Daddy, you were passionate about horses, and for a few years I pretended I loved them too. That is, until I fell off a horse while learning to jump and decided you would still love me even if I stopped riding, which I did. What a relief, not to pretend anymore. I gave up trying to please you. You were lost to me. You weren’t there and never would be.
I had to let you go, Daddy. Sad, so sad, I put you in the closet, and I’m feeling so bad.
I still have that picture of us on my dressing table. It doesn’t upset me anymore, even though it’s all I ever had and will have of you.
“The Dark Is Light Enough.”
Your loving daughter, Gloria
Reginald Vanderbilt inherited millions of dollars from his family, but by the time he died he had spent nearly all of it. He was in debt, and there was little left for his young wife, my grandmother. A five-million-dollar trust fund had been set up for Reginald’s offspring, however, and upon his death it was divided between Cathleen Vanderbilt (his twenty-one-year-old daughter from a previous marriage) and my fifteen-month-old mother, who would not receive her share until she turned twenty-one.
Because Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, my grandmother, was not yet old enough to be legal guardian of my mother, New York Surrogate Court Judge James Foley was put in control of her trust fund. My grandmother was given a monthly stipend of four thousand dollars, and Surrogate Foley allowed her to move to Paris with her identical twin sister, Thelma; their mother, Naney Morgan; my mother; and her governess, Dodo.
After my father died, my mother never mentioned him to me, and she never once spoke of the Vanderbilts. She hotfooted it out of Newport and took me and Dodo and Naney to Paris, where we lived along with my mother’s identical twin sister, Thelma, on the Avenue Charles Floquet. We had a big house, and Dodo, Naney, and I were installed on a separate floor from my mother and Thelma.
My mother led an active social life, going every day to lunches, cocktail parties, dinners, and cabarets. Though Naney, Dodo, and I lived in the same house as she, it didn’t feel like we did. It was as if two families were occupying one house. We had our floor, and a beautiful stranger glimpsed only fleetingly, my mother, occupied the rest.
Though I rarely saw her, I had Dodo and Naney, and I was happy. Dodo had been with me from the moment I was born. Cut by cesarean section from my mother’s womb, I was handed straight into Dodo’s arms. My newborn body took root in her embrace and found a home. Dodo’s voice was the first I heard. Naney’s the second. They were all the family I needed.
In my young eyes, they were a couple: Mother Dodo and Father Naney.
They were my parents, wrapping me with love as though with swaddling cloth, while my so-called real mother and father left for a ten-month European vacation soon after I was born. I was a baby, and they thought there was no point in spending time with me.
How to describe Dodo? Sometimes she was a mountain of soft sheep’s wool for me to sink into; other times, a tree rooted so deep in earth that no thunder, wind, or rain, no storm of day or night, could rip my arms from her. In later years, it made me feel safe to just sit with her in a room without talking.
Naney offered me this sense of security as well, but in a much different way; incapable of holding back the extravagance of her affection, she demonstrated it by showering me with love, and chattering away. Her voice sounded like the tweeting of birds mingled with castanets.
It wasn’t until we began to go for strolls in the Bois de Boulogne that I saw women and men walking together pushing baby carriages or playing games with children who called them “Mama” and “Papa” and whom they seemed to know very well indeed. That is how I learned what might have been for me if my father hadn’t “gone to heaven,” as Dodo once told me. But at the time I didn’t feel deprived or that I was missing something. That came much later.
Your parents left you for ten months after you were born so they could go on a trip? That is incredible. I know, in those days, it was not unusual for wealthy parents to hand their kids over to a governess to raise, but it’s hard to imagine that your mother was so completely uninterested in spending that time with you.
Did things change once you got a little older and you were in Paris with her? Did she start to take more of an interest in you?
During our first year in Europe, Aunt Thelma lived with us, and she and my mother were always out having fun. When I did see them, they were usually on their way out the door to a dinner or a party, and they looked so alike I couldn’t tell one from the other.
They were knockout beautiful, and more than anything I wanted to be like them when I grew up! If I could be that beautiful, I believed, I would have power and everything would be all right. More than all right—it would be perfect. I longed to meld into my mother, but she was always out of reach.
The closest I came to her was when Marie, her maid, let me go up to the top floor, where she tended to my mother’s clothes. There I found dresses in fabrics so soft to the touch. I remember spreading my palm to touch a dress made of buttery yellow velvet, as it hung in the closet. I have not since seen or been able to recapture that color in a painting, but it is clear as can be in my mind’s eye. I held that dress against my face, taking a deep breath, the scent lingering from the flacon of Shalimar on my mother’s dressing table consuming me. Longing to hug her, I tightened my hand into a fist around the soft fabric and pulled it to me.
“Mais non! NON! Miss Gloria, sois gentille,” Marie called out, angry I might leave a mark on the velvet. All I ever wanted was for my mother to love me.
I didn’t know you’d stayed so long in Europe as a child. For some reason I thought it was only for a year or two. Did your aunt Thelma live with you the whole time?
I lived in Europe until I was eight, but we traveled around a lot. Aunt Thelma married Lord Marmaduke Furness, a very rich British aristocrat, and she moved into his house in London and their country estate near Melton Mowbray.
While I don’t have many memories of my mother, I do have flashbacks of Naney and Dodo in Paris, whispering in the bathroom with the light left on and the door partly open. I was afraid of the dark, so after they’d tucked me in, they would stay in the bathroom until I fell asleep. I’d lie in bed mesmerized by the soft sound of their hisses coming from within that slit of light. Gazing up at the ceiling, I’d catch occasional flashes of headlights from cars passing in the street below. I thought if I lay still, nothing bad could happen, so that’s what I’d do, and eventually I’d drift off.
I’ve since realized this is when the plotting began. Naney, a master strategist, idolized Napoléon and always kept a copy of Emil Ludwig’s biography of him by her bed. She’d underlined passages throughout the book that had special meaning to her. It’s hard to know exactly when she came up with the plan, but soon it wasn’t only at night that she and Dodo conspired—it continued on into th
e day, when they took me to play in the park.
They talked about a German prince named Friedel Hohenlohe, the great-grandson of Queen Victoria. He and my mother were in love, and she planned to marry him and take me to live in his castle in Germany. Naney hated Germans and wanted to figure out a way to stop the romance and get me away from my mother.
“She’s an American girl and should be brought up in the United States with her American family,” she kept saying.
Dodo also chattered constantly to me about “going to meet your family.”
I didn’t know what they were talking about. I had already met my family. Dodo and Naney were my family.
I wonder if your mom considered Dodo to be part of your family as you did. I imagine not. It is always interesting to me how children perceive things compared to adults.
When I think of our family for the first ten years of my life, I think of you, Daddy, Carter, and also May McLinden, the no-nonsense Scottish nanny who took care of me from the time I was born. She was quick to laugh and loved Carter and me as her own. She had no children, but she had us, and we had her.
Looking back, I realize I didn’t know you all that well for the first ten years of my life. I was certainly closer to you than you’d been with your mother, but you worked a lot and were often traveling. The designer jeans you became so well known for hadn’t come out yet, but when I was a child you were designing home furnishings and frequently traveled the country to make in-store appearances. I knew Stan and Chris, your sons from your previous marriage, to Leopold Stokowski, but they had already moved out of the house, and I don’t recall much about them from that time.
I do remember a little about the house we lived in for the first six years of my life. It was a large limestone building on Sixty-Seventh Street, off Park Avenue, and perched on either side of the entrance were two imposing stone lions my father bought.
The Rainbow Comes and Goes Page 2