The town house still stands, but it’s now an ambassador’s residence. It saddens me to walk by it. The wisteria Daddy planted outside the entrance is still there and has taken over one side of the house. I think of him every time I see it.
There was a grand foyer with a black-and-white check marble floor and a curving staircase that went up the center of the building. I remember only some of the rooms, which you had meticulously decorated, and I recall you were constantly changing things: reupholstering furniture, repainting walls, moving pictures around.
You covered one bedroom entirely in patchwork quilts: the walls, the floor, the ceiling, even the furniture. Stepping inside it was like walking into a kaleidoscope.
The dining room walls were covered with antique Chinese wallpaper, and you frequently entertained actors and artists, directors and writers. Truman Capote, Lillian Gish, Gordon Parks, Charles Addams, and Liza Minnelli were among the guests, and even though Carter and I were very young, we were expected to sit at the table conversing with them. At the time, it didn’t seem unusual to me, but it is so different from the way you were raised.
I remember the room I shared with Carter, on the top floor of the house, and just down the hall lived May. You’ve told me that when I was born Carter was less than thrilled by my arrival, though you had gone to great lengths to try to prepare him for the shock of no longer being the only child in the house. In most of the pictures from that time, I’m smiling smugly, while Carter chews the inside of his lip, annoyed at the indignity of having to pose with this plump interloper.
I was outgoing and funny. Carter was smarter, more serious and sensitive. As a child, he read voraciously and loved history and literature. I would follow him around, trying to imitate him as best I could, pretending to read the same books, agreeing with the opinions he so freely stated. Because Carter collected toy soldiers, so did I, and we would stage daylong war games on our bedroom floor: Crusaders battled Turks, Germans fought Americans, British colonial forces faced off against Zulus.
Even when you were home, I could always tell you felt slightly uncomfortable in the role of parent. I never doubted your love for me, but you carried with you a sadness, a slight distance you seemed to find hard to overcome. My father was such a presence in our lives, so comfortable being a parent, that I think it made you feel at times less than adequate. I didn’t know then, of course, that you had never really had a mother or a father, or a stable family life.
That you were related to the Vanderbilt family had little significance for me. When I was about five or six, my father showed me the statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt that stands outside Grand Central Station in New York City, and it gave me the idea that all grandparents turned into statues when they died.
Later, when my class visited the Museum of Natural History, the teacher pointed to the statue of Teddy Roosevelt on the front steps and asked if anyone knew who it was.
I raised my hand. “I think it’s my grandfather,” I said.
I recall meeting a few cousins from your branch of the family, but I didn’t understand how we were related, and I never had the sense that you felt a deep connection with them. Now I know why. You didn’t grow up knowing anything about them.
I surmised, from the gossiping of Dodo and Naney, that the Vanderbilts were beyond rich, but who were they? It wasn’t until I was about seven that I learned that my father had a sister named Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, but I had no idea where she lived. I didn’t even find out that he had a daughter from a previous marriage, Cathleen, until I was fifteen.
That I have the name Vanderbilt has always felt like a huge mistake. I felt I was an imposter, a changeling, perhaps switched at birth, intruding under false pretenses. For me, this feeling has never gone away.
I had to look up the definition of changeling. In folklore it’s a strange or ugly child left by faeries in the place of a pretty child. You said you were surrounded by love from Naney Morgan and Dodo. So what made you feel like that?
How to explain it?
I longed to connect with my mother, to feel that we belonged together, but I never seemed able to get her attention. I was always aware of her presence, though I had no intimacy with her that I can remember. I adored her beauty from a distance, but it was something I could never reach, never touch. She was a magical stranger.
I knew early on that Naney and Dodo were intensely preoccupied with my mother’s comings and goings, nosey about what was happening in her part of the house. Because they watched her so closely and often whispered about her, it was clear to me it was my mother who was really in charge—la maîtresse de la maison, as the French would say. When you came right down to it, Naney and Dodo had no real power, so every moment felt perilous. We were all walking on eggshells.
I began to fear my mother. At times I’d cling to Dodo and Naney and cry for no apparent reason, unable to stop even when they tried to comfort me. How could Naney and Dodo really belong to me, and protect me, when they themselves were vassals of my mother? And if they weren’t really in control, then who was I? Perhaps I didn’t belong there at all, and it would be only a matter of time before I was discovered and snatched from my bed, thrown up to the ceiling, onto the threatening shapes streaking across it from the headlights of cars passing in the street below.
I can understand that you didn’t know your mother, you saw her only as an elusive, beautiful creature heading out with her identical twin to cocktail parties and dinners, but why did you fear her?
It’s hard to understand—it has certainly taken me a long time to make sense of it—but I think that Naney and Dodo’s anger and fear that I would be taken to Germany began to seep into me. It was when I was lying in the dark in bed at night, listening to them whispering, that the fear began to take root. Something was amiss, something terrible was about to happen, and it had to do with my mother—but exactly what it was, I didn’t know.
If I’d had a relationship with her, a connection to her, it would have been different, but I had none. Naney and Dodo’s feelings toward her became my own, and my fear would only grow in the coming years.
After a while, my mother became tired of all of Naney’s meddling and wanted to get some distance from her, so she sent her to live in a separate apartment nearby. My grandmother must have sensed that her power was under threat, which only gave her more incentive to get me back to America.
We were moving around a lot throughout Europe, because my mother wanted to go to parties and meet people. After Paris, there was a rented house in Cannes—or, rather, two houses: the one where she stayed with Lady Nada Milford Haven and other friends and the one where I lived with Dodo.
Dodo and I then moved to a hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, before going on to Melton Mowbray, in England, for a Christmas visit with Aunt Thelma, who was married to Lord Furness. The marriage was not a happy one, and Thelma was in the midst of a long affair with Edward, Prince of Wales. He was a guest of honor at the Christmas gathering, and other visitors drifted in and out, making a big fuss over him because someday it was thought he would be king of England.
Of course, he later ended up abdicating the throne to marry Wallis Simpson. In fact, it was Thelma who introduced her friend Wallis to Prince Edward, asking her to “look after him” while she went on a trip in 1934. Wallis certainly did.
It was a festive holiday: every day a gala, with guests coming and going, one more exquisitely beautiful than the next. I’d glimpse my mother among them, there but nowhere near me.
One morning in our room, Dodo got up quickly and firmly locked the door leading into the hall. She then told me to sit down at the desk, handed me a pen, and placed a sheet of stationery in front of me. I could tell it was serious because her neck was flushed red as roast beef, which always happened when she was upset.
Her voice was suddenly that of a stranger, with a harsh tone I’d never heard before: “Your Naney wants to hear from you, and this is the letter you are going to write to her: ‘Dear Naney, My mother s
aid not to write but I am not paying any attention to her. She is a rare bease. Well, I will be in dear old New York soon. Love and kisses, Naney dear. Gloria.’”
What was going on? The door locked? Dodo so unlike herself? A letter to Naney who at that very moment was also a guest at Melton Mowbray, sitting in the room next to the one we were in, with a misspelling of beast that Dodo made me put in so it would look like I’d written the letter myself?
“No,” I said, throwing the pen on the floor.
Dodo leaned down swiftly, picked it up, and shoved it back into my hand.
“Yes! Now! Right now! Naney will be very, very angry with us both if you do not do this now, right now!”
Dodo was shaking, too, but raising her voice, she pushed on, “She’s in the next room waiting for me to take it to her, so no more questions. Snap to it!”
Confused, angry at Dodo, but most of all, angry at myself without knowing why, I did what I was told.
It was only later that I came to understand that this letter was a tiny piece in the puzzle of partnership Naney and Dodo had formed to get me back to America with the Vanderbilts, where they believed I belonged. The letter surfaced later, in the custody case. It was obviously not something a child that age would have written, and it was used by my mother’s lawyer, Nathan Burkan, in an attempt to prove Naney’s manipulation of me, and her betrayal of her own daughter.
After our stay at Melton Mowbray, Dodo and I went to live in a rented house in the English countryside, before returning to the Savoy hotel in London. Then, suddenly, Naney, Dodo, and I were on a ship called the Majestic, sailing to America and the Vanderbilts.
It’s incredible to think that Naney Morgan, your grandmother, would plot against your mother, her own daughter, so that she would lose custody of you. What was her motivation?
I adored Naney when I was a child, but I really do believe she was mentally unbalanced. How else can one explain the events that followed? She had the intelligence and cunning of Machiavelli’s Prince, and was capable of blowing up subways, if necessary, to achieve her plans. I’ve often wondered what kind of early experiences molded her into a feminine version of her idol, Napoléon. Would she reveal her secrets if we could confide in each other today? I think not.
Although an ardent Roman Catholic, Naney found her true God in money and social position. This may be part of the answer to the riddle of why she hatched the elaborate plot that made such a tangled mess of so many lives.
Naney was born Laura Delphine Kilpatrick in Santiago, Chile, in 1877. Her father was an infamous Civil War general, Hugh Judson Kilpatrick, who had been appointed consul general to Chile, and her mother, Luisa Valdivieso, was from a well-known Chilean family. I have some gold-tooled, red leather scrapbooks that Naney made specifically for pasting newspaper clippings of the hundreds of social events she attended over the years. Page after page details the occasions and names of those present, hers prominently featured.
Naney talked endlessly about Chilean socialites she had known, rambling on and on about this one and that one, always mentioning at some point that the Valdivieso family was related to Vincent of Loyola, the Catholic saint.
Naney was still unmarried at thirty-three when she came to America for the first time, with her mother. She would have been considered an “old maid,” as back then most girls married in their teens. It was in New York City that she met a diplomat, Harry Hays Morgan. He was quite a catch, and they married soon after.
Naney maneuvered a meeting with President Taft, who was in office at the time, and charmed him into posting my grandfather as consul general in Lucerne, Switzerland. There she gave birth to a daughter, Consuelo; then a son, Harry Junior; and later to the twins, my mother and Thelma.
Naney adored all her family, but as her daughters grew, it was clear that the beautiful twins were the most likely to achieve the brilliant marriages she had envisioned for her girls, and for her own future protection as well.
When my mother married Reginald Vanderbilt in 1923, Naney was ecstatic. She was now linked to one of America’s most prominent families. When I was born, nine months to the day later, she ensconced herself along with Dodo in my father’s house on Seventy-Fourth Street and on Sandy Point Farm, in Newport, for the summer, which is where they were living when my father died.
So she schemed against her own daughter because of money and wanting you to be part of society in America?
Greed and ambition were a big part of it, but it wasn’t until my mother became involved with Prince Friedel Hohenlohe that Naney sprang into action.
The prince had a title and came from a very distinguished family, but he didn’t have money. Naney and Dodo considered him “a Count of no account,” which wasn’t true, but it’s what Naney used to say about most of the men my mother spent time with. If he married my mother, what would they live on? My trust fund, of course, and I would be taken to live in the prince’s castle in Germany. Perhaps Naney was also worried about the rise of Adolf Hitler, or her own financial position if she were no longer living with us.
So Naney decided it was time to get me back to America, where she believed I belonged, with the Vanderbilts—and who was more appropriate than my father’s sister Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to take charge? Gertrude had a fortune, and her own children were all grown.
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and her sister, Gladys, were the only surviving siblings of Reginald Vanderbilt. They had another brother, Alfred, who was a passenger on the ocean liner the RMS Lusitania when it was torpedoed by a German submarine in 1915. Alfred gave his life jacket to a woman on the ship who had a small child, even though he didn’t know how to swim and knew there were no more lifeboats available. He drowned in the freezing cold water along with 1,197 other passengers and crew members. His body was never found. He was thirty-seven years old.
Gertrude was ahead of her time in many ways. One of the richest women in America, she was an accomplished sculptor, and in 1930 she founded the Whitney Museum of American Art, which remains one of the most important contemporary art museums in the world.
My mother knew nothing about her aunt Gertrude when she returned to America in 1932. She was an eight-year-old girl coming to a country she had no memory of, to meet a family that had not seen her since she was an infant.
When Dodo and I arrived in America, we went straight to Newport, to stay at Oakland Farm, with my cousin Bill Vanderbilt and his wife, who told me I could call her Mummy Anne, as her own daughters did. I was thrilled.
It was the first time I had seen a mother and a father up close. I’d always thought of Dodo as my mother and Naney as my father, but here was a father who was actually a man. They were all part of the “family” Dodo had told me I was going to meet, but I didn’t get to stay there long, certainly not long enough to understand what family life could be like. Naney wanted Aunt Gertrude to get to know me, so she arranged for me to move to my aunt’s estate in Old Westbury, New York.
I had met Gertrude only once, when I visited the Breakers, in Newport, with Mummy Anne. The Breakers was built for my father’s parents, Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt, by the architect Richard Morris Hunt in 1893. It was as large as a palace, with seventy rooms, but was referred to as “the cottage,” and occupied only in the summer months. During the rest of the year, they lived in New York, in another mansion that took up the entire block of Fifth Avenue between Fifty-Seventh and Fifty-Eighth Streets. It was later torn down; the department store Bergdorf Goodman now stands in its place.
When I met Aunt Gertrude, I had no idea of the plans Naney and Dodo had been making for me and no hint of the important role my aunt would play in the rest of my life.
When I was a child, I remember looking at pictures of Gertrude, but I didn’t understand who she was and how she was related to you.
Her appearance was striking. In the photographs, she was no longer young but she was dressed beautifully, her face often hidden under a large hat, and unlike other women of that time, she seemed alway
s to be wearing pants.
I remember we spent several Thanksgivings when I was a teenager at Gertrude’s former estate in Old Westbury. The main house and its grounds had been sold off and turned into a private club, but her granddaughter lived in what had been Gertrude’s studio. It was nice to meet those relatives, and they were always very gracious, but they were so different from the many members of my father’s family I had met. Since we really saw them only once a year, I never got to know them very well.
What was Gertrude like?
Aunt Gertrude was gracious, charming, and steady, but distant, uncommunicative, and extremely reserved. Her demeanor and the clothes she wore were appropriate to every occasion, and she was always immaculate from head to toe.
She was so unlike fiery Naney Morgan, whose wardrobe was meager, and who usually appeared in a well-worn orange sweater and black suit. Naney was always going off on tangents and extravagantly smothering me with love.
The first time I met Aunt Gertrude she was wearing pants like a man! It was something of a shock. In those days women didn’t wear what later came to be known as slacks. Gertrude favored men’s pants fashioned by a tailor who appeared when summoned with fabrics from Italy for her selection: cashmeres, wools, silks, and taffetas in white, deliciously creamy. She wore tailored shirts to complement each ensemble. I never saw her without masses of Vanderbilt pearls cascading down her neck or the pair of pearl and diamond bracelets, one on each wrist, which she left to Cathleen, my older half-sister, and me in her will.
Was the red hair a wig? Probably not, but that is how it seemed to me as a child. Her hair was always perfectly marcelled, curled in layers, not a wave out of place. It framed her face and was sprayed to stay put through any emergency. On summer days, she wore a jaunty hat of palest thin straw, in winter one of softest felt, with a ribbon of black grosgrain silk.
The Rainbow Comes and Goes Page 3