For more than two decades now, I’ve moved constantly from one place to another, one story to the next, never allowing myself to slow down for long. I’ve worried that if I become too self-reflective or too mired in the pain of the past, the losses of Carter and Daddy, I will no longer be able to function, no longer be able to breathe.
It says something about the difference between us that you imagine yourself on a tightrope, constantly at risk of falling, and I see myself as a shark. I do not have a shark’s thick skin, or the hunter’s instinct, but there are times I wish I did. What is interesting to me is that you have always been able to keep going forward and at the same time have remained vulnerable. I worry that I have shut myself off to feeling, numbed myself so that I am not weighted down. I don’t want to be numb, but it’s hard to move forward constantly and to feel at the same time.
I don’t think you really see yourself as a shark. It is not in your nature. If it were, you would be a businessman or a lawyer or in some other profession where ruthlessness and cunning are required. You are a storyteller, and though you may wish at times that you didn’t feel pain, the fact that you continually put yourself in situations where you will, and where you can help others feel as well, speaks volumes about who and what you really are.
I could have hardened myself after Dodo was banished, but something in me made me decide not to. I chose to keep moving forward, but also to remain true to myself. I did become even more wary of my mother however. It was because of her that Dodo was taken from me.
When Judge Carew made his ruling in the custody trial, he also decreed I had to visit my mother on weekends. When I would see her, I was accompanied by private detectives, and a new governess named Eleanor Walsh. Out of all the governesses who came into and left my life after Dodo was dismissed, she was the best. She let me call her Tootsie Eleanor.
Every weekend my mother took us both to lunch at the Sherry-Netherland hotel. She always asked for a demitasse coffee after dessert and a glass of brandy, and then ordered one after another for what seemed an eternity, before she would ask for the check and we could leave.
Sundays, we went to Mass together at St. Francis Church, accompanied by a police car using its siren to get us through the crowds that gathered to ogle us. Though the trial was over, the public’s fascination with my mother and me was not. To be less conspicuous, we were ushered up to the balcony inside the church, where the organ was. I’d sit with my mother on one side and Tootsie Eleanor on the other. My mother always became faint at some point during the Mass and would put her head between her knees so as not to keel over and pass out, but Tootsie was a registered nurse, so I knew that if anything happened, she’d be able to take care of her.
Who was the biggest influence on you as a teenager? I’ve always had the feeling that after the custody case you basically raised yourself.
What influences most people growing up is the reflection they have of themselves from a parent or parents. That was not the case for me when I was a teenager. The only reflection I saw of myself was a blob of nothing staring back at me in the mirror.
Even though I feared and often hated my mother, secretly I held a tiny hope that someday I might get her attention by growing up to be as beautiful as she was. She’d love me then—wouldn’t she?
There were no role models in my life whom I could confide in. Dodo and Naney had surrounded me with their full attention and love, but they were not what today we call “mentors.” Nor were Auntie Ger or Surrogate James Foley, who was my legal guardian until I was twenty-one.
The only real role models I had were characters in movies or books or on the radio. How shallow to have to admit that many of my childhood values were formed in large part by Busby Berkeley musicals, by Dick Powell singing to Joan Blondell, “By a waterfall, I’m calling you-oo-uu-oo-ooo.”
Years later, when Frank Sinatra and I were dating, we dined once with Joan Blondell. I longed to tell her how influential she had been in my childhood, but when I tried, it was too complicated to explain why.
I had seen my first movie in 1935, when I was eleven. It was Becky Sharp, with Miriam Hopkins, and it premiered at Radio City Music Hall, where I climbed the winding steps up to the reserved seats in the mezzanine.
Before the movie, the famous tenor Jan Peerce appeared onstage and sang “The Bluebird of Happiness.” When he sang, “Be like I . . . Hold your head up high . . . Till you find a bluebird of happiness,” I almost fainted with the thrill. My soul soared into the thunderous applause. Yes! Yes! Happiness. There is somewhere a bluebird of happiness, and I will find it. I can, and I will. If I don’t, I will die.
The glamour of it all was mesmerizing. It was the grown-up world of beauty and fantasy I longed to belong to. I melted back into my seat, torn between looking around at the ornate theater and watching what was happening in the film, although, at my age, I really didn’t have a clue about the shenanigans on-screen.
I went back to Auntie Ger’s house breathless, eager to see more movies, but I had to wait a long time. She only occasionally permitted me to watch films, and only ones she considered appropriate for my age.
My mother was more lenient. When I started weekend visits with her, she let Tootsie Eleanor take me go to the movies anytime I wanted. It was heaven for me, and for my mother, too, I imagine. It gave her a break from pretending everything was hunky-dory between us.
There were dozens of movies to choose from. All it took was a quick jaunt through Central Park to the West Side, where the theaters stood all in a row. If we managed to scoot out early from the endless lunch at the Sherry-Netherland, we could squeeze in a double feature, hopping from one theater and right into another.
With luck we’d hit a movie with Kay Francis, a famous actress I secretly thought resembled my mother. It was a thrilling communication, sitting silently in the almost empty theater, imagining that the woman on the screen was my mother and that we were together, having a much better time than we did when we actually were. Sounds weird, but that’s how it was.
I recently rediscovered the Andy Hardy movies of the 1930s, starring a teenage Mickey Rooney. I had forgotten how these movies captivated me in my adolescence. Andy Hardy had a mom and a dad, Judge Jim Hardy. They lived in a house surrounded by a picket fence.
Mesmerized by the daily lives of this family, I discovered that this was what it could be like and what I wanted.
I loved best the scenes when Andy, seeking advice and reassurance, would knock on his dad’s door. His father was always available, never too preoccupied with serious matters to have heart-to-heart talks with his son. He gave him sage advice, solving his problems with the wisdom of ultimate authority. I didn’t realize it then, but these films held a secret message for me: if Dad is there, everything is safe.
I no longer puzzle over why, throughout my life, I have left men who loved me and whom I loved in return. Nothing ever felt safe, and though it was unfair of me, it felt wiser to abandon them before they abandoned me.
As I told you before, I was born with a hole in my heart. Sometimes a shock of wind whistles through it. It can never be completely filled.
Why am I telling you this? Because I’m hoping it may in some measure help you understand the roots from which my failings come, and the perseverance and strength it has taken to get me through ninety-one years to where I am now, standing unafraid, free and clear.
All those movies I saw provided my education. I believed that what appeared on the screen was how it was going to be when I grew up, and I couldn’t wait for the reality of it to begin. When it finally did, it was quite a shock to discover it wasn’t like that. No, not at all.
Back at Auntie Ger’s, I started listening to “Uncle Don’s” radio program, about Little Orphan Annie, who had been adopted by a billionaire she called Daddy Warbucks. Immediately I identified with Annie. If she survived, so could I. Auntie Ger was my Daddy Warbucks.
At fourteen, though, out went Orphan Annie and in galloped Jo March from Louis
a May Alcott’s Little Women. I loved the book, and when Katharine Hepburn portrayed Jo in the movie, I was over the moon. That was who I wanted to be, and I wasn’t alone. All my schoolmates and cousins craved to be Jo, and we wouldn’t settle for any of Jo’s siblings—not even Amy, the pretty one—so we finally agreed to stop squabbling and we all started calling ourselves Jo.
Later, when Sidney Lumet and I were married, he directed Katharine Hepburn in Long Day’s Journey into Night. I never told him why I didn’t visit the set. I didn’t want to meet her, not even after the movie had wrapped and she came to visit our apartment.
Why didn’t you want to meet her? She had been so important to you, and probably would have loved to hear the story.
Because, in a secret place inside me, the unworthy, fat girl of thirteen still had the grip of a tiger.
When Hepburn arrived, I was in my studio, which was next to the elevator. I could hear her voice as Sidney greeted her at the front door, but I didn’t come out, and she left without our meeting. I felt unworthy at thirty-eight to shake Katharine Hepburn’s hand. Unworthy at ninety-one? Indeed, no. Now I would feel worthy to give her a big hug, but it’s taken me a long time to get here, and I congratulate myself on finally making it.
Your mom had so many opportunities to forge a relationship with you; Gertrude did as well. If only they could have made more of an effort, or at least tried to put themselves in your shoes. Your mom could have taken you to the movies herself and out for a meal afterward. It would have been such an easy thing to do, such a simple gesture that could have brought you closer together.
After Daddy’s death, you and I started going to the movies often. It was one of my favorite things to do with you, and I looked forward to it all week. I liked sitting in a darkened theater together, sharing popcorn, waiting for the film to begin.
It reminded me of when my father would sometimes take me out after dinner for a slice of pizza around the corner from our house on Sixty-Seventh Street. It wasn’t that I was hungry, but it was an opportunity for the two of us to spend time together. To this day, whenever I smell pizza, I think of sitting with him at a linoleum table, talking about what happened that day in school or whatever else was on my mind.
I’m sorry you didn’t get to have that kind of interaction with your mother, or with Gertrude.
Some people really should not be parents, and perhaps my mother was one of them. To have a child, you have to be able to extend yourself, and she wasn’t capable of that. The only person she could truly love was her identical twin sister, Thelma.
She once told me, “When you were born, you were so tiny I was afraid to hold you.”
We just never connected. She was too young and self-involved to bond with an infant. By the time I was an adult, it was too late.
I remember I was visiting her one weekend in New York and I was brought into her room to say hello. She sat at her dressing table as Wannsie, her lady’s maid, brushed her hair.
Looking straight at me in the mirror as I stood behind her, she said, “How about dyeing my hair blond?”
Was she joking? It didn’t sound so, because her voice—with its hesitant stammer, usually so soft one almost had to lean in close to hear what she was saying—was different now, threatening even.
“Don’t do that, Mummy,” I wanted to scream, but of course I didn’t. Meekly I stood silent, transfixed, while Wannsie continued brushing the dark hair rippling down to my mother’s waist before combing it into a middle part with gentle waves on either side of her face, then twisting it back to secure into a cushiony pillow of a chignon.
“Run along now,” my mother said, “let me finish dressing.” I ran out the door of her room crying, but unsure why.
My mother had started dating A. C. Blumenthal, who was a very wealthy real estate investor and theater promoter. He would send his driver to pick up Tootsie Eleanor and me at the movie theater and take us back to her house on Seventy-Second Street, between Park and Madison. When we returned, my mother would be sitting in the living room smoking a cigarette, the inevitable pale drink on the coffee table in front of her.
“Did you have a good time, darling?” she’d ask. I’d sit beside her on the sofa, and she would struggle to think of other topics of conversation. I wasn’t much help. But the time would pass, and soon the moment would come for Freddy to drive us back to Old Westbury.
And Auntie Ger. Why was I always the one who reached out to hug her before she would embrace me? She was so reserved and always polite, but she brilliantly edited herself. In all the years I lived with her, we never spoke about my father, her own brother, and my mother’s name was never spoken between us. Of course now I realize how cautious she had to be after the custody trial. She couldn’t say anything derogatory about my mother that might be seen to make me more fearful of her than I already was. But even without talking about my mother or father, they were there, no matter where I went, unknowable, ghostly, and strange.
Sometimes it was difficult to keep the ball rolling in conversations with Auntie Ger, but in those moments, she would reach over to the coffee table in front of the sofa and pick up the latest copy of House and Garden magazine. “Let’s look at the rooms,” she’d say, opening to a page. “What do you think of this decoration?”
I had no problem expressing my opinion when we discussed this or that room. It was fun, and I felt at ease with her as never before. My heart soared when she was interested in hearing my opinion.
Eventually, when I understood what my aunt had been up against, I came to love her, but I was an adult by then, and she was long gone. She died shortly after I turned eighteen.
I know you started painting when you were ten. Were you influenced at all by the fact Gertrude was an accomplished sculptor and art collector? Did she have a creative influence on you?
I wish I could say that she was an influence on my artistic development, but the truth is, she never talked about art with me. The only time she mentioned her sculpture in my presence was when I was fifteen and she permitted Louise Dahl-Wolfe to come to Old Westbury to photograph me for Harper’s Bazaar. Auntie Ger made it clear to Wolfe and her team that no photographs were to be taken of me with her sculpture Diana, which was prominently placed in the center of the courtyard in front of her house. She was after all a serious artist and didn’t want her work appearing in a fashion magazine.
There had been many times during the years I lived with her that I longed to talk with Auntie Ger about her art, but I didn’t dare bring it up. I was afraid, too, of telling her how often I had walked around alone in her darkened studio, removing the coverings from her sculptures and gazing in wonder, longing to ask questions, talk to her. But I never did.
So what did influence me to become an artist? It was not only something I wanted to be; it was something I could not stop myself from becoming.
Before me is a small painting of a dancing girl in a pink dress. Her thin arms out wide, she appears to be in midflight. It is the first oil painting I did, at age ten, while attending the Greenvale School.
On the table below this painting is a sculpture I made from clay, also at Greenvale. It is of a girl leaning against a rock, her face hidden in her arms because she does not want to reveal she is crying. Yes, sobbing because she is desperate, so distraught she contemplates killing herself.
Everywhere I have lived over the years, I have always displayed these two early works of mine, which tell of the turmoil that raged within me after the custody battle. There were moments when I was the dancing girl—joyous, full of hope. Those feelings were real, but so were the feelings of the girl sobbing her guts out, tears flowing unseen as she hides her head in shame. Is it her fault her father was an alcoholic and her mother a lesbian? Would she also grow up to be one or the other, or perhaps both?
Is this what led to the spells of drinking and sobbing that began in my twenties? Spells long since abolished? Did the dancing girl in the pink dress push the girl on the rock away so that she no long
er existed?
Is this how and why I became an artist? It was early on in those days at Greenvale that I started painting, and I’ve kept on doing it ever since and will until the day I die.
In my late teens I became a student of Robert Beverly Hale and John Carroll at the Art Students League in New York. Mesmerized as I was by the ethereal beauty of Carroll’s work, I was thrilled when he asked me to model for him.
Today, that first Carroll portrait hangs in my living room. In it, a passive girl in a gold Fortuny dress gazes out, but she is a stranger to me now.
If she’d only known then what I know now, but she remains as she was, unaware that one day she will meet your father, and that he will die long before she does. She has no idea she will launch a successful career in home furnishings and fashion and become a painter and a writer, and that one day she will stand on a balcony pleading with her son Carter not to let go of the ledge he clings to fourteen floors above the East River.
What do I wish I’d had when I was growing up? A mother and a father—parents I could depend on from the beginning, balanced and sure of heart. Parents I could talk to about my hopes and dreams. Parents to make me aware I had choices.
It’s always interested me how some people are able to propel themselves forward no matter what happens while others are hobbled or done in by their circumstances. Where do that drive and determination come from? Are they something you are born with or do you develop them based on experience?
Had you not faced the traumatic events of your childhood, would you have been so driven? Would you have accomplished all that you have? I ask this of myself as well.
If my dad hadn’t died and Carter had not killed himself right before my senior year of college, if I hadn’t been left reeling by those losses, would I have taken the risks I did early on in my life and my career? I don’t think so.
The Rainbow Comes and Goes Page 6