I tapped the older man on the shoulder and he turned around. “I’m Gloria Vanderbilt,” I said.
He was speechless. His face dissolved in embarrassment and dismay; his son’s as well. I thought they both might faint.
For me, though, there was a feeling of hope. I’d made a decision and had the guts to speak up for myself for the first time.
On the eve of being shipped overseas, Pat DeCicco came down with septicemia, which in those days was a life-threatening illness. He recovered but was discharged from the army. My mother finally left him in January 1945, after three years of marriage. She returned to New York one month before she turned twenty-one and inherited a trust that was then worth more than four million dollars.
Knowing I would soon receive my inheritance, I became more confident in myself, but what made me decide to leave Pat was that I got really scared of him. He would go into these dark rages, slapping and punching me. I finally told him I wanted a divorce, and left him shortly before my twenty-first birthday. His close confidant and gambling buddy Joe Schenck called me and said I could get a divorce if I paid Pat two hundred thousand dollars. There was no reason to give him anything. I could have easily gotten an annulment; but I wanted him out of my life fast.
“Okay, Joe,” I said. And that was that.
When I turned twenty-one I started having a lot of fun. I was the girl of the moment. People were making a big fuss over me, and for the first time in years I was going out with friends my own age. The war was about to end, and it was an incredibly exciting time to be in New York. Not only that, but it was the year I inherited this wad of money from my father’s estate, and as you might guess, I had no trouble spending it. The money meant I could take care of my beloved Naney and Dodo, whom I was able to see regularly once again, and I showered them with presents.
I also started supporting my mother financially. Despite her behavior the summer I lived with her in Los Angeles, and the hasty wedding she’d orchestrated, which had been a way for her to get back at Auntie Ger and protect her own financial future, I was drawn in again by her charm and beauty. I started to believe that maybe she did love me a little after all. I included her in the bounty bestowed upon me by the Vanderbilt money, giving her a hefty allowance and agreeing to her suggestion that we live together in an apartment on Park Avenue in New York.
By pushing you to marry Pat DeCicco, how was your mother getting back at Gertrude and protecting her own future?
If I was married under her auspices, it meant that I had sided with her, and no matter what the court had decreed in the custody trial, it made my mother feel like she had won in the end. She would get back at Gertrude by showing the world that she was in control of my life and that Gertrude no longer had any say in it. Also by connecting herself to me, she had a better chance of being able to get money from me.
One night I went to a party and met the conductor Leopold Stokowski. He appeared like a god. We were instantly attracted to each other, and it bowled me over to have this great genius suddenly madly in love with me. I couldn’t wait to tell my mother. How proud she would be that this brilliant man was crazy about me and wanted to marry me.
But when I told her, she pulled back, flabbergasted and furious. It was the only time I ever saw her express anger.
“He’s sixty-three! An old man!” she said, raising her voice. “You’re just twenty-one. It’s disgusting.”
Did she honestly believe that, or did she know that if I married Leopold, the plans I’d recently made for her to live with me would no longer be possible? The lease on the apartment had already been signed and the place was ready for us to move into. She had envisioned herself romping around town, lunching at the Colony, or hosting little dinners chez nous with this or that whomever. Her social position would again be secure, while I danced the nights away at El Morocco or the Stork Club.
Of course, this didn’t occur to me at the time. She agreed to meet Leopold only once, and the hatred on both sides was evident. She was not even influenced by the fact that Greta Garbo, whom she so admired, had had a long, serious love affair with him. He could have married Garbo, but instead he chose insignificant me. I was certainly impressed, but not my mother.
“It’s disgusting!” she kept repeating after she had met him, her voice louder than I had ever heard it as it spun around the room. I was in tears after I left her, and stuttered as I tried to tell Leopold of my encounter with her and repeat the vile words she had said about him. He sat back in the chair, steady, calm, silent, sagely taking it all in, as I attempted to articulate the fears I’d had about her since the day I was born. But it was coming out tangled, too complicated to explain.
I kept on trying until he held up his hand, silencing me, then took me in his arms gently, quietly, with complete authority and simplicity, saying, “She never gave you love. It was Dodo who gave you love.”
Of course, Leopold the god was right. Only he understood. From that moment on, passionately in love and under Leopold’s spell, I cut my mother out of my life and left her without a penny. I assuaged any guilt or doubts I felt by telling myself that Thelma had a multimillion-dollar divorce settlement from Lord Marmaduke Furness that she would share with her, and they would live happily together ever after.
From that day in 1945 until 1960, I did not see or talk to my mother even once.
I didn’t know you cut her out of your life. It’s hard for me to imagine you doing that, but you were a very different person then. You were so passive in many ways, so easily influenced by others. DeCicco told you to marry him, and you did. Then Stokowski wanted to marry you and have you cut off your mother, and so you agreed.
At the risk of sounding like an armchair therapist, do you think your attraction to a sixty-three-year-old man had something to do with your wanting a father figure?
Oh, absolutely! But at the time, the fact that he was so much older did not occur to me. I thought of him as ageless. Of course, now I see it in a different light. Being attracted to someone who was forty-three years older was the act of a fatherless girl who was desperately seeking a dad, but back then, I didn’t realize that, and I didn’t understand my mother’s reaction. I was astonished and bewildered. The indifference she had always had toward me had turned into hostility.
However, it all happened much, much too quickly. You can’t spend just three weeks with a person and decide to get married, but that is exactly what I did. I met him in December, went to get my divorce in April, and we married in Reno on the day it became final.
There were moments when a voice inside my head would say, “Wait, wait! After years of DeCicco calling you Fatsy-roo and giving you black eyes, take some time to find out what you really want.” But alas, these moments were fleeting. I should have remained unattached, and allowed myself to figure out who I really was, but Leopold’s love was a force I couldn’t resist. I was deeply in love as well, and flattered he wanted me to be his wife.
The first summer we were married, he was conducting at the Hollywood Bowl, so we moved to his house in Los Angeles. Then we moved to New York, into a penthouse apartment at 10 Gracie Square. That is where I got pregnant, first with Stan, then two years later with Chris.
You write that “it all happened too quickly,” as though marrying him were beyond your control. I know you were insecure and young, but you had so many options. It obviously didn’t feel like that to you at the time. I think back to when I was twenty-one and just graduating from college. I realize now I also had options, but I wasn’t aware that I did. When I decided to start going to war zones to shoot stories, it felt like that was the only path I could take. I had to make that work. I had no plan B.
Given how low your self-esteem was, what was it like when you became a mother for the first time? You were twenty-six when you gave birth to Stan. Was motherhood what you thought it would be?
Being a mother wasn’t what I expected at all. I was sure I would have a girl, and it was a shock not to; the second time, another shock
, and then again and again. Little did I know that you, Carter, Stan, and Chris would be the greatest joys of my life.
Every time I’ve been pregnant I believed I was doing the most important thing in the world. But afterward, I really didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t relaxed and could never nurse for long. I felt tremendous guilt, as if there were something wrong with me.
I wanted to correct the mistakes my mother made with me, but I didn’t know how. I read books on parenting, but none gave me the answers I was seeking. I fantasized about creating a large family, but my dreams were simplistic, and I kept reaching out blindly for some kind of road map to follow. I thought God Leopold could lead the way, but it turned out that, obsessed by his work, he knew as little about parenting as I did, though he had three other children by previous marriages. Also he wasn’t around very often. He was touring constantly, and the choice was to either go around the world with him and two young children, which I didn’t want to do, or try to create the home I desperately longed for.
Where I failed with Stan and Chris is that I didn’t really talk to them about important things when they were growing up. No one had ever talked to me about anything, so I had no frame of reference. I expressed my love with hugs and affection, but rarely communicated with them about significant events occurring in our lives.
Leopold and I separated in 1954, after nine years of marriage. I remember asking Dr. McKinney, the psychiatrist I had started to see, “What should I say to Stan and Chris?”
“Tell them, ‘I guess you boys have noticed your father and I haven’t been getting along lately, and we are going to separate,’” he replied.
Well, of course that was true, but it was hardly enough information to give to young kids.
Why did you decide to get a divorce from Stokowski?
Leopold was very possessive. He didn’t want us to have any friends, or have a life beyond the two of us. At first it was romantic, but over the years, it wasn’t easy. In retrospect, I see he was like this because he was probably nervous that I would discover he’d invented his past.
Leopold had told me that he was an illegitimate child related to a royal family and had been brought up in Poland. He claimed his mother died when he was a child, and he said he’d been raised by a governess, who sounded very much like Dodo. This made me feel close and connected to him, but none of it turned out to be true.
He grew up in England, with a brother and parents, and there had been no governess. Everything he had confided in me about himself was a lie. I had told him everything about myself, but he hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me the truth. His real background wouldn’t have made any difference to me, but the fact that he lied to me, deceiving me into loving a fantasy he’d created, did matter.
I began to discover his deception only when he took me to meet the woman he claimed was his governess. We were on a train to Bournemouth, where she was in a nursing home, and as he talked about her, I started to realize this woman really was his mother. That was the beginning of the end. He wasn’t the god I had made him out to be.
But I really got the power to leave Stokowski only when I met Frank Sinatra. He was in New York playing at the Copacabana for a couple of weeks, and he asked Jule Stein to introduce us. That’s when I moved out of our apartment and took the kids with me.
The divorce was very bitter. Leopold fought for custody of the children, which dragged on for more than a year. He didn’t think I would be willing to go through a custody battle, given the trial I had experienced as a child, but he underestimated me. I was willing to fight, and I won. He was granted visitation rights.
With the passing of time, however, I now remember much that was magical about our relationship. No longer is he a monster who tried to take my children from me. He is, once again, the genius I first encountered. He and Howard Hughes were among the most extraordinary men I’ve ever known.
There was nobody like Leopold. He was supportive about my painting and other creative pursuits. He never put me down or spoke harshly to me, and that was a huge encouragement. He always built me up, making me feel that I was the most beautiful, extraordinary woman. I’d never had anyone do that for me except Howard Hughes, in our brief relationship. His great love for me helped my self-esteem enormously.
If I could rewrite the story of our marriage, I would, but the deeds are done. Nothing can be changed, only the memories shuffled, making it possible to forgive him and myself for what went wrong between us.
It is nice that you can look back on your relationship with him and see the positive things he did for you despite how it all ended. That certainly is a mark of maturity that many people are not capable of.
I love the pictures I’ve seen of you and Sinatra together. You look so beautiful and happy. What was Sinatra like?
Does one ever know what another person is really like, even someone very close to us? Do we know what we are like ourselves? What we are today may not be what we are tomorrow.
I can only tell you what he was like to me, first as a lover and later as a lifelong friend. As lover, he made me believe I was the most important person in the world to him. As a friend, I knew I could always depend on him.
AP Photo.
Sinatra was a knight in shining armor who came and rescued me from Stokowski. I never expected that we would stay together for very long, and we didn’t—only about three weeks—but it gave me a gigantic boost to suddenly have him in my life.
Of course, today I could rescue myself. I wouldn’t need a knight to come along, but it has taken a lot of time to sort it out and come to that place.
I do think it curious you felt the need to be rescued by Sinatra or by any man. I’ve always felt I had to rescue myself, and not depand on anyone else to. I am not saying my way of thinking is better, but the idea of waiting for a knight in shining armor to come along is foreign to me.
I think men are something of a mystery to you. I remember when I was a teenager, and you were in a relationship with a man who was married. For years he kept telling you he was going to divorce his wife and move in with you. Every time you mentioned this to me, I thought it was obvious he was lying, and I assumed you knew but just didn’t care.
I never told you what I thought about his empty promises until I realized you actually believed them. When I finally told you he wasn’t being honest, you seemed genuinely surprised. After all the men you have known, you still don’t understand them very well at all.
That’s absolutely true.
Your father once said to me, “You respect and trust women more than you do men.”
He was right. Could it be because I grew up without any men in my life? My mother’s suitors came in and out of the house in Paris, escorting her to dinners and parties, but I never talked to them. I was told to curtsy, and say, “How do you do?” That was it.
Later, when I lived with Auntie Ger, there were no men I really knew. After my embarrassment when I asked her attorney, Frank Crocker, if he would be my father, even if an appropriate candidate for a father figure had come along, I doubt I would have risked another rejection. For much of my life, men seemed always just out of reach, unknowable. Like an octopus, I stretched out my tentacles, desperately hoping to latch on to someone floating by who would give me the stability I so sorely lacked. I always hoped and believed that if a man loved me, everything that was wrong in my life would be put right.
So many of my early beliefs about men were formed by the fairy tales Dodo occasionally read to me: Cinderella rescued by Prince Charming from her wicked stepsisters. I would fall asleep dreaming a prince was waiting out there somewhere; all I needed to do was grow up so we could move into his castle, where we would live happily ever after.
It is in my nature to be romantic, and for me that meant falling in love with someone strong, tall, and handsome; someone to look up to, who adored me, and who would take care of me while I doted on them.
Keep in mind, these ideas I’m revealing come from a time now past, but I h
eld on to them far longer than I should have. Except for DeCicco, I have been blessed with great love, but after Leopold’s betrayal, it was difficult for me once more to give a man all of myself.
It is only through knowing you, Carter, your father, and Sidney Lumet that I came to respect and trust men as I do women. I came to stand free and clear of crippling fears, the sobbing in the dark.
My mother was thirty-one when her divorce from Stokowski was finally granted, in 1955. By then she had already fallen in love with Sidney Lumet, a director working in theater and television, who would go on to direct a number of legendary films, such as 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, and Network. When my mother left Stokowski, she intended to take her sons, Stan and Chris, and move to Los Angeles to pursue acting, but after Sidney came into her life, she once again changed her plans.
Richard Avedon introduced me to Sidney, telling me, “You may have something to give—each to the other.” He was right. Instantly, Sidney and I fell in love, and just three weeks later, he bought the wedding rings. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get married again, and I certainly didn’t want to that quickly.
At the time, I was in New York in a play called The Swan, and Frank Sinatra had come to a rehearsal and asked me to sign a contract with him to appear in three movies he was producing. I was excited and signed the contracts, but Sidney, wildly insecure, worried that if I went to Hollywood, I would remain there and he would lose me, so eventually I asked Sinatra to release me from the contract. I stayed in New York and started studying acting with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse.
There was always part of me that wanted to be a movie star, but when I got involved with Sidney, I dismissed the idea. Had I thought it through, I could have done at least one movie with Sinatra and seen what happened, but I didn’t. Over time, I began to resent Sidney for the decision I had made.
The Rainbow Comes and Goes Page 10