The Rainbow Comes and Goes

by Anderson Cooper

  Sometimes in high school when I’d visit friends’ houses and meet their moms I’d wish you were more like them, more conventional. My friends had kitchens full of home-baked bread and cookies, and their mothers seemed to know everything that was going on in their lives. You didn’t cook, and you weren’t really aware of what I was doing in school or who my friends were, but the idealization of my friends’ moms never lasted very long. The more time I spent at their houses, the more smothered I started to feel.

  It was then that I began to see how unique you were. You were never the type of parent to lecture Carter and me or tell us what to do or think.

  From the time we were little, you treated us as if our ideas mattered. You and Daddy encouraged us to form our own opinions, and listened when we expressed them. We were not just children in your eyes; we were people who deserved respect. That was a powerful lesson.

  It is remarkable how both of you included Carter and me in your lives. I recently found a photograph from the New York Times of me shaking Charlie Chaplin’s hand when he arrived for a party at our house on Sixty-Seventh Street. He had just returned to the United States for the first time after many years in exile in Switzerland.

  We watched his films with you both in the weeks before the party, so that we would understand who he was and what he had accomplished. I was five years old, and I remember when I met him being surprised to discover the youthful little tramp was now a white-haired man of eighty-three.

  You even took us to Studio 54. Twice! I am pretty sure that was completely illegal, but it was a fascinating experience, and I’ve never forgotten it.

  I didn’t know how rare it was for parents to include their children like that, and it had a tremendous impact on the person I became. It gave me confidence and a deeply held belief that I was valued and worthy.

  It was through your father that I learned what a family really was and what it meant to be a parent. Your father grew up talking nonstop about everything with his brothers and sisters and his large family, and he just naturally communicated with you both.

  One summer Frank and Barbara Sinatra visited New York and were staying near us with friends, who threw a party for them. Your father and I asked if we could bring you and Carter.

  “No way!” Barbara said. “This is a party for grown-ups.”

  She didn’t understand that you both would have been great additions at the party. After all, you were old enough to be seated next to Diana Vreeland and Charlie Chaplin at our dinner table. Needless to say, we stayed home that night.

  I am envious of my friends who still have both their parents, but as I mentioned before, I don’t believe I would have done all the interesting things I have in my career and my life if I’d known the stability that two parents can bring.

  I certainly longed for that sense of safety as a teenager. It would have been nice to have a male figure in those years. It always surprised me that none of the men you were friends with made an effort to reach out to Carter or me after Daddy’s death. I kept secretly hoping someone would come forward as a mentor or a friend, occasionally taking me out for a slice of pizza or to a movie.

  It is clear to me now just how much I turned inward in the aftermath of Daddy’s death, hoping to steel myself against further losses or pain. I started keeping my thoughts to myself, never letting on how much I wished that instead of doing it on my own, I had someone who would guide me.

  Did you ever think about getting married again? Many times I wished you would, though I never talked to you about it.

  When your father died, I knew I would never remarry. Sidney Lumet did come back into my life. He was getting divorced from Gail Jones, and we started seeing each other constantly—and once again became lovers. He soon asked me to marry him. I seriously considered it, but it was only two months after your father had died, and it was happening too fast.

  I wish you had told me that you hoped I would marry again. It would have strongly influenced my way of thinking, my perception of the direction our lives were taking. No doubt, I would have married Sidney. He had loved Stan and Chris and would have extended himself in his devotion to you and Carter.

  It really occurs to me only now that there was no man in my family as I grew up, no father or father figure. This is why, after your dad passed away, I didn’t think I needed to find a man to be there for you and Carter, but I should have sought a suitable mate capable of loving and supporting us, creating the family your dad would have wanted us to be.

  I remember when Sidney came back into your life. I liked him a lot and would have been happy if you had remarried him.

  Over the years, Carter and I would meet your more serious suitors, and sing the praises of the ones who seemed stable. Unfortunately, the more reliable and steady they were, the less interested you became.

  “He likes sports,” you’d say, and we knew you had soured on him.

  Or, “He tells jokes,” which always meant the relationship was doomed.

  Once, when I was older, I remember you described a man you were seeing as “the Nijinsky of cunnilingus.” I don’t know much about dance, but I’m guessing Nijinsky was pretty limber. I rolled my eyes at you, but you just kind of giggled and looked at me like I had no sense of humor.

  “Oh, come on,” you said, laughing. “It’s funny.”

  Perhaps the only thing more embarrassing than hearing about your sex life was discovering it was more interesting than my own.

  Well, I do think it’s important to have a sense of humor about sex and “this funny thing called love,” to quote Cole Porter.

  Symptoms: weakness in the knees, shortness of breath, pit of the stomach flipping over, heart a whirligig twirling. Looking into someone’s eyes, about to faint, while that someone becomes the center of your universe. Is it chemical, or the soul’s deepest search to feel complete at last?

  Sometimes, unable to sleep, I count lovers instead of sheep. How far back can I go? Unannounced, troubadours emerge from the darkness, parading one after the other before vanishing once again. How fortunate I have been that I have only good things to say about my suitors. Many remained devoted friends, even those who passed like ships in the night and one to whom I bitterly regret behaving badly.

  You recently read me a quote by Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead, it’s not even past.” That is true for all of us, but it seems especially so for you. Your past and present seem to coexist. The little girl being led into court by detectives, the teen dreaming in a darkened movie theater, the woman in her twenties in search of a father. You are all those people still, in addition to many others you have been.

  So much of our adult lives is influenced by what happened to us as children. It is all still there, the memories, the feelings, and fears, stored just beneath the surface in the hidden crannies of our cortex.

  You wanted to right the wrongs of your mother by becoming a mother; Daddy wanted to fix his father’s failures as a parent. There are echoes of your mother’s passive nature in your own youthful willingness to let strong men determine your actions and choices. Your mother’s inability to reach out and talk to you was repeated in your own difficulties early on talking with your kids. There were echoes of your relationship with Dodo in my relationship with May. We repeat patterns without even knowing it or wanting to.

  We like to think we are our own people, but sometimes it seems we are just playing out a script that was imprinted in us long ago. I’ve never asked you what happened to your mother. You said you didn’t see or talk with her for fifteen years. How did you reconnect?

  After I stopped talking to my mother in 1945, at the urging of Leopold Stokowski, I didn’t see her again until 1960.

  The therapist’s session with LSD that year gave me a new perspective. Perhaps it was also the wisdom and understanding that time brings. But it was confusing. I was ready to forgive, but I wasn’t sure who I was forgiving, my mother or myself?

  I was still wary of my mother, but I took a huge leap and invited her t
o tea at my apartment. I have to admit it took all the guts I had to concentrate on the momentous event of once again being face-to-face with her.

  My heart was pounding as I opened the door to her, but standing there alone in the hall was a stranger: tentative, beautifully dressed, but hesitant, even fearful. Had we passed on the street, I would not have known who she was or given her a second glance.

  Was this my mother?

  The person I had feared all my life?

  She was suffering from hysterical blindness; no doctor could find anything wrong with her eyes, but her vision came and went. I wondered how she had gotten to my place on her own, but realized someone must have dropped her off downstairs, and the elevator operator brought her into the hallway and rang the doorbell.

  Putting my arms around her, I led her into my studio and sat down beside her on the sofa. She asked for a scotch and soda, and I lit her cigarette. I wasn’t sure what to talk with her about. The last time I’d seen her I was twenty-one, and by then I was thirty-six. I took her hand in mine, but she pulled it away to pick up her drink.

  I wish I could say we opened up to each other, talking of the past and what we hoped our future would be, but we didn’t. From the day she walked through that door until the day she died, we never discussed the trial or anything about my childhood. Not once. She wasn’t capable of doing so, and I certainly wasn’t ready to. I would be now, but back then it was so complicated, and I was still wary of her in many ways.

  We kept our conversation polite and on the surface. Despite your father’s support and encouragement of my becoming close to her, because of all the things that had happened and the years of separation, there was no way to begin.

  How banal and strange to call all that had happened things. As I look at it on the computer screen, the word is little, a meaningless abstract squiggle devoid of the fear, sorrow, and deep regret over the loss and the pain it brought to all of us, Naney, Auntie Ger, Dodo, and to me, changing our lives forever.

  After your father met my mother for the first time, he said to me, “She doesn’t know one single thing that has ever happened to her.” He was right. She was born beautiful, got married at seventeen, gave birth at eighteen, and was widowed a year and a half later. I cringe in pain imaging how stunned she must have been during the custody case, as if hit by a bus.

  During the long years of separation, I had tried to forget her, but she never left. She stuck in my gut like glue.

  One night in my dressing room, after I’d appeared in a play, thinking about my mother’s admiration of the anorexic thinness of the actress Constance Bennett, I asked my friend Russell Hurd, “Did I look thin onstage?

  “Yes, darling,” he assured me.

  “No! No! I mean thin, really, really thin?

  “Yes! Really, really, really thin!”

  “That’ll show the old bitch,” I screamed, to his surprise.

  Now here she was, back in my life, sitting by my side. It drained all my wits and energy to keep a toehold on the tenuous tightrope my unsteady feet were attempting to negotiate. I found myself fighting an avalanche of hostility toward her, realizing just how misguided she had been as a parent, how self-involved and narcissistic.

  When I was seventeen and went to visit her, and started dating completely inappropriate men like Errol Flynn and Pat DeCicco, she never warned me about what I was doing. What she wanted was to get me back from Auntie Ger, and she did that by letting me do anything I wanted, no matter how risky.

  Several months after we reunited, in the summer of 1961, I visited Los Angeles with Stan and Chris, and I went to see her at the house she still shared with Thelma. I rang the bell, and Wannsie opened the door.

  “Oh, Miss Gloria,” she said, welcoming me, “It was all just a terrible misunderstanding.” This was such a mild description of the tumultuous events we had all been through, I couldn’t help but laugh as I hugged her.

  Thelma suggested we rent cottages for a week next to each other on the beach in Malibu. I was excited because Stan and Chris would have a chance to spend some time with their grandmother and great-aunt, not to mention my having time with my mother, perhaps even to get to know her a little bit better.

  Wyatt joined the family get-together, which was at first a cautious reunion, but by week’s end a huge success. My mother and Thelma usually slept late but joined us for lunch and dinners.

  The first day we settled in, Thelma casually mentioned that Harry Richmond also lived somewhere nearby in Malibu.

  “Harry Richmond!” I shouted, almost falling off my chair. When I was eleven, Harry Richmond was a hugely popular singer, as well known as Sinatra was years later. I had collected and treasured his records, playing them over and over at Auntie Ger’s. He performed at the Club Richmond back then, which was close to New York City, just across the East River. My mother, knowing how much I admired him, had wanted to take me to hear him, but she knew Surrogate Foley, who was my legal guardian, would have had a fit.

  “Let’s invite him for dinner,” Thelma now said, and sure enough that very night, stepping out of an old Chevy, appeared Harry Richmond in full stage makeup, dressed in a top hat and white tie and tails!

  There were big hugs all around, but he was clearly eager to start the show. And what a show it was! His voice was no longer what it had once been, so he lip-synced to his old records, which he had brought with him, gesturing as he slowly moved around the room mouthing the words to “The Night Is Young and You’re So Beautiful,” and other songs I had played in my bedroom in Old Westbury long ago.

  It was surreal to be there now with my mother, a family at ease, happy in the moment. An evening never to be forgotten, and not just because I got to meet Harry Richmond at last, but because it brought me close to my mother in a way I had never been before. That week in Malibu, I hadn’t been suspicious of her, not for one minute.

  Alas, though she came back into my life, we never really connected. It was too late. In all the times we saw each other after reestablishing contact, the conversation rolled politely along without long silences, but we never broke through to each other’s heart.

  I’ve never forgotten an intense conversation between my mother and her older sister Consuelo that I’d unexpectedly interrupted once as a child. My mother’s back was toward me, but Consuelo saw me as I entered the room, and she grabbed my mother’s arm and hissed at her, “Cuidado, cuidado!”

  The word stuck in my mind. I wrote it down and later looked up the English translation: “Be careful! Be careful!”

  I knew then that they had been speaking of things they didn’t want me to hear.

  Secrets and fear. That is what there had always been between us.

  All that is long gone.

  How can any of this be of importance or value to you right now? Maybe it will be useful only in the future to assure you that with age everything, yes, everything, in one way or another, falls into place. You can face your past in a way you never thought possible: confidently, securely, and without fear.

  It is so sad that you never discussed the trial or anything about what happened between you. Now of course you would be more than capable of doing so, but it also says a lot about her that she didn’t bring up the past, either. It shouldn’t have been all on your shoulders.

  How did your mother die?

  Five years after we reconciled, she and Aunt Thelma were planning to stay in our house on Sixty-Seventh Street, to be there when Carter was born, but before they were to come, she fell ill. It turned out to be cancer and she was dying. Within days she was hospitalized in Los Angeles.

  I spoke to my mother on the phone a few hours after giving birth. She had hoped for a girl, as had I. “The third Gloria,” I’d promised her. Knowing how ill she was, I nearly lied and told her I’d finally had a girl, but I didn’t.

  “Another boy!” she said, “Gloria, you’re going to start a baseball team.”

  Those were her last words to me. She died shortly after. She was sixty. />
  I had to stay in the hospital with Carter, so your father went alone to Los Angeles to attend the funeral. Her death had little reality for me. Who was she, really? Someone I had never known. Someone I had longed for once, a longing that by then felt like it was someone else’s.

  For decades after she died, I tormented myself with the fantasy that she lived around the corner from me, close, close as could be, and we could speak daily. I imagined visiting her, or her strolling around the block and stopping by for a cup of tea and a cozy chat, eager to hear about my latest adventures and offer her wise counsel.

  In this fantasy she remained as lovely as the image I once had of her in Paris: coming in and going out, her long black tresses marcelled into a beguiling chignon, wearing one of her simple black dresses, the huge Marquise diamond engagement ring presented to her by my father still on her left hand beside the gold wedding band.

  She’d sit beside me on the sofa, and it no longer bothered me that it was a light scotch and soda she sipped instead of tea; no longer bothered me that she lit one cigarette after another; the smoke became perfumed incense. In this fantasy, nothing about her bothered me. Instead of the passive, exquisite creature hoping to be Her Serene Highness Princess Hohenlohe, she had metamorphosed into a wise, chatty combination of Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Mother Teresa.

  But this fairy tale is always replaced by the memory of another trip to Los Angeles after we reconciled. I flew there hoping to see her right away, wanting to talk with her, and perhaps finally open up about all that had passed between us.

  I called her from the airport. “Mummy, I’m here,” I said, my voice nearly breaking. She could tell I was upset.

  “Oh, darling,” she said. “I’d love to see you, do please call me when you’re feeling better.”

  It wasn’t malicious. She was simply incapable of expressing real emotion and felt no motherly connection to me. I visited her later during that trip, and she pretended as though I had never called upset, and I made no mention of it, either.