Wherever we went, Sonny found a bar. On vacation in Mexico with his sister, also a fan of the high life, at the Villa Vera, an infamous Acapulco resort crawling with playboys and starlets, there was a bar smack in the middle of the pool. Sonny started drinking—and flirting—early and kept at it all day. He acted, to my mind, like a single man, loud and laughing, even as his long-suffering wife looked on from a nearby chaise longue.
Livid, I took to my room and refused to come out. I’m not a party girl and never have been. Listening to Sonny and his sister and their new pals scream with laughter next door until three in the morning, I became a basket case. In an expensive long-distance call that would certainly enrage Sonny, I implored my father to save me. “You have got to get me out of this!” I cried. “Daddy, I cannot endure it anymore.”
My father and mother, both adoring of Sonny, always made peace even as they witnessed firsthand how his drinking poisoned our marriage. During one winter break with my family, Sonny arrived in Chicago just in time for New Year’s Eve, a holiday I came to loathe as the night to cap off all party nights.
In the middle of a snowstorm, Sonny landed in Chicago inebriated and unable to speak. I didn’t get the whole story, but during a trip to Philadelphia to see some friends there was a fight during which somehow my delightful husband had been punched in the voice box! “What are you doing to yourself?” I wailed while he sat on the floor with a bottle of scotch and drank until his bobbling head rested permanently on his chest.
I was furious over more than just the alcohol. I knew the men he had visited in Philadelphia, and they were attractive, single, with beautiful women always in tow. Someone had probably given Sonny a good shot for playing around with his lady friend.
When it came to women, my husband didn’t need any help from his Philadelphia friends. Women were always attracted to him, and he to them. They flirted, he flirted. I often felt the fool, like right after Kathy’s birth when a friend of ours asked about the origin of our daughter’s name. “Oh, is Sonny naming his daughter after the showgirl he dated at the Copacabana?” she joked cruelly.
I didn’t know how many of them there were, but I knew they waited for him at parties and met him at bars. Sonny’s infidelities were thrown in my face. The outward, blatant flirting in my presence—was this intended to make me angrier and not go near him for months? In that way I suppose I helped push Sonny toward other women. But I had women calling at two o’clock in the morning asking for him. Try getting back to sleep after that!
I wasn’t squeaky clean either. I threw the infidelities right back. Like my nana and my mother, I always liked men. From the time I was twelve, I’d had a boyfriend. For most of my young life, I was in and out of love, and yes, the boys liked me (no matter how many my father chased away).
At all the parties Sonny and I attended, there were men who paid attention to me. At first it frightened me, and then I hungered for it. To get back at Sonny and to be wanted. I had my liaisons, not with men who were going to rescue me but rather men who were attracted to me. As I became more reliant on them they would leave. That was heartbreaking, and I felt belittled. I was not made for that kind of lovemaking. The affairs only served to drive Sonny and me even further apart.
We had huge fights, where I tried to provoke Sonny by any means necessary.
“Where have you been?”
“What have you been doing?”
But I never got an answer.
Sonny’s muteness was his greatest assault. He shut his mouth while I ranted on and on and on. Old Zipper Mouth. That I couldn’t get a rise out of him angered me almost as much as my suspicions. Against his buttoned-up lip, I had nowhere to go. It was so unfair that I never got an explanation.
I picked up a radio, a beautiful gift from my family, and threw it on the floor. But it was like shaking a rag doll. Nothing came of it.
I escalated my attacks. At an Italian restaurant with a large group of friends, I had an impulse to hurl something at Sonny. He was in his cups, and I wanted to show that he wasn’t the only one of us in the room. Many said that I gave Sonny a hard time. Everyone adored him, much more than they did me. It was the Malcontent versus the Charmer. So I threw a dessert at his head. At least it was now out in the open, I reasoned with all the maturity of a stupid child.
Sonny wasn’t mean. He just never gave me enough of what I wanted, which was ostensibly more of himself. I longed for him to take me out to lunch and to a museum on a Saturday afternoon instead of drinking. I desired him alone, not with a big, boisterous crowd. I needed him to give without being asked.
Out of jealousy and rage, I succumbed to the sickness of dressing. Shopping was a mundane diversion from the unhappiness at home. I channeled a tremendous amount of energy into the habit, even though, or perhaps because, my expensive taste infuriated Sonny so. A particular golden sable I coveted created such a row that his mother intervened. (“Why don’t you ask your father?” she said. “I thought my father had done enough,” I replied.) No one had ever heard of a golden sable, but I’d seen a picture of the Duchess of Windsor wearing one and had made my mind up to get it by hook or by crook. A dear friend in the fur business, who loved me a bundle, laughed at my silliness and made me the beautiful coat. I loved that coat the way you would a friend. (It still hangs in my closet thirty-five years later.)
That I felt closer to my sable than to my husband should have been sign enough, but the attachment to the man was stronger than our affection. I transferred the deep dependence that my parents had fostered in me directly to Sonny. I was too fragile to imagine life alone.
Deep down I was angry at my neediness. So I severed the cord with my own children early. Although it took all my strength, I sent them out into the world very young. I literally threw both my children onto the subway at nine years old. (John missed his stop and wound up in the Bronx.) In the depths of my fear and feelings of inadequacy, I vowed they weren’t going to grow up disabled, as I had become. They would be much, much stronger.
I was separated from John far too early, though, as we sent him away to school when he was still a little boy. His problems began when he couldn’t keep up with his studies at his prestigious Upper East Side private school. He seemed not unlike the shell-shocked soldiers during World War II who could recognize a dog, for instance, but couldn’t get the word out. John worked so hard as a child, running to a therapist most every day and having all sorts of tests. I worked hard, too, trying to help with homework. But, anxious myself, I felt I was doing more harm than good. Sonny, who saw a lot of himself in his son, had given up. “Stop,” he said to me repeatedly. “He’s never going to college. He’ll come into the business.” I went crazy: “No!”
It was terrible for John. I finally brought him to Columbia Presbyterian for a day of every test imaginable, including scans of his head. It was just my little boy and me, him carrying my lunch tray for me in the Columbia cafeteria. After an entire day of wires, X-rays, everything imaginable, the doctor turned to me and his diagnosis was dyslexia. There was a man in Pomfret, Connecticut, who was a pioneer in reading disabilities, and so John entered the Rectory School when he was seven. We packed him up, shipped him out, and I took to my bed. When and where had I failed?
Sonny and I would bring the dog, Max, for visits and leave heartbroken. People at the Rectory were sympathetic, but I had a very difficult time. I wanted John home and everything normal. We got through it, and then he went off to another boarding school for high school. I hated the whole scene and believe he did, too, although he never complained.
During the holidays, however, when John was home and the whole family was together, I went all out. Being an only child and knowing loneliness at holiday time, I had grown up fantasizing everyone sitting around a food- and flower-laden table, beautiful packages under a tree—Hallmark kind of nonsense.
We celebrated every festivity. For birthday parties when the children wer
e small I emptied the dining room to put down a grass carpet and filled small clay pots with flowers in the shape of scoops of ice cream. Frieda and I always worked hard at the birthday cake. She baked, and I decorated. We took a jelly roll and made it into a train for John’s birthday one year. There were hired magicians, clowns. All the parents came. It could be an afternoon with as many as twenty-five to thirty people. There was always lots of screaming.
When it came to Christmas, my children would say I was a neurotic tree trimmer. It drove them bananas, but all their friends came for the event, even through the college years. On Easter Sunday everyone in the household loved getting his or her very own individual basket. We had dyed the eggs, but the general excitement was over the baskets themselves, from Woolworth’s, silly things but fun.
I marveled over Kathy’s eggs—splattered, painted, artistic, inventive, and visual, as with everything she did. She and I loved to make dioramas for Sunday school—such as the one we made for Sukkoth, the harvest festival. While we weren’t a particularly observant household (we never attended the temple where Kathy attended religious school, and John never had a bar mitzvah), the shoe boxes filled with dried flowers and people we had crafted always won a prize.
I marveled over nearly everything Kathy did. From the time she attended nursery school, she was a star pupil. Never did we have to say to our tremendously smart and disciplined daughter, “Do your homework.” Even during one of the city’s major blackouts, we had to scrounge up every candle in the house so that she could study for a chemistry test, even though, as I kept telling her, school would be canceled the next day.
At school she was obedient, always on time, rarely sick, a prime student. Her defiance, which could be great, was reserved for things she disdained. From the start, Kathy was very willful. When we still had nurses for the children, a German doozy, who intimidated me, exclaimed that Kathy had kicked her in the stomach and was gone soon after. If Kathy, a notorious noneater like my mother, shut her lips tight, no one could wedge in a spoon. Once she went for an afternoon nap and woke up with the same piece of lamb chop she had defiantly parked inside her cheek during lunch. (Sweet, roly-poly John, on the other hand, was a nursemaid’s delight and cleaned his plate.)
We all sent our children to the same private schools (if they could get in), the same Sunday school (they were happy to get them), and the same dancing school (Ms. Wolf’s, and God knows what went on there). Kathy would not comply and become a clone. She dressed if you made her, learned proper manners, and pretended. On parents’ weekend at the summer camp I sent her to in Maine, the director pulled Sonny and me aside to let us know what a strong personality we were dealing with. Kathy refused to get out of bed on the bugle call and had been caught behind the cabins smoking her first cigarette.
The director didn’t need to tell me about this stubborn streak. Kathy and I had lots of disagreements that ended with my grabbing her by the arm to shake her. I would get so angry when she would not bend.
Underneath all that strong-willed studiousness was a very interesting and artistic young person. She liked clothes, but she liked the Metropolitan Museum of Art better (she wore the same school uniform from eighth grade through high school; she just kept rolling it up). At twelve years old, Kathy entered the Art Students League and was by far the youngest person in her live-model class. Sonny almost fainted when he picked her up one Saturday and saw a nude model and Kathy painting away.
At fifteen she got herself a job at a small folk museum located in midtown Manhattan. The following summer she went off to Chicago by herself for a newspaper job she’d gotten through my father’s connections. Kathy came home flaunting eyeliner and a romance with a famous conductor, who had picked her out of the crowd at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park.
I thought her father was going to commit all of us, since the summer of 1964 had been a hard one on everyone. One evening while coming home from the country, I bled so badly from my period that I couldn’t get out of the car when we arrived at the apartment. Sonny had to run into the building to retrieve towels to wrap around me so I could go upstairs without showing the doormen the humiliating stain spread across my lower half.
My period had been getting progressively worse for a while, but now there was no ignoring the problem. The next day I was at a recommended gynecologist and a week later lying on a very narrow green metal table in an operating room at Mount Sinai. Moments before the hysterectomy, the young doctor told me, “Betty, we are going to do an incision you’ll never see so that you can wear a bikini.” A bikini? I was lying on the chopping block and he was talking to me about swimwear? I could have cared less; I just wanted him to get me out of there and on with it. “I’ve never worn a bikini in my life,” I replied, “and I never intend to.” Somehow being very willful, I didn’t feel the effects of the medication intended to sedate me, so they put a very large mask over my face, and the next thing I knew, at thirty-five I’d had a partial hysterectomy. Well, I thought, no more awful periods—or children.
Three years later Kathy landed in Bennington (although her elite private school wanted her to go to Smith, she had to be a renegade), where she majored in art and English (Bernard Malamud, her adviser, wanted her to become a writer and said he wouldn’t graduate her unless she stayed in the English department). By that time my daughter already had a full résumé.
Meanwhile I, with children out of the home and a husband hardly there either, had never worked a day in my life—per my father’s orders (“It isn’t nice,” he said). So I thought that Ed Parnes, an old acquaintance of Sonny’s who was opening a new division for the American designer Chester Weinberg, was just making small talk at a cocktail party when he offered me a job. I knew and liked Chester’s clothes—he was ahead of his time, working in suede and bold prints as well as showing a lot of boots before any of that became popular. The new division, Chester Now, would attempt a lower-priced sportswear line that retained the avant-garde spirit of the more expensive couture. This was very early on in the evolution of secondary lines, when most designers did not cross over.
“Want to run it?” Ed asked.
“Run it?”
“Absolutely.”
Either he was intoxicated or I was, or most likely we both were, because he meant it, and while I wasn’t capable of running a cash register, let alone a business (I didn’t do figures and still don’t), I answered gaily, “Why not?” My courage sometimes showed up in strange ways.
In his office a week later, I was more honest about my ability. “Eddy, I have no idea what any of this is about,” but he waved that off as a trifle, and I was hired. I didn’t lie—I was terrible, and it only took about a month for Eddy to realize the mistake he’d made. He didn’t fire or even admonish me. Instead he brought in Maria Scotto, an Italian ex-model who had worked with the designer Ken Scott. She was as fiery as her red hair, and the more aggressively she called buyers or added sales, the mousier I became. I didn’t last the year with Chester Weinberg. (Forty years later, though, Maria and I are still close friends despite the difference in our temperaments; we love to chop and cook together in her kitchen in Bridgehampton, where she entertains and I sleep and eat her glorious pasta.)
I cared little about my lack of success at my first job. Seventh Avenue was just a temporary detour from my real life of twenty years on Park Avenue. As if to prove the point, each morning Sonny took me down to work and picked me up each night. There wasn’t any leeway. If I were still clearing up or chatting in the showroom, I had to leave and wait downstairs like a child being fetched from school.
Having my husband pull up in a car chauffeured by Prince was part of what gave people the impression that here was a rich girl someone had taken on, a reputation that preceded me when I started working at Geoffrey Beene. The job was another stroke of luck during a cocktail party, where this time I met Bob O’Donnell, who had just left Neiman Marcus to head up a new secondary line for
the legendary designer.
Mr. Beene decorated the three floors of 550 Seventh Avenue he occupied in the same silver and navy palette that extended throughout whatever he did, whether flatware or jumpsuits, for his entire life. The first floor was devoted to his couture, which was—and still is—the most beautiful clothing in the world. Born into a Louisiana family of doctors, Mr. Beene had spent a few semesters studying medicine at Tulane; the rigor and interest in the human body held over from this early discipline. He was a madman at construction. Trapeze dresses, architectural jackets, jersey, and silk—his clothes revolutionized fashion in the way that they draped a woman’s figure and yet were instant classics in their timelessness.
The second floor was Beene Bag, his sportswear line, and the workrooms. In the early seventies, when I joined the company, nothing in fashion was manufactured abroad. Imports were not yet accepted, so Seventh Avenue was filled with craftspeople sewing, lacing, and beading the most beautiful items. The workrooms were my favorite part of Mr. Beene’s company, because the pattern makers brought wonderful food: cookies I’ve never heard of and never seen again; thinly sliced cold meats; large hunks of cheese. One was transported to lunchtime in a small village in Italy when they laid out their daily spread on the cutting tables. Around those tables we celebrated every holiday, no matter how small, until Mr. Beene had a real tantrum about the constant partying.
The last floor housed Mr. Beene, a medium-priced line where I was hired as underling to head salesman Ernst Hamburg, a German gentleman to end all gentlemen. I had never seen a man more meticulous in my life. He was always brushing invisible flakes of nothing off his pristine suit. I knew that it was going to be an easy day when he came to work in his version of casual wear: a navy jacket and gray flannel pants that never showed a wrinkle. His shoes were polished so that you could see your face in them. Even his handwriting, always committed to paper with a gold pen kept in his breast pocket, was precise. Impeccable doesn’t begin to describe the man. If he hadn’t been Jewish, he would have been called a Nazi!
I'll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist Page 9