Authors: Christina McDowell
“M
om, how did Dad propose to you?” I sat on the couch, watching Roxana slide a black St. John knit over my mother's head. Roxana, an exotic Iranian woman who wore clunky gold bracelets and bright red lipstick, was my mother's personal stylist at Saks Fifth Avenue. She always had a Coke and a Snickers bar waiting for me on the coffee table next to the pink lilies.
Our private dressing area had its own kitchen and powder room, and was filled with racks of couture gowns, tailor-made suits, stilettos, jewelry, and purses for my mother to try on. After I was born, my father insisted he was making enough money so my mother didn't have to work. She was now serving on the board of directors at the Columbia Hospital for Women, was vice president of Discovery Creek Children's Museum, and was a member of the Junior League. In her new role as philanthropist, she always needed a rotation of outfits for benefits, meetings, and cocktail parties.
“Honey, you know this story,” my mother said, adjusting her bodysuit underneath the dress.
“Tell me again,” I said. I was playing hooky. Mara and Chloe were at school. I often lied so I could spend the day with her, watching episodes of
General Hospital
, shopping and running errands. I wanted to talk to her all day long about grown-up things. It was more fun than playing with Poggs and Beanie Babies on the playground.
“Well, I have to tell the whole story,” she began, “because of what happened a few days earlier.”
My father had been late coming home from law school when my mother showed up at his apartment on Nineteenth and R Streets. She began spending most evenings at his apartment, but he hadn't given her a key yet. My mother was tired and frustrated after a long bus ride home from work and began picking at my father's lock with one of her bobby pins. Without any luck, she pulled out the key to her apartment, intending to use it to continue picking at the lock. But instead, it slid right in, unlocking my father's front door.
“Like fate,” my mother said, twirling left and then right in her new St. John knit. After my father arrived home, they had dinner, and when they were reading and lounging on the couch afterward, he said to her casually, with his head still buried in his book, “What do you think about getting married?” My mother had asked if that was a proposal. He looked at her; he was nervous. “Yeah,” he said. “Do you want to get married?” Mom smiled at him. “Yes! Let's get married.”
“A few days later”âmy mother was now standing in her bra and panty hose, waiting for Roxana to bring her an evening gownâ“I walked into the apartment, and there was a sock lying in the middle of the living area, which was strange, because your dad always liked to have things clean and neat. I picked up the sock, reached my hand down inside of it, and pulled out a black velvet box. Inside was my diamond ring. But
this
diamond ring.” My mother gently lifted the small diamond to her gold necklace resting between her collarbones.
On a trip to Paris, my father had surprised her with a 9-carat-diamond upgrade from Tiffany. She turned her original diamond into the necklace she wore.
“At the time, your dad didn't have a penny to his name. He sold his blue Austin-Healey the day after I said yes so he could buy me this ring,” my mother said proudly. “And believe me, he loved that Austin-Healey.” My father wanted to make sure she said yes before he sold it.
“But he loved you more than the car,” I always assured her.
M
y father started making what he ironically called “real money” in the late eighties and early nineties. We moved from our quaint town house across from American University, a community called Westover Place, to the white brick Georgian house on Lowell Street across from the Mexican Embassy, where we held Fourth of July block parties and Halloween parties with the neighbors. Local firemen drove their trucks down to let us kids honk the horn and sound the sirens. We attended Christmas parties and birthday parties with guests named (Joe and Jim) Biden, (Arianna) Huffington, and (David) Rubensteinâbefore they carried the power they do today.
For my tenth birthday party, my mother hired a wild-animal trainer. He arrived dressed in safari gear and brought a wild alligator for us to play with. I didn't care about any of the other wild animals he brought, like the African dwarf frogs and baby goats. I spent the entire afternoon chasing that wild alligator around the playroom in my plaid skirt while the mothers were upstairs in the family room gossiping over bottles of Pinot Grigio, Carr's crackers, and caviar.
When we moved from the city to our estate in Virginia, our birthday parties and Christmases became even more extravagant as my parents' wealth grew along with their position in the social hierarchy of Washington.
One year, the Woman's Club of McLean selected our home to showcase Christmas decorations and interior design as part of the Holiday Homes Tour. (One of the others chosen was Merrywood, the fifty-acre estate on which Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy grew up.) It was a tour where wealthy women wore booties on their shoes as they walked around the decorated mansions oohing and aahing at the décor with the comfort that the money they donated would go toward a designated charity.
For weeks, my mother and the interior designers spent all day hanging red ribbons and green wreaths from each window above the green boxwood bushes and lush ivy. Candles shimmered in the center of each windowsill. White lights swirled around the Corinthian columns illuminating the front door, making it look like a winter wonderland when it snowed. Inside, the house smelled of cinnamon and vanilla, poinsettias clumped in every corner of every room next to antiques, and mistletoe swung in the loggia. Each room a vision of warm perfection. My mother had come to develop the most sophisticated and exquisite taste, moving further and further away from her laid-back California upbringing.
I was fourteen years old, and I'll never forget the gifts I received that year on Christmas morning. Stacks of presents covered the lower third of our twelve-foot Christmas tree in red-and-white Santa wrapping paper. But before we opened presents, we had already been led by footprints made from fake snow down into the playroom to find a Ping-Pong table and a pool table placed under the hanging green Tiffany lamps. The room was big enough for both.
My father had given me a $2,000 steel watch from Tiffany and had bought me a background role on my favorite TV show,
Dawson's Creek
. He bid the most money during the silent auction at a charity event for the Choral Arts Society of Washington. Eight weeks later, on my fifteenth birthday, my father flew me in his Beechcraft King Air twin turboprop down to Wilmington, North Carolina, where they filmed the show. I hung out on set all day with stars Katie Holmes and Joshua Jackson and had them autograph my yellow North Face backpack.
During those years, we had nannies and housekeepers, painters and gardeners, private chefs and academic tutors. And every six months, it seemed, I'd come home from school to see the newest model of a red or black Porsche being driven off the flatbed of a truck. I'd see Dad standing in the driveway in his white polo and khakis, his arms in the air, directing the landing of the Porsche safely onto the gravel.
My father insisted on buying sports cars with manual transmissions only. “Automatic is for sissies,” he would say. My BMW was a stick shift, and when I asked him why he bought me a stick, he said with a laugh, “Because, Bambina, you'll drive all the boys wild. I bet half of them won't know how to drive your car.” He was right, except Blake knew how to drive a stick.
When I arrived in Los Angeles a week after my high school graduation, Blake and I would race his friendsâthe sons of directors, movie stars, and studio mogulsâacross Mulholland Drive. One of his best friends, the son of an executive at Viacom, flipped his BMW in one of the canyons. He was lucky to have walked away alive. But a few weeks later, he showed up at a party in Bel Air with a brand-new GMC Denali: black rims, blacked-out lights, and tinted windows. High-end cars for the kids who come from “real money” were disposable.
During my summer at the New York Film Academy, I met Steven Spielberg's son, who was a friend of Blake's. He took me to DreamWorks Studios for lunch one day. We ate salmon and Caesar salad and played Grand Theft Auto the entire afternoon in Mr. Spielberg's office. When I got up to use the bathroom and came back, Mr. Spielberg was standing in front of his desk. He looked at me, smiled, and introduced himself. I wiped my hands along my red Marc Jacobs skirt and then shook his hand. He asked where I was from and where I was planning on going to college. I couldn't believe how normal he was. I wanted him to be the vicious director yelling at me through an old-fashioned megaphone. But he was just like any other dad, which thoroughly disappointed me. He had hundreds of awards that followed the entire length of his office. I was oblivious to his being considered the greatest film director of our time.
Jaws
made me nauseous, and
E.T.
scared me so much that I refused to even walk into the family room when Mara or Chloe was watching it. But I wanted to touch one of his awards
.
So when he wasn't looking, I picked up his Golden Globe for
Saving Private Ryan
.
After we finished playing video games, Mr. Spielberg took us for a cruise around the lot in his golf cart. My father was so excited on the other line of the phone when I called him that night and told him about my afternoon. “My little movie star!” he exclaimed. “By golly, Steven Spielberg . . .” I beamed, knowing how much I'd impressed him. I'd been in Hollywood only three weeks and was hanging out in Mr. Spielberg's office.
I was never conscious of the kind of privilege I was around or the fact that I got whatever I wanted. I was growing and being shaped inside a bubble of wealth where everyone I surrounded myself with appeared to accept it as normal.
Normal.
I believed it was normal. Because it was. It was all that I knew.
Six months had passed since the FBI arrested my father, and it was now summer. Mara, Chloe, my mother, and I were piled into the Range Rover and heading to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Battery Park, where we would stay for the duration of the trial. My father had flown up a few weeks earlier to prep with his attorneys, spending sleepless nights reviewing documents and depositions in the hotel conference room. We drove to save money, and when Mara questioned him before we left about why we were staying at such an expensive hotel, he replied, “Because we got a good deal. Not a lot of tourists want to stay downtown right now.”
The financial district was desolate and abandoned as we made our way down Greenwich Street, passing the metal fence encompassing what remained of the World Trade Center. I saw enormous tractor-trailers bulldozing and digging up dirt and construction workers yelling at one another back and forth in their orange hard hats and yellow vests. I thought about loss as I remembered sitting in religion class when the principal called for an emergency school meeting, watching on television the collapse of the second tower into the crescendo of death, and the rumbling of F-16s over my bed that night. Yet, still, I had no grasp of what loss really meant.
For the entire five-hour drive from Washington, DC, to Manhattan, my sisters and I never fought. Instead, we reminisced over our childhoods and all of our favorite memories. It was as if we were searching for all the reasons to hold on to life the way that it was, all the memories of our past, so it would make everything that was happening okay. We remained lighthearted, skating along the surface of any real emotions, hiding behind laughter, too afraid to accept any kind of reality, as everyone was unsure of our family's fate.
L
ater that night, my father's attorneys paced back and forth with their hands in their pockets in front of the glass window of our hotel suite. You could see in the distance the twinkling lights of Lady Liberty standing dignified with her raised torch of freedom, mocking us.
“No makeup, no jewelry of any kind, simple colors, collared shirts, and conservative skirts,” said Mr. David Kenner, one of my father's attorneys. Mr. Kenner was from Encino, California. Exceptionally tan, a silver fox with more hair spray than Dolly Parton, too-perfect teeth, and looked like he had had way too much plastic surgery. He was known for representing Death Row Records and getting Snoop Dogg acquitted of murder charges. I thought it was a good sign. I asked him toward the end of the trial, “So, who killed Tupac, and who killed Biggie?” He looked at me and walked away. He didn't think it was funny.
“It is very important that the jury and the judge like you,” Mr. Alvin Entin said. Mr. Entin was my father's other attorney. He was from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and loved to wear different-colored suspenders. Mara, Chloe, and I sat on the edge of the bed, nodding our heads up and down like three little puppet dolls. Innocent and humbled bait waiting to be fed to the jury and the judge with tears in our eyes. We were being written into their presentation and were now part of the game plan.
My mother sat in the chair across from me; the loss of color in her cheeks was apparent. She wasn't wearing her usual burgundy Chanel lipstick, and she was stripped of any jewelry, except for her diamond eternity band. My father stood next to her. For a minute, I studied his furrowed brow. I could tell he was nervous and trying to hide it. Then I looked back at my mother again, who looked back and forth between us girls. I could tell she was trying to gauge our reactions. She looked embarrassed, and scared, her expression one of an apology. But she never said a word. She wouldn't dare interrupt my father or his attorneys, who were tracking us, making sure we would obey. And we did.
T
he next day, when we pulled up to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York at 500 Pearl Street, I stepped out onto the sidewalk and gazed up at its enormity. Orange barricades reading “Property of US Government” surrounded the grandiose building. Scattered groups of protestors stomped in circles below the steps shouting things I don't remember. Men with leather briefcases in suits, ties, and tasseled shoes walked by as if the protestors were invisible. We did too, my mother, Mara, Chloe, and I, clad in our khaki skirts and collared shirts, conservative yet bland, intentionally ambiguous and unassuming as we tagged behind my father and his two attorneys, who, in their Brooks Brothers suits, carried brown file folders under their arms.