Carriage Trade (27 page)

11

Mrs. Consuelo Tarkington (interview taped 8/17/91)

I can't really say I'm surprised that the art collection turned out to be fakes. I'm disappointed, of course—for my late husband's sake, and poor Smitty's. But the people who advised him, and the people he bought from—they were simply not experts. They knew nothing about art, and neither did he, but then neither did I, which was why I stayed out of it. Whenever Si bought a painting, I'd say how pretty it was and help him hang it, but that was it. Collecting was his hobby, not mine.

Thank God Mr. Hockaday didn't come back to us the other night and say some of the paintings were stolen! I don't know why, but that was my greatest fear, that some of the pieces might have been stolen from other collections and fenced to my husband. You see, when I learned that someone like Moses Minskoff had acted as his agent—but never mind. It doesn't matter now. At least Mr. Hockaday didn't say anything about stolen paintings, and now we're done with him, thank God. I must say I didn't care for Mr. Hockaday.

When I married my husband, I made only one promise to myself: No matter what happened, I was going to be Silas Tarkington's final wife. Not just his second wife but his final one. I knew there had been other women in his life, and there probably always would be. People don't change. A wife can't change her husband; she's foolish if she tries. My father taught me that. My father was a rather old-fashioned mid-Victorian man. He said it was in a man's nature to have a roving eye, and if that happened, as it probably would, I was not to mind. “Remember, Bobolink, there has never been a divorce in this family,” he said to me, “and there must never be. And so, if you marry this man, you are marrying him for life, for better or for worse, from this day forward, as long as you both shall live.” I promised him that, and I kept my promise.

No, I won't say that Si's and mine was a happy marriage. What does the phrase mean, anyway? Are there any happy marriages? Perhaps, but I don't know of any. My sisters certainly don't have happy marriages. They have successful marriages, which is not the same as happy. In many ways, I consider myself the luckiest of the three, because I loved my husband, though love isn't a happy state. Love is a matter of constant compromise and sacrifice, and in any sacrifice there's bound to be anger, bitterness, and resentment. Love is a matter of adapting your needs to the needs of the person you love, and this is never easy, but it must be done. Miranda gets very angry with me when I talk like this, but I've lived longer than she has, and I know it's true. Let the feminists say what they want. It's still a man's world.

How did I adapt my needs to his? In many ways. He was in the designer apparel business, running a fashionable women's store. Therefore, I had to be fashionable. That was where his first wife had let him down. By refusing to be fashionable, she was hurting his business, and his business meant everything to him. He told me once that he liked me because I had class, so it was up to me to maintain that class, to fit the image of his classy store.

It wasn't easy. It's not easy to get on the Best-Dressed List, and it's even harder to stay on once you're there. It's all politics; it's like running for President of the United States every year, and almost as expensive. There's a committee and all sorts of other people you have to be nice to and pay court to—designers, fashion writers, photographers—people you otherwise wouldn't notice. But my husband wanted me to be on the list, for the store's sake, and so I went to work on it. It's all about publicity, so in the beginning I hired a P.R. man. But it can't be just any P.R. person. Ideally, it should be someone who also represents at least one major designer, a couple of other ambitious women, and a fashionable restaurant. Then the P.R. person arranges for his lady clients to meet for lunch at his restaurant, wearing his designer's clothes. Then he arranges for someone from
Women's Wear
to photograph everyone going in or out of the restaurant. The designer then publicizes the women, the women publicize the designer, and the designer and the women publicize the restaurant. Everybody publicizes everybody else.

After I learned the ropes, I was able to dispense with the publicist, but in the beginning he was indispensible—and, I was told, tax-deductible—even though I didn't always enjoy the things he had me do.

As I think I told you, my main interests are music and gardening. The Westbury Garden Club has been after me for years to join, and the town of Manhasset has been struggling to start its own symphony orchestra and has begged me to be on the board. But I couldn't afford to do either of those things. Not visible enough. Not high-profile enough. I was told to go on the board of New York Children's Hospital because it has the biggest, splashiest, highest-profile fundraiser of the year.

I hate hospitals. People die in hospitals. I've visited enough people in hospitals to know I never want to be in one. But what did I do? I agreed to chair the committee for the hospital benefit. I've done that now for nine years. For months ahead, I traipse around Manhattan, hat in hand, begging for underwriters. Any successful charity event should be completely underwritten. I call on retailers and corporate executives, begging them to advertise in the program. I go begging to Seagram's to get them to donate the liquor and wines. I beg Mobil to donate the flowers, someone else to pay for the music, someone else to pay the cost of the room. I hit up designers for gifts for the raffle, and people like Estée Lauder to give the items for the goody bags that have to be at each place setting. Oh, those goody bags! People will kill for them! I once had the idea that, at each table, there would be a little X symbol under one of the chairs, and the person who had the X-marked chair would get to take home the table's floral centerpiece. Two Social Register women got into a hair-pulling fight because one of them claimed that the X had been under her original chair, but she'd changed places during dinner. A fight over a centerpiece! I'd tell you who these women were, but they're too well known.

Sometimes I envy Margaret, my maid. She gets to sit home with a tuna sandwich and watch her afternoon soaps. She has a favorite, called
Another World
, that goes on at two. But every weekday I'm busy at that hour being visible with my lunch ladies—either Tarkington's clients, or potential Tarkington's clients, or what I call my committee ladies. So I'm never home at two o'clock, and I've never seen a single episode of
Another World
. Margaret tells me the plots. Will Felicia find her long-lost daughter? Will Olivia give Marley the baby? Who put the chain around the baby's neck before it was given up for adoption? Will Marley let Iris raise the baby? It all sounds so much more interesting than what I get to talk about at Le Cirque or Grenouille.

You see, I no sooner finish putting on one year's hospital ball than it's time to start planning next year's. There's much more to it than just selling ad space in the program, finding sponsors and underwriters, and getting freebie bottles of perfume for the goody bags. After that's all done, you have the problem of what the French call
le placement
. Everybody who's had anything to do with the evening wants to be
bien placé
. Even the hairdressers nowadays expect to be seated at the best tables, and if they're not they have their ways of getting revenge, believe me. Planning the seating for a party like that can take months, working with big charts laid out on the floor and pushing around little slips of paper. Mrs. A won't sit at a table with Mrs. B and wants to sit at Mrs. C's table and so on. You try to keep everybody happy, but you just can't keep everybody happy. A lot of people are going to be unhappy, no matter what you do. And who are they angriest at? Me, the chairwoman! I spend my life making enemies. I chair the hospital ball in order to make people hate me. And those who don't hate me are jealous of me. The other day on the street a woman recognized me, and I heard her say, “That's Consuelo Tarkington. I wish I had her money!” How does that make me feel? Wounded. Unappreciated. And through it all, I always have to be perfectly dressed, perfectly groomed, every hair in place, because I've got my place on the Best-Dressed List to keep, and the competition out there is unrelenting. Voracious! Waiting for me to make a mistake, hoping to make me slip a notch on that damned list! Does this sound like a happy life to you, Mr. Turner? It's a miserable life. Sometimes at night, after a particularly awful day, I go home and cry myself to sleep.

But I've done it, and I never complained to my husband. And why did I do it? Because it was what he needed and what he wanted. I did it because I loved him and was determined that no other woman would ever take him away from me, because I was determined to do what I did better than any other woman could. And so I did what I had to do—for the man I married.

A happy marriage? No, but a
successful
one, because it lasted.

Miranda doesn't understand any of this, that marriage is
work
, hard work, not fun.

Miranda takes after her father. Si was essentially a simple man, an uncomplicated man, by which I mean there were no deep, hidden facets to his personality and psyche. Oh, he had secrets, of course. His age. His background. His family. Things he never liked to talk about. His mother, for instance, is still living. She's a very old lady now, living in a nursing home in Florida. His sister, Simma, also lives in Florida. These were secret relatives, and I've never met either of them, but now that he's dead I see no reason to keep those secrets any longer, do you? If you like, I can tell you how to get in touch with them. They might have something to say about his background, his early days, and why—before I met Si—his mother and sister became … estranged. I imagine it had something to do with money. It usually does, in families. I never asked, because he didn't want me to know.

That was another thing he trusted me to do—not to ask too many questions about matters he found unpleasant. You see, he had a very trusting nature, my husband. Sometimes, he was too trusting; I guess the art collection is an example of that. When people betrayed him, or disappointed him, or let him down, he couldn't understand it. When this happened, he usually just dropped those people, but some people were hard to drop, and that made his life difficult.

I tried not to complain about how hard I worked for him and for his store—at work I hated—because that would have been letting him down. Oh, I'm not saying I never got angry with him, never nagged. I'd be lying if I said that. I did my share of ranting at him, but mostly it was when I felt he was being too trustful and other people were taking advantage of him. I hated to see people taking advantage of him, and of course he hated it when I pointed out that this was happening. I tried to protect him from those people, but, as my own father warned me, most men don't like to feel smothered by a protective woman, and they hate it even more when they know they need to be protected. That's when we'd have our blowups.

Thank God for the farm! If it weren't for the farm, I don't know what I would have done. On weekends at the farm, I could relax, let down my hair, shake all the cobwebs out of my mind, be by myself with my own thoughts, and stop worrying for a little while about how good a job I was doing at being Mrs. Silas Tarkington. At the farm, I could wear jeans and sneakers and a big floppy hat. I could walk in the woods, or supervise the planting of a crab-apple tree, or just sit on the bridge in my Dell Garden and feed my fish. Fish have no problems, except being fed. They're even more relaxing to watch than the daytime soaps. They have babies too, but they don't worry about putting them up for adoption.

But still, at the farm, I couldn't do that all the time. Si didn't like seeing me in jeans and sneakers and a big floppy hat all that much. At the farm, there were still house guests to entertain, parties to give, parties to go to. For those, I would still have to be
on
, still have to be Mrs. Silas Tarkington, the perfect wife, the perfect hostess. Sometimes I wonder what I would have done with my life if I hadn't married Si. Not very much, I suppose. He was my life.

That's why I think I've been so lucky. He gave me something to do, something to really work at. And look—I won! I was his final wife. Nobody was able to take him away from me … until God did.

Not even Smitty, bless her poor heart.

12

Over the years, a great deal has been written about Consuelo Tarkington's beauty. “The Beauteous Bannings,” as they were called in their debutante years were also described as “heiresses to an Old Guard Philadelphia Main Line fortune.” This has always struck Consuelo as amusing.

True, she and her sisters grew up on the Main Line and attended proper Main Line day and boarding schools. And, true, their father, George F. Banning, was a prosperous Philadelphia lawyer, with some Old Guard Main Line clients, at least one of whom George Banning had saved from going to the federal penitentiary for tax evasion. But George Banning was born in San Francisco, where his father ran a hardware store. And Consuelo's mother, née Nielsen, was from Minneapolis, where the Nielsens were regarded as part of that city's Dumb Swede population. Did that make the Bannings Old Guard Philadelphia Main Line? Connie herself thought not. “Where does the press get this stuff?” she used to ask her husband.

“Never correct the press,” he used to say to her, “if you want to keep the press your friend. Besides, the fewer hard facts the media know about you, the better off you are. Always.”

And he didn't mind reading that he was married to an Old Guard Main Line heiress. How grand that sounded!

The press elevated all three Banning sisters into the firmament of Philadelphia's aristocracy. George Banning managed—with help from that blue-blooded client who really should have gone to jail—to get his three daughters presented at the Philadelphia Assembly, very definitely an Old Guard Main Line affair. And all three had gone on to make “brilliant” marriages, which was to say marriages to very rich men, which was precisely what their father wanted for them.