Goey and me at the pool by our house in Villefranche.
Finally, one Saturday before I went home, he asked if he could take me to dinner the next evening, since there were no performances to stage-manage on Sunday nights. He picked me up in his old red Ford convertible, I remember that part, but nothing of the dinner or what we talked about. It’s what happened afterward that still reverberates in my body when I think about it. Goey and I drove to the pier at the end of the Kennedy compound right near our house, walked out to the very end of it, and stood looking out at the setting sun. I didn’t know what to say, so I just stood still. Hoping. Heart racing so loud I was sure he could hear it. Then he put his hands on my shoulders, turned me to him, and looked deeply into my eyes. His look was so long and intense that I felt embarrassed and started to pull away, but he wouldn’t let me. He held me firm and then, with his eyes still looking into mine, slowly pulled me into him. My body swooned against him, my knees buckled, and he had to hold me to keep me from falling, which made him laugh while he was kissing me, a laugh of pleasure. When our lips parted I stepped back and had to sit down,
plunk.
Everything was swirling: the sea, the sky.
The sky!
I will never forget the sky, the way it looked right then. It was a different color from what it had been two minutes before, all covered with a shimmering haze. Hemingway’s line “And the earth moved” came to me. This is what he meant! I thought. The earth is moving.
It was my first swoon, and while it wouldn’t be my last, there’s something about that first swoon—and the boy who caused it. Goey and I became an item. We were together every spare minute for the rest of that summer. I was eighteen, he was twenty, and we seemed so much younger than most kids that age seem today. Though we kissed endlessly and exchanged furtive caresses in the moonlight, we never made love, and I relished the sweet pleasure of postponement. It was the best summer of my so-far life.
Dad brought his new woman friend up to Hyannis Port. She was a Venetian woman in her thirties, with green eyes, red hair, and a certain hard-sell charm that Peter and I mistrusted instantly. “Phony” was the word that came to both our minds. We figured he intended to marry her, since he never exposed us to girlfriends unless marriage was at hand. We sensed immediately that this was no Susan, no cozy, openhearted stepmother, but we were just enough older that it didn’t matter as much as it would have earlier. In some ways my relationship with my father seemed to grow even more distant the closer to womanhood I got, and his choosing to bring this Italian woman into his life created further distance. But I loved him dearly, and his long shadow was still the defining factor of my life.
I
had been trying (sequentially) to lose my virginity for at least a year and a half with three different boyfriends, but it hadn’t worked in the total-penetration sense—almost, but not quite. It fell in the “but I didn’t inhale” category. (This technicality matters if you’re trying to prove to yourself that your “down there” is normal.) My persistent virginity just sort of sloughed away incrementally and—as Carrie Fisher wrote in
Surrender the Pink—
“not because it was so large that it took three times to knock it out.” It was more that my body simply said,
Sorry, not ready.
(I couldn’t call what we did making love because it wasn’t, and I didn’t know then that the love part would be important to me. After all, it hadn’t been important to Carol Bentley, or so she said.) Later on I remember listening (sequentially) rapt and envious as two of my husbands told me of their own first times.
Vadim had lost his virginity rapturously in a haystack in France during World War II. As he wrote later in
Memoirs of the Devil,
when he climaxed, the ceiling of the barn “began to move. The ground trembled. . . . An apocalyptic rumbling filled the air.” Vadim assumed at first this was the result of his orgasm (the Hemingway factor again). What had happened, however, was that he had chosen to lose his cherry “at one of the great moments of history: zero hour, 6 June 1944—the first wave of the Allied landings in Normandy”—and the barn was only a few kilometers from the coast.
Ted Turner, on the other hand, didn’t make love until he was nineteen years old, but when it happened it was such an epiphany he “did it again ten minutes later” (a story he told me on our second date and often thereafter for ten years, if there was someone around who hadn’t heard it before).
I can make no such life-altering claims. I simply don’t remember. I know that it happened with Goey that fall at Yale. I do have an acute memory of how it felt the first time we spent an entire weekend alone together during a blizzard at a small farm his family had in upstate New York: having a whole house to ourselves, not having to worry about noise, waking up in the same bed, taking baths together, him teaching me to make whiskey sours. That part I remember. Just not the sex.
Having a steady boyfriend who was writing a classical drama validated me. I decided to ask for a dorm room of my own at Vassar, preferably a tiny garret where I could appropriately wallow in existential angst, recite speeches from Shakespeare, listen to Mozart and Gregorian chants, and read Kant into the night.
In the mid-1950s, most of the girls I knew didn’t go to college to learn where their interests and talents lay in order to prepare for a profession. It was what they did until they got hitched. And they were dropping like flies. Carol Bentley left Vassar in our second year to get married, and so did Brooke Hayward. Most Americans then believed that there was something wrong with a girl if she wasn’t at least engaged by the time she left college. Not me. Much as I enjoyed my relationship with Goey, I was never tempted to consider marriage. In this one area, at least, I had the good sense to know that if I got hooked to one man at that point in my life, I’d get stuck someplace I didn’t belong.
O
ne day during sophomore year I got a call from the headmaster of Westminster, the boarding school Peter had graduated to, telling me that Peter had flipped out and I should come get him.
When I arrived I found him hiding in some bushes, his hair bleached light blond. He asked me to call him Holden Caulfield, the antihero in J. D. Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye;
Holden is kicked out of his prep school because he refuses to adjust to the phoniness he finds there. I bundled Peter up to take him—where could I take him? “Home,” Dad’s house in New York, wouldn’t do because Dad was away working someplace and we weren’t allowed to stay there alone. I couldn’t keep him with me at Vassar. So I called Aunt Harriet in Omaha. Peter ended up living with her and Uncle Jack for four years.
When he first arrived they had him tested to see if he was crazy; the answer was that he needed help. They also tested whether or not he should repeat a grade; it turned out he had an IQ of over 160—in the genius category. So he began psychoanalysis (with financier Warren Buffett’s father-in-law) and entered the University of Omaha. Peter was the nonconformist who “acted out.” Psychotherapist Terrence Real writes in
I Don’t Want to Talk About It
that acting-out boys are “little protesters, sit-down strikers refusing to march off into the state of alienation we call manhood. . . . We usually call these boys delinquents.” People would say about Peter, “Well, he’s just looking for attention,” and I’d nod in agreement, thinking, Why can’t Peter just grow up? Today, if I heard adults saying that about a kid like Peter, I’d shout, “So why don’t you give him some of the attention he’s looking for
before
he starts acting out, some
loving
attention!”
I acted out, too, in my way. But I was much more ready to buy into the system than Peter ever was. I never ventured too close to the edge. I knew how to play both sides—almost getting into big trouble but never really.
Aside from my relationship with Goey, nothing much remains from the two years I spent at Vassar. I drank too much, didn’t study enough in spite of my good intentions, “experimented among the passions,” became hooked on Dexedrine, got better grades than I deserved, and wasn’t inspired by my teachers. I’ve learned over the years that for me to want to study, it can’t be the generic liberal arts approach. I have to understand
why
I am learning, what I’m learning
for,
have to feel the
need
to learn because it relates in a palpable way to my life, to what I am
doing.
For the last twelve years or so, because of my nonprofit work with youth and families, I have needed to know why people behave as they do and what causes them to change. So I devour books on psychology, relational theory, behavioral sciences, early child development, international development, and women’s biographies. But at Vassar I didn’t know what I was learning
for.
In my final music-history exam, I used my exam book to draw pictures of women screaming. A few days later, when I was called into the dean’s office, I fully expected to be told I had flunked out. Instead I was told that they understood I was going through a difficult emotional time because my father had just married again (the Italian), so I would be allowed to take the music exam over. This seemed preposterous. I didn’t feel emotionally upset over Dad’s marriage—I was inured by then—and I found it disturbing to be let off the hook that way. I wanted and needed to be held accountable for my actions, to be challenged. That’s when I decided I was wasting my time and Dad’s money and that I should leave.
I told Dad that I hadn’t finished my exams and didn’t want to go back to college in the fall, and then I found myself telling him that I wanted to go to Paris to study painting. The truth is I wasn’t entirely sure that was what I wanted, and I secretly hoped Dad would save me from myself and say no. Maybe he was distracted by his new wife. Maybe the two of them wanted me out of their hair. Whatever the reason, he agreed to let me go.
The summer of 1957 Dad rented a villa on the French Riviera near the town of Villefranche, which still retained the charm of a small fishing village. The villa was large, with a generous front yard, a pool, and a lawn rolling straight out to the edge of the rocky cliffs that rose at least one hundred feet above the Mediterranean. They did a lot of entertaining all summer long—or rather Afdera, his wife, entertained. Dad had never been part of the international jet set. It was touching to watch him try to disguise his discomfort and fit in, usually by hiding behind his camera. I loved that about him.
The luminaries of the international elite would come and go: Gianni and Marella Agnelli; Jacqueline de Ribes; Princess Marina Cicconia and her brother, Bino; Count and Countess Volpi and their son, Giovanni; Senator Kennedy and Jackie. Elsa Maxwell, the internationally known “hostess with the mostest,” had rented the adjacent villa. We visited Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis on his enormous yacht, the
Christina—
which had a Picasso hanging in the living room, gold-leafed faucets in the bathrooms, a mosaic swimming pool, and always many pretty girls with secrets in their eyes who talked easily with men who owned Picassos. We paid a visit to Picasso in his nearby studio. We met Jean Cocteau, Ernest Hemingway, and Charlie Chaplin. I was continually speechless.
One afternoon when Dad and Afdera were entertaining, Greta Garbo came over with a female companion. After a perfunctory drink with the guests, she and her friend went into the house and came out wearing terry-cloth robes and white rubber swimming caps, the serious kind worn by professional swimmers. Garbo asked if I wanted to go swimming in the sea with her. You could have fanned me with a brick. Greta Garbo! By the way, she was the only guest all summer who expressed interest in leaving the social scene and walking down the steep steps carved into the cliffs to swim in the sea. I had done it myself only a few times—it was a long way down and the water was cold. But down we went—Garbo, her companion, and me. When we got to where the waves broke over the rocks, Garbo threw off her robe to reveal her
naked
athletic body, stepped out to the farthest rock, and did a perfect dive into the water—none of the dipping toes in first, then knees, the “let’s get used to it gradually” approach I preferred. I reminded myself that she was Scandinavian, after all, held my breath, and threw myself in after her (wearing a bathing suit, of course). She swam vigorously for quite a ways without stopping, then turned and swam back, meeting up with me as I was trying to catch up. We bobbed about, treading water and looking at each other. Garbo’s face was luminous and utterly pure, not a trace of makeup.
Then, in that throaty
Ninotchka
voice, she asked me, “Are you going to be an actress?”
I was stunned that she had asked me about myself.
“No,” I said, “I don’t have talent.”
“Well,” said Garbo, “I bet you do, and you’re pretty enough to be one.”
Oh my God!
“Thank you,” I said, swallowing a mouthful of salty water while my thoughts careened about:
She’s just being polite. But wait a minute—someone who leaves the party to go swimming nude doesn’t say things just to be polite. But how could Garbo think I’m pretty?
We crawled out onto the rocks to dry in the sun, and I noticed that her body was healthy and athletic but not pinup beautiful. This made me feel good: Maybe you could be adored even if you didn’t have a perfect figure. I remember climbing up the steps to the house behind Garbo and trying to hide the Cheshire Cat grin I could feel spreading across my face.
The village of Villefranche is just to the west of Monaco, the small independent kingdom then ruled by Prince Rainier and his wife, Grace Kelly. On the curve of the Monte Carlo harbor was the resort and casino where the rich and famous gambled. Every Saturday night in the summer there would be a gala ball where the jet set would dine, drink champagne, and dance under the stars. At the evening’s close there would be an astonishing display of fireworks. Afdera arranged blind dates for me with the sons of rich counts or industrialists; I think she was hoping I would marry one—probably to get me out of the New York house but also because it would add to her cachet. I was never tempted to get serious with any of the men I met at the time—the upper-crust idle rich—any more than with the Ivy Leaguers I had met in school. I needed someone who could take me into other worlds—not of wealth but of passion and intensity. I needed a rebel, an adventurer, an outsider.