The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (10 page)

I hadn’t applied for any jobs my senior year of college because I felt so confused after Carter’s death. Once school was finished, and I’d taken some time to travel, I asked a friend to make me a fake press pass so I could go to war zones with a camera to shoot stories, but I didn’t know that it would lead to a lifelong career. It was just something I felt I had to do.

My drive certainly comes
from the experiences I had early on, the fear, and all the other feelings that built up in me as a child. Because I had the same name as my mother, as an adult it became of utmost importance to me to work under the name I was born with. Although I have never told you or any one else, I did this because I believed that if I succeeded in writing, or acting, or painting, it would expiate in some mysterious and secret way the public vilification of my mother and free her to love me as I longed to be loved. Can you understand this? My wish, though fervent, was like water passing through a sieve, but it continued throughout my life, and in many ways still does.

Something else that motivated me early on was an article I accidentally saw during the custody case, in a copy of the
Daily News
that had been left in the kitchen in Old Westbury. There was a photo of me heading into court under the headline “Poor Little Rich Girl.”

It was the first time I saw that phrase. I was stunned, confused. Was
that
who I was? I didn’t feel “poor,” and I didn’t feel “rich.” I felt like a ten-year-old girl with hopes and dreams who couldn’t wait to grow up and find out what it would be like to be a
person.
I was being branded with word-play
so catchy that it would stick. I was terrified it would be with me forever.

I did not want to be the “Poor Little Rich Girl,” and it made me determined to make something of my life. I’ve never been able to admit how intensely it motivated me. I’m not even sure I should admit it now, but it no longer matters. I have achieved many of the things I wanted to in my life, and the sting is gone.

I remember an interviewer on a local news show in Chicago once said to me, “Why do you work so hard? If I were Gloria Vanderbilt, I would be on a beach somewhere.”

That always stuck in my mind. It says more about the interviewer than it does about me. It should be everyone’s right to nourish and develop the talents they have, and in so doing add their contribution to the world, however large or small. Why should someone born into a wealthy family be any different? None of us chooses the situation into which we are born. To think that if you are from a rich family you should not want to achieve something on your own is a foreign idea to me.

As for you, Anderson, you have always had a fierce drive, a burning desire to make a name for yourself. For a long time I don’t think people even knew you were related to the Vanderbilt family.

T
hat was intentional on my part. I didn’t want to be burdened by other people’s judgments and assumptions. I didn’t want people to think I was just dabbling in journalism and/or that reporting was a hobby.

A lot of people probably believe that you don’t have to work, either, but I’ve always been impressed that you’ve never let others define who you are or what you care about.

The first time you told me that you didn’t read anything about yourself, I thought it strange, but now I understand why you don’t. I’m guessing it was something you learned early on, after being written about in tabloids during the custody trial.

I did an experiment recently and stayed off Twitter for a weekend, and I was so much happier without reading strangers’ comments about me. It’s hard to calculate just how destructive other people’s opinions can be.

Yes, I would hate that. I
find the idea of Twitter fascinating, but I have no desire to join it. People revealing things they feel at the moment that can’t ever be taken back—a lot of people are going to regret the things they’ve said.

The craving to be famous is like an insidious disease. No matter how well known you become, it’s never enough; it never satisfies.

I have never let myself dwell on other people’s opinions of me. Perhaps they thought I was dabbling in acting, painting, or writing, but it doesn’t touch me. If that is what they think, so be it. You can never change their minds, so why waste time trying? Why agonize over it? Better to concentrate on more important things.

I
t has taken me a long time to figure that out. I try not to read what people write about me, but it’s sometimes hard to ignore. Also I think it’s important for me professionally to be open to criticism. I still have a lot to learn, and want to get better at what I do. I don’t ever want to feel too comfortable in my career.

Well, I can certainly
understand that, but I think there is a difference between being open to constructive criticism and letting jealous strangers say cruel things to you that make you feel bad about yourself.

As a child, I had to ignore what people said about me, or else I would have been done in. I would have turned into a pillar of salt. After the custody case and all throughout my teenage years, I was constantly pursued by the press.
The public had formed opinions about me and wanted updates about my life, and newspapers were only too happy to oblige.

I developed a survival tactic: I imagined I had a protective cloak over my shoulders that sheltered me from the storm. I used this often, like when I was thirteen and being confirmed, and photographers followed me up to the altar in the church.

I
know that my father was raised Baptist, but what was your religious background and what do you believe now?

My father’s family
was Episcopalian, and my mother’s Catholic, so I was christened in both faiths. I had no religious instruction until Surrogate Foley, who still had responsibility for me, decided I was to be raised Catholic and should have religious training. Every Friday after school, I was sent for instruction with Father Fealey. I adored him. He always had a little bowl with square, crunchy white mints on a table, and I’d eat them while he rambled on and on. I took it very seriously, but the way he presented things, the horrors of the Crucifixion didn’t sound so bad. Mary Magdalene was the star, as far as I was concerned—naughty and beautiful. What better combination?

I became extremely caught up in it all and decided to be a nun when I grew up. That all changed of course, once boys came into the picture.

My First Holy Communion was a private ceremony in Old Westbury, with no family present. I have to admit I really hadn’t a clue about what was going on, but I did feel a sudden mystical something. Dressed as I was like a bride, in white with a veil, I imagined this was what it must feel like to get married.

The next week, I was confirmed with a large group of girls at another parish, dodging paparazzi as we edged slowly toward the altar. Required to take saints’ names, I chose Regina, in memory of my father, and Francesca because I loved the name. One of the girls in the long line was chattering about what her mom had planned for dinner after the service. I boasted about the mix of delicacies my mom was preparing. Of course, I made it all up.

I still remember the thrill of the confessional! I tremble reliving the awe, the mystery, as I waited to enter the dark cave: the slight “woosh” as I opened the velvet curtain separating me from the priest.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

There were times when I was hard-pressed to come up with a sin. It’s not that I was perfect, but my mind often went blank. I knew it was wrong to receive Holy Communion unless I had gone to confession first, so often I just made something up, letting my imagination run wild.

It was so dark inside that I was never certain if it was Father
Fealey or someone else to whom I was confessing. Whoever it was listened silently and then offered brief counsel before pronouncing, “Five Our Fathers, and fifteen Hail Marys,” or whatever. Clutching my rosary beads, I’d scurry out to kneel in front of the altar.

Soon after my confirmation, I was taken by Auntie Ger and Naney to have tea with Cardinal Spellman at his private quarters in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I felt paralyzed as the three of us sat in the gray Rolls-Royce on our way there, and I felt that way all during the tea party, except when I curtsied meeting the cardinal.

Naney, on the other hand, continued her chatter about our kinship to Saint Ignatius of Loyola, while Auntie Ger, very much at ease, skillfully moved the conversation to more recent topics, graciously trying to involve me by mentioning my activities at Greenvale.

It was as if we were in a play, sitting in that quiet room in the presence of Cardinal Spellman, the horns of taxis and traffic outside muffled to silence by His Eminence.

For an instant, Auntie Ger appeared to me as Saint Gertrude and Naney was Saint Naney Napoléon. As for me? Saint Francesca Regina, of course. Why not? The image lasted only a blink, but last it did.

In the car on our way back to Old Westbury, I longed to confide my illuminating apparition to Auntie Ger and Naney,
but decided it was too risky. Anyway, Naney was so energized by the experience that even Auntie Ger couldn’t get a word in as she chitchatted away.

I no longer attend Mass, but there are times even now when I sense a mist covering that which I gaze on. If I could only penetrate this mist, it would reveal a place I know well.

What am I if no longer an ardent Catholic? An agnostic, I suppose, but I do believe in a mysterious force secretly in charge of our destiny, enabling us to make life bearable and keep moving even when times are tough. The end will turn out as it was always meant to be. Yes, from the beginning, we have nothing to do but wait.

Our choices are preset from the beginning. Whatever direction a person’s life goes in was destined. It was meant to happen in precisely that way, although we do not as yet know why.

I
don’t believe that the end will turn out as it was always meant to and that all we have to do is wait, and I’m not sure you do, either. That sounds like magical thinking.

Everything is predestined? Come on. You have worked relentlessly to give shape to your life, as have I. What about all those people for whom things do not work out? Was it just not meant to be for them?

I don’t mean that
it is going to end up well for me or for anyone else. But I do believe if it doesn’t end well, then there is a reason for that. It’s like finding a piece of a puzzle that completes a picture. Things happen as they are meant to, for better or for worse.

Y
ou really believe that things always happen as they are meant to? I don’t think that’s true. What about accidents? Disasters? Children who die young because they don’t have access to clean water or antibiotics? I don’t think there is a reason those children die. It is senseless death and unfair, not somehow predestined or meant to be. We will just have to agree to disagree on this topic.

Three

After the custody trial was over, my grandmother continued to live in New York and received a regular, though reduced, income from my mother’s trust fund. In addition to supervised visits on weekends, the court also mandated that my mother spend several weeks with her mother each summer.

The summer after
I was confirmed, my mother announced that we were going to go on a brief trip. It was the first time since the custody case that Surrogate Foley, my guardian, permitted her to take me out of New York State. She told me we were going to visit Hollywood.

“Wouldn’t it be fun to meet some of my friends?” she asked.

It certainly would! I knew she was talking about movie stars, and I couldn’t believe it!

The train trip lasted three days but seemed like forever.

Side by side, Tootsie Eleanor and I sat gazing out at the landscape speeding by. I kept singing out, “Hooray for Hollywood, that screwy, ballyhooey, Hollywood . . .”

But I did this only when my mother was in the compartment adjoining ours. I didn’t want her to think I was behaving foolishly, and my voice, wild with excitement, tended to wiggle off-key.

Actually, we saw my mother only now and then. She liked to sleep late, and Wannsie brought her breakfast and lunch on a tray. She would join us at dinner, in the dining car.

We got off the train in Albuquerque for a few minutes, and my mother mingled on the platform with Native Americans in feathered headdresses selling handmade silver and turquoise jewelry.

When she got back on and went into her tiny compartment, she found a huge basket of white peonies with a note attached. For an instant she looked happy, but when she opened the card, her expression soon faded.

“From Maurice . . . how sweet,” she sighed turning away to look out the window at a man holding up a turquoise necklace to get her attention. Maurice Chalom was a very successful French decorator with whom she was involved on and off for several years.

When we arrived in Los Angeles, we ensconced ourselves at the Ambassador Hotel.

My mother had made all sorts of plans. The first was to visit the actress Constance Bennett. She had hired a driver and a Rolls-Royce to take us around during our stay, and we drove
to Beverly Hills, where Bennett lived with the actor Gilbert Roland.

To set foot in their house was to enter a beige-on-beige world: carpeting, furniture, curtains—all different shades of beige. A butler let us in as, side by side, down the winding staircase, descended a gorgeous beige couple.

Bennett wore a long, clinging beige dress. Her softly sculpted beige-blonde hair was coiffed back over her ears, which were clipped with topaz earrings. My mother later remarked admiringly, “She was so thin, if she ate an olive it would show.”

Gilbert Roland wore a beige shirt and slacks with a scarf casually placed around his neck, accenting his handsome face and black, black hair. It was a riveting moment, at least for me!

My mother, ever at ease, was greeted with hugs and kisses, while I sat goggle-eyed, listening to gossip about this and that Hollywood star.

Next stop was the hospital, to see Maureen O’Sullivan, who was recuperating from giving birth to a daughter. I had seen all her movies co-starring Johnny Weissmuller and was stunned that I was now actually sitting in a chair by her bed.

“Is it all right to speak in front of . . .” Maureen whispered to my mother while nodding to me.

“Oh, yes,” my mother assured her, subtly shaking her head. I think she meant talking about giving birth. Of course I was
dying to hear more, but they didn’t pursue the conversation, so I didn’t get any details.

The next night, my mother took me to a party at the Trocadero, on Sunset Boulevard, though she told me I could stay only for a little while, because it was for grown-ups and would continue late into the night. Speechless, I sat with her at a table next to Dolores del Rio, with Loretta Young across from us.

The room was filled with movie stars I had seen only on the silver screen, in dark theaters, but here I was now, sitting with them in real life. And don’t think I wasn’t aware that my mother could hold her own among all that glamour and beauty! As for fatso me—well, there was still time to shed weight, wasn’t there? Fiercely, I would put my mind to it. My heart beat faster as I vowed to achieve this goal, my spirits soaring as I glanced around the candlelit room, gulping it all in. I knew I would soon have to leave and get back into the car parked outside, where Tootsie Eleanor sat waiting to take me back to the Ambassador Hotel.

I was so excited that night I didn’t sleep, going over and over in my mind all I had seen.

A few days later, my mother took me once again to Beverly Hills. “A really big surprise,” she promised, but what could it be? The car stopped outside a house on Rodeo Drive, and she told me it belonged to Marlene Dietrich and that she was expecting us!

As the chauffeur opened the door, my mother said,

“You wait here, Pooks, while I go in for a minute.”

Pooks was a name she occasionally called me when in a good mood. I was beside myself—I was going to meet the most mysterious, glamorous, ravishingly beautiful of all movie stars.

In a drawer in my room at Old Westbury, hidden from everyone (especially Auntie Ger), I kept a twelve-by-fourteen-inch photograph of Dietrich that my mother had asked her to autograph especially for me. And now here I was outside the door of Dietrich’s house about to meet her! Heaven can wait. “This is it,” I thought as I twiddled my thumbs in anticipation.

But my mother didn’t appear. Why was it taking so long?

“What time is it?” I asked the driver.

I knew it must have been at least an hour since she had entered the house. I started getting worried. Maybe something had happened to her?

Finally she came back to the car, and instead of taking me out, she got in beside me and told the driver to take us to back to the Ambassador. “Sorry, but Marlene wasn’t feeling well. You’ll just have to meet her some other time,” she told me. And that was that. We drove back in silence.

Years later, when I was married to Sidney Lumet, he and I went to Marlene’s New York apartment for dinner. She greeted us at the door wearing very little makeup and a nurse’s uniform
with white flat-heel shoes. The only other guest was Ernest Hemingway, who had known my half-sister, Cathleen, in Havana. Sidney and I sat in the living room talking with him while Marlene occupied herself in the kitchen preparing dinner. Now and again she would pop in to join the lively conversation.

It was the first time I had met her, and it seemed surreal indeed. The four of us sat cozily around the table, talking and eating, enjoying the excellent dinner she had cooked, but as far as I was concerned, there was a fifth guest present: my mother.

One Sunday on that Hollywood trip, we had lunch with Maureen O’Sullivan (who was now home from the hospital) and her husband, the director John Farrow. At one point he nodded toward me, whispering to my mother, “She has ‘it.’”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I’d read enough movie magazines to know that Clara Bow had “it,” so “it” must be something fantastic. I spent a lot of time that summer staring at myself in the mirror trying to figure out what he’d seen.

Desperate to be bone-thin like Constance Bennett, or as slim as my beautiful mother, I worried the time away, preoccupied with the belief I would be forever encased in blubber. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I should trust in God and make the best of whatever was bestowed on me. Even if I didn’t turn out to be as beautiful as my mother, I was what I was, and I became determined to make it work. I would look
in the mirror and think, “This is what I am, make the most of it. Trust it. Believe in it. Confidence will prevail!”

In the summer of 1941, before her senior year in high school, my mom was invited by her mother to visit her in Los Angeles. Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt had moved out of New York and was then living with her twin sister, Thelma, in a house in Beverly Hills.

My mother was supposed to stay in California for only two weeks, but when she got there she found herself unsupervised for the first time and decided she didn’t want to return to her aunt and the restricted life she had known in Old Westbury.

It pains me
to recall the events of that summer. I should never have been permitted to visit my mother in Los Angeles when I was seventeen. What a tragic error it was. I cringe at the terrible mistakes I made, the foolish choices. If I hadn’t gone, I would have graduated from high school in 1942. I might have applied to college, or art school, which is what I really wanted to do.

Surrogate Foley approved a two-week trip for me to see my mother, as long as I was accompanied by a chaperone.
What Foley didn’t know was that the chaperone, whose name was Constance, would be chaperoning from a distance, because she wasn’t given a room at my mother’s house. She was sent to a hotel, and there she stayed for a few days alone, without seeing me, until my mother told her she was no longer needed and then—
poof!
—off she went, back to New York. I never set eyes on her again, and though Auntie Ger was dismayed by the turn of events, there was nothing she could do about it.

It was sheer heaven at first. The day I arrived, I had lunch with my mother and Thelma on the patio of their house on Maple Drive. Thelma, who had divorced Lord Furness, was having an affair with a handsome actor named Edmund Lowe.

My magical mother sat beside me as Wannsie brought out a platter of smoked salmon. We sat under an umbrella filtering the sun, fleeting shadows gently altering the faces of my mother and her twin. I listened as they gossiped about their friends, this and that movie star. I was so happy. Why had I ever been afraid of her? Why had we been separated for so long?

But that lunch turned out to be the last.

A few days later a woman named Kitty Kelly suddenly appeared. She was an actress who had started her career in the Ziegfeld Follies and had minor roles in Hollywood in the 1930s and ’40s.

From the minute I saw them together, I sensed something was going on. My passive mother was clearly enchanted by Kitty’s extroverted, brassy personality. They shared secret jokes, and giggled a lot together, acting more like lovers than friends.