The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (13 page)

While Pat was in the army, I lived in a small rented house in Junction City, Kansas, for two years. I would see him on weekends, when he had leave. I didn’t look forward to his arrival. He would constantly put me down, calling me Fatsy-roo—and then there were his violent rages. He would scream at me and slap me.

I was so ashamed, and I didn’t have anyone I could talk to about what was going on. I obviously shouldn’t have made such a hasty decision to marry him, but my mother had moved so quickly to make it happen.

Auntie Ger had died four months after the wedding, which left me stunned. We hadn’t spoken, because she was so opposed to my marrying Pat, and no one had told me she was even ill. I went to her funeral in New York, and in the car on the way back to my hotel, I completely collapsed, hysterical. I was so unhappy and miserable, and now I believed there was no one I could trust to help me out of this huge, awful mistake.

T
hough she was distant and reserved, your aunt had tried to bring a level of stability to your life that you had never experienced. I found a box of letters from her in storage last week and have sent them to you. She seemed to express things in writing that she never actually said to you in person, offering to “talk things over” with you and telling you how much she cared about you. In the letters, it was clear that she loved you and wanted to reach out to you. If only she had been able to express that to you when you were living with her all those years.

So many
of the sweet words she wrote to me in letters when I was in Los Angeles that terrible summer were sentiments she had never been able to directly express to me. After you sent me that box of letters and I went through them, I wrote her a letter. It made me feel a little better, and perhaps somehow, somewhere, she will hear of it.

I
wonder what would have happened if you hadn’t married Pat DeCicco and had instead gone back to New York to live with Gertrude. She died in April 1942, so you would have been nearly finished with high school. Assuming you didn’t marry Howard Hughes, you might have gone on to college or art school.

I think about that
a lot, what might have been. Instead, I lived in Junction City for two years while Pat was stationed at Fort Riley. In 1942, on a quick trip to Washington, DC, we met Senator Happy Chandler. He seemed a happy fellow indeed, and if he wasn’t, he certainly imitated one well. Pat and Happy really hit it off, both telling lots of jokes that I never found funny, though I would laugh along with them. Pat was soon calling him his new best friend, and together they were a merry Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

One evening, when I joined them at a restaurant in Washington, Pat told me that Happy had the clout to turn him from a first lieutenant into a captain if only we could come up with ten thousand dollars in cash to give him. Both Pat and Happy kept looking expectantly at me as we sat around the table.

Not yet twenty-one, I hadn’t gained access to the money I was going to inherit, receiving a monthly allowance instead. Pat knew this, but when we got back to our hotel, he started shouting at me. “Sit your ass down and get Hughes on the phone. Tell him you need to borrow ten grand; you’ll pay him back when you are twenty-one. And Fatsy-roo, don’t be a dummy and tell him what it’s for.”

“I can’t do that,” I replied, and started to cry.

Pig-eyed with fury, he snatched the phone and shoved it into my chest.

Terrified, I called Howard, whom I hadn’t spoken to since my engagement to Pat was announced.

When Howard picked up the phone, his only response was, “I thought you were calling to say you were coming back to me.”

Howard and I never spoke again, and Pat did not get the undeserved promotion.

P
eople stay in relationships for all kinds of reasons, but you did have options. You could have returned to your mother or moved back to New York. You had attorneys and a legal guardian, Surrogate James Foley, who controlled the money being held in a trust for you. Why didn’t you leave DeCicco?

Oh, darling, why does anyone
stay in an awful marriage? I knew I had made a horrendous mistake, but I didn’t see an easy way out. I was an insecure eighteen-year-old who had never felt connected to her family, and I didn’t think I had anywhere else to go. Auntie Ger wouldn’t want me back after the way I behaved—or so I thought.

The first time I remember having a glimmer of belief in myself was when I was riding on a train back to Junction City after a visit to Los Angeles. In the seat across from me sat an
older man, and next to him, his son. I was immersed in Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
when suddenly I heard my name. I looked up from my book, but the men continued their conversation, clearly oblivious that the person they were gossiping about was sitting just an arm’s length away.

“So sad, that Vanderbilt girl, just a kid from such a well-known family, with so much to look forward to. Why didn’t someone do something to stop her from marrying a gigolo clearly after her money?”

My face stinging, I wanted to bolt out of the compartment and jump off the train, but I just sat there paralyzed.

“People say DeCicco murdered his first wife, that actress Thelma Todd. Wonder how he got Gloria to marry him. She’s just a kid in her teens, and he’s so much older, in his thirties.”

I continued to sit with my head down in my book, as they chatted on—about my mother (saying hateful things) and Auntie Ger (who came out swell), but always returning to DeCicco and me.

“Surely she can only come to a bad end starting out like that.”

Would I come to a bad end? It frightened me to hear it said out loud, so evident even to strangers.

We arrived in Junction City and stood in a long line slowly making our way off the train. Did I dare? Did I have the courage?

I tapped the older man on the shoulder and he turned around. “I’m Gloria Vanderbilt,” I said.

He was speechless. His face dissolved in embarrassment and dismay; his son’s as well. I thought they both might faint.

For me, though, there was a feeling of hope. I’d made a decision and had the guts to speak up for myself for the first time.

On the eve of being shipped overseas, Pat DeCicco came down with septicemia, which in those days was a life-threatening illness. He recovered but was discharged from the army. My mother finally left him in January 1945, after three years of marriage. She returned to New York one month before she turned twenty-one and inherited a trust that was then worth more than four million dollars.

Knowing I would soon receive
my inheritance, I became more confident in myself, but what made me decide to leave Pat was that I got really scared of him. He would go into these dark rages, slapping and punching me. I finally told him I wanted a divorce, and left him shortly before my twenty-first birthday. His close confidant and gambling buddy Joe Schenck called me and said I could get a divorce if I paid Pat two hundred thousand dollars. There was no reason
to give him anything. I could have easily gotten an annulment; but I wanted him out of my life fast.

“Okay, Joe,” I said. And that was that.

When I turned twenty-one I started having a lot of fun. I was the girl of the moment. People were making a big fuss over me, and for the first time in years I was going out with friends my own age. The war was about to end, and it was an incredibly exciting time to be in New York. Not only that, but it was the year I inherited this wad of money from my father’s estate, and as you might guess, I had no trouble spending it. The money meant I could take care of my beloved Naney and Dodo, whom I was able to see regularly once again, and I showered them with presents.

I also started supporting my mother financially. Despite her behavior the summer I lived with her in Los Angeles, and the hasty wedding she’d orchestrated, which had been a way for her to get back at Auntie Ger and protect her own financial future, I was drawn in again by her charm and beauty. I started to believe that maybe she did love me a little after all. I included her in the bounty bestowed upon me by the Vanderbilt money, giving her a hefty allowance and agreeing to her suggestion that we live together in an apartment on Park Avenue in New York.

B
y pushing you to marry Pat DeCicco, how was your mother getting back at Gertrude and protecting her own future?

If I was married
under her auspices, it meant that I had sided with her, and no matter what the court had decreed in the custody trial, it made my mother feel like she had won in the end. She would get back at Gertrude by showing the world that she was in control of my life and that Gertrude no longer had any say in it. Also by connecting herself to me, she had a better chance of being able to get money from me.

One night I went to a party and met the conductor Leopold Stokowski. He appeared like a god. We were instantly attracted to each other, and it bowled me over to have this great genius suddenly madly in love with me. I couldn’t wait to tell my mother. How proud she would be that this brilliant man was crazy about me and wanted to marry me.

But when I told her, she pulled back, flabbergasted and furious. It was the only time I ever saw her express anger.

“He’s sixty-three! An old man!” she said, raising her voice. “You’re just twenty-one. It’s disgusting.”

Did she honestly believe that, or did she know that if I married Leopold, the plans I’d recently made for her to live with
me would no longer be possible? The lease on the apartment had already been signed and the place was ready for us to move into. She had envisioned herself romping around town, lunching at the Colony, or hosting little dinners
chez nous
with this or that whomever. Her social position would again be secure, while I danced the nights away at El Morocco or the Stork Club.

Of course, this didn’t occur to me at the time. She agreed to meet Leopold only once, and the hatred on both sides was evident. She was not even influenced by the fact that Greta Garbo, whom she so admired, had had a long, serious love affair with him. He could have married Garbo, but instead he chose insignificant me. I was certainly impressed, but not my mother.

“It’s
disgusting
!” she kept repeating after she had met him, her voice louder than I had ever heard it as it spun around the room. I was in tears after I left her, and stuttered as I tried to tell Leopold of my encounter with her and repeat the vile words she had said about him. He sat back in the chair, steady, calm, silent, sagely taking it all in, as I attempted to articulate the fears I’d had about her since the day I was born. But it was coming out tangled, too complicated to explain.

I kept on trying until he held up his hand, silencing me, then took me in his arms gently, quietly, with complete authority and simplicity, saying, “She
never
gave you love. It was Dodo who gave you love.”