The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (14 page)

Of course, Leopold the god was right. Only he understood. From that moment on, passionately in love and under Leopold’s spell, I cut my mother out of my life and left her without a penny. I assuaged any guilt or doubts I felt by telling myself that Thelma had a multimillion-dollar divorce settlement from Lord Marmaduke Furness that she would share with her, and they would live happily together ever after.

From that day in 1945 until 1960, I did not see or talk to my mother even once.

I
didn’t know you cut her out of your life. It’s hard for me to imagine you doing that, but you were a very different person then. You were so passive in many ways, so easily influenced by others. DeCicco told you to marry him, and you did. Then Stokowski wanted to marry you and have you cut off your mother, and so you agreed.

At the risk of sounding like an armchair therapist, do you think your attraction to a sixty-three-year-old man had something to do with your wanting a father figure?

Oh, absolutely!
But at the time, the fact that he was so much older did not occur to me. I thought of him as ageless. Of course, now I see it in a different light. Being attracted to someone who was forty-three years older was
the act of a fatherless girl who was desperately seeking a dad, but back then, I didn’t realize that, and I didn’t understand my mother’s reaction. I was astonished and bewildered. The indifference she had always had toward me had turned into hostility.

However, it all happened much, much too quickly. You can’t spend just three weeks with a person and decide to get married, but that is exactly what I did. I met him in December, went to get my divorce in April, and we married in Reno on the day it became final.

There were moments when a voice inside my head would say, “Wait, wait! After years of DeCicco calling you Fatsy-roo and giving you black eyes, take some time to find out what you really want.” But alas, these moments were fleeting. I should have remained unattached, and allowed myself to figure out who I really was, but Leopold’s love was a force I couldn’t resist. I was deeply in love as well, and flattered he wanted me to be his wife.

The first summer we were married, he was conducting at the Hollywood Bowl, so we moved to his house in Los Angeles. Then we moved to New York, into a penthouse apartment at 10 Gracie Square. That is where I got pregnant, first with Stan, then two years later with Chris.

Y
ou write that “it all happened too quickly,” as though marrying him were beyond your control. I know you were insecure and young, but you had so many options. It obviously didn’t feel like that to you at the time. I think back to when I was twenty-one and just graduating from college. I realize now I also had options, but I wasn’t aware that I did. When I decided to start going to war zones to shoot stories, it felt like that was the only path I could take. I had to make that work. I had no plan B.

Given how low your self-esteem was, what was it like when you became a mother for the first time? You were twenty-six when you gave birth to Stan. Was motherhood what you thought it would be?

Being a mother wasn’t
what I expected at all. I was sure I would have a girl, and it was a shock not to; the second time, another shock, and then again and again. Little did I know that you, Carter, Stan, and Chris would be the greatest joys of my life.

Every time I’ve been pregnant I believed I was doing the most important thing in the world. But afterward, I really didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t relaxed and could never nurse
for long. I felt tremendous guilt, as if there were something wrong with me.

I wanted to correct the mistakes my mother made with me, but I didn’t know how. I read books on parenting, but none gave me the answers I was seeking. I fantasized about creating a large family, but my dreams were simplistic, and I kept reaching out blindly for some kind of road map to follow. I thought God Leopold could lead the way, but it turned out that, obsessed by his work, he knew as little about parenting as I did, though he had three other children by previous marriages. Also he wasn’t around very often. He was touring constantly, and the choice was to either go around the world with him and two young children, which I didn’t want to do, or try to create the home I desperately longed for.

Where I failed with Stan and Chris is that I didn’t really talk to them about important things when they were growing up. No one had ever talked to me about anything, so I had no frame of reference. I expressed my love with hugs and affection, but rarely communicated with them about significant events occurring in our lives.

Leopold and I separated in 1954, after nine years of marriage. I remember asking Dr. McKinney, the psychiatrist I had started to see, “What should I say to Stan and Chris?”

“Tell them, ‘I guess you boys have noticed your father and
I haven’t been getting along lately, and we are going to separate,’” he replied.

Well, of course that was true, but it was hardly enough information to give to young kids.

W
hy did you decide to get a divorce from Stokowski?

Leopold was very possessive.
He didn’t want us to have any friends, or have a life beyond the two of us. At first it was romantic, but over the years, it wasn’t easy. In retrospect, I see he was like this because he was probably nervous that I would discover he’d invented his past.

Leopold had told me that he was an illegitimate child related to a royal family and had been brought up in Poland. He claimed his mother died when he was a child, and he said he’d been raised by a governess, who sounded very much like Dodo. This made me feel close and connected to him, but none of it turned out to be true.

He grew up in England, with a brother and parents, and there had been no governess. Everything he had confided in me about himself was a lie. I had told him everything about myself, but he hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me the truth. His real background wouldn’t have made any difference to me, but the fact that he lied to me, deceiving me into loving a fantasy he’d created, did matter.

I began to discover his deception only when he took me to meet the woman he claimed was his governess. We were on a train to Bournemouth, where she was in a nursing home, and as he talked about her, I started to realize this woman really was his mother. That was the beginning of the end. He wasn’t the god I had made him out to be.

But I really got the power to leave Stokowski only when I met Frank Sinatra. He was in New York playing at the Copacabana for a couple of weeks, and he asked Jule Stein to introduce us. That’s when I moved out of our apartment and took the kids with me.

The divorce was very bitter. Leopold fought for custody of the children, which dragged on for more than a year. He didn’t think I would be willing to go through a custody battle, given the trial I had experienced as a child, but he underestimated me. I was willing to fight, and I won. He was granted visitation rights.

With the passing of time, however, I now remember much that was magical about our relationship. No longer is he a monster who tried to take my children from me. He is, once again, the genius I first encountered. He and Howard Hughes were among the most extraordinary men I’ve ever known.

There was nobody like Leopold. He was supportive about my painting and other creative pursuits. He never put me down or spoke harshly to me, and that was a huge encouragement.
He always built me up, making me feel that I was the most beautiful, extraordinary woman. I’d never had anyone do that for me except Howard Hughes, in our brief relationship. His great love for me helped my self-esteem enormously.

If I could rewrite the story of our marriage, I would, but the deeds are done. Nothing can be changed, only the memories shuffled, making it possible to forgive him and myself for what went wrong between us.

I
t is nice that you can look back on your relationship with him and see the positive things he did for you despite how it all ended. That certainly is a mark of maturity that many people are not capable of.

I love the pictures I’ve seen of you and Sinatra together. You look so beautiful and happy. What was Sinatra like?

Does one ever know
what another person is really like, even someone very close to us? Do we know what we are like ourselves? What we are today may not be what we are tomorrow.

I can only tell you what he was like to me, first as a lover and later as a lifelong friend. As lover, he made me believe I was the most important person in the world to him. As a friend, I knew I could always depend on him.

AP Photo.

Sinatra was a knight in shining armor who came and rescued me from Stokowski. I never expected that we would stay together for very long, and we didn’t—only about three weeks—but it gave me a gigantic boost to suddenly have him in my life.

Of course, today I could rescue myself. I wouldn’t need a knight to come along, but it has taken a lot of time to sort it out and come to that place.

I
do think it curious you felt the need to be rescued by Sinatra or by any man. I’ve always felt I had to rescue myself, and not depand on anyone else to. I am not saying my way of thinking is better, but the idea of waiting for a knight in shining armor to come along is foreign to me.

I think men are something of a mystery to you. I remember when I was a teenager, and you were in a relationship with a man who was married. For years he kept telling you he was going to divorce his wife and move in with you. Every time you mentioned this to me, I thought it was obvious he was lying, and I assumed you knew but just didn’t care.

I never told you what I thought about his empty promises until I realized you actually believed them. When I finally told you he wasn’t being honest, you seemed genuinely surprised. After all the men you have known, you still don’t understand them very well at all.

That’s absolutely true.

Your father once said to me, “You respect and trust women more than you do men.”

He was right. Could it be because I grew up without any men in my life? My mother’s suitors came in and out of the house in Paris, escorting her to dinners and parties, but I never talked to them. I was told to curtsy, and say, “How do you do?” That was it.

Later, when I lived with Auntie Ger, there were no men I really knew. After my embarrassment when I asked her attorney, Frank Crocker, if he would be my father, even if an appropriate candidate for a father figure had come along, I doubt I would have risked another rejection. For much of my life, men seemed always just out of reach, unknowable. Like an octopus, I stretched out my tentacles, desperately hoping to latch on to someone floating by who would give me the stability I so sorely lacked. I always hoped and believed that if a man loved me, everything that was wrong in my life would be put right.

So many of my early beliefs about men were formed by the fairy tales Dodo occasionally read to me: Cinderella rescued
by Prince Charming from her wicked stepsisters. I would fall asleep dreaming a prince was waiting out there somewhere; all I needed to do was grow up so we could move into his castle, where we would live happily ever after.

It is in my nature to be romantic, and for me that meant falling in love with someone strong, tall, and handsome; someone to look up to, who adored me, and who would take care of me while I doted on them.

Keep in mind, these ideas I’m revealing come from a time now past, but I held on to them far longer than I should have. Except for DeCicco, I have been blessed with great love, but after Leopold’s betrayal, it was difficult for me once more to give a man all of myself.

It is only through knowing you, Carter, your father, and Sidney Lumet that I came to respect and trust men as I do women. I came to stand free and clear of crippling fears, the sobbing in the dark.