The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (15 page)

My mother was thirty-one when her divorce from Stokowski was finally granted, in 1955. By then she had already fallen in love with Sidney Lumet, a director working in theater and television, who would go on to direct a number of legendary films, such as
12 Angry
Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico,
and
Network.
When my mother left Stokowski, she intended to take her sons, Stan and Chris, and move to Los Angeles to pursue acting, but after Sidney came into her life, she once again changed her plans.

Richard Avedon introduced me
to Sidney, telling me, “You may have something to give—each to the other.” He was right. Instantly, Sidney and I fell in love, and just three weeks later, he bought the wedding rings. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get married again, and I certainly didn’t want to that quickly.

At the time, I was in New York in a play called
The Swan
, and Frank Sinatra had come to a rehearsal and asked me to sign a contract with him to appear in three movies he was producing. I was excited and signed the contracts, but Sidney, wildly insecure, worried that if I went to Hollywood, I would remain there and he would lose me, so eventually I asked Sinatra to release me from the contract. I stayed in New York and started studying acting with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse.

There was always part of me that wanted to be a movie star, but when I got involved with Sidney, I dismissed the idea. Had
I thought it through, I could have done at least one movie with Sinatra and seen what happened, but I didn’t. Over time, I began to resent Sidney for the decision I had made.

Sidney was separated from his first wife when I met him, and after he went to Nevada and got his divorce, he quickly returned to New York. “Now we can get married,” he said.

When I suggested, “Let’s wait,” he was devastated. I couldn’t bear to hurt him, so I said yes.

I
t seems so clear now that you had no long-term plan, no sense of direction. You never sat down and really thought about what you wanted. You always allowed men you were involved with to make decisions for you.

That is true. I
went with the flow, rarely having a plan or thinking seriously about the future. When I was in my early teens, I thought, “I want to get married and have a big family and wear an apron in the kitchen, cooking like the mother in the Andy Hardy movies.” That was the kind of dream I wanted to make real. Later, I flirted with the idea of going to college or art school, but instead went to Los Angeles that summer, and all those ideas disappeared.

The future has never had much reality to me. It still doesn’t.

AP Photo/Anthony Camerano.

I wish I had made plans, but that just didn’t seem realistic to me. Even now, I think about death; I think about you, Stan, and Chris, and your futures, but I don’t think about my own, the coming months or years.

I’ve always been way too impulsive for long-term plans. You and I are very different in this way.

T
hat is for sure. I plan all the time, and I think it’s because I grew up knowing you did not. I always sensed, after my father died, that there wasn’t a plan, and it worried me tremendously.

I remember lying awake at night worrying about what I would do when I became an adult, what kind of career I would have, how I would support myself. I would try to figure out how much money I needed to earn to be able to take care of you and Carter and May.

I used to fantasize about having a board of directors I could go to for advice: wise men and women, pillars of the community who would offer me sage counsel. I still kind of like that idea, though I find it very difficult to actually ask anyone for advice or for help. It is something I have rarely ever done.

Throughout your life you have had lawyers and financial advisers, and they must have urged you to plan ahead, but
I’m guessing it just sounded like they were speaking a different language to you

Why don’t you plan ahead?

It never occurred to
me as a child that when I grew older I would have choices and could make plans. The first eight years of my life I had no permanent home. We traveled from one place to the next, in France, England, Switzerland, one hotel or house to another. Dodo and Naney were my only home. We three traveled around with our Vuitton trunks and suitcases, packing and unpacking, living in the moment.

The only inkling about plans came to me filtered through gauzelike whisperings between Naney and Dodo.

Even as a teenager my plans, such as they were, were all short term, urgent, constantly in flux, motivated by random influences, unseen currents, and crises in an ever-shifting sea.

Spinning a wheel of fortune inside my head, my thoughts rattled around, landing on one thing or another: How could I get rid of the stutter that plagued me? Would my attempt at a
Little Women
haircut even remotely resemble Katharine Hepburn’s? (Alas, the answer was no.) How would I lose the fat that encased me? These were some of the random “plans” I pondered, but they led nowhere.

While I was living with Auntie Ger, she never brought up the possibility of my making choices about the direction my life might take; nor did Surrogate Foley who was my legal guardian, ever bring up anything about my future, a long-term look at my life. Although I did dream about what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had no idea that I could make decisions that would determine my future.

It would have reassured me to have a plan, a direction, to move toward, but even as an adult, I have found this elusive. I’ve achieved some of my goals, but rarely in the way I expected. Without plans, I believe in dreams, even if sometimes they melt like ice cream.

D
id anyone ever talk to you about money? Did they prepare you for the money you inherited when you turned twenty-one?

Ah, money, money, money!

It was a shock in February 1945, when I turned twenty-one, and was escorted into the vaults of Bankers Trust by a team of guardians and attorneys congratulating me on the $4.5 million now in my charge. None of it seemed real.

Hard to believe, but no one had ever discussed this inheritance with me. Naney, though obsessed with money, never
said anything; nor did Auntie Ger. I hadn’t a clue how cautious I should be, or how I should handle it.

I wish I had known then that the greatest gift of money is the independence it can give you. If you are lucky enough to have money, learn how to hold on to it, but don’t be a miser, because it will shrivel your insides and start showing on your face in ways that will startle you. “To give is to receive”—and all those other platitudes we come upon now and again—is actually true.

What I did know about money was how to spend it on friends and family, charity, and myself. This is another failing I have to keep close tabs on. But I never doubt that I have the gift of my talents to rely on to make a living. Just when I suspect I am about to fall off the tightrope on which I am balanced, the acrobat pauses, then confidently moves forward. One way or another, a new venture begins and back the money comes!

O
y! It makes me nervous to read that. We have such completely different views on this. I just don’t believe that one can always rely on one’s talents to make money. Talent fades, accidents happen, the world shifts and suddenly a once-prized skill is no longer in demand.

When I was in Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia, I would see people in the market selling whatever possessions they
had to earn money. The jobs they once held no longer existed. I bought a broken pocket watch from an elderly man. I didn’t need it, but I wanted to help him, and he refused to accept a gift.

In war, societies are turned upside down. If you can fix a motor or wire electricity, you can become a king, but if you have a less practical skill, you will struggle to survive.

When I was a teenager I overheard you on the phone one night telling a friend, “Well, I will always be able to do something to make money.”

I froze hearing that. It went against everything I believed, and it still does.

What surprises me about you is that unlike many people who inherit money, you have always had a tremendous drive, a need to create and achieve. I think that is rare. How many children of wealthy or accomplished parents have gone on to make their own mark?

Early on, you and Daddy told me that I would not be inheriting any money and would be on my own financially after college. I’m thankful for that. I never wanted a trust fund, and it has always bothered me when people assumed I had one.

While I was proud of your success, it wasn’t mine. I wanted to achieve something on my own.

I am not pretending to be a self-made man. I grew up with
tremendous privileges and advantages that others did not. You paid for my education outright, and I have been lucky in countless other ways. But had I believed there was a financial cushion to fall back on, I probably would have made different choices, and I doubt I would have been as driven. I certainly wouldn’t have started working when I was twelve as a child model in order to save up money, calling an agent every day after school to see what auditions or “go sees” there were for me.

Knowing I would have to find my own way financially is another reason I paid more attention to the Cooper side of our family history than I did to the Vanderbilt side. I didn’t feel like any good would come of thinking of myself as a Vanderbilt, and I still don’t.

Your father was born
into a family that didn’t have much money, and he wanted you to understand money’s value and the importance of hard work. I certainly agreed with his thinking. I’d seen enough of what money could do to families and wanted you to grow up without the feeling of entitlement so many children of wealthy parents seem to inherit.

People who are given trust funds often sit back on their duffs and do nothing. For me, work is the key. The money I have earned through work is the only money I respect. The
money I inherited never belonged to me. I felt as though I’d received it under false pretenses. I had not earned it.

M
oney is supposed to bring stability to one’s life, but your lack of planning has often meant you were surrounded by chaos. I’ve never understood why you seem comfortable with that chaos. I’ve worked hard to avoid uncertainty. It is another reason I was so eager to become an adult, so that I could impose order and structure on my life.

I think you would be much happier if you weren’t so used to having chaos around you, but I don’t think you can allow that kind of stability in your life. It’s not something you’ve ever had.

Chaos does not frighten
me. On the contrary, I am comfortable with it. Chaos is my natural habitat. Part of me does long for stability, and always has, but whenever I’ve achieved it, I haven’t been able to let it last. Restlessness is rooted in my nature.

Dorothy Parker wrote, “They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.” And I think that is very true. I was formed by chaos, even before the custody trial, it was always present, although I wasn’t able to identify it as such. There was Naney, always agitating, planning, plotting, and whispering; and my
mother, moving from one rented house to another, in Paris, Cannes, and London.

Chaos is part of me, like a tattoo.

T
attoos fade, though. They can even be removed.

Yes, but it’s very painful
to remove a tattoo from one’s skin. It takes a long time; you have to go back again and again for sessions.

Am I ever content? Of course, but rarely. Perhaps just momentarily.

Do you know the story by E. B. White, “The Second Tree from the Corner”? On the way from a session with his psychiatrist, a man sees a beautiful small tree with the light hitting it just right. He remembers his doctor asking him, “Do you know what you want?”

Suddenly he knows, telling himself, “I want the second tree from the corner, just as it stands.”

Of course, this is something he can never have. It is a fleeting image; it exists only in the moment that he’s seen it, and represents the idea of never being satisfied.

I try to create order and stability around me in my home, but it never gets near where the trouble really is, so I always feel the need to change it around again. I decorate a room and I’m enchanted with the changes for a while, but then I think,
“No, no, this isn’t right at all; it has to be another way.” When I lived at 10 Gracie Square with Leopold, I used to repaint rooms every few months.