The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (4 page)

They were my parents, wrapping me with love as though with swaddling cloth, while my so-called real mother and
father left for a ten-month European vacation soon after I was born. I was a baby, and they thought there was no point in spending time with me.

How to describe Dodo? Sometimes she was a mountain of soft sheep’s wool for me to sink into; other times, a tree rooted so deep in earth that no thunder, wind, or rain, no storm of day or night, could rip my arms from her. In later years, it made me feel safe to just sit with her in a room without talking.

Naney offered me this sense of security as well, but in a much different way; incapable of holding back the extravagance of her affection, she demonstrated it by showering me with love, and chattering away. Her voice sounded like the tweeting of birds mingled with castanets.

It wasn’t until we began to go for strolls in the Bois de Boulogne that I saw women and men walking together pushing baby carriages or playing games with children who called them “Mama” and “Papa” and whom they seemed to know very well indeed. That is how I learned what might have been for me if my father hadn’t “gone to heaven,” as Dodo once told me. But at the time I didn’t feel deprived or that I was missing something. That came much later.

Y
our parents left you for ten months after you were born so they could go on a trip? That is incredible. I know, in those days, it was not unusual for wealthy parents to hand
their kids over to a governess to raise, but it’s hard to imagine that your mother was so completely uninterested in spending that time with you.

Did things change once you got a little older and you were in Paris with her? Did she start to take more of an interest in you?

During our first year
in Europe, Aunt Thelma lived with us, and she and my mother were always out having fun. When I did see them, they were usually on their way out the door to a dinner or a party, and they looked so alike I couldn’t tell one from the other.

They were knockout beautiful, and more than anything I wanted to be like them when I grew up! If I could be that beautiful, I believed, I would have power and everything would be all right. More than all right—it would be perfect. I longed to meld into my mother, but she was always out of reach.

The closest I came to her was when Marie, her maid, let me go up to the top floor, where she tended to my mother’s clothes. There I found dresses in fabrics so soft to the touch. I remember spreading my palm to touch a dress made of buttery yellow velvet, as it hung in the closet. I have not since seen or been able to recapture that color in a painting, but it is clear as can be in my mind’s eye. I held that dress against my face,
taking a deep breath, the scent lingering from the flacon of Shalimar on my mother’s dressing table consuming me. Longing to hug her, I tightened my hand into a fist around the soft fabric and pulled it to me.

“
Mais non! NON!
Miss Gloria,
sois gentille
,” Marie called out, angry I might leave a mark on the velvet. All I ever wanted was for my mother to love me.

I
didn’t know you’d stayed so long in Europe as a child. For some reason I thought it was only for a year or two. Did your aunt Thelma live with you the whole time?

I lived in Europe
until I was eight, but we traveled around a lot. Aunt Thelma married Lord Marmaduke Furness, a very rich British aristocrat, and she moved into his house in London and their country estate near Melton Mowbray.

While I don’t have many memories of my mother, I do have flashbacks of Naney and Dodo in Paris, whispering in the bathroom with the light left on and the door partly open. I was afraid of the dark, so after they’d tucked me in, they would stay in the bathroom until I fell asleep. I’d lie in bed mesmerized by the soft sound of their hisses coming from within that slit of light. Gazing up at the ceiling, I’d catch occasional flashes of headlights from cars passing in the street below. I thought if I
lay still, nothing bad could happen, so that’s what I’d do, and eventually I’d drift off.

I’ve since realized this is when the plotting began. Naney, a master strategist, idolized Napoléon and always kept a copy of Emil Ludwig’s biography of him by her bed. She’d underlined passages throughout the book that had special meaning to her. It’s hard to know exactly when she came up with the plan, but soon it wasn’t only at night that she and Dodo conspired—it continued on into the day, when they took me to play in the park.

They talked about a German prince named Friedel Hohenlohe, the great-grandson of Queen Victoria. He and my mother were in love, and she planned to marry him and take me to live in his castle in Germany. Naney hated Germans and wanted to figure out a way to stop the romance and get me away from my mother.

“She’s an American girl and should be brought up in the United States with her American family,” she kept saying.

Dodo also chattered constantly to me about “going to meet your family.”

I didn’t know what they were talking about. I had already met my family. Dodo and Naney were my family.

I
wonder if your mom considered Dodo to be part of your family as you did. I imagine not. It is always interesting to me how children perceive things compared to adults.

When I think of our family for the first ten years of my life, I think of you, Daddy, Carter, and also May McLinden, the no-nonsense Scottish nanny who took care of me from the time I was born. She was quick to laugh and loved Carter and me as her own. She had no children, but she had us, and we had her.

Looking back, I realize I didn’t know you all that well for the first ten years of my life. I was certainly closer to you than you’d been with your mother, but you worked a lot and were often traveling. The designer jeans you became so well known for hadn’t come out yet, but when I was a child you were designing home furnishings and frequently traveled the country to make in-store appearances. I knew Stan and Chris, your sons from your previous marriage, to Leopold Stokowski, but they had already moved out of the house, and I don’t recall much about them from that time.

I do remember a little about the house we lived in for the first six years of my life. It was a large limestone building on Sixty-Seventh Street, off Park Avenue, and perched on either side of the entrance were two imposing stone lions my father bought.

The town house still stands, but it’s now an ambassador’s residence. It saddens me to walk by it. The wisteria Daddy planted outside the entrance is still there and has taken over one side of the house. I think of him every time I see it.

There was a grand foyer with a black-and-white check marble floor and a curving staircase that went up the center of the building. I remember only some of the rooms, which you had meticulously decorated, and I recall you were constantly changing things: reupholstering furniture, repainting walls, moving pictures around.

You covered one bedroom entirely in patchwork quilts: the walls, the floor, the ceiling, even the furniture. Stepping inside it was like walking into a kaleidoscope.

The dining room walls were covered with antique Chinese wallpaper, and you frequently entertained actors and artists, directors and writers. Truman Capote, Lillian Gish, Gordon Parks, Charles Addams, and Liza Minnelli were among the guests, and even though Carter and I were very young, we were expected to sit at the table conversing with them. At the time, it didn’t seem unusual to me, but it is so different from the way you were raised.

I remember the room I shared with Carter, on the top floor of the house, and just down the hall lived May. You’ve told me that when I was born Carter was less than thrilled by my arrival, though you had gone to great lengths to try to prepare him for the shock of no longer being the only child in the house. In most of the pictures from that time, I’m smiling smugly, while Carter chews the inside of his lip, annoyed at the indignity of having to pose with this plump interloper.

I was outgoing and funny. Carter was smarter, more serious and sensitive. As a child, he read voraciously and loved history and literature. I would follow him around, trying to imitate him as best I could, pretending to read the same books, agreeing with the opinions he so freely stated. Because Carter collected toy soldiers, so did I, and we would stage daylong war games on our bedroom floor: Crusaders battled Turks, Germans fought Americans, British colonial forces faced off against Zulus.

Even when you were home, I could always tell you felt slightly uncomfortable in the role of parent. I never doubted your love for me, but you carried with you a sadness, a slight distance you seemed to find hard to overcome. My father was such a presence in our lives, so comfortable being a parent, that I think it made you feel at times less than adequate. I didn’t know then, of course, that you had never really had a mother or a father, or a stable family life.

That you were related to the Vanderbilt family had little significance for me. When I was about five or six, my father showed me the statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt that stands outside Grand Central Station in New York City, and it gave me the idea that all grandparents turned into statues when they died.

Later, when my class visited the Museum of Natural History,
the teacher pointed to the statue of Teddy Roosevelt on the front steps and asked if anyone knew who it was.

I raised my hand. “I think it’s my grandfather,” I said.

I recall meeting a few cousins from your branch of the family, but I didn’t understand how we were related, and I never had the sense that you felt a deep connection with them. Now I know why. You didn’t grow up knowing anything about them.

I surmised, from the
gossiping of Dodo and Naney, that the Vanderbilts were beyond rich, but who were they? It wasn’t until I was about seven that I learned that my father had a sister named Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, but I had no idea where she lived. I didn’t even find out that he had a daughter from a previous marriage, Cathleen, until I was fifteen.

That I have the name Vanderbilt has always felt like a huge mistake. I felt I was an imposter, a changeling, perhaps switched at birth, intruding under false pretenses. For me, this feeling has never gone away.

I
had to look up the definition of
changeling
. In folklore it’s a strange or ugly child left by faeries in the place of a pretty child. You said you were surrounded by love from Naney Morgan and Dodo. So what made you feel like that?

How to explain it?

I longed to connect with my mother, to feel that we belonged together, but I never seemed able to get her attention. I was always aware of her presence, though I had no intimacy with her that I can remember. I adored her beauty from a distance, but it was something I could never reach, never touch. She was a magical stranger.

I knew early on that Naney and Dodo were intensely preoccupied with my mother’s comings and goings, nosey about what was happening in her part of the house. Because they watched her so closely and often whispered about her, it was clear to me it was my mother who was really in charge—
la maîtresse de la maison
, as the French would say. When you came right down to it, Naney and Dodo had no real power, so every moment felt perilous. We were all walking on eggshells.

I began to fear my mother. At times I’d cling to Dodo and Naney and cry for no apparent reason, unable to stop even when they tried to comfort me. How could Naney and Dodo really belong to me, and protect me, when they themselves were vassals of my mother? And if they weren’t really in control, then who was I? Perhaps I didn’t belong there at all, and it would be only a matter of time before I was discovered and snatched from my bed, thrown up to the ceiling, onto the threatening shapes streaking across it from the headlights of cars passing in the street below.

I
can understand that you didn’t know your mother, you saw her only as an elusive, beautiful creature heading out with her identical twin to cocktail parties and dinners, but why did you fear her?

It’s hard to understand—it
has certainly taken me a long time to make sense of it—but I think that Naney and Dodo’s anger and fear that I would be taken to Germany began to seep into me. It was when I was lying in the dark in bed at night, listening to them whispering, that the fear began to take root. Something was amiss, something terrible was about to happen, and it had to do with my mother—but exactly what it was, I didn’t know.

If I’d had a relationship with her, a connection to her, it would have been different, but I had none. Naney and Dodo’s feelings toward her became my own, and my fear would only grow in the coming years.

After a while, my mother became tired of all of Naney’s meddling and wanted to get some distance from her, so she sent her to live in a separate apartment nearby. My grandmother must have sensed that her power was under threat, which only gave her more incentive to get me back to America.

We were moving around a lot throughout Europe, because my mother wanted to go to parties and meet people. After Paris, there was a rented house in Cannes—or, rather, two houses: the one where she stayed with Lady Nada Milford Haven and other friends and the one where I lived with Dodo.