The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (6 page)

Actually, it made me feel
more so. Mummy Anne and Cousin Bill had welcomed me in Newport as if I was one of them, but when I went to stay with Aunt Gertrude, her grown children, who lived in other houses on her estate, made me feel like an intruder and it was only a matter of time before I would be discovered and banished.

Naney spent the summer in New York, installed in a one-room apartment at the Hotel Fourteen in Manhattan, and I hadn’t heard anything from my mother for months. Then suddenly I learned she had also arrived in New York and Dodo and I were sent to live with her in a house on Seventy-Second Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues.

Y
ou hadn’t heard from your mother for months? Transatlantic telephone calls were new, but she hadn’t written to you? What was it like to see her again?

It was strange seeing her
after so long. When Dodo and I first entered the house, she was sitting in the living room with her older sister, Consuelo. My mother looked as ravishing as ever: long nails lacquered mahogany red; raven hair coiled tenderly in a chignon at the nape of her neck; her
passive beauty as exquisite as it was the last time we met. But there wasn’t much of a reunion. She was polite as always, and we hugged each other, but neither of us could think of what to say. Dodo and I were shown up to the top floor of the house, which was to be our domain.

I’ve since learned that Naney had been in communication with Aunt Gertrude, telling her about my mother’s lifestyle in Europe and how she was spending money from my trust on herself instead of on me. Gertrude had then told Surrogate Foley, who was in charge of my finances, that I was staying in Newport with relatives that summer, so he cut my mother’s allowance dramatically. My mother must have realized that unless she were living with me, she would have no money. So that is why she came back to New York.

Realizing she was vulnerable without parental rights over my mother, my grandmother decided to petition the Surrogate Court to name her sole guardian of my mother, which she hadn’t thought to do previously. Naney Morgan decided it was time to act and filed a complaint with the court against her daughter, claiming that she was an unfit mother.

I didn’t know anything
about what my mother or Naney were doing, but one day during the first week at my mother’s house, I overheard my aunt Consuelo saying, “First thing you must do is get rid of the nurse. What that child needs is a German fräulein.”

Consuelo was telling my mother to fire Dodo! It was a gunshot into my gut. If Dodo were taken from me, I would die. With those words, the fear of my mother, which had for years been only a vague feeling, exploded into panic and terror, burrowing deep into my heart.

If she had the power to take Dodo, my true mother, away from me, then she was capable of anything.

I ran up the stairs to find Dodo, but I was really running to a cliff’s edge, and when I came to it, I didn’t stop. I took a giant leap, falling, falling forever into the fear. I loved my mother, but I hated her.

I hugged Dodo, exploding between sobs, trying to get out what I had just heard.
Get rid of the nurse!

“Gloria, listen,” Dodo said. “We are going to go down the stairs. If asked, say that we are going to the park. It will be all right, but you must stop crying. You must act as if nothing has happened. If you can do that, we can slip out of the house. Everything will be all right.”

Dodo knew Aunt Gertrude had the power to put right whatever was wrong. Casually down the stairs we went, past my mother and Consuelo, still deep in conversation, so engrossed they didn’t notice us slip by. Once outside, we headed straight for Aunt Gertrude’s studio in Greenwich Village.

When we got there, I lay down on the sofa, a sobbing, hysterical child, choking on pain and fear and clinging to my aunt as she tried to calm me.

“You don’t have to go back to your mother’s,” my aunt said. “You can stay with me.”

And there it was. This was the moment Naney and Dodo had dreamed of and planned for. The moment that changed my life.

I was safe, or so I thought—but the fear of my mother would never go away.

Two

When she discovered where my mother was, my grandmother accused Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney of imprisoning her child. She served Gertrude with court papers ordering her to return my mother, but Gertrude refused and, with Naney Morgan and Dodo on her side, decided to fight for custody.

Lawyers were hired, a trial date was set, and both sides began preparing for a court fight unlike any the country had ever seen.

Before it began, Surrogate Foley, my mother’s legal guardian, tried to convince my grandmother not to go to trial.

“Do you know what a trial of this caliber can do?” he asked her. “There will be so much dirt in the press that it will drag you and the child through a mire of infamy that will cling to her as long as she lives.”

Naney Morgan tried a different appeal to her daughter: “If you permit her to live with Mrs. Whitney, I feel sure Mrs. Whitney will give you fifty thousand dollars a year for life.”

But my grandmother decided to go to trial anyway, to fight for custody of a child she barely knew.

The trial began on October 1, 1934, when my mother was ten years old. It was presided over by Judge John Francis Carew, and was a global media sensation. More than one hundred reporters packed the courtroom for what many papers called “The Trial of the Century.”

Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images.

After showing up
at Aunt Gertrude’s studio sobbing, I didn’t go back to my mother’s house, and instead went to live on Gertrude’s estate in Old Westbury, on Long Island. I was enrolled at the nearby Greenvale School, and every day Freddy, her chauffeur, would drive me there in a gray Rolls-Royce. I hadn’t gone to school in Paris, so I was placed in a grade below my age group.

My aunt told me to call her Auntie Ger, and so I did. I thought she was very old, but she was only fifty-nine, which seems very young as I sit here right now.

I now understand why she had felt compelled to act with regard to my custody. She was doing what she believed to be the right thing. She must have thought, “Something is terribly wrong about the way my niece is being treated by her mother to make her sob so hysterically.”

I didn’t understand then how difficult it must have been for her, how courageous and brave to take me, a related, but unknown child, into her life. She was the most private of women,
yet she must have realized that she would be sucked into a very public custody battle.

Auntie Ger lived in Manhattan during the week and came to Old Westbury only on weekends. Dodo would rev me up to be ready for her arrival. When we heard the car coming up the driveway, I was to rush down the ten steps, holding on to the bannister, throw my arms around her, and cry out, “Auntie Ger, Auntie Ger! I’m so happy to see you!” And it was true. I was.

We would have lunches and dinner together in the dining room overlooking the lawn and meadows beyond. The meals were served by William, the butler, with the second footman standing discreetly nearby. It was the kind of lifestyle you see now only on
Downton Abbey
, but it was a strain knowing what to talk about with my aunt. I longed to find out more about my father, but I didn’t quite know how to bring him up. She had a sculptured bust of him, by Jo Davidson, in an alcove in her bedroom, but she never mentioned my father’s name to me. Not once.

Sensing I was often at a loss as to how to behave in the social situations that were part of this new world I suddenly found myself in at Auntie Ger’s, Dodo gave me
Emily Post’s Book of Etiquette.
The charmed life I read about fascinated me.

I went to bed much earlier than my aunt did, and I’d lie awake (with the door half open because I was still afraid of
the dark) and listen to her voice as she came up the stairs calling out to her dachshund, “Come along, Comet. Come along, Comet.” I’d hold my breath, wondering if she would stop by my door and call out to me,
“Buona notte”
as she had the night before. And she always did.

I
am surprised your mother decided to go to trial. She could have taken the money Gertrude was offering and gone back to Europe. It’s not like she spent any time with you; she barely knew you. Why do you think she fought for custody?

I’ve often wondered that.
Of course, I didn’t know at the time that Auntie Ger had used Naney as an intermediary to offer my mother fifty thousand dollars a year for life if she would let me stay in Old Westbury. That was a huge amount of money in those days.

I suspect she didn’t accept because not only would the Vanderbilt family have thought poorly of her, but there would have been nasty gossip about her. My mother, well trained by Naney, had achieved the pinnacle of social success by becoming Mrs. Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt.

If she had taken the money, Newport and New York society would likely not have reacted sympathetically, and she would have been ostracized, a story line Edith Wharton often explored in her novels.

I also suspect that she believed she would win the custody case. William Randolph Hearst had become a friend and was fully behind her, giving her favorable press coverage, and the American public was on her side, at least in the beginning. People found it inconceivable that a child would testify in court that she didn’t want to live with her own mother.

I have no doubt she was completely unaware of her failings, her lack of interest in me, and her inability from the beginning to bond with her blob of an infant daughter. As she grew older, she was proud to have photographs taken of us together, but simply because she believed it reflected well on her.

I think she considered herself a good mother—that is, if she thought about it much at all.

I
t’s hard to believe she could have thought of herself as a good mother, but I guess narcissistic people don’t have much sense of what they are really like or how they make other people feel.

It’s sad to think of you at that age, surrounded by people with so many competing interests. Even though Naney Morgan and Dodo clearly loved you, it was very manipulative of them to try to get you away from your mother and back to America.

You must have felt so scared with all that was happening. Fear is one of the things I hated about being a child, particularly
after Daddy died. I always felt a lack of control over what might happen next. Just as you said you did as a child, I felt like we were adrift on a raft without a rudder.

We had moved out of the house on Sixty-Seventh Street when I was six and were living in an apartment near the UN when he died. Soon after, we moved to another apartment, in a building nearby. At the time, it didn’t seem unusual that we pulled up stakes and relocated so often, or that you were constantly redecorating rooms wherever we lived. It must have felt very normal to you to move so much, since you spent your childhood frequently traveling around Europe. No place could ever have given you the feeling of stability you were seeking.

The fear I felt so often as a child is something I’ve worked a long time to rid myself of, and it’s why I so enjoy the confidence that age and experience bring.

Did you know your mother was going to fight in court to get you back and that you would be asked to decide between her and your aunt?

Auntie Ger never mentioned
the trial or my testifying. Not once. One day, we were joined at lunch by Frank Crocker, Auntie Ger’s lawyer, and he soon became a frequent guest. I had met him before and, in a moment of confusion and sadness, had asked him if he could be my father. He
looked at me, stunned, dismay in his eyes, then stuttered and stumbled out of the room. Ever since then, I called him Fatso, but only secretly to myself.

Why was he now appearing at our lunches? I wondered. It was after the third visit that I discovered the answer. Auntie Ger left me alone with him in the living room, and he went straight to the point, informing me that my mother wished me to live with her and not my aunt. Did I want to go back to my mother or remain living with Auntie Ger?

“Here, here at Auntie Ger’s, Auntie Ger’s,” I said, then started crying. “Here with Dodo, Dodo, Dodo!”

He went to the French doors and stood looking out over the lawn, with his back to me. I sobbed and sobbed, and the big fat blob turned and came toward me. I got up to run from the room, but he moved fast for my hand and pulled me onto the sofa beside him.

“Well, well, that’s settled then. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Listen to me and stop that crying. Listen to me. All that has to be done is for you to make your wishes known to the nice judge, and he will arrange it so that you will live with your Aunt Gertrude for as long as you like.”

“Forever and ever?” I cried out.

“Of course. Forever and ever.”

The next time Crocker came to Old Westbury was not for lunch but for the first of many sessions going over what was
about to happen. He told me that if I was to remain with Auntie Ger, the law required that I appear in court to meet Judge Carew and tell him in my own words why I didn’t want to live with my mother.

It was an interesting question. I knew if I were sent back to my mother, I would never see Dodo, my true mother, ever again. Dodo was there with me in Old Westbury, sleeping in the room across from mine, and Auntie Ger was friendly toward her, so I had no doubt that it couldn’t be like that forever. Crocker was hardly a person to confide in, though, so I didn’t tell him that Dodo was the real reason I wanted to stay with my aunt. Of course he didn’t have a clue that I had begun to fear my mother because of the atmosphere Naney and Dodo created around her, a fear that took hold in me early on.

Crocker told me to tell Judge Carew a story that Naney made up about Prince Friedel Hohenlohe extinguishing his cigarette on my arm. It wasn’t true of course. I had met the prince only once, in the living room of our house in Paris. He was very formal and polite, and he was smoking, but he certainly never tried to harm me. I assumed Crocker had heard the story from Naney, but luckily it never came up in my conversation with the judge. It took a lot of effort to remember all the things Crocker told me to say:

“I am happy living with Auntie Ger because, with my
mother, we always kept moving around so much and now I have a real home.”

“It’s been great fun to start going to school and have friends my own age to play with.”

And so on.

Auntie Ger was not at the house the day I had to go to court to have the “little chat,” as I was told, with the judge.

I was dreading it and went over the lines I’d rehearsed with Crocker again and again. I hoped to God I wouldn’t forget anything.

When the time came, Freddy, my aunt’s chauffeur, drove me to Manhattan with a private detective in the front seat. There were crowds of people waiting in the street outside the courthouse, and photographers taking pictures as I got out and proceeded up the steps flanked by more detectives. I could hear people shouting my name, some of them telling me to stick up for my mother.

Paralyzed with terror, I went into Judge Carew’s private chambers. It was just the two of us and, at a distance, a stenographer with pretty pink nail polish who clicked our conversation onto a little machine. The judge spoke softly and was friendly, and I was careful to answer his questions as I had been instructed. The meeting was short and it wasn’t so terrible after all. I left knowing I had done well and proud of myself for not flubbing my lines. The future was assured.