The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (7 page)

Driving back to Old Westbury, I knew Auntie Ger would not be waiting for me, but Dodo would, and that was all that mattered. She and I would live together happily ever after. Or so I thought.

T
he other day I watched an old black-and-white newsreel of you arriving at the courthouse. I found it online. A mob of private detectives in overcoats and fedoras surrounds you. Your head is down and you are walking quickly into the building. None of these men is looking at you or seems connected to you in any way. One jumps in front of the cameras with his arms stretched wide in a ridiculous attempt to block you from being photographed. I kept watching it over and over. You were only ten years old, and though you were surrounded by guards, you were all alone.

I saw another newsreel of you leaving the court. An announcer intones, almost gleefully, “Frightened by the curious crowds, Little Gloria jumps into her aunt’s limousine. . . . Mooooney isn’t everything!”

Did anyone talk to you about what was happening at the trial each day? Did you know what was going on?

Auntie Ger’s estate was
a fortress, shielded from the world and the publicity of the trial, but I knew from seeing the crowds outside the courthouse and hearing people
shout at me that the public was hungry for daily tabloid updates. It was a drama that had everything: sex, scandal, glamour, and big, big money at stake. In the coverage, we became like mythical characters in a soap opera—except, of course, we were real.

I had no idea what was happening each day in court. Neither Auntie Ger nor anyone else talked to me about it, but one day I overheard Bridie, the cook, gossiping with William, the butler, as they pored over a front-page story about the trial in the
Daily News
, and I learned that Judge Carew had closed the proceedings to the press and public because of something unspeakable that had been revealed about my mother.

Marie, the maid who had worked for her in Paris, was brought to New York by Auntie Ger’s lawyers to testify that she had seen my mother and Lady Nada Milford Haven in bed together making love.

I didn’t know what homosexuality was. The words
gay
and
lesbian
weren’t in use at the time, and even if they had been, I would never have encountered them. Whatever it was, I could tell it was something heinous that must be my fault, something that I, too, may have inherited. Could this be the hole in my heart that I’d always felt?

I
was in high school when I first heard that your mother was accused of being a lesbian. I wanted to ask you about it, but I sensed it disturbed you, and I didn’t want to upset you by bringing it up.

The Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

It was part of what scared me about telling you I was gay when I was twenty-one. I had all the normal feelings of trepidation about coming out to you, but it was largely because of the allegations against her; I wasn’t sure how you would react.

I remember I once told you that I thought sexual orientation was partly genetic, and you quickly and firmly disagreed. Your reaction surprised me because the idea clearly upset you, yet so many of your closest friends were gay, and were such a big part of our lives growing up.

Was your mom a lesbian?

Yes, she was
, but she also had affairs with men. I think that for some people sexuality is fluid. Much later she told me her one great love was Prince Friedel Hohenlohe, but she had been unable to wed him because Surrogate Foley, who controlled my trust fund, said that no part of it could be used to finance a second marriage and neither of them had enough money to support themselves in the style to which they were accustomed. By marrying the prince, she would have become a “Serene Highness,” which no doubt would have been important to her, as well as marrying the love of her life.

After her engagement to the prince ended, her longest and most passionate relationship was with Lady Nada Milford
Haven, who was related to the Russian royal family and married to Prince George of Battenberg, a great-grandson of Queen Victoria. Fascinating, glamorous, mesmerizing in her zaftig splendor, Nada had a mop of tousled red and orange hair and lacquered her nails the same shade of mahogany as my mother. She wore dresses of soft, flowing fabrics and carried a cigarette in an ivory holder. Her face was startlingly alive, and she had a great verve for life.

My passive and shy mother was attracted by the contrast in their personalities. She became another person when she was with Nada: she appeared happy. I didn’t know it then, but I realize now it was because they were madly in love.

When I was seven, during a stay in London, I once spied on my mother and Nada. Through a half-open door, I saw them sitting together on a sofa, arms around each other, laughing, and whispering in front of a glowing fire.

My mother, turning suddenly, caught me staring. “Close the door,” she called out, annoyed. “There’s a draft coming in. Run on out and play.”

Something was going on, but it both confused and frightened me.

My mother was proud of her relationship with Nada, who was constantly by her side. They even traveled together, guests of William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies at San Simeon, Hearst’s fabled ranch.

When the story about my mother’s relationship with Nada became public, it was a terrible scandal. In 1934, being gay was considered evil. It was a crime. Gay people could be, and were, arrested, imprisoned, and institutionalized.

I heard that the doors of the courtroom had been closed and blocked to the public because of a revelation concerning my mother, but I didn’t know what it was, just that it was very terrible—as terrible as murder. Later, I pieced together that it wasn’t murder, but in the minds of many back then, it was considered even more unspeakable.

The allegation that my beautiful mother was a lesbian, clamped down on my ten-year-old heart, squeezing it hard, as if with a nutcracker. Pain scrambled my brain, sucking me into a whirlpool of vile thoughts. I didn’t understand what it meant, but I knew it wasn’t like the love between Jeanette Macdonald and Nelson Eddy in
Maytime
or any of the other movies I would come to obsess over. It was something chill and bitter, confirming all the fears I already had about my mother.

There was no one I could speak to about this. I shut myself in and tried desperately to put the pieces of my heart and mind back into some kind or order. It was a long haul because I obsessively worried that I, too, would grow up to be like my mother: a lesbian.

When boys came into the picture it was an incredible relief. I was a girl who loved boys, not a “freak” who loved girls.

I tell you all this so you understand why it took me so long, until my thirties, to understand that there is nothing strange or peculiar about being gay or lesbian. Love between two women, or two men, is precisely the same as love between a woman and a man.

W
hen I told you I was gay, it must have brought up a lot of your feelings about your own mother. It makes sense to me now. I remember the day I finally decided to speak to you about it. I was really nervous, but felt like I couldn’t wait any longer.

I had come out to my friends while I was in high school, but had waited to tell you. When I graduated from college, I decided it was silly to avoid it any longer. I assumed you’d figured it out, because you had never asked me about girls, and I’d had a boyfriend all through college whom you knew very well. He slept over at our apartment often, and I thought you must have guessed he wasn’t just a friend. Still, when I went into your room that day, I was very nervous.

“There is something I need to talk to you about,” I said, sitting down next to you on your bed. “I think I’m gay.”

I immediately regretted the wording. I didn’t
think
I was gay. I
knew
I was. I had known it since I was six or seven years old.

“You do?” you asked, but it wasn’t really a question. You were biding your time, absorbing what I had just said.

I explained that I had felt this way all my life, and that I was happy about being gay.

You said my boyfriend was always welcome, and then, after a slight pause, you said, “Don’t make any definite decisions.”

It wasn’t really what I expected you to say, and I wondered if perhaps I should have been more direct, but then I decided to just let it sink in for a while with you.

Did you know I was gay before I told you?

I may have occasionally
suspected you were gay, but it only floated in and out of my mind along with my unresolved feelings about my mother’s sexuality and my remembered terror as a child that I might have inherited the same orientation as well as the alcoholism of my father.

If you were gay, I thought, it would be my fault and an indication that I had been a bad parent.

When you said, “I think I’m gay,” you left it open, as if you were not yet certain. We all go through adolescence with conflicting emotions, and I wasn’t sure if you meant you were or might be. Then you left the room soon after without continuing the conversation.

When you left I was shattered, because I remembered something I had said offhandedly years before when we were
talking about one of your friends who might be gay: “I would feel I had failed as a parent if one of my children were gay.” It was an ignorant remark, and I had no idea it would or could have anything to do with you. I wish you had known those words came from feelings I still harbored about the revelation about my mother in the trial.

It took great courage for you to confide in me, and I wished you had stayed longer so that we could have talked more, but I understood that after telling me something so important you needed time alone to get back to yourself.

A
ctually, I thought that after the big reveal you might be the one who needed some time alone. But I knew once you got over the initial surprise you would be supportive. As I said, so many of your friends were gay, and they were always coming over for dinners and parties.

I didn’t remember your saying that you’d feel like a failure if one of your children were gay, but I do remember something else you once said that made a strong and positive impression on me.

We were waiting for guests to arrive one night for a dinner at our house when I was around eleven. I asked you about the theater director José Quintero and his partner, Nick, who were coming that evening.

“They are just like a married couple,” you explained to me. Of course, this was 1979, and in the eyes of the law and most Americans, they certainly were not anything like a married couple, but I never forgot that you believed they were. That is why I knew you would be okay with it when I finally told you I was gay.

Well, I hope you know
that I am more than “okay” with it; I
rejoice
that you are gay! It is part of what makes you the person you are, and I am so glad that you have found someone who makes you happy. I wouldn’t want you any other way, even if that were possible, which it most certainly is not.

Today it is still hard to believe how far we have come, with same-sex marriage legal in all of our United States. Of course, it is only the beginning. True equality still has a long way to go both here at home and around the world.

After the light dawned on me in my thirties, I often secretly wished I, too, had been born gay. My closest friends have always been women, and I certainly understand them more than I do men, but it was not to be. Some people have all the luck!

In the wake of the headline-making revelations about my grandmother’s relationship with Lady Nada Milford
Haven, public opinion began to shift in favor of my mother’s aunt.

After seven weeks of testimony, the
Matter of Vanderbilt,
as the case was officially called, came to a close.

Judge Carew awarded custody of my mother to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. My grandmother Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt would be allowed to have supervised visits with my mom on weekends and some holidays.

The judge also made a ruling that my ten-year-old mother could never have predicted, one she thought she might not survive.