The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (8 page)

Nothing worked out in
the custody trial as I imagined. Though my mother lost, her lawyers said that Dodo had influenced me against her, and Judge Carew decreed that Dodo could no longer have any contact with me. She was fired, and I was not allowed to see her or even speak to her on the phone. I didn’t know where she had gone. I was ten years old, and I thought I would die. It was the worst thing that could ever happen to me—or so I thought until Carter died.

Up until the judge’s ruling, I had been secure in the knowledge that I was loved, not by my mother, but by Dodo and Naney, who were my real parents. While they were by my side
I knew for sure that I was the center of their world. Never had a child been so cherished, loved, and adored.

When I was separated from Dodo by the judge, part of me did die. Without Dodo at Auntie Ger’s, I felt like a lowly, miserable creature who had committed a crime, only I didn’t know what it was.

Unexpectedly tiptoeing into this strange new world appeared the changeling, keeping its head up by treading water, wee paws slipping through the marshy meadow, a mouse not shaking the grass, desperately trying and failing to remain unnoticed, all the while dying and straining to please those around me, but most of all the queen herself, Auntie Ger.

I started stuttering, and dreaded each school day, especially Lit class, when I would inevitably have to stand and stumble through a poem in front of everyone. I recently came across a Greenvale School report card. Below all the C’s and B’s was a handwritten note from my teacher, “She will succeed—eventually.” (See? Everything can turn out all right if you just hang in there!)

I put on weight and hated myself. I was a hippo on an island, alone, floundering around, clutching at reeds so as not to slip into the hostile sea.

What mattered beauty? What mattered perfection? They were the attributes gifted only to my mother and Aunt Thelma, which I would never achieve.

Doubt about who I was spread into my veins. If I didn’t know, then how could Auntie Ger or anyone else? I longed to please and be accepted by her and her grown children, these strange new relatives I had not even known existed, and this desire for acceptance took hold of me with a grip that wouldn’t let go.

This is a terrible flaw that you, Anderson, thank God, do not have. From birth, you have been cherished and adored. Even as an adult, the need to please others coursed through my veins. Pleasing a person flooded me with warmth, which made me feel successful, and momentarily safe. But it never lasted.

Trying to please everyone all the time never works. It leads to hating oneself and then hating oneself even more when one later tries to assert one’s authority.

Today, I am still tempted to be drawn into old patterns. Someone will ask me to do something, work on a painting for them or give an interview, and I have to force myself to pause and question: Do I really want to do this? But whether the answer is yes or no, at least I know the answer will be one that is true to my desires.

I
t is stunning to think that the judge would take away the person you cared most about, the woman who’d raised you from the moment you were born. She was your mother certainly more than your biological mother ever was.

To have gone through all that you did, just to keep Dodo by your side, only to have her removed so suddenly and thoughtlessly—it’s awful.

I remember when my nanny, May McLinden, who had been with me from the time I was born, left. I was inconsolable and I was
fifteen
, old enough not to need her as I once had. With Dodo exiled from your life, you must have felt so alone, more than ever before. Was there anyone you could turn to for support?

Dodo was banished
, but I could still see Naney, and every night, promptly at 6:30 p.m., I was allowed to call her room at the Hotel Fourteen in Manhattan. Volunteer 5-6000. I’ll never forget that phone number.

The judge had the power to send Dodo away, but he couldn’t stop me from talking to my grandmother, even though she had played the key role in the effort to turn me against my mother.

That call was the lifeline that got me through the day. I knew she would always be there. Her voice leaped through the receiver as I held the phone close to my ear, “Hello, darling mine!” That is how she always greeted me.

We’d chat about this and that, and I hated having to hang up when it was time to say good night. Occasionally she came out to stay at Old Westbury when Auntie Ger was there. Naney loved to gossip about parties she had attended with my Grandfather
Morgan when he was an ambassador in Europe. She’d go on endlessly in Spanish-accented English, a steady stream of banter about royalty, dropping names that meant nothing to me and certainly bored Auntie Ger.

I adored her and her visits, until one day, when I was fifteen and had met a boy named Geoffrey Jones. In love with him, I wanted to share my happiness with Naney, and told her that we planned to get married someday. But instead of being happy, she trembled with fury.

“Listen to me, little one: you are a
Vanderbilt
and can
never
marry anyone with the name
Jones
.”

I became hysterical. The intensity of my reaction startled and frightened her.

She tried to calm me. “There, there, little one,” she whispered, quickly putting her arms around me. “What’s the matter? What’s upsetting you? There, there, don’t cry.”

But it was too late. I never stopped loving her, but from that day on, it wasn’t the same between us. When I became an adult, I saw her less and less often, fearful that any disagreement between us would topple me off the tightrope on which I so gingerly kept a grip. To move forward, to not fall off and be destroyed, took all the energy I had.

When Stan and Chris were born, Naney was ecstatic, and though I didn’t accompany them on their weekly visits to see her at the Hotel Fourteen, I encouraged their affection for her.
She died in 1956. Her rambling final words were, “Did you get the ice cream for the babies?”

It wasn’t until after her death that I learned she had reconciled with my mother at some point after the custody trial. My mother and Thelma were at Naney’s bedside when she died, and she left both of them substantial sums in her will, but she never mentioned my mother to me after the trial, not once.

Geoff Jones was my first great love, but my first crush was for a boy named Johnny Delehanty. He was several years older than me, outgoing, at ease with himself, and divinely handsome as well. I was very shy then, if you can believe it. I literally would get weak in the knees every time I saw him.

Once, when my school friends Betty Lewis and Cynthia Ellis stayed overnight at Auntie Ger’s, we sneaked out to meet Johnny and his chums, who picked us up past the estate’s driveway and took us to Rothmann’s restaurant. Auntie Ger had a watchman named Sharkey who caught us on our way out, but he never said anything to her or anyone else. We never thought about the danger, or the horrendous position my aunt would have been in with my guardian, Surrogate Foley, had this been discovered.

At Rothmann’s we sat in a banquette drinking ginger ale for half an hour or so—then Johnny drove us back and we sneaked back into the house and into our beds. I had endless fantasies of Johnny and me getting married and living in a cottage
like the ones I could see from the car window when I was driven into New York in my aunt’s car. I would write Johnny’s name next to mine over and over again,

“Delehanty. Gloria Delehanty. Mrs. John Bradley Delehanty. Mrs. John B. Delehanty.”

His name was inexpressibly magical.

He was killed in an automobile accident during his freshman year at Cornell. His was the first death of someone I had been close to, and the first funeral I ever attended. It was inconceivable that Johnny could die. Death didn’t exist, except as a word in a dictionary. It’s what happened to old people. It had nothing to do with him.

I kept Johnny’s letters, which I still have, and a framed photograph of him hangs today in my studio. He looks so young, but at fifteen, he was so much older in my eyes. I grieved, but after a time he faded into the landscape—and with him, the reality of death.

I
’ve never heard you use the tightrope image before, but I understand what you mean. I think we are so alike in our desire to always move forward. It’s something I think about all the time. I don’t know that it’s the healthiest way to live, but it is absolutely at the core of what I believe I need to do. I remember learning years ago that sharks have to keep moving forward to stay alive; it’s the only way they can force
water through their gills and breathe. Ever since, that is how I’ve imagined myself: a shark gliding through dark, silent seas.

For more than two decades now, I’ve moved constantly from one place to another, one story to the next, never allowing myself to slow down for long. I’ve worried that if I become too self-reflective or too mired in the pain of the past, the losses of Carter and Daddy, I will no longer be able to function, no longer be able to breathe.

It says something about the difference between us that you imagine yourself on a tightrope, constantly at risk of falling, and I see myself as a shark. I do not have a shark’s thick skin, or the hunter’s instinct, but there are times I wish I did. What is interesting to me is that you have always been able to keep going forward and at the same time have remained vulnerable. I worry that I have shut myself off to feeling, numbed myself so that I am not weighted down. I don’t want to be numb, but it’s hard to move forward constantly and to feel at the same time.

I don’t think you
really see yourself as a shark. It is not in your nature. If it were, you would be a businessman or a lawyer or in some other profession where ruthlessness and cunning are required. You are a storyteller, and though you may wish at times that you didn’t feel pain, the fact
that you continually put yourself in situations where you will, and where you can help others feel as well, speaks volumes about who and what you really are.

I could have hardened myself after Dodo was banished, but something in me made me decide not to. I chose to keep moving forward, but also to remain true to myself. I did become even more wary of my mother however. It was because of her that Dodo was taken from me.

When Judge Carew made his ruling in the custody trial, he also decreed I had to visit my mother on weekends. When I would see her, I was accompanied by private detectives, and a new governess named Eleanor Walsh. Out of all the governesses who came into and left my life after Dodo was dismissed, she was the best. She let me call her Tootsie Eleanor.

Every weekend my mother took us both to lunch at the Sherry-Netherland hotel. She always asked for a demitasse coffee after dessert and a glass of brandy, and then ordered one after another for what seemed an eternity, before she would ask for the check and we could leave.

Sundays, we went to Mass together at St. Francis Church, accompanied by a police car using its siren to get us through the crowds that gathered to ogle us. Though the trial was over, the public’s fascination with my mother and me was not. To be less conspicuous, we were ushered up to the balcony inside the church, where the organ was. I’d sit with my mother on
one side and Tootsie Eleanor on the other. My mother always became faint at some point during the Mass and would put her head between her knees so as not to keel over and pass out, but Tootsie was a registered nurse, so I knew that if anything happened, she’d be able to take care of her.

W
ho was the biggest influence on you as a teenager? I’ve always had the feeling that after the custody case you basically raised yourself.

What influences most people
growing up is the reflection they have of themselves from a parent or parents. That was not the case for me when I was a teenager. The only reflection I saw of myself was a blob of nothing staring back at me in the mirror.

Even though I feared and often hated my mother, secretly I held a tiny hope that someday I might get her attention by growing up to be as beautiful as she was. She’d love me then—wouldn’t she?

There were no role models in my life whom I could confide in. Dodo and Naney had surrounded me with their full attention and love, but they were not what today we call “mentors.” Nor were Auntie Ger or Surrogate James Foley, who was my legal guardian until I was twenty-one.

The only real role models I had were characters in movies
or books or on the radio. How shallow to have to admit that many of my childhood values were formed in large part by Busby Berkeley musicals, by Dick Powell singing to Joan Blondell, “By a waterfall, I’m calling you-oo-uu-oo-ooo.”

Years later, when Frank Sinatra and I were dating, we dined once with Joan Blondell. I longed to tell her how influential she had been in my childhood, but when I tried, it was too complicated to explain why.

I had seen my first movie in 1935, when I was eleven. It was
Becky Sharp
, with Miriam Hopkins, and it premiered at Radio City Music Hall, where I climbed the winding steps up to the reserved seats in the mezzanine.