Real Lace (37 page)

Naturally, he loved night life and was a popular figure at such bright spots as Armando's and the old E1 Morocco. Once he confided to a reporter that he had vowed never again to taste anything stronger than ginger ale, and yet, a few nights later, he was at El Morocco with his friends drinking champagne.

In 1945, when he was barely twenty-one, he announced his marriage to a beautiful socialite-actress named Betsy Ryan—Scotch-Irish Protestant, and no kin of the other Ryans. He had met Betsy at a party at Armando's, and Nancy Randolph, society editor of the
Daily News
, learned of the secret even before Bob's dismayed parents. Earlier that year his cousin Jeanne had eloped with Alfred Vanderbilt, and, the following year, both the Vanderbilts and the Bob Cuddihys were dropped from the
Social Register
.

The marriage was, as might have been expected, tempestuous, stormy, though party-filled, with many nights at night clubs. Once, after a party, when Bob Cuddihy was stopped for speeding and was asked to show his license and registration, the policeman threatening to take away both, Betsy hit the patrolman over the head with the heel of her high-heeled slipper. There were quarrels, separations, reconciliations. Bob Cuddihy became jealous of the attentions paid to Betsy by Marion Hargrove, the writer. Finally, in 1951, from his fourteen-room house in Southampton, Bob Cuddihy announced that he and Betsy were getting a divorce. They had been married just six years, and there were five small children. “She's left me several times before,” Bob told a reporter
at El Morocco, “and now she's left for good.” He added wearily, “I'm sorry to have taken so much of your time. I wish I could say that at least I'd known you before spilling my troubles to you. I wish I could say we'd even met once. In fact,” he sighed, “I wish I could say I even read your column.”

Seven months later, Betsy Cuddihy married a Southampton real-estate man named Lawrence Godbee, who had four children of his own by a previous marriage. At the time, she surrendered custody of her own children to Bob Cuddihy. The children adored their father, and spent several years living alone with him. There was always excitement of one form or another. Once the garage burned down, and, when he had collected the insurance money, Bob Cuddihy asked the children if it wouldn't be more fun to have a swimming pool than a new garage. The children agreed, and so the money was used to build the pool. Then, in 1956, Bob Cuddihy announced his marriage to a Knoxville, Tennessee, girl named Mary Smiley, a coolly blonde and beautiful television and fashion model—and another Protestant—whom the family promptly nicknamed “the unsmiling Miss Smiley.” Unsmiling or not, the new Mrs. Cuddihy took her husband's children under her wing.

Not quite nine months later, at quarter of eight on a summer evening, Bob Cuddihy was driving his car—fast, as usual—along the Dune Road in Westhampton Beach. He was traveling east and ahead lay the Surf 'n' Sand Restaurant when his car went out of control. It skidded, sidewiped a telephone pole, skidded again, turned over, and burst into flames. In the crash, the driver was thrown fifteen feet from the car. At first he seemed unhurt, cheerful and nonchalant as ever. But he was taken to Riverhead Hospital, where he died four hours later of internal injuries. Robert the Roué was dead at the age of thirty-two.

One of the first to hear the news was his sister Mary Jane. Their mother was spending the summer on the Jersey shore, where she
was recovering from a heart attack. Mary Jane decided that she must break the news to her mother as gently and as gradually as possible, lest she suffer another attack. She telephoned her and said, “Mother, there's been an accident, and Bob's badly hurt. He may not live.” Immediately her mother asked, “Has he seen a priest?” Mary Jane—who at that point did not know the answer to the question—replied, “Yes.” “Did he receive the Last Rites?” Mary Jane replied again, “Yes. He's back in the Church.” Her mother sighed, relieved at least of that anxiety.

Next Mary Jane telephoned Riverhead Hospital and asked, “Did my brother see a priest?” Yes, she was told, a priest had visited him, and she was given the priest's name. She then got the priest on the telephone—”a dumb Irish priest,” she says—and asked him if he had administered the Last Rites. “No,” the priest told her. “I looked in on him, but he didn't seem sick enough. I didn't do anything.” “You fool,” she said, “would it interest you to know that he's dead?” She slammed down the phone.

She had lied to her mother. But she decided that she would have to let the lie stand. After all, she could not bear to have her mother go through the rest of her life believing, as she would have to believe if she knew the truth, that her son was in hell, and forever.

The trouble was, of course, that a Catholic who is known publicly to be living outside the Church, and who has not been received back, cannot be buried in consecrated ground. Mary Jane telephoned the pastor at St. Thomas More Church in New York, Monsignor Philip J. Furlong, and explained the situation to him, asking him whether, out of consideration for her ailing mother, her brother could not have a Catholic burial. No, Monsignor Furlong replied, he could not; it was absolutely out of the question. The next morning, since there was no time to be lost, Mary Jane Cuddihy MacGuire herded her brother's five small children into her car and drove to New York, and to Monsignor
Furlong's office, where she sat the children down before the priest. She began asking the children questions. “Who took you to Mass every Sunday?” They replied, “Our daddy did.” “Who taught you your catechism?” They replied, “Our daddy did.” She continued with the questions, and each time the response was the same. She asked, “Where is your daddy now?” They answered, “Our daddy is in heaven.” Suddenly the priest rose from his chair, eyes brimming, and excused himself. He came back a few minutes later and said, “I've just talked to the Chancery, to Cardinal Spellman. It's all right.”

And so Bob Cuddihy was buried a Catholic, and the secret of the lie lived on, locked in Mary Jane's heart.

Bob Cuddihy's death touched off a terrible court battle for custody of the children. Their mother, Betsy, now Mrs. Godbee, wanted them back. Bob's widow swore that his dying words to her had been “I'm dying, Mary—please take care of the kids.” Mary Smiley Cuddihy's lawyers contended that Betsy Godbee was an unfit mother, that she was an alcoholic. Bob's brother confirmed this. Betsy's lawyers contended that she had reformed and no longer drank, and there was confused testimony as to whether she had ever been an alcoholic or whether she had suffered, instead, from a form of epilepsy. A nurse, Stella Gray of Southampton, testifying in Bob's widow's behalf, said, on the contrary, that Betsy had often given the children liquor “for their colds,” and that she had once crashed her car into a tree and emerged from the accident “so drunk she couldn't walk a straight line.” On another occasion, the nurse stated, Betsy had spent over two hours in the Southampton house, raging drunk and smashing windows. In the end, however, the court awarded the children to Betsy, who, after all, was their natural mother. At one point while all this was going on, two of Bob Cuddihy's brothers were walking on the road at Westhampton, not far from where the accident had occurred, when one of them spotted a matchbook cover
fluttering in the wind. He picked it up and saw that it advertised the Federal Pacific Electric Corporation of Long Island of Long Island City, their brother's last employer. He had been the firm's district sales manager. The matchbook cover appeared weathered at the edges. “I've kept the matchbook cover, and put it in a frame,” John Murray Cuddihy says. “Very black Irish of me I suppose, but I keep it as a reminder of what happened to Bob.”

That was in the summer of 1957. A year or so later, Mary Smiley Cuddihy was married again, to a man named Arthur M. Murray, Jr., a Catholic and in the
Social Register
, but no relation to any of the other Murrays, nor to the Arthur Murray Dance Studio family.

In the fall of 1961, Betsy Cuddihy Godbee was driving her ten-year-old Packard convertible along Deerfield Road in Water Mill. Failing to negotiate a sharp left curve, her car left the road, crashed through a rail fence and into two large oak trees. The impact of the crash was so severe that her body was thrown completely through the windshield of her car. She died two and half hours later in Southampton Hospital without regaining consciousness. Now Bob Cuddihy's children—Robbie, Edith, Sean, Christopher, and a little girl named Michael Elizabeth—were orphans.

So the children, now aged seven to fifteen, were plunged into another custody fight, one which turned Cuddihys against Cuddihys. One of Bob's brothers, Thomas M. Cuddihy, had been named executor of Betsy Godbee's estate, and at the time of her death assumed custody of his nieces and nephews. But there were those in the family who questioned Tom Cuddihy's qualifications to stand
in loco parentis
, including the children's two grandmothers, Mrs. Lester Cuddihy and Mrs. Leonard Ryan.

The grandmothers—who, after all, as older ladies could not have been exactly overjoyed at the sudden prospect of five small children to care for—did at length agree to let Tom have custody, but only on one condition: the grandmothers were to have regular
visitation privileges, in order to be able to check on how things were going. Then Tom Cuddihy did an astonishing thing. Without consulting or advising anyone, and in defiance of a court order, he shipped all five children off to England. The two older children were enrolled in Kilquahanity House, Castle Douglas, Scotland, and the three younger ones were placed in the controversial Summerhill School in Leiston, England. Summerhill, now defunct, was known as a school run by the children themselves; study was optional, and the child was his own boss. It was known as “the most revolutionary school in Great Britain,” where students were given “absolute freedom”—academically, theologically, and sexually.

Immediately Mrs. Lester Cuddihy filed an action against her son, demanding that his guardianship rights be revoked. She complained that not only could she not visit her grandchildren, as ordered by the court, but she could not even communicate with them. Of his mother's suit against him, Tom Cuddihy commented matter-of-factly at the time, “Well, the only thing I know is that all of the kids are happy at the moment—we correspond back and forth and I hope to get over there by Christmas.” He had put the children in schools abroad, he said, because, “all things considered, the educational opportunities there are better both on my budget and because of the limited amount of money available to the children.”

Other Cuddihys joined the foray. John Murray Cuddihy wrote a lengthy letter to the judge who was hearing the case, denouncing his own brother as “erratic and unreliable.”

The battle dragged on for months and, meanwhile, the children, protected from all the family discord surrounding their future by the width of the Atlantic Ocean, began to enjoy the new surroundings in which their Uncle Tom had placed them. They had indeed been banged around a lot, and, after all of that, the sunny greenness of the British Isles must have seemed extraordinarily peaceful. Their letters home were happy and hopeful, even
though one of the younger ones, Sean, achieved the unusual distinction of being the only child ever expelled from permissive Summerhill; he was placed in another English school. They did not
want
to come back to New York. And so, in the end, the grandmothers relented. Both women were getting older, and Mrs. Cuddihy was ailing. It became, in the end, a question of: if Tom Cuddihy, who wanted to be their guardian, was not permitted to be, who else was there who was willing or able to assume the job? The children, though they made occasional visits home, remained in Britain, where they became thoroughly Anglicized. Relations between Tom Cuddihy and the rest of his family have, meanwhile, remained somewhat cool. Today, Tom's brothers and sisters do not know where Tom lives.

On July 31, 1970, the
New York Times
published an announcement of the marriage of Robert the Roué's oldest son, Robert A. Cuddihy, Jr., to a Scottish girl named Elizabeth Bryden, from the village of Lockerbie, near Kilquahanity in Dumfriesshire where Robbie had gone to school. The bridegroom was at the time a student at the University of Edinburgh, and the couple were married in the Protestant Church of Scotland. Robbie had come back to the United States for a while and attended Portsmouth Priory, which pleased his grandmother. But his heart was in the Highlands, and he returned to graduate from Scotland's Napier College. Like his great-grandfather, old Grandpa R. J. Cuddihy, he had become a publisher, having bought a firm called Islander Publications, whose fortnightly newspaper, the
Islander
, Robbie Cuddihy himself published from the island of Arran. He had also become active in the Labour Party, and edited the Red Paper on Education, a critique of the British educational system.

The
Times
announcement was unusual in that it printed a photograph of the couple's wedding invitation, which was, as the
Times
put it with its usual understatement, “a move away from strictures of etiquette.” Printed in sepia on poster-weight paper, the invitation was eight inches wide and sixteen inches long, and it
displayed a photograph of the bride and groom—Robbie looking very British with a walking stick, high collar, and big Windsor-knotted tie with a regimental stripe—posed, smiling and happy, on the steps of the church prior to the ceremony. What would Emily Post have thought? Clearly, Robbie Cuddihy is the uncommon product of an uncommon father, an uncommon uncle, and an uncommon family.

Our story ends on a note of grace.

Many years after her brother Bob's violent death, Mary Jane Cuddihy MacGuire was at a New York cocktail party. There she fell into conversation with a young Catholic priest and, during the course of it, let drop the fact that her maiden name had been Cuddihy. The priest was thoughtful for a moment, and then asked her, “Did your family ever have a summer place in the Hamptons?” Yes, she replied, they had all had places there for years.