The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (5 page)

Dodo and I then moved to a hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, before going on to Melton Mowbray, in England, for a Christmas visit with Aunt Thelma, who was married to Lord Furness. The marriage was not a happy one, and Thelma was in the midst of a long affair with Edward, Prince of Wales. He was a guest of honor at the Christmas gathering, and other visitors drifted in and out, making a big fuss over him because someday it was thought he would be king of England.

Of course, he later ended up abdicating the throne to marry Wallis Simpson. In fact, it was Thelma who introduced her friend Wallis to Prince Edward, asking her to “look after him” while she went on a trip in 1934. Wallis certainly did.

It was a festive holiday: every day a gala, with guests coming and going, one more exquisitely beautiful than the next. I’d glimpse my mother among them, there but nowhere near me.

One morning in our room, Dodo got up quickly and firmly locked the door leading into the hall. She then told me to sit
down at the desk, handed me a pen, and placed a sheet of stationery in front of me. I could tell it was serious because her neck was flushed red as roast beef, which always happened when she was upset.

Her voice was suddenly that of a stranger, with a harsh tone I’d never heard before: “Your Naney wants to hear from you, and this is the letter you are going to write to her: ‘Dear Naney, My mother said not to write but I am not paying any attention to her. She is a rare bease. Well, I will be in dear old New York soon. Love and kisses, Naney dear. Gloria.’”

What was going on? The door locked? Dodo so unlike herself? A letter to Naney who at that very moment was also a guest at Melton Mowbray, sitting in the room next to the one we were in, with a misspelling of
beast
that Dodo made me put in so it would look like I’d written the letter myself?

“No,” I said, throwing the pen on the floor.

Dodo leaned down swiftly, picked it up, and shoved it back into my hand.

“Yes! Now! Right now! Naney will be very, very angry with us both if you do not do this now,
right now!”

Dodo was shaking, too, but raising her voice, she pushed on, “She’s in the next room
waiting
for me to take it to her, so no more questions.
Snap to it!
”

Confused, angry at Dodo, but most of all, angry at myself without knowing why, I did what I was told.

It was only later that I came to understand that this letter was a tiny piece in the puzzle of partnership Naney and Dodo had formed to get me back to America with the Vanderbilts, where they believed I belonged. The letter surfaced later, in the custody case. It was obviously not something a child that age would have written, and it was used by my mother’s lawyer, Nathan Burkan, in an attempt to prove Naney’s manipulation of me, and her betrayal of her own daughter.

After our stay at Melton Mowbray, Dodo and I went to live in a rented house in the English countryside, before returning to the Savoy hotel in London. Then, suddenly, Naney, Dodo, and I were on a ship called the
Majestic
, sailing to America and the Vanderbilts.

I
t’s incredible to think that Naney Morgan, your grandmother, would plot against your mother, her own daughter, so that she would lose custody of you. What was her motivation?

I adored Naney when
I was a child, but I really do believe she was mentally unbalanced. How else can one explain the events that followed? She had the intelligence and cunning of Machiavelli’s Prince, and was capable of blowing up subways, if necessary, to achieve her plans. I’ve often wondered what kind of early experiences molded
her into a feminine version of her idol, Napoléon. Would she reveal her secrets if we could confide in each other today? I think not.

Although an ardent Roman Catholic, Naney found her true God in money and social position. This may be part of the answer to the riddle of why she hatched the elaborate plot that made such a tangled mess of so many lives.

Naney was born Laura Delphine Kilpatrick in Santiago, Chile, in 1877. Her father was an infamous Civil War general, Hugh Judson Kilpatrick, who had been appointed consul general to Chile, and her mother, Luisa Valdivieso, was from a well-known Chilean family. I have some gold-tooled, red leather scrapbooks that Naney made specifically for pasting newspaper clippings of the hundreds of social events she attended over the years. Page after page details the occasions and names of those present, hers prominently featured.

Naney talked endlessly about Chilean socialites she had known, rambling on and on about this one and that one, always mentioning at some point that the Valdivieso family was related to Vincent of Loyola, the Catholic saint.

Naney was still unmarried at thirty-three when she came to America for the first time, with her mother. She would have been considered an “old maid,” as back then most girls married in their teens. It was in New York City that she met a
diplomat, Harry Hays Morgan. He was quite a catch, and they married soon after.

Naney maneuvered a meeting with President Taft, who was in office at the time, and charmed him into posting my grandfather as consul general in Lucerne, Switzerland. There she gave birth to a daughter, Consuelo; then a son, Harry Junior; and later to the twins, my mother and Thelma.

Naney adored all her family, but as her daughters grew, it was clear that the beautiful twins were the most likely to achieve the brilliant marriages she had envisioned for her girls, and for her own future protection as well.

When my mother married Reginald Vanderbilt in 1923, Naney was ecstatic. She was now linked to one of America’s most prominent families. When I was born, nine months to the day later, she ensconced herself along with Dodo in my father’s house on Seventy-Fourth Street and on Sandy Point Farm, in Newport, for the summer, which is where they were living when my father died.

S
o she schemed against her own daughter because of money and wanting you to be part of society in America?

Greed and ambition
were a big part of it, but it wasn’t until my mother became involved with Prince Friedel Hohenlohe that Naney sprang into action.

The prince had a title and came from a very distinguished family, but he didn’t have money. Naney and Dodo considered him “a Count of no account,” which wasn’t true, but it’s what Naney used to say about most of the men my mother spent time with. If he married my mother, what would they live on? My trust fund, of course, and I would be taken to live in the prince’s castle in Germany. Perhaps Naney was also worried about the rise of Adolf Hitler, or her own financial position if she were no longer living with us.

So Naney decided it was time to get me back to America, where she believed I belonged, with the Vanderbilts—and who was more appropriate than my father’s sister Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to take charge? Gertrude had a fortune, and her own children were all grown.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and her sister, Gladys, were the only surviving siblings of Reginald Vanderbilt. They had another brother, Alfred, who was a passenger on the ocean liner the RMS
Lusitania
when it was torpedoed by a German submarine in 1915. Alfred gave his life jacket to a woman on the ship who had a small child, even though he didn’t know how to swim and knew there were no more lifeboats available. He drowned in the freezing cold water along with 1,197 other passengers
and crew members. His body was never found. He was thirty-seven years old.

Gertrude was ahead of her time in many ways. One of the richest women in America, she was an accomplished sculptor, and in 1930 she founded the Whitney Museum of American Art, which remains one of the most important contemporary art museums in the world.

My mother knew nothing about her aunt Gertrude when she returned to America in 1932. She was an eight-year-old girl coming to a country she had no memory of, to meet a family that had not seen her since she was an infant.

When Dodo and I arrived
in America, we went straight to Newport, to stay at Oakland Farm, with my cousin Bill Vanderbilt and his wife, who told me I could call her Mummy Anne, as her own daughters did. I was thrilled.

It was the first time I had seen a mother and a father up close. I’d always thought of Dodo as my mother and Naney as my father, but here was a father who was actually a man. They were all part of the “family” Dodo had told me I was going to meet, but I didn’t get to stay there long, certainly not long enough to understand what family life could be like. Naney wanted Aunt Gertrude to get to know me, so she
arranged for me to move to my aunt’s estate in Old Westbury, New York.

I had met Gertrude only once, when I visited the Breakers, in Newport, with Mummy Anne. The Breakers was built for my father’s parents, Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt, by the architect Richard Morris Hunt in 1893. It was as large as a palace, with seventy rooms, but was referred to as “the cottage,” and occupied only in the summer months. During the rest of the year, they lived in New York, in another mansion that took up the entire block of Fifth Avenue between Fifty-Seventh and Fifty-Eighth Streets. It was later torn down; the department store Bergdorf Goodman now stands in its place.

When I met Aunt Gertrude, I had no idea of the plans Naney and Dodo had been making for me and no hint of the important role my aunt would play in the rest of my life.

W
hen I was a child, I remember looking at pictures of Gertrude, but I didn’t understand who she was and how she was related to you.

Her appearance was striking. In the photographs, she was no longer young but she was dressed beautifully, her face often hidden under a large hat, and unlike other women of that time, she seemed always to be wearing pants.

I remember we spent several Thanksgivings when I was
a teenager at Gertrude’s former estate in Old Westbury. The main house and its grounds had been sold off and turned into a private club, but her granddaughter lived in what had been Gertrude’s studio. It was nice to meet those relatives, and they were always very gracious, but they were so different from the many members of my father’s family I had met. Since we really saw them only once a year, I never got to know them very well.

What was Gertrude like?

Aunt Gertrude was gracious
, charming, and steady, but distant, uncommunicative, and extremely reserved. Her demeanor and the clothes she wore were appropriate to every occasion, and she was always immaculate from head to toe.

She was so unlike fiery Naney Morgan, whose wardrobe was meager, and who usually appeared in a well-worn orange sweater and black suit. Naney was always going off on tangents and extravagantly smothering me with love.

The first time I met Aunt Gertrude she was wearing pants like a man! It was something of a shock. In those days women didn’t wear what later came to be known as slacks. Gertrude favored men’s pants fashioned by a tailor who appeared when summoned with fabrics from Italy for her selection: cashmeres, wools, silks, and taffetas in white, deliciously creamy.
She wore tailored shirts to complement each ensemble. I never saw her without masses of Vanderbilt pearls cascading down her neck or the pair of pearl and diamond bracelets, one on each wrist, which she left to Cathleen, my older half-sister, and me in her will.

Was the red hair a wig? Probably not, but that is how it seemed to me as a child. Her hair was always perfectly marcelled, curled in layers, not a wave out of place. It framed her face and was sprayed to stay put through any emergency. On summer days, she wore a jaunty hat of palest thin straw, in winter one of softest felt, with a ribbon of black grosgrain silk.

In the evening, before dinner, she would change into one or another of her floor-length gowns, fashioned of flowing silk or jersey, complementing the extreme slenderness of her body.

Despite her superb style and elegance, she couldn’t come anywhere close to the movie star beauty of my mother. But she did have something my mother did not—the power money brings.

W
hat was it like to suddenly meet all these relatives? Did it make you feel like any less of a changeling?