There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me (4 page)

According to my mother, the next day Third Avenue was converted to a one-way street heading uptown. It turned out to be a bit later than the next day, but the day after sounded more dramatic and appealing to her. This was just another one of my mom’s slightly lying truths.

I can only imagine the sense of loss my mother must have experienced. I believe that because she lost her dad as a kid and then her fiancé, a deep fear of abandonment began planting its roots in her heart
.
Mom was a tough cookie in many ways, and she did what she could to move forward. She was never one to talk about her true feelings but suffered inside and alone.

Her life continued and she found other suitors but no proposals she wanted to accept. She wanted to date, have fun, be entertained, and, I am guessing, drink. She was the life of every party and I don’t believe her drinking had done more at this point than help her maintain her fun-girl status. At one point Mom did meet another man with whom she was rumored to have been very serious. But it wasn’t until years later that I would hear the truth about that relationship.

•   •   •

While she had plenty of tragedy in her life, she also had a great deal of fun. Mom loved Broadway and anyone associated with the theatre. Some years later she ended up dating a married (but separated) man named Murray Helwitz, who was treasurer of the Shubert Theatre.
They dated for a while, and Mom fell right into the world of premieres and late-night cocktails, dinners, and dancing at various dinner clubs. Social hobnobbing like that made my mother come alive. She befriended all the local bartenders, coat-check girls, and restaurant managers. This seemed to be the beginning of a lifelong pattern where Mom gravitated toward those she called the underdogs.

While seeking her fabulous and glamorous future, she always seemed to hover on the fringe. It appeared she meant to inhabit two paradoxical worlds. It was an odd paradox because she wanted to be accepted into a more elevated social status, but she held tightly to a darker and more troubled socioeconomic echelon. She was seeking some kind of recognition and a level of improvement in her life but fought it at the same time. It seemed that she was longing for, craving, an escape from her roots. Yet she could never quite give them up. She’d revert to a tougher type of talk if she felt intimidated. I always said she wore being from Newark like a badge, flashing it when necessary or threatened. Whenever she felt a crack in her armor or felt a moment of social ineptitude, she’d counterbalance with a brash declaration of her Newark upbringing. She often outwardly credited Newark as the reason she couldn’t be beat. I always loved visiting there with her because it felt uncomplicated. But I also loved leaving because I would get bored, just as she did.

The bartenders in particular seemed to look out for her. Once, while Murray and Mom were in a fight, a bartender spotted Murray with another woman, sitting at what had been “their” table. The bartender reached under the counter for the phone and called my mom. He quietly informed her that her beau was currently at the joint with another gal. Mom thanked him, took a quick shower, and put on the new mink coat Murray had purchased for her as a gift along with a pair of high heels. Decked out in
just
a fur and heels, Mom cabbed it to the restaurant, walked to the back of the place, stood in front of the
table for two, and looked right at Murray but angled herself slightly more toward the other woman, who turned out to be his wife. Seems like they weren’t so separated after all! She asked him if he liked her new fur coat. As she asked, she proceeded to open it up and do a full twirl before wrapping her naked self back up and continuing out the restaurant. On the street she may or may not have cried, but she had made a point. Mom liked to make such scenes, and her various dramatic antics would become legendary.

The fur-coat story aside, clothes paid an important role in my mom’s life, and she chose them carefully. Early on, she recognized the power of certain labels. But she also realized she was unable to afford them. She knew how to dress for various social environments and would not let her lack of finances infringe on her wardrobe. In the late fifties and early sixties Emilio Pucci had become wildly popular. Mom loved the bright colors of Pucci and thought it ingenious how he wrote his name throughout the patterns. But she was unable to afford the famous print mini shift dresses all the uptown ladies were wearing. So Mom once again had to be creative.

And that she was. Mom bought some fabric in a print that was practically indiscernible from the now famous Pucci patterns and fashioned her own shift dress. She sewed it herself and then in pen she wrote her own name, “Teri,” in cursive on all the same areas one would find the esteemed signature “Emilio.” She recalled many socialites coming up to her at a cocktail party and commenting on the specialness of her dress. “I just love your Pucci, Teri!” Mom said she made a point of saying thank you and walking away so her secret stayed safe. She would joke that she was fine as long as she wasn’t caught in the rain, because then if she had been unlucky enough, her dress would begin looking like a fashion by Rorschach test, with ink blots developing where her name had been previously so neatly placed.

Mom coveted the clothes she saw the rich women wear, and eventually learned to hunt them down in various Upper East Side thrift shops. She knew those were the places that the Park Avenue women were likely to deposit their old Gucci, Courrèges, or other designer labels. She combed through the racks and stacks and over time, and with her keen eye, was able to procure and savor a wardrobe that any proper Upper East Side WASP would deem appropriate.

It was thanks to this wardrobe and her recently, intently, avariciously learned rules of etiquette that Mom began dating more and more well-bred men and being invited into communities previously reserved for high society, for the educated, wealthy, and elite. Mom felt at ease and if she was at all insecure about her level of education, she made up for it with her humor, her style, and her astute ability to read a room. Mom’s wry wit and her keen human observations made her a welcome dinner date or companion to anyone lucky enough to have her at their table. When you added alcohol to these characteristics, she was hard to resist. Her drinking at this point in her life, although probably necessary for her confidence, was still not a negative. Mom dated senators and theatre owners, bankers and trust-fund kids. She was wined and dined by them all. Mom began being recognized around town as the beautiful and vivacious “Teri Terrific.”

•   •   •

Mom looks happy in the photos I have from this time. I believe that during this period of her life, she might have actually been. There was no sadness in her eyes yet. This may have been the happiest I had ever seen her. She was on the ascent and having fun. She looked the best she had ever looked and was celebrated for all she wanted to be. I held on to the fantasy that one day I’d be able to help Mom return to that feeling in her life.

She seemed gorgeous, carefree, and very alive. She was living the life of a single woman in New York City in the early sixties. But she
was getting a bit older according to the current social mores, and I believe she began wanting a bit more security and a more substantial relationship.

Well, such a relationship was around the corner, and although it may not have been what she had expected, it changed the entire course of her life.

Chapter Two

Shields and Co.

I
f asked, Mom always boasted that late ’64 and ’65 were a very good and very busy time. Over the course of a year my mother met my father, got pregnant, married my dad, had me, and got divorced.

As the story goes, Mom was nursing a broken heart at a local watering hole called Jimmy Weston’s with an equally sad buddy who had just been dumped by his lady friend. His name was Jack Price and he evidently knew my father from around. Together Mom and Jack ventured out to commiserate and drown their sorrows. Evidently my twenty-four-year-old dad, still wet behind the ears and newly graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, walked into this particular bar on the Upper East Side by himself. He stood six foot seven with thick black hair slickly side-parted and combed over like a little boy’s. His strong jaw and Roman nose gave his face a regal appearance—to me, his face always looked a bit like the Statue of Liberty’s or like one of the Greek gods. According to my mother, Dad was wearing shined Belgian loafers, a crisp shirt, and a navy blazer. He was beautiful.

Mom claims she took one look at him and thought,
I want that!
Somehow introductions were made as they often are in these bars
filled with regular customers. Friends of friends introduced everybody all around and Mom quickly devised a plan. She proceeded to focus on getting her drinking buddy hammered so as to unload him. Once Jack began to stammer, Mom made her move. She asked my father to help put her friend in a cab. She told the cab driver his address and then stood on the street with my dad, open to suggestions.

“Can you believe he just left me!” Dad offered to take her home.

Here she was, the five-nine blond beauty with legs like Cyd Charisse’s, the attire of a well-bred New Yorker, and a riveting wit. These were her most beautiful years, and when you add in some inhibition-erasing cocktails, she became captivating. How could he resist? This was all I got of this part of the story, but evidently she went back with him to his apartment on East Fiftieth Street and there it all began. My father missed his flight to Los Angeles the next day and had to make up a story to tell the girlfriend he had intended to visit. Mom claims they didn’t leave the apartment for three days. I did not need to hear that particular detail, but I got the impression things went well. Mom and Dad began dating (and finding out about one another).

My dad came from a very, very different background from that of my Newark-born mom. His mother was Infanta (Donna) Marina Torlonia, an Italian-born aristocrat and daughter of the 4th Prince of Civitella-Cesi, Marino Torlonia, and Elsie Moore, his American wife. Marino had been the first private banker to the pope and was the primary administrator of Vatican finances. Mussolini even claimed one of his properties for his summer residence, paying him only one dollar.

Dad’s Italian mother, Marina, married New York City–born tennis player Francis Xavier Alexander Shields. “Pop-Pop” or “Big Frank,” as people referred to him, was president of the Davis Cup and a finalist at both Wimbledon and the US Open. (This was his second marriage.) Pop-Pop was also an actor under contract in the old studio system. It was said that his contract had been used as collateral in a poker game and because of a loss he was forced to switch studios.
Mom and I would see some of his movies later, particularly
Come and Get It
, which was directed by Howard Hawks and starred Pop-Pop and Frances Farmer.

My grandparents divorced after having my father, also named Frank, and his sister Marina. His mother then married Ed Slater, another American, and divorced him after having a son and daughter. Pop-Pop had two more children with his third wife, Goody Mortimer. It was always interesting to me that in almost every case, there was an aristocrat marrying outside the social boundaries, and to an (American) commoner. My royal grandmother married a tennis player–actor from New York City, my dad married a woman from Newark, and I first married a tennis player from Vegas. Dad would comment on this when I was about to marry Andre. (Clearly, none of the couplings ended well.)

A few years later it was said that my grandmother was in love with a married man. While on her way from the wedding of her nephew in Italy to the reception, she was killed in a horrible car crash. It was rumored that she purposely did not ride in the same car with her secret love so as not to create a scandal. The sad irony is that this man’s son, Roffredo Gaitani Lovatelli, would die the same way. More grim, however, was that Dad’s mom was decapitated and her only son, who was just eighteen years old, was forced to identify the body. In Italy, the firstborn son is considered the next of kin, and because she was divorced at the time, he had to fly over from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a freshman, to Italy to identify the body.

It must have been a very sad time in my father’s life. I don’t think he was ever the same after his mom died. Even though he had been at boarding schools and often not with his mom, she was a prominent figure in his life. She lived the life of a royal and jetted all over Europe. Mom once claimed she saw postcards from Dad’s mother from places
like Gstaad, where she wrote she was sorry she could not be with him for Christmas but was skiing and would see him soon.

Like Dad’s mother, my mom was tall and statuesque. His mother would be considered more of a “handsome” woman rather than the beauty my mother was, but they each had a strong presence. Marina was strong and obviously in control. Maybe my dad saw something of his mother in my mom? I’m sure he was drawn to her power and seeming confidence as well as her beauty. He did not seem to have any qualms about my mother’s age. She was eight years older than he was and this was not common in the sixties. I guess he couldn’t resist the gorgeous spitfire who made him laugh. However, Mom’s upbringing and background would later be a prominent obstacle.