Wry Martinis (30 page)

Over the
linguine alle vongole
(which I found quite good), we did a sort of
Recherché du Hemlines Perdu
, going back over all the different fashion phases she has gone through. For the last twenty years or so, it’s been mostly Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta, with a little Donna Karan, Isaac Mizrahi, and Calvin Klein thrown in. Before the era of Blass and de la Renta, there was the era of caftans (the mid-seventies), and, before that, maxis. (Never midis: “that ugly creation,” she told the press at the time.) Before that—the sixties now—there was her “Native American period. Beaded headbands, long buckskin skirts, high boots. There is no broth in this pasta at all. Big silver jewelry. If I was feeling particularly frivolous, a feather. I loved Mary Quant. When was she? I fell for her clothes in a big way. I think I started wearing short skirts before almost anybody, mainly because of my beauteous legs. Who wants to read this kind of crap? Does yours have any broth? The mid-sixties, Pucci. All my bathing suits, pants, tops were Pucci.” And back in the fifties, before her New York
life began—before she had friends named Nan, Mica, Jerome, Chessy, Estée, Slim, Rocky, and Pano—she was a suburban Connecticut car-pooling housewife and mom. “Classy country clothes, probably from Lord & Taylor. But I always had my sort of hooker side at night.”

Who taught her about fashion?

“Me. I think I’ve always had an eye. For my own kind of style. Mind you,” she added heavily, “there have been
many
mistakes made.”

This part took no coaxing. She relishes stories in which she is the figure of run. “About four years ago. It was a Blass, made like an Austrian shade, all wired and pleated. When I was having my fitting, no one said, ‘Sit down.’ The minute I went out in it, I sat down, and the whole thing came up over my head. People were in total hysteria. I had to stand up to eat.”

She went on, “Bill Blass was the first designer I took very seriously. I adored him. It was because I became enamored of—how would you call it?—the classic American look with a tweak to it. Maybe ‘tweak’ isn’t the right word. There’s a certain casualness, but there ain’t no grunge there. Have you seen the latest Chanel outfits? Please. Bill is a classic American designer. He never loses sight of taste. I didn’t mean ‘tweak,’ I meant ‘twist.’ A little added … If he’s dressing you somberly, there’s always something to take the somber out of it. And his evening clothes are very romantic.”

My mother’s parents were Canadian. Her mother was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba; her father was from Toronto. They lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, where my mother was born and reared. Her father was a mountainous, gruff self-made man who at various times made his money in timber, cattle, gold mines, oil, gas, and racehorses. His name was Austin Taylor; his wife’s name was Kathleen. She had soft Irish skin, beautiful red hair, a great, matronly bosom. She was called Babe. They were always well turned out, in a classic sort of way, but they never would have thought of themselves as fashionable.

“One time,” she said, “the
Province
or the
Sun
ran a picture of Daddy on the front page and the caption underneath said, ‘Sartorial Gem.’ He was in such a rage that he went out to the farm and stayed there for three days.”

I think this is where her profound ambivalence about the big-city part of her life comes from. Many times, I’ve heard her describe herself as “a simple country girl from a frontier town in British Columbia, whom my father named after his favorite hunting dog.” To put it politely, this is total bullshit. There is nothing simple about my mother, and it’s been a long
time since she left Vancouver. The part about being named for a springer spaniel may be true. But something in her upbringing—I can hear my grandmother’s voice admonishing her (“
Pat!
”), and even when she was in her late thirties I noticed that she wouldn’t smoke in front of her father—has kept her grounded throughout many a New York vanity bonfire.

In 1975, Enid Nemy wrote in
The New York Times:

From her mother, she inherited civic-mindedness. In Stamford, when she wasn’t carpooling, it was the Junior League. In New York she got involved with the Institute for Reconstructive Plastic Surgery, Memorial Sloan-Kettering and, more recently, St. Vincent’s Hospital, the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, and many other institutions. The “most of the time” referred to above is spent taking care of my father—a job that would keep all of Brigham Young’s twenty-seven wives busy. “I guess the only thing I really do well is run a house,” she once told a reporter. That is complete bullshit, but she has the gift of self-deprecation.

My father has the fashion sense of a Romanian country-parish priest, but he appreciates beauty on a woman, and has always done his best to be encouraging. When she made the Best Dressed Hall of Fame, the Valhalla of Seventh Avenue, he called me up to tell me, “Be sure to make a fuss. This is apparently a
very
big deal.” I called her and made a big fuss. She changed the subject, if memory serves, to the dog’s bladder infection.

Does my father still make a fuss?

“Yes. I don’t understand why the food is this way. I had exactly the same thing here last week, and it was delicious. Whenever I come out in a new dress, he always makes a point of saying, ‘A new dress. I think it’s absolutely divine.’ The other day, I came out in a fifteen-year-old Madame Grès, and he said, ‘Ducky, that’s absolutely divine. Who is it—Bill or Oscar?’ He’d seen it twenty times.”

At last, she is slightly warming to the subject. She likes fashion more than she will admit. Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta are two of her best
friends. At some point in the late seventies, their photographs, framed in silver, turned up on her crowded bibelot tables. For more than thirty years, she has been very close to Nan Kempner, whom she calls “probably the best-dressed woman I know.”

Yes, thank you, she’s finished with the
linguine alle vongole
. “Fashion is fun. As long as you don’t embarrass your husband. I remember last year coming down the staircase at the apartment in an outfit that I thought was absolutely, startlingly gorgeous, and your father said, ‘You look absolutely gorgeous. Where’s the rest of the dress?’ It was up to the kazoo. Don’t use the word ‘kazoo.’ ”

Another time: “I remember it was a Victorian show, and Blaine”—Blaine Trump—“got herself rigged out in some fancy-dandy outfit, and I was standing with Robert”—Blaine’s husband—“and some other man. Blaine was wandering around in bustles and furbelows and God knows what, and this man said, ‘My God, did you get a load of that?’ And Robert said, ‘I not only got a load of it, I’m
married
to it.’

“Espresso, please. I won’t tell you what designer it was, but I went about a year ago to order my fall outfits down on Seventh Avenue, and out comes this dress with cutouts here.” She points to just below her still-
belle poitrine
. “Black velvet, with net. And I said, ‘My God, I think I’m too old for this.’ And the designer said, ‘But Brooke Astor’s just ordered it in four different colors.’ Do you want dessert? I really shouldn’t. I can’t fit into any of my clothes.”

I have been hearing her say this since the mid-nineteen-fifties, when my memory began.

“The Italians are not good at pastries. Do you want more cappuccino? I don’t know what else to tell you about fashion. Except what I’d really like to do. My wildest fantasy would be to dress like Cher.”

Pat!

“Just dreams one has. Although, much as I’d like to go around looking like Cher, I can’t. Why? Well, Cher and I, shall we say,
share
different ages. No no no, this is my treat. Where are my glasses? I can no longer see anything. You’ll have to calculate the tip. I’m sorry it was so dreadful. It must not be their regular chef. I’m sure all this will be riveting. Just remember that I never take myself seriously about fashion. In fact, I never take myself seriously at all. Given my taste in clothes, I’ll probably come back as RuPaul.”

—
The New Yorker
, 1994

If the end of George Bush’s presidency marks a generational shift in American politics—the last time the office will be held by someone who fought in the Second World War—his mother’s death could be said to mark the passing of an American era, all the more poignantly for her having died so close to the precise moment when the baton was passed. Dorothy Walker Bush died at her home in Greenwich, Connecticut, just after five o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19th. She was ninety-one years old. Since Mr. Bush had lost the election little more than two weeks earlier, it was not surprising that he should say, when he spoke to us by telephone from Camp David the day before the funeral, “Well, it’s been a kind of emotional time for all of us.”

Much has been said and written about the way young George Bush strove to live up to his father, the late Senator Prescott Bush. Yet, by all accounts, Dorothy Bush was a much more dominant force in his life. Barbara Bush once told an interviewer that her mother-in-law had “ten times” the influence on her son that his father had.

Dorothy Bush was the daughter of Loulie Wear Walker and of George Herbert Walker, a well-to-do Midwestern investment banker named for the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet and Anglican priest George Herbert. She grew up in St. Louis and attended finishing school at the Farmington School Academy, in Connecticut. At Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1921, she married Prescott Bush, a handsome young Yale man, who went on to become a partner in Wall Street’s extension of Skull and Bones—Brown Brothers, Harriman & Company—and, in 1952, United States senator from Connecticut. She reared four sons and a daughter, was active in civic and volunteer work, excelled at sports and
games, and divided her time—as they say of those who have more than one house—between Greenwich, Kennebunkport, and Jupiter Island, in Florida. She was a matriarchal American aristocrat.

The impulse toward what her president son once referred to as “noblesse noblige” came, perhaps, from her faith. Her father was an Episcopalian, her mother a Presbyterian. She herself was an Episcopalian—indeed, so much of one that the designation “Anglican” seems almost more appropriate. Dorothy Bush was a deeply religious woman, and she read from the Bible to her children every morning of their young lives. Two days before the funeral, Jonathan Bush, the president’s younger brother, recalled, “She went through life with Dad and Christ. Those were her two great companions, and she believed that all things were possible with prayer.”

On the phone, the president said, “She led a life of faith. She was totally convinced—not just in her further-along, advanced years—of the life hereafter, and of God’s love: all those principles that for us her life really epitomized. She was something. She was really something. She became after Dad’s death the leader of our family. All the cousins and aunts, you know, I’m sure loved their mothers, but would cite Mother as the perfect example of the giving, caring person.”

The president has often told a story about one morning at Christ Church in Greenwich, where the Bush family attended services (“
every
Sunday,” her daughter, Nancy Ellis, groans, “
never
missing a Sunday”). The minister, descanting on Song of Solomon 2:5, got carried away and kept shouting out the line “Comfort me with apples.” “He said it about three times,” the president recalls. “ ‘Comfort me with apples! Comfort me!’ Pressie”—the eldest brother, Prescott Bush, Jr.—“and I burst out laughing. Mum was giggling, and the old man threw us out. He pointed—
out
. We couldn’t contain ourselves. There were a lot of incidents like that with her.” “The pew shook,” Nancy Ellis says. “She got the giggles. She was a person who got the giggles. She was fun.”

Mrs. Ellis also says, “An
enormous
athlete, Mother. A beautiful shot and a good horsewoman and a fabulous swimmer—and tennis, and golf, and paddle tennis. And a fantastic game player. Bridge, Scrabble, anagrams, backgammon, Peggoty, gin rummy, Sir Hinkam Funny-Duster—marvelous card game, Mother was a champ at it. Russian bank, tiddledy-winks. No wonder George runs from horseshoes to the golf course.”

For such a competitive woman, Mrs. Bush was remarkably—indeed, legendarily—adamant that her children not boast of their prowess on the playing fields. Vic Gold, the cowriter of the president’s 1987 campaign biography,
Looking Forward
, has come up with a scene that his editor cut from the book: “He”—the president—“was eleven years old, and just coming off the tennis court, and he said, ‘My game was off.’ And his mother said, ‘Young man, you don’t have a game.’ And he told me, ‘Right then and there is where I learned the idea of humility.’ She had this basic code of American sportsmanship.” Mrs. Ellis echoes the thought: “She hated that expression ‘my game.’ ”