Edie (9 page)

Alice Sedgwick and Saucie, 1931

A sampler showing the de Forest home, Cold Spring Harbor. Alice’s mother embroidered it as an engagement gift for Alice.

My mother and grandmother were very different. Grandma was very devout and very generous, active in charities and clubs. My mother thought all mat was for the birds. Grandma grieved that my mother no longer went to church. She was very strict about manners. I heard her ask people not to smoke at table, very nicely, but that was it. She did everything quietly and calmly, though I know from stories that she was strong-willed. Her French maid told me that Grandma had once forgotten an ivory-handled hairbrush in a Santa Barbara hotel, and she made my grandfather stop the train and go back for it.

From the time I was born, my parents literally grafted me onto my grandmother. I was sent to Grandma’s with a trained nurse when I got sick, and for long holidays when I grew older. She had a special cupboard of toys with a real microscope and specimens, a set of Chinese fingernail guards in heavy gold filigree, and seashells from the Bahamas. She played games with me endlessly, and she was affection itself. But as much as I loved to be with my grandmother, I never liked life on Long Island. It always seemed basically dreary. And I had an unaccountable sense of danger: I was afraid to close my eyes when I was around adults. I didn’t want anybody looking at me that I couldn’t keep my eyes on. I had to watch out. Our months in the East were like Persephone’s six months in Hades—dark, winter, death. My parents dressed like Easterners, very buttoned up, in dark colors and evening clothes. Their friends were quiet and well spoken, and the women kissed each other on the cheek by turning their faces away from each other. My father seemed incredibly vivid and boisterous among them.

California! That was the ideal world—it was Arcadia. Eternal sunlight, endless blue sky, just seamless harmony and perfection. In 1943 we moved there for good—that’s where Edie and Suky were born. We first lived on a fruit ranch in Goleta, fifty acres or so in the foothills near Santa Barbara. The house stood halfway up a slope beside a grove of eucalyptus trees, which gave a great soughing sound in the wind, especially at night. The view seemed to stretch away infinitely—a vast sweep of orchards as far as the sea. Off in the distance you could see the Santa Barbara Islands. Just below the house was a small wild garden, with steppingstones down to a grotto where huge ferns grew under live-oak trees. Beyond were lemon orchards—twenty acres or so—and a creek, barns and corrals for the horses, the greenhouse, and walnut orchards. On the hI’ll behind the house there were avocado and persimmon trees and a steep, narrow path that went up to the pool and the tennis court. The house itself
was white stucco covered in vines: plumbago, lantana, trumpet vine, a glorious magenta bougainvillea, and ivy. It was Spanish in style, built around a patio. There was marvelous furniture, and paintings—Ruysdaels and a Carpaccio. We children lived with our nurse in bedrooms at the back which gave onto the patio. My mother and father’s room was at the front, toward the view, but they often slept outdoors on a porch over the terrace. There was a ladder and a trapdoor and a double bed up there.

When we were little, we thought that our parents lived the life of Greek gods. Don’t forget that there was a strong classical tradition in our family. We knew the myths from early on, and my parents and their life seemed somehow suffused with the same light and feeling as gods. Their physical beauty was very apparent to us. They seemed golden and dressed in white—in fact, they
were,
since they played tennis every day. They led their own life, and it seemed to be full of light and joy. But we had very little access to them . . . none to my father except as a sort of Olympian figure who would punish us. Of course, they
had
to be gods if they were to avoid what happens to humans.

There was a tremendous feeling of happiness in that place—so incredible in light of what happened later. I remember my parents singing all the time. My father was hopelessly tone-deaf, but he had a beautiful voice. He sang “Penny Serenade” . . . “Si, si, si, you can hear it for a penny. Si, si, si, just a penny serenade.” My mother sang, too, in a low, rather windy voice, without words. They called each other “darling” all the time. And the air was fragrant—on hot days you could smell the orange orchard in the house. It was just paradise. In fact, that was Babbo’s name for it—Paradise Ranch—and he always said he half expected to find St. Peter standing at the gate. My parents gave us the feeling that life was sensational and you couldn’t get enough of it. And their friends enjoyed it with them—I remember the place literally ringing with laughter and conversation. You can’t fool children: that was real, absolutely real.

Both my parents came from the world in which “connections” and schools and clubs were fantastically important. Like everyone else they knew, they were class conscious, though my mother—perhaps because she was more secure—never showed it. My father would often refer to people as being or not being “out of the top drawer.” But in California, even though most of their friends had come from the East, it was a more varied and vivid group. I remember an old lady whom we called Mrs. Fithy, who always came wearing a floppy hat and carrying
a wicker market basket full of presents; Kate and Curtis Cate of the Cate School; the Baring-Goulds, who were Scottish; Jane Wyatt, the actress, and her husband, Eddie Ward; Chris and Maddie Rand; Alex Tonetti—gloriously beautiful—with her husband, B. C. White, who taught tennis at the Montecito Club; lots of Hoyts, Rogers, and MacVeaghs, especially Jack MacVeagh, who came every week to play tennis; Lockwood de Forest, my mother’s cousin, who was responsible for all the planting at Goleta; and Mary Joyce, who had red hair and blue eyes and a very droll lisp. I can stI’ll hear her squeaking with laughter at some outrageous remark of my father’s: “Franthith, you are a detethtable man.”

From very early on, one of the family’s closest friends was Dr. Horace Gray, a Jungian analyst, who came every Sunday for lunch. My mother and father used to boast that he had tested them and found them to be the most extreme examples of introvert and extrovert of his experience. I think my parents liked to define themselves this way: my mother was the feeler, my father was the thinker. Horace Gray didn’t play tennis, he didn’t come up to the pool, I doubt if he came to parties—he was the wise man, the seer, Merlin.

In a way, my parents were really Renaissance people, but they were more cultivated than intellectual. They read aloud every evening—Dickens, Macaulay, Turgenev. And my mother always knew a lot about music. Even after my father made her stop playing the piano because he said she should devote more time to the children, she stI’ll found time every day to listen systematically to records and read and learn. The tragedy was that along with their happiness and their incredible appetite for life, the forces of darkness were always there, although you would never have known it: the surface looked so good. So it was a life of extremes—paradise and paradise lost.

The Twentieth Reunion Book, Harvard University, 1946:

FRANCIS MINTURN SEDGWICK

Occupation
: Rancher

Married
: Alice de Forest, May 8, 1929, New York, N.Y.

Children
: Alice; Robert Minturn, 2d; Pamela; Francis Minturn, Jr.; Jonathan Minturn; Katherine; Edith; Susanna.

My endeavors to enlist in the armed forces having been thwarted by asthma, I settled on my ranch and devoted myself to raising a few cattle and quite a lot of children.

Ranching has the undoubted advantage of providing beef and pork, chickens and rabbits, and milk and eggs as well as vegetables; and also the doubtful advantage of spare time for indifferent sculpture, worse painting, and a novel, “The Rim,” worst of all, the latter published in April, 1945, since four hours a day in the saddle sufficed for the cattle work.

In these peaceful pursuits I have been bucked off three times, thrown twice, had a horse fall on me three times, and, for real excitement, bid in the Grand Champion and Reserve Champion Pens of Bulls at the Great Western Livestock Show at prices below average for the show—very dangerous for blood pressure. Strange uses for a Harvard degree!

I am a trustee of the Cate-Vosting School.

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 During the war my parents bought another place in California, a ranch called Corral de Quad. We children heard about it first from the cook, Nancy Kennedy. Later I remember hearing my father tell some people, “I’ve decided to raise cattle for the war effort. That’s the one thing I can do, since I can’t get into the service.”

Corral de Quati was a real working cattle ranch, not romantic like Goleta, but glorious because of the land. It was in the Santa Ynez Valley, about fifty miles inland from Santa Barbara—three thousand acres of dry yellow tableland, with sagebrush and live-oak trees. The buildings were strung out around a big open circle, including a nice big cottage where Jonathan, Kate, Edie, and Suky eventually lived. Everything was painted yellow and brown. Near the back door of the main house there was a huge pepper tree, and a bell which was rung fifteen minutes before meals and again at mealtime. Out of earshot of the main house my parents built three little bunkhouses. Bobby and Pamela and I each had one. There was a bed, a desk and a chair, and hooks screwed into the wall for clothes, simple Indian bedspreads, and one single light bulb in the ceiling with a long string. The main house had a big living room with a polar-bear rug in front of the fireplace. The furniture was all very simple—unpainted, or covered in plain cotton. Everything was plain—no sybaritic pleasures, no tennis court, no pool, no parties to speak of.

DR. JOHN MILLET
 When the Second World War came, Francis Sedgwick tried very hard to get into the military. His brother, Minturn, was on his way to establishing an excellent and glamorous record with the intelligence branch of the Eighth Air Force in Europe. But though Francis tried very hard, he was turned down—I’m almost sure for the bronchial asthma he had suffered since his early twenties, and very likely because of that large brood of his—six children by then. I wrote to the U.S. Medical Corps that he was a man of exceptional ability and superior intelligence who had learned how to manage his extremely dynamic make-up, both emotional and physical, and that in my opinion he could be of great value in the service. The letter didn’t work.

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 I think my father was ashamed and disappointed not to be in the service. He felt that people would look at this glorious physical specimen and think of him as a shirker. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons we moved to California. If anyone thought we were trying to avoid the war, it was ironic, because the only attack
on continental American soil took place when a Japanese sub lobbed a few shells into an orchard not far from where we were living.

My father took it very hard when two of his best friends were killed in the war: Richard Scott, who was in the Porcellian Club at Harvard with my father, and who was killed on flight duty in North Africa; and Rex Fink, who was killed on Iwo Jima. Both men were incredibly handsome, and admirable in every way. Certainly their dying heroically added to the effect on my father. He did a painting of Rex, and a bas-relief of Dick Scott, which is at Cambridge University, where they were both at Trinity College. He also dedicated his first novel,
The Rim
, to Dick Scott. Here is the dedication: “To the friend of my boyhood, youth, and manhood,” with a quote, “And the elements / So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up / And say to all the world, This was a man!’” and another: Though they fell, they fell like stars, / Streaming splendour through the sky.” My father was quite self-effacing about his book and it did not get good reviews. The best was in the
Atlantic
. One reviewer said that art and adultery had got a good workout.

JOHN P. MARQUAND, JR.
 I never read
The Rim
, but I remember hearing that he wrote a horrible description of his poor wife brushing her teeth. She is fat and standing in front of the bathroom mirror; her flesh is jiggling and she is spattering herself with toothpaste. it’s a rather sadistic novel about his wife and children. He had a really brutal kind of hold on all of them and brought his children up on this huge ranch in the Groton-Harvard-Porcellian Club myth that he lived in.

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 My father never told my mother anything about the book while he was working on it. She was in the East when she read it for the first time—I think she had the chicken pox, which she had caught from us, and she was stuck at my grandmother’s on Long Island. I found the letter she wrote him about it in a desk drawer in the study, and even though I was only thirteen at the time, I had the feeling that my father had shut my mother out.