Mary's Mosaic (29 page)

Unlike many in New York’s aristocracy who were untouched by the economic hardships of the Depression of the 1930s, Amos Pinchot was not immune to the downturn. In fact, he feared for the future of his family, often secretly dulling his anxiety with copious amounts of alcohol. The effects of his drinking became known to Mary one evening when she was about to graduate from Brearley. She had returned to the Pinchot apartment with her date. Amos, drunk, became combative and criticized his daughter’s social life. Mary retorted in her own defense, and Amos slapped her across the face. Her companion that evening must have been shocked and embarrassed by the spectacle, yet already the unflappable Mary was not one to back down. It was the beginning of a break with her father.
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Perhaps inspired by Rosamund’s example, Mary became a committed diarist. Starting when she was seventeen—soon after her sister died—she would use the act of writing as a tool for self-realization and reflection, especially in times of emotional crisis, and rely on it throughout her life. As noted previously, most of her earlier diary is still in existence, but its contents are unknown outside the family. However, in 1940, on the second anniversary of her sister’s suicide, the
New York Times
published Mary’s poem “Requiem,” a remarkable disclosure of verse that divulged a stirring dimension of Mary’s own persona. According to Bibi Gaston, “Requiem” had first been written in Mary’s diary.

Requiem

I saw her lying there so calm and still,

With one camellia placed beside her head.

She looked the same, and yet, her soul and will

Being gone she did not seem dead.

I thought if one so loved and beautiful

Should wish to leave, perhaps there was a voice

That called her back—and she was dutiful.

Somewhere the gods rejoice.

In some far place, where all the lovely things

Of earth are born, the gods no longer weep.

She has returned to them. And what she brings

We lose, but always keep.
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So began Mary’s published authorship, in the
New York Times
no less, at the age of nineteen, during her sophomore year at Vassar. Around the same time, Amos published his own poignant tribute, “To Rosamund,” in the
Herald Tribune
.
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While Mary’s initial path led to journalism, she had arrived at Vassar considering a career in medicine. She was drawn to the idea of helping people, but she ultimately preferred the arts and the literary life. Unlike many of her classmates, she frequently chose solitude over the clamor of endless parties, gossip, and Ivy League college weekends. While her beauty ensured she never lacked for attention, she wasn’t attention seeking. Mary had little desire to flaunt her good looks, or her good fortune. Ego gratification wasn’t her objective; her affirmation seemed to come from within. “Mary wasn’t very gregarious,” her Vassar classmate Scottie Fitzgerald Smith told authors Ron Rosenbaum and Phillip Nobile in 1976. “She didn’t mingle about. She was an independent soul. I always thought of her as a fawn running through the forest.”
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Mary’s independence was already a well-established hallmark of her character by the time she entered college. At one point during her undergraduate years, Vassar’s administration abruptly forbade the student body to patronize the drugstore adjacent to campus. No explanation was offered. Mary, in flagrant violation of the new edict, recruited a reluctant classmate and went to
the pharmacy—to learn its side of the story. According to the classmate, it appeared that someone at the store—a proprietor or an employee—might have made an unwanted advance toward a Vassar student. Mary’s former classmate had lost the specific details, but her memory of the event remained clear many years later. “Mary was a real rebel,” she recalled. “I was just a fake rebel.” Then she added, “Mary was exceptionally independent, but not a loner. She didn’t need to ‘run with the crowd,’ like the rest of us.”
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Social life at Vassar was as active as Mary wanted it to be. In addition to maintaining a relationship with Bill Attwood at Princeton, she traveled to Yale and Williams for weekend visits with other male friends—none of them flames. It appears that Mary met her future husband, Cord Meyer, during one of her visits to Yale, even though they didn’t date at the time. Cord himself wrote that he only knew Mary “slightly before the war”; in fact, he was a year behind her in college (Yale ‘43), but graduated in December 1942 due to an accelerated wartime academic schedule.
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The two did, according to one account, have several dates before Cord went to war.
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During that period, Mary also crossed paths again with Jack Kennedy, but no relationship ensued. It was a time when the patrician class stuck together. “Everybody knew everybody then,” recalled Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and “everybody” was anybody with a similar social pedigree.
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That did, in fact, include Jack Kennedy, who according to one account, dated several members of Mary’s class at Vassar, though not Mary. However charming, Jack was decidedly a wealthy playboy and always on the make. Mary would have been bored with this kind of man. She thirsted for something deeper, a man with purpose, a partnership of allies. In one of his impromptu campus visits to Vassar, Jack in fact introduced himself to a gullible classmate of Mary’s. The two went on a date, during which Jack, eager to carve another notch, concocted a story that he had recently been stricken with leukemia and had only weeks to live. His gullible date felt so sorry for him, she took pity, and slept with him that night, unaware of the duplicity young Kennedy had employed in taking her for a ride.
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The Kennedy calling card was already in full swing.

O
ne of the most revealing glimpses into Mary’s psyche at Vassar was a short story she authored in the spring of 1941 for the
Vassar Review and Little Magazine.
Published six times during the college year, the magazine enjoyed an independent circulation beyond the college community. The two-column, three-page short story, “Futility,” depicted a young woman named Ruth Selwyn,
attending her friend Beatrice Barclay’s cocktail party in New York. Bored by idle chitchat, Ruth stands away from the crowd, casting a gaze around Beatrice’s recently redecorated living room. She makes a mental note of how “cold and angular” everything is: “… the furniture all chromium and corners, the women chicly cadaverous, the conversation brittle and smart and insignificant.” Ruth can’t wait to leave the party. She is on her way to an operation that will change her life forever. She has pleaded with Dr. Morrison to perform the procedure for weeks. The surgery will connect Ruth’s optical nerves to the hearing part of her brain and the auditory nerves to her visual cortex, “so that everything the patient hears she sees, and vice versa.” Commenting to his nurse, Dr. Morrison irritatingly says, “She wants something new. You know the type: bored with life, looking for excitement at any price—as though life weren’t complicated enough as it is.”

The day after the operation, Ruth is amazed. As she passes the florist’s window, she notices that the orchids have been replaced by a variety of other flowers, and that the display includes two framed paintings, one of which features sunflowers by Van Gogh. At the sight of it, Ruth hears Stravinsky’s “Sacre du Printemps.” The sight of baby’s breath elicits the sound of a calm sea washing up on a beach at night. Roses evoke a slow waltz. And “when her eyes moved along past them to a clear white orchid, the waltz ended in the sharp tinkle of thin glass breaking.”

One dimension of Mary’s story describes what is commonly known as
synesthesia.
It is, to some degree, a medical condition whereby in certain people and animals, a stimulus in one sense modality involuntarily elicits a literal sensation/experience in another sense modality. For example, the taste of a lime would visually evoke the color blue. The elicited synesthetic experience doesn’t replace the normal experience; it just enhances it. Many artists, for instance, strive to train themselves to become more synesthetic: seeing the colors of sound; hearing some visual perception they wish to communicate; or describing the “personality” of a bedroom’s doorframe.

One irony of “Futility” was that it foreshadowed a significant event in Mary’s later life. The fictional character Ruth Selwyn was having a classic hallucinogenic experience after her operation. The ultimate experience of synesthesia is easily induced under the influence of most hallucinogenic substances, including the psychedelic LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide). As an emerging artist in the late 1950s, Mary would embark on her own exploration of psychedelics, including LSD and psilocybin. This wasn’t superficial thrill seeking on her part; it was more the result of being in the vanguard of a group
of people, many of whom were already established artists in quest of greater self-expression. Equally fascinating in “Futility” was Mary’s commentary on orchids: “They look as though they had been grown in damp underground caves by demons. They’re evil sickly flowers with no life of their own, living on borrowed strength.” How ironic that someone would later appear in her life who was obsessed and surrounded by orchids, someone who had presented himself as a friend, before his betrayal.

Yet at its core, “Futility” was an allegory for an issue that Mary would encounter most of her life: the divide between narrowly prescribed cultural roles for women, and her own aspirations. The “chicly cadaverous” women, who had succumbed to a life of wanting for nothing, horrified her; yet all around Mary and her contemporaries, social influence dictated the grooming for such a life. In “Futility,” Mary took aim at what she saw as the vapid existence dominated by the superficial pursuit of elegant, novel redecorating, filled with “conversation brittle and smart and insignificant.” In spite of her social and economic mobility—the plush confines of Grey Towers, a first-class education, the cultural cornucopia of New York City—without a deeper purpose, without some higher calling and sense of inspiration and passion, Mary still risked slipping into the banal, the empty, the insignificant and self-absorbed, making life itself hollow.

B
y 1940 all of Europe would be struggling against the warlord march of Germany and Adolf Hitler. But that spring, Mary’s life at Vassar continued untouched. Having been selected as one of the twenty-four most beautiful women in the sophomore class to carry the chain of daisies and laurel at commencement, Mary Pinchot had worn the wreath known as the Vassar Daisy Chain, Vassar’s most famous tradition. In September, Germany began the devastating bombing of London—seventy-six consecutive nights of air strikes known as the London Blitz. Life in America was changing. While Glen Miller and Tommy Dorsey pumped out music with time to dance, young men, many of Mary’s contemporaries, were disappearing late at night to enlist. It was just a matter of time. America was going to war.

By the summer of 1942, World War II had enveloped the entire country.

The sophomoric college days of endless parties and gaiety had abruptly come to a halt. With the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, an era—almost overnight—had ended. Academic calendars were curtailed; graduation ceremonies took place in December instead of June, if they took place at all.
Everywhere, the preparations and demands of a world at war were becoming all consuming.

But not even war could stop love. Mary had returned to New York after her graduation from Vassar. She found a job as a feature writer for United Press International (UPI), established her own column, and enjoyed rapid success.
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On her own and away from her parents, Mary’s fierce independence and selfconfidence bloomed. Even in wartime, New York was an exciting place for a young woman just starting out on her own. And it was about to become even more so.

R
obert (“Bob”) L. Schwartz was a young Naval officer and a journalist for
Yank
magazine. Hailing from a Midwestern Jewish background in Salem, Ohio, the handsome Schwartz was tall, lean, and intellectually articulate by any standard. One Friday night, sometime during the summer of 1942, Bob was at one of his favorite after-work watering holes, Tim Costello’s Bar in New York. That night, he noticed a woman so alluring, he felt impelled to meet her. The problem was that every other man in the bar felt the same way. Tim Costello, the bar owner, was particularly protective of Mary and operated as a kind of “guardian at the gate,” particularly if the men became obnoxious.
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