Personal History (7 page)

Bis was popular with boys. She entered Vassar at sixteen and later went on to study in Munich and at Barnard. She often brought glamorous figures home for house parties, where my pedestrian young male friends paled in their shadow.

In 1915, along came Eugene Meyer III. Any boy with that name was going to have a hard time, and Bill, as he was always known, did, especially as he got older. Being the only boy of five children would be difficult in any family, but it was particularly so in ours, both because of my father’s unapproachability and prominence and because of my mother’s awkwardness with men. But my mother was elated at his birth. She had wanted nothing but sons and she felt, as she admitted, “a ridiculous sense of achievement.”

Even as a young child, Bis found, or recruited, a companion rebel in Bill. The two of them formed a team; like Bis, Bill assumed a defiant stance toward the grown-up world. We were all away once on a yacht trip and Bill had stayed home, learned to fly, and gained his pilot’s license. He told my mother he had something to show her. She held her breath, fearing it was a marriage license, in comparison with which a pilot’s license seemed benign. He then “showed her” by buzzing our house in Mount Kisco, dipping his wings in acknowledgment.

From as early as I can remember, I adored my older siblings, but particularly Bis and Bill. I was desperately eager to be part of their adventurous life and terribly envious of Bis’s nonconformist image. I really even wanted to
be
her. I envied her self-assurance, her independence, her daring, her willingness to cut up and row with the family. I would have liked to be a dashing law-breaker, but I didn’t have the proper instincts or the courage, and I was always scorned for passively going along. Where Bis was a rebel, I followed the rules. I was Goody Two-Shoes, begging to be taken along with Bis and Bill wherever they went. Naturally, they considered me a pain.

Worse, when I was very young I was the world’s most ignoble tattle-tale—without even realizing what I was doing. I didn’t tell on the older ones to be mean, get even, or ingratiate myself with my parents. I simply had no idea that I had transgressed. I shared their lives so little that I didn’t understand that their activities were meant to be secret, and was merely reporting. After one episode when I was about four, Bis, Bill, and Flo took me into a bathroom at Mount Kisco and carefully taped my mouth shut. As Bis remembers, “The big tears on those very fat cheeks almost undid me. It was so sad, but the cause was just.”

As the fourth of five children, I was oddly shielded from the rigors of living with parents who demanded perfection and from some of the eccentricities of our curious upbringing. More so than the older children, I was supervised by our parents from afar. This was in certain ways lucky, because, growing up somewhat alone, I didn’t experience the rules and heavy hand to which the older children were subjected.

By the time I was growing up, the battles between the children and the parents had already taken place. Not only were our parents busier and more preoccupied than ever, but my impulse was always to please. Only later did I observe that this curious passivity left me freer than both my older sisters and brother: their rebellion somehow left them more enslaved and affected by the family’s myths and wishes. Somehow, in their defiance, my siblings were more captives of the negative part of our upbringing. So my position in the family turned out to be a lucky one; I bore neither the brunt of my mother’s newness to parenthood nor the force of her middle-aged traumas, as my younger sister, Ruth, did. I was somehow
protected. Luck helped me be a survivor and gave me strength, but at the time what I really wanted was a place in the remote and exciting world of my older sisters and brother. As Bis succinctly put it later, I was “safe but gypped.”

My difficulties were much more tied to a lack of guiding personal relationships, for I had more or less to bring myself up emotionally and figure out how to deal with whatever situations confronted me. At the same time that I was surrounded by extreme luxury, I led a life structured and in many ways spartan, circumscribed by school and lessons, travel and study. The only person who was physically affectionate with me was Powelly, whom I emotionally outgrew when I was about seven. From then on I was on my own.

The youngest of us, Ruth, was born in Mount Kisco in July 1921. I was led in to see the new baby lying on the bed in the guest room. I hadn’t the remotest idea how the baby arrived or whence it came and don’t remember being curious. I was just in awe of her, with her tiny curled-up fingers.

Ruth’s birth, the last in our family, sealed my separation from the older three, who viewed Ruth and me as a pair of infants. Ruthie was an enchanting child and I was jealous that she was blonde, blue-eyed, and beautiful, whereas I was dark and pudgy. I once tested family members by suggesting that if a fire broke out we’d all meet in Ruthie’s room because we’d rush to save her first. No one contradicted this thesis or got the point of my test.

Ruthie and I were set apart as a duo in other ways. We both remained under Powelly’s care as the older ones outgrew her, even sharing a room until I was twelve. When guests were present at dinner, which was nearly every night, Ruthie and I had to eat alone at an earlier hour. Every summer until I was nine and allowed to join the older contingent, my parents took the three of them on a trip to Europe or, in alternate years, on a camping trip out west. While the others were off enjoying exciting adventures, Ruthie and I were left in Mount Kisco with our governess.

As the fifth and last child, Ruthie received even less in the way of parental attention and interest, and more in the way of being attended to only by a governess or nurse. Naturally, because we were always considered a separate unit and I was four years older, I became a sort of parent to her, or at least an important mentor. She grew increasingly shy, gentle, and unassertive. For the most part, she lived in a world of her own, eventually becoming a gifted, devoted horsewoman. Her attention was focused on a Springer spaniel named Cricket and the governess, Mademoiselle Otth, whom she loved very much. When Ruth was fifteen, the dog died and the governess was sent away at about the same time. Needless to say, Ruth’s heart was broken. When Mademoiselle left, Ruth wrote me:

I understood only too well how she felt. My mother later wrote up these events in a story that she tried to sell to one of the women’s magazines. I was indignant that she was using her daughter’s grief and wounds in this way, but she calmly replied that she’d shown it to Ruthie and that Ruthie had liked it. I didn’t believe it at the time, but she proved to be right. When Ruthie and I were going over my mother’s papers after her death, the story reappeared. I stupidly tore it up, my anger returning at the sight of it. Years later Ruthie told me she had resented my tearing it up and thought I was jealous because it was about her, not me. The complexity of family relations is too deep to comprehend. This incident certainly testifies against moral certitude—mine.

M
Y LIFE AS
a child was centered in the house in Washington and in our summer home in Mount Kisco. At that time it was an eight-hour train trip from Washington through New York and on into the country, but we made the trip regularly, those treks engineered by Mother, traveling with five children, several canaries, and all the baggage. The horses went separately.

The ambience of the huge country house was wonderful, making up in gaiety what it may have lacked in warmth. As a bachelor, my father had bought an old farm and had added to it over the years until his property reached seven hundred acres at its peak, which was most of my childhood. Originally, there was a beautiful old farmhouse, which he had used and where the family lived in summers in the early years of my parents’ marriage, before they decided to build a larger home.

Designed in 1915 by Charles Platt, the architect my mother’s friend Freer had selected to build his Oriental-art gallery in Washington, the new stone house was built to be lived in year-round, so that my father could commute to Wall Street by car or the excellent commuter train. Since my parents moved to Washington in 1917, we used it only from early summer until early fall.

The new house—surrounded by enormous trees, all transplanted—stood on top of a previously barren hill overlooking the old farmhouse. In the other direction, the house overlooked Byram Lake, a New York City water supply, but also our boating-and-fishing hole in a once-a-summer
event. We always referred to this neoclassical country house as “the farm,” because my parents thought of it as that and because it was a regular working farm. There were pigs and chickens, as well as Jersey milk cows, from which we got unpasteurized milk, buttermilk, and rich cream. There was a large and bountiful orchard and a garden at the foot of the hill, from which we ate fresh vegetables and enjoyed magnificent bouquets of flowers all over the house, refreshed and replaced every day. Flowers were even sent to Washington for our successive houses there, and in winters, many of the farm’s products were delivered by truck to our Washington house. The care of the gardens, at least in summer, took a dozen men. Another dozen ran the farm. They all lived at the old farmhouse in a bachelor establishment.

The house itself was large but simple in lines. Though it was very grand in concept, it managed to retain a feeling of informality. Made of rough-hewn pinkish-gray granite blasted out of huge rocks from a quarry on the place and chipped and carved into immense brick-shaped slabs by stonemasons, it took two years to build. Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, had to be summoned to settle a jurisdictional dispute between two unions involved in the construction—stonecutters and bricklayers, I believe.

The rooms were all big. Most of the bedrooms had screened sleeping porches attached. There was an indoor swimming pool and a bowling alley, as well as a tennis court. There was a beautiful formal garden next to the house at one end, which was completed by a separate large, classical orangery. Two massive Italian birdbaths were situated on either side of a pond containing large lotuses at both ends and water lilies in the middle.

Most surprising was a big organ with pipes that wove through the house on every floor. My father loved to blast us out of bed on Sunday mornings by playing “Nearer My God to Thee” at its loudest, saying, “Everybody up!” We also had a grand piano, and both the organ and piano had mechanical attachments for playing rolls of music. We had scores of piano rolls, including many by Paderewski, a great friend of my mother’s. One of my principal childhood memories is hearing one of the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies waft throughout the house.

My mother prided herself on not having had a decorator. She and Platt together had chosen the furniture, with curious and not very practical results. Since both of them were tall, they had naturally chosen chairs for the living rooms that were quite large. In several, my father’s feet barely touched the ground, since he was a few inches shorter than she. None of the rooms had proper reading lights near the beds, or desks with appropriate chairs and lights. My father complained loudly that he didn’t have a reading light in his bedroom—I think he finally managed to secure one by buying it himself. My mother’s bedroom was the only room in the
house that was both beautiful and livable, in the sense that it had proper lights and comfortable chairs.

No room on the ground floor had enough chairs for a cozy group to sit and talk, except for an outdoor porch off my father’s study. We just about lived on this porch, which was open but roofed. It was in my father’s study that we always gathered after dinner. There, too, there were only two large chairs, placed on either side of the fireplace. My father’s desk and chair and a sofa were way off in opposite corners, so the conversation group had to be created anew each evening by bringing extra chairs in and pulling them close to the fireplace.

Not only did my mother never have a decorator, but she never changed anything once it was in place, except as we children grew up and altered our room arrangements. At first, I lived with Ruthie and a nurse, later a governess, in a room with a porch off it, on which we slept, and a playroom next door. Flo and Bis and their governess lived in a similar arrangement. My parents had a suite at the end of the hall. Bill and his tutor lived up on the third floor.

The whole house was lined with large Chinese paintings. In the biggest living room was a table on which sat many of my mother’s beautiful bronzes, vases, and other objects. In her study stood two Brancusis—
Danaïde
on the mantel and
The Blonde Negress
at the door. In the library there was the large white marble
Bird in Space
, on a wooden base that Brancusi had carved in our garden on his first visit to the United States, when he had stayed with us at Mount Kisco. I remember sitting around watching while Brancusi hacked away and chatted with us simultaneously.

As Ruthie and I got older, meals were mostly taken together, the whole family gathered, especially on weekends, when my father arrived from Washington. We had two dining rooms. If there were a lot of us, we used the larger, more formal, marble-floored inside dining room, which was rare and special. When it was just the family and a few friends we would eat in what we called the “outside” dining room, which could still seat about twenty. It had a green Venetian dining-room set and was enclosed by large glass windows that provided views of the terrace and woods beyond the house. The only decoration in this room was a sculpture by Brancusi, his rendition of my mother. Needless to say, this was a very abstract black marble, which he called
La Reine pas Dédaigneuse
, or
The Not-Disdainful Queen
. Many people laughed at it, describing it, among other ways, as a horse’s swollen knee. Only once was it shown in a Brancusi show, at which my sister Bis heard someone remark, “What the hell is that thing?” She turned to the poor baffled stranger and said, “Sir, that is my mother!” I’ve always found it extraordinarily beautiful.