I was soon on a flight back to the States with my very frustrated mother. After two and a half years in Africa I was being sent to live with my mother’s relatives in Connecticut. My parents were hoping that my health would improve, but I suspected that my trip home was also about my attitude. I had made it clear that I didn’t like Africa, and my parents had probably grown tired of my unhappiness.
Mom enrolled me in the Kathleen Laycock Country Day School for girls, about twenty miles north of Greenwich in a community called Westport. I was sent to live with the family of Mom’s second cousins. Kathleen Laycock was built on the former estate of R. T. Vanderbilt and boasted an enrollment of 250 girls of all ages along with thirty teachers.
Having been born into MRA’s cocoon of the Four Absolute Standards, I found myself at age fourteen living in a world just as foreign as the one I’d seen in Africa. Women wore makeup, adults smoked and swore, and my surrogate parents drank cocktails every night before dinner.
Years later, when we were adults, my siblings and I would decide that all of us should have spent time with a deprogrammer after we left Caux and before we were reintroduced to normal society. You don’t spend the first ten years of your life under the direction of strict MRA nannies while your parents are off doing God’s work without undergoing culture shock when you see how other families operate.
I didn’t get along well at my new home or in my new school. I spent a lot of time in the school infirmary. The nurse couldn’t find anything physically wrong with me; I just felt lousy and lifeless. I wasn’t doing well academically, either. It wasn’t because the schoolwork was difficult; I simply didn’t care or apply myself. I think part of my problem, besides being a teenager, was that I’d been berated in Caux by my MRA teachers for being, as one wrote in my report card, “too competitive.” The teacher chastised me for not being an “obedient girl.” Within MRA, a good girl didn’t compete with boys. That teacher’s lecture was reinforced by MRA nannies and unintentionally by my own mother, who, I felt, had surrendered her own aspirations to assist my father and his work in Africa—to the point of abandoning us as children.
Living with my relatives soon became untenable, and my mother boarded another flight back to the States to deal with what was becoming known as “the Jessie problem.” I could almost hear my parents asking themselves, “What do we do with her now?”
Their solution was to move me back to Grandmother Moore’s house. I would finish the rest of the school year being chauffeured to classes and cared for by an MRA nanny, an older woman whose nickname was Tweedie. Before returning to Africa, Mom warned me that Tweedie had epilepsy and that if I caused her too much trouble, she might have a seizure and die.
In addition to my grandmother and me, there was Tweedie and Suza living in this big house. I moved back into the wing that my mom had added for a family of six. At night I would lie in my bed, listening to every creak and strange noise, painfully aware that I was isolated and alone. I wondered what my sisters and brother were doing. I felt unwanted by my parents. Every morning I would step out of my room and run as fast as I could, screaming, down the long green hall to the main house, where everyone else stayed. Monsters were after me, but if I screamed I would be all right.
Now that I was back home, I was reunited with Valentina Quinn, the youngest child of the Academy Award–winning actor Anthony Quinn and his first wife, Katherine DeMille, daughter of the legendary Cecil B. DeMille. I called my friend Valli. Her parents had been recruited by MRA, but unlike my mom and dad, Anthony Quinn had rebelled at becoming an MRA convert. His refusal had caused strains in his marriage, especially when Katherine had gone to be indoctrinated in Caux without him. That’s where I’d met Valli for the first time. We had gotten into trouble in Caux for pushing flowerpots off a windowsill—it was fun to see and hear them crash on the cement several floors below. Our MRA nannies had separated us and sent us to a so-called Four Table, which meant we each had to eat at a table with three adults, who grilled us about why we had broken the MRA’s Four Absolute Standards by being naughty. Ugh…
Valli’s mother moved her family back to California from Caux, and then everyone went to Italy, where Anthony was filming the 1961 movie Barabbas. During shooting, Anthony Quinn had a highly publicized affair with an Italian seamstress, whom he impregnated. Valli’s mom brought the kids back to the States, where she filed for divorce and eventually moved east.
I had a lot in common with Valli. Her two older sisters were off traveling with Up with People, the MRA singing group that toured college campuses and military bases. My sister Glenn was one of the group’s singer-songwriters. Valli also had a deeply troubled relationship with her famous father. The truth was that both of us were raising ourselves.
Occasionally I would have some contact with Glenn or my other siblings. I think all of them realized that I was drifting on my own. Sandy wrote a letter to our parents telling them that I needed to be with them, no matter how loudly I screamed the opposite. I didn’t know about it until years later. His pleas fell on deaf ears.
Without a strong parental figure to guide me, I began testing adult waters with my friends. Susie, a classmate from school, and I raided her parents’ liquor cabinet one night when her parents were out. There was another girl with us, and she got so drunk that she blacked out. We thought she might be dead, so we panicked and called Susie’s parents, who hurried home and telephoned the girl’s father. The girl’s mother blamed Susie and me and claimed that in addition to drinking, the two of us were smoking pot. At that point, I didn’t even know what marijuana was, but that would soon change.
I think alcohol affected me differently from the way it affected most young girls. It not only made me feel less inhibited and eased my painful shyness, it affected my brain. My thoughts seemed to slow down. I didn’t feel as if I had a jackrabbit jumping through my head.
I began smoking Tareyton cigarettes, too. Its commercials featured a smoker with a black eye who boasted, “Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.” It seemed so adult, and that slogan appealed to my rebellious streak. Smoking also seemed to soothe my brain.
Susie and I were both boy-crazy, and I quickly realized that boys were interested in me, too. I had long, naturally blond hair, and my boobs had become so enormous that my brother, Sandy, embarrassed me once when I’d been in Africa by asking how I managed to stand straight up without tipping over. I was five feet four inches tall, weighed 110 pounds, and when I bought my first bikini, I had to purchase a size 6 bottom for my hips and a size 8 for my breasts.
Susie was cute, too, with fiery red hair. I soon fell desperately in love with a townie from Westport named Greg. Susie and I would pile into a car with Greg and one of his friends and head to a local drive-in theater, where we would drink beer and make out for hours.
It was 1967, the so-called Summer of Love, and Susie and I thought of ourselves as rebels. We decided to see who could lose her virginity first. I won.
Greg and I had sex almost immediately after we’d met. I turned fifteen that summer. We used a contraceptive. Just the same, a part of me hoped I’d get pregnant. If I had a baby, I’d have someone who would love me for who I was. I would have my own family.
When the school year ended in the spring of 1968, my parents wanted me to spend the summer in Africa. I dug in my heels, because I didn’t want to leave Susie or Greg. A compromise was reached. Susie would come to the Congo with me for half the summer, and I would spend the rest of the summer with her family. The first thing Susie and I packed were our newly purchased Beatles records.
Susie wasn’t used to living in a paracommando camp that white girls couldn’t leave without an escort. After four weeks living with me, Susie confided that she’d never met parents as “stiff” and “appallingly uptight”—her words—as mine were. She said my father was self-engrossed and oddly disconnected from the rest of us. My parents, meanwhile, didn’t like Susie at all. They thought she was a bad influence on me. Her comments were the first to show me how others saw my parents and my family. We were different.
To me, my dad was totally preoccupied with his African adventure and my mother naturally supported him. She took a special interest in Tambu Kisoki, a teenager who was hired to help around our house, and began teaching him English. He was such a pleasant and enthusiastic student that my parents decided to informally adopt him and help pay for his continued education in the United States. Legally, he was not a Close, but emotionally he was quickly accepted.
Tambu and I were moving in opposite directions. I was becoming more removed from my family at a time when he joined it.
Susie and I lost contact in the fall, when we enrolled in different schools. Mom sent me to her alma mater, Rosemary Hall, where the teachers quickly discovered that I was not like the earlier Moore and Close family girls. I was told I had to repeat the ninth grade, which was humiliating and made me feel even more insecure and rebellious. Mom also decided that I should board at Rosemary Hall rather than live with my grandmother. Wanting to fit in, I developed a reputation for being the girl who would try anything. One night, someone suggested that we put our dorm mother’s cat down the laundry chute. “I’ll do it!” I volunteered.
In a short span, I’d started drinking, smoking cigarettes, having sex, and establishing a reputation as a rebel. I’d come a long way from being the reclusive tomboy wearing an army uniform and hunting imaginary Nazis with Rocket.
When the school year ended in the spring of 1969, my parents were told that I would not be welcomed back at Rosemary Hall for my sophomore year because of my grades and antics. Once again, Mom boarded a flight from the Congo, returning to the States to deal with the problem child.
Mom and Dad were not happy. Not only had I embarrassed myself by failing at Rosemary Hall, Mom also discovered that I had had sex. I was clearly out of control.
Having run out of ideas about how to control me from Africa, my parents decided to get me out of Greenwich before I did further damage. They legally surrendered their parental rights. I was being turned over to my oldest sister, Tina, who was now living in Pacific Palisades, outside Los Angeles.
Much like mine, Tina’s life had been scarred by MRA and restricted by my parents. She’d wanted to attend art school after graduating from Rosemary Hall and had been accepted at Parsons School of Design, but my father had dismissed a career in art as being impractical. He’d urged her to become a nurse. Uncertain what to do, Tina had returned to the Congo, doing odd jobs that our dad had arranged while she was living with them. Out of the blue, she had received a letter from Diarmid Campbell, a Scotsman thirteen years her senior who was in MRA. His sister had met Tina and had assured Diarmid that Tina would make a good wife. Diarmid’s proposal was a way for her to escape from Kinshasa and begin her own family, so Tina agreed to marry him and move to California.
I was used to being away from my parents, but giving Tina legal rights to me was something I didn’t understand. Anger toward them burned inside me, but on the other hand I looked forward to living without their interference and rules. As far as I was concerned I was still on my own; Tina didn’t have a clue.
I moved into my twenty-four-year-old sister’s two-bedroom bungalow and immediately began pestering her about getting my driver’s license. A few weeks after I settled in, Valli showed up on our doorstep. Her mother had grown weary of what she called “Greenwich snobbery and isolation” and had decided to move back to Los Angeles, too. She’d sent Valli ahead so that she could enroll at Palisades High School, which was two blocks away. Valli’s mom planned to follow and buy a house as soon as she sold their home in Greenwich.
Once again, Valli and I were bringing up ourselves.
Valli and I dutifully enrolled for classes that fall, but neither of us was interested in high school. We began skipping classes; instead we would go to the beach, get high on pot, and meet boys. We would get up each morning, put on bikinis, and walk down Temescal Canyon Road to the ocean.
Driving is close to breathing in Southern California. I wanted my license so that I could be independent of my now-pregnant sister and her husband. Tina hired a private driving instructor, who arrived in a yellow sports car with a stick shift, which I had requested; I wanted to know how to drive anything and everything. For someone twice my age, he was cute. During our third or fourth lesson, he asked me if I could get him some weed. The next time he showed up, we drove to his office and got high. He tried to put his arms around me, but I pushed him away and we went on with our lesson stoned. Welcome to California in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
There was a window in my new bedroom that I crawled out of a lot after Tina and Diarmid went to bed. The driveway at their one-story bungalow sloped down to the street, so I would release the brake of the boxy Datsun that my parents had bought for me long-distance and let the car glide down to the street with its driver’s-side door open. Once there, I would crank the engine. Tina and Diarmid never heard me driving away.
Even though I was only attending classes at school periodically, the times when I did go were torture to me. I hated the noise, the confusion, and the thousands of kids crowded in the halls. The school demanded that I take driver’s ed, even though I already had my license. The instructor gave us numbers from his seating chart. He called on me one day without using my name, only my number. Filled with teen outrage, I slammed my books on my desk, stood up, and started for the door. I never went back. I felt so small, so insignificant; a person of no value. Being a number was just too much.
Not long after that I overheard Tina talking on the phone to my mother. Tina had put a blanket over her head to muffle what she was saying, but it wasn’t difficult for me to figure it out. Tina was worried that a truant officer was going to knock on her door. Here we go again, I thought. The problem child was acting up. Only this time it was Tina who was frustrated by my antics.
It turned out that Tina’s worries were unfounded. No one at school missed me.