Ganny didn’t talk very much about her childhood. She was never one for self-analysis and maintained a special loathing for all manner of bragging and complaining. If guests came over and went on and on about themselves, whether about their problems or their achievements, as soon as they left, Ganny would exclaim, “How boring!”
She lived by her own law. In those final years, her back pain was so severe that she had a hard time bending over to pick up a dropped book or to pet her beloved lapdogs Mini and Bibi—but she never spoke of this aloud. The only reason I knew about her back trouble at all is because my father told me that she whispered an explanation for her labored movements to him, her eldest son, out of earshot of other family members. He later told me that when she said she was in pain she sounded slightly ashamed, as if her failure to conquer the discomfort were a failure of will. She always wanted to be strong for us. To her, that meant never asking for help or admitting to frailty.
I sometimes sensed that there was genuine pain lurking behind her stoicism, particularly when it came to her past. While she never discussed such matters with me when I was young, later in her life when I had children of my own, she opened up a little bit. I imagine she had reached a point when she felt compelled to share the stories of her youth, and I was an eager audience. I was curious to know what early experiences might have helped make her into our indomitable matriarch.
Early one day in Maine, I asked Ganny about her childhood. Ganny answered frankly. Born in New York City but raised in the suburb of Rye, New York, she was the third of four children. She adored her father, Marvin Pierce, nicknamed Monk, and longed to be just like him.
“He was so tall and handsome,” she told me wistfully, her face suddenly losing years, her hazel eyes filling with light.
As a young man, Marvin was considered one of the finest athletes to attend Miami of Ohio. As an adult, he was president of the McCall Corporation, which published Redbook and McCall’s magazines. And he was an attentive father. He took time to talk to his daughter openly and honestly about her life. She loved how he treated her like an equal.
Ganny’s mother, Pauline, was a renowned beauty. Ganny told me her mother openly favored her gorgeous older sister, Martha, always commenting on her long, lustrous hair and elegant figure. According to Ganny, as a young woman she was plump in comparison to her sister and far preferred sports to fashion. At the dinner table, Pauline often told Martha to eat more and my grandma to eat less.
Listening to my strong Ganny say these words made my heart hurt. Imagining young Barbara Pierce, with her quick wit and brilliant brain, reduced to her body shape, compared unfavorably with her thinner sister, was almost too much to bear.
Ganny’s other siblings, too, received more attention than she did. Her brother Scott, five years younger, spent his early childhood in and out of hospitals because of a dangerous bone cyst. Jimmy, three years older, was a lovable rascal.
When Ganny was twenty-four, living far from home in remote West Texas and pregnant with her second child, Robin, she received a horrible shock. Her parents had been driving in their car in New York when Pauline set down a cup of coffee on the seat. Marvin reached over to steady it and lost control of the car, which hit a tree and stone wall. He survived, but she died in the crash.
Ganny was unable to attend her mother’s funeral because she was six months pregnant and had been advised not to travel. Missing the service would always haunt her, as their fraught relationship came to an end without closure.
Marvin’s new wife, Willa, whom he married three years later, was no kinder to Ganny about her looks. (She won few friends in the family, too, when she later contributed to Jack Kemp’s campaign against her own son-in-law, something that was publicized by the Kemp campaign.)
Even in her nineties, many years after both her sister and her mother had died, Ganny still felt inferior; comments about her appearance still stung. Until she met my grandfather, only her father had ever made her feel seen and loved. It seemed that she was still scarred by her mother’s having thought her unattractive—a judgment reinforced every time the press made fun of her fashion choices.
As the sun moved higher in the sky and I sat across from her on the faded blue sofa, she told me that it was simply a matter of fact, not opinion—she was never the pretty one, and “Martha was the true beauty.”
I stared at her, agape. This woman had accomplished so much. Her face showed the decades of winter snowstorms and summer suns, the pain of losing a child and the stress of politics, but also the strength of a woman who made the world better and who had experienced lifelong love. She had been the First Lady of the United States! She was one of only two women in history to have her husband and her son become president. She had traveled the world, lived in China. She had adoring children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Untold books and articles had been written about her. And yet the ache resulting from hearing her mother say that her sister was more beautiful seemed never to have left her.
Ganny’s mother’s words were a personal tragedy for my grandmother. They also created reverberations felt by others in our family. As so many do, Ganny turned her feelings about her own appearance outward, critiquing those she loved best. If she thought someone was dressed inappropriately or if their body did not look its best, she let them know. If Barbara or I wore cutoff jean shorts, Ganny scolded us. If one of her sons seemed to be developing a paunch, he would hear about it from her. Would a great-granddaughter get away with wearing a crop top in her presence? Absolutely not!
When I was nineteen and sitting by her pool in Maine, clad in a yellow bikini (and greased up, I’m sure, with some ungodly tanning oil), Ganny told me how proud she was of the grades I’d received in my first year at UT Austin. Then she said, “You’ve put on some weight, haven’t you?”
I had. I’d gained the usual freshman fifteen, or freshman eighteen, but who was counting? Still, her pointing it out hurt my feelings. I tugged at my bikini, silently wishing it would hide more of me, wanting the cover-up I had left in my room. Now, though, I know that when she spoke about my weight it was her mother’s voice speaking through her, admonishing her own teenage self.
There was irony there, of course. Even as she scolded us for not keeping better control over our bodies, Ganny let herself age. She embraced her wrinkles. She’d let her hair go white in her forties. Botox was not a word—let alone a product—she’d ever use. Especially as someone in the public eye, she was brave to let nature take its course. She famously said that people who worried about their hair were boring. When pundits said she looked older than her husband during the 1988 campaign, she told a reporter, “I’m not going to turn into a glamorous princess. I’m not going to worry about it. I have plenty of self-confidence, not in how I look but in how I feel.” She said she felt good about her husband, her children, and her life.
And she did feel good about those things. Still, I could see that she carried a lifelong insecurity about her looks, too, and I blame her mother for that. I feel fortunate that my parents never put pressure on Barbara and me to look any particular way. They may have raised their eyebrows at an odd outfit here or there, but they always told us we were beautiful, no matter our weight. Our mother never dieted. She didn’t keep junk food in the house, but that was only because she didn’t want to eat it. She definitely wasn’t the type to ever say, “I look fat,” or “This doesn’t look good on me.” Looking back, I think it was a conscious effort on her part to model a healthy body image for my sister and me.
Yet from a young age, I felt chubby. In my fourth grade diary, my New Year’s resolution was to lose weight. Now I want to hug that little girl. I can’t bear to think about my beautiful daughters ever feeling that way. I want them to love the way they look and to take gaining and losing weight as an inevitable part of being a human living in the world, rather than as a moral failing. I am careful never to use words like fat or skinny, or to make them overly conscious of their bodies or their appetites.
I did tell Mila over Christmas, “You’ve had ice cream every day of vacation, but remember, we’re not going to have dessert every day when we get home to New York.”
So far I would say she does not seem to be neurotic about food, because her reaction to this was the indignant reply: “How dare you put me on a diet!”
At a family dinner in Houston after Ganny’s funeral, my aunt Doro and I talked about Ganny in all her might and all her acerbity. And Doro told me a story. She talked about arriving in Houston with nothing black to wear for the funeral. Shopping at the local mall, she found a dress she loved, but she worried that it was too expensive. She thought, Gosh, Mom would hate this dress. She would think it was too showy. Ganny was frugal; she would think it had cost far too much. Doro went ahead and splurged on the dress. Once at her parents’ house, she put it on again and went to admire herself in the mirror. It was a beautiful dress. She felt good that she’d bought—
At that moment, the mirror fell off the wall.
Doro thought her mother was sending her a clear sign: Yes, I hate it! Too expensive! And Doro returned the dress.
I set down my fork and put my hand on Doro’s. As the buzz of our relatives’ conversation and the clinking of silverware continued around us, I told her that I interpreted the falling mirror in another way. I saw it as a sign that Ganny did not want Doro to worry about her clothes or her looks for one more second. I told Doro I thought Ganny was saying, Don’t look at the mirror anymore. If I ever said anything that hurt you, that’s because of my mother. You are beautiful. Wear whatever makes you feel good. Spend money now if you like, because you can’t take it with you. Enjoy your one wild and precious life.
Doro did not seem completely convinced, but she said that could be one way to interpret the falling mirror.
As I lay in bed that night, I said a prayer to my grandmother. I told her, “Thank you for seeing that all the women you love deserve to be free of the shame and distraction that might otherwise keep us from enjoying the blessings of this life.”
I told her, too, that I hoped she was now able to hear a voice louder than her mother’s and her stepmother’s. I hoped that those fusty old calls to diet, to wear more makeup, or to try to look younger, slimmer, more alluring, were being drowned out by the strong, sure voices of her besotted husband, of her devoted children and grandchildren and friends, and of those thousands of mourners at St. Martin’s. I hoped she could finally hear our voices raised in her honor. I hoped she could at last believe what we told her—that to us she was among the most beautiful women who ever lived.