6 
MA
Chissie and I had been at Arden only a few months when I was led one evening into the oak-beamed room where Marie Harriman was sitting with a couple of friends, drinking a martini.
I let go of Chissie’s hand and approached the sofa. My face was burning. Marie looked up and said, “What is it, darling?”
I rushed at her, grabbed her knees with both arms, and cried, “Is it all right if I call you Ma?”
She set her glass down and pulled me into her. “Of course.”
From then on, I never called her anything else.
Ma’s arrival was always dramatic. It wasn’t the motor you first heard but the crunch of the pebbles. Then the huge black Lincoln Zephyr came into view and rolled to a stop in front of the cottages. I’d race over, nearly bumping into Walter the chauffeur as he held open the rear door. “Hi, Pete. How ya doin’?” he’d say in his gravelly Bronx voice. And out stepped Ma.
During the war, Ma would come up to Arden once or twice a month to get away from her USO duties and relax with friends. Her maid, Victoria, would arrive first. Everybody loved Victoria. She was a round French peasant with bluish white hair, a heavy accent, and a cackling laugh. She’d pull me to her, tickling my cheek with the little hairs that grew out of her nose, and then she’d announce, “I’m going to get the house ready for Madame!”
Ma was tall and chestnut-haired, and her great charm was in no way lessened by the thick, tinted glasses she wore after her operation in 1941 for glaucoma, a condition that made her nearly blind for the rest of her life. She would lean down and kiss me, and I would be thrilled by the softness of her skin, the silkiness of her dress, the scent of her perfume.
I always had so much to tell her: about how Alan Crawford had taken me out that morning on one of the polo ponies and we’d spotted two bucks fighting in the woods. I knew “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” by heart. Did she want to hear it?
“Of course, darling!”
I loved the way Ma talked. She was totally direct, no bullshit. The daughter of a prominent Democratic lawyer, Sheridan Norton, and a wonderful old character of a mother, Beulah, who was part Jewish and part Irish, she had a mongrel’s love of the unconventional. She spoke out of one side of her mouth in a sort of drawl through clenched teeth. It was one of the things that must have endeared her to a man she always said she’d found “immensely attractive”—Al Capone. In the twenties, when she was married to her first husband, Sonny Whitney, she’d gambled with Capone at the casino in Nassau.
Marie Harriman, “Ma,” in the little Crosley at Forest Lake in 1939, with her ubiquitous cigarette holder.
Ma chewed gum and smoked Viceroys in white plastic holders that were scattered everywhere in china and silver cups. She had a habit of emptying the contents of one ashtray into a larger ashtray and carrying the whole mess out to the kitchen. It was the only time I ever saw her go into that room. After one of those journeys, she reappeared white-faced. “My God, Mado,” she said to one of her buddies, Madeline Sherwood, wife of the playwright Robert E. Sherwood, “I’ve just seen the goddamn butler drinking straight out of a bottle of Black Label. What should I do?”
“Fire him immediately,” Mado said.
Firing a servant was the last thing Ma could do, partly because of her kind heart and partly because she hated confrontations. The job of firing her boozy butler, along with other unpleasant tasks, was left to her faithful secretary and friend, Ann Sardi, sister of the restaurateur Vincent.
Ma could cut through any phoniness or stickiness, usually with a crack that began, “For Chrissake!” She loved talking about sex, and she swore like a trooper. She may have coined the expression “rat-fuck,” which is what she called parties that were too big. I don’t know what she had against the City of Brotherly Love, but she called a really terrible big party a “Philadelphia rat-fuck.” Another Ma-ism: “Boston girls are staid. Newport girls are fun. And Philadelphia girls are easy lays.” In general, I’ve found that she was right.
Once, just after the war, Ma and Averell were in Paris, where he had been sent by President Truman to set up the Marshall Plan. Ave and Ma were invited to lunch with Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, and on the way, Ave said, “For God’s sake, Marie, don’t get into anything political. Just keep quiet and listen.”
Everything was going fine, but Ma got bored. She wasn’t used to just listening. She became increasingly restless until finally, when there was one of those awful silences during which you can hear the knives and forks clicking, she found herself saying, “Chancellor Adenauer, I’m very concerned about my dachshund, Gary Cooper. He’s in a bad way because I can’t find a girl for him and I think he might have hard balls.”
Ave’s jaw dropped, but Ma sailed on. “I think what I should do is start a bordello for pets.”
Adenauer roared with laughter. A week later, another dachshund arrived at Ma’s hotel with a note from the chancellor: “Now you can start your bordello.” Ma named her Fifi.
Gary Cooper—the dog—starred in another Ma story. One Christmas, Ma and Ave were down in Hobe Sound with their houseguests, including Madeline and Bob Sherwood. After the Sherwoods left, Bob wrote a thank-you note on a postcard and as a joke addressed it to “Gary Cooper, care of Marie Harriman, Jupiter Island, Hobe Sound, Florida.”
When the local postmaster, who read everything, saw the name on the card, he immediately called up Fred Arborgast, the local realtor. “My God,” he said. “You’ll never guess who’s staying at the Harrimans’. Gary Cooper!”
Fred, never one to miss a wealthy sucker for a property deal, jumped into his car that morning and careened up the Harriman driveway. An aged gardener was raking leaves outside the house.
“Fine day,” Fred said, climbing out of the car.
“Certainly is, sir,” the gardener replied.
“Uh, tell me, is Gary Cooper in the house?”
“Yes, I reckon he is, sir.”
“Do you think I could say hello to him?”
The gardener looked at the realtor curiously, then said, “Well, sir, I don’t think right now. I believe he’s still in bed with the madam.”
Fred got back into his car and fled.
Ma, who was having her morning massage upstairs, heard this exchange and nearly fell out the window. Needless to say, she did nothing to stop the gossip that had swept the island by lunchtime.
Ma was not a woman who screamed, but she lost it one morning as she watched Ave tie one end of a string around a baby tooth I was losing and the other end to the knob of an open door. He positioned me carefully and told me it might hurt for “a second.” I was speechless with terror. When Ave slammed the door, out popped my tooth, along with a geyser of blood. Ma screamed.
In the early sixties, I was invited on a trip to the Philippines and Japan, where Ave, then undersecretary of state for political affairs, was sent to explain the Kennedy administration’s policy in the Far East. I was to keep Ma company while Ave was working, which was most of the time. In Honolulu, during a twenty-four-hour stopover, Ma and I left Ave to hit the town. He had suggested we take in the “terrific hula show” in the hotel, but Ma had immediately vetoed that as “tourist crap.” She ordered a limo.
No sooner had we climbed in than she tapped on the dividing glass and said to the driver, “Do you know how to find that stripper who can make the tassels on her boobs go in different directions at the same time?”
“What, Mrs. Harriman?” asked the driver.
Ma repeated the question in the same offhand tone.
“I don’t believe I know who you mean, ma’am,” the driver stammered.
“Last year,” Ma said, “I went to a club with a fabulous stripper who had these huge knockers with blue tassels on them. She had terrific coordination. One of them went clockwise. The other went counterclockwise. You must know her.”
“I don’t think so, ma’am.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Ma said. “Just drive us around. We’ll hit all the joints if we have to.”
A dozen clubs later, we still hadn’t found the stripper with the ambidextrous boobs. Ma didn’t want to give up, but we’d run out of clubs. There was nothing to do but tell the driver to take us back to the hotel. Ma gave me fifty bucks to give him for a tip. The driver said, “Thank you, ma’am. I’ve never had so much fun in my life.”
Underneath Ma’s salty exterior, she was deeply vulnerable. I’ve often wondered whether this had to with the fact that neither of her husbands was sexually faithful to her. Her first marriage, to Sonny Whitney, a great-grandson of old Commodore Vanderbilt, was wrecked by his roving eye. Her second nearly came apart during the war when Ave’s romance in London with Pamela Churchill, who was married to Winston’s son, Randolph, was splashed all over the front pages.
Ma had stayed behind in New York, where she was recovering from her eye operation. She had known about the affair from friends and didn’t seem particularly bothered, dismissing it as “one of those wartime flings.” But when it hit the newspapers, she fired off a telegram to Ave with the ultimatum that he’d better stop playing around or he’d be facing the most expensive divorce “in the history of the Republic.” Years later, laughing about it, she remarked, “I was very proud of the word Republic.“
After the war, when Ave was Truman’s secretary of commerce in Washington and Ma was mostly in New York, their marriage hit another rocky patch. Ave was having a fling with Kay Halle, a beautiful journalist and department-store heiress from Cleveland who, oddly enough, had been romantically involved with Randolph Churchill before he married Pamela. Ave proposed to Kay but was turned down. His marriage was saved when he was appointed to lead the Marshall Plan team in Paris, where Ma accompanied him.
I believe it was only when Ave ran for governor of New York in 1954 that he realized what an asset she was. With her warmth, utter lack of snobbery and pretension, and ease with all sorts of people, Ma was a great campaigner, especially in contrast to the candidate. Ave had stammered as a boy, and he was a stiff, dreadful public speaker. But Ma could wade through any crowd, looking absolutely thrilled to be there, making new friends wherever she went.
She hated having her picture taken, and with each passing year she got a little younger, according to the date of birth in her passport. By the last fifteen years of their marriage, when I was old enough to understand their relationship, Ma and Ave had settled their differences and forged a real closeness based on mutual dependency, deep devotion, and lots of kidding. Ave was well aware that he would never have become governor—and continued to be called Governor, which pleased him to no end—if it had not been for Ma’s brilliant campaigning. He had also come to rely heavily on her judgments of people, realizing that in this crucial area she had far better instincts than he.
In those days, the world of grown-ups wasn’t as open to children as it is today, and as a child I had no idea that behind Ma’s exuberance she hadn’t had it easy. Her near blindness was a terrible trial for her, especially since her greatest pleasure was art. In the thirties, she had assembled the world-class Harriman collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings. Her happiest years, she always said, were from 1930 to 1942, when she ran the Marie Harriman Gallery on East Fifty-seventh Street. There she had showed her favorite painters—among them, Picasso, Braque, and Gris—as well as such contemporary American artists as Walt Kuhn, Isamu Noguchi, and John Kane, whose careers she avidly promoted. She designed all the catalogs herself, and they were so striking that they were given an exhibition of their own at the New York Public Library.
As wonderful as she was with me, Ma was not very good with her own children from her first marriage, to Sonny. (She and Ave remained childless.) Ten years older than I, her daughter, Nancy Whitney, was the first girl in my life to whom I attached the idea of “beautiful.” Soft, blonde, and exquisitely pretty, she was also immensely kind. As soon as I heard that Nancy would be coming to Arden for the weekend, I couldn’t wait for her to burst into the cottage to give me a bath and snuggle up for a Kipling story.
Harry Whitney was the perfect older brother. Even though we were separated by thirteen years, he had all the time in the world for me, maybe because he refused to grow up himself. Harry was big in every way: six foot three, physical, loud, totally unpredictable. He was extremely handy with radios and cars, and he drove a Model T Ford called Annie, in which we’d race around Arden, looking for woodchucks. Later, he and Annie gave me my first driving lessons.
He also tooled around on a huge, shiny, black motorcycle. Being driven the four miles to my public school in Central Valley in Bill Kitchen’s stately Pontiac was nothing compared with climbing on the back of Harry’s Harley-Davidson and sending the gravel flying. One morning we roared into the schoolyard. When we hit the parking area, Harry spun the Harley around and around, faster and faster in smaller and smaller circles. Before a bug-eyed audience of first- and second-graders, I felt like Lindbergh.
Harry Whitney, top, Ma’s son from her marriage to Sonny Whitney, was the closest thing I had to an older brother. He gave me driving lessons and let me ride on the back of his motorcycle. His sister, Nancy, was one of the most beautiful girls I’d ever seen. Harry and Nancy (below, in Sun Valley in the forties) had a tougher time as kids than I realized then.
Exploring Arden on foot with Harry made the woods seem deeper, the sense of a bear or fox behind every tree more real. Harry sharpened my forest vision with fantastic stories. Once into the woods, we’d lie on the ground behind a thick bush to see how close a deer might come to us. While we waited, Harry in his hoarse, deepest whisper would describe the terrible monster with jagged teeth and long arms who was lurking behind that great beech. Not to mention the goblins, hairy and dwarflike, who would undoubtedly arrive the moment the sun went down. If I looked very hard across the stream, I might be lucky enough to glimpse the wood nymphs—“the most beautiful girls you ever saw”—cavorting naked in the morning mist. Lying there wide-eyed, I was sure that any perceptible shift in the light signaled the appearance of these wonderful creatures.
Later I learned that much of what fueled Harry’s fantastic imagination was opera, especially The Magic Flute and Wagner’s Ring cycle. Harry paid no attention to rules. One night he got thrown out of the Met for singing along with the soprano in his booming baritone.
But Harry, who died after a heart operation in 1985, was a tragic figure. Not until I became an adult did I know that he was manic-depressive. Nor, until recently, did I realize that my wonderful “older brother” had been constantly at war with the woman I found the easiest person in the world to be with.
One recent bleak November day, I drove over to say hello to Harry’s sister, Nancy, at her house in central Connecticut. She was
recently widowed, and the loss of her husband was plain on her face as we sat by her kitchen window, looking out over a long meadow, now completely brown. A few weeks earlier, I had played for the wedding of her youngest daughter (and my goddaughter), Vicky. Once we got through the wedding gossip, I asked what it had been like to be Ma’s daughter.
“There’s no point in not being completely honest, is there?” Nancy began.
“Of course not.”
“Well, I know you thought the world of her—and she did of you, Peter—but there was a time in my life when Harry and I would wake up every morning and wish she were dead.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. In fact, there were many times when Harry and I actually plotted to kill her. You know, she never had much time for us.”
I said lightly, “Well, maybe you and Harry weren’t the easiest kids in the world.”
“God, we were difficult! I guess that goes with being a Whitney. But we wouldn’t have been so difficult if she hadn’t had that way of erasing us. I know Harry was furious when he was sent away at seven to a school in Arizona because of his asthma. He felt he was being thrown out of the family.”
“Were you both rebels?”
“You could say that. Mummy would make us come into the sitting room when she had guests for dinner. I was supposed to curtsy, and Harry was supposed to bow. Instead he’d pee on the carpet.”
“Amazing.”
“He did it repeatedly. There were all sorts of scenes with Mummy. She couldn’t cope with poor Harry. She’d wake me up in the middle of the night and say, ‘You have to come and do something about your brother.’ I’d walk into his room half asleep and he’d be sitting in bed, propped up with all these pillows, his little fists clenched with rage, his eyes narrowed, and screaming at poor Mummy, ‘I hate you! Get out of my room!’ I’d go over and sit by the bed and pat his hand and say, ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’ Finally, he’d calm down and say to me, ‘I’m going to blow up this house! I’m going to kill my mother! I’m going to kill Averell! I’m going to kill everybody!’ You can’t imagine what a relief it was for Mummy when you came into our lives. You were perfect. You were so easy. You were someone we could all feel sorry for.”
I winced. “Did Ma and Ave know how ill Harry was?”
“No. In those days, nobody understood about manic depression. Do you know about the time Harry tried to kill me?”
“No.”
“We’d all gone out west to a wedding, and Harry and I were staying in the same motel. He’d had too much to drink, and he locked himself in his room and wouldn’t come out. I was in the hall, listening to him going on and on about wanting to kill himself and all sorts of crazy things, and I just stood there, pleading with him to open the door. Suddenly, he did open the door, and he pulled me inside. He put his big hunting knife up to my neck and said he was going to kill me. I knew he meant it. I’ll never forget that feeling. Then it occurred to me that the only way to calm him down was to take him back to our childhood. I said, ‘Remember the game of mumble-the-peg we used to play out in the backyard? You always beat me. This time, let me go first with the knife. Come on, Harry, let me go first.’ He got very quiet, and he handed over the knife. I threw it out the window and ran like hell.”
This was shattering. I had known and loved Harry and Nancy all my life. I thought of them as family—yet they had belonged to another family, one that I had known nothing about.
Nancy continued in her clear, quiet way: “Do you know what Sonny [Harry and Nancy’s father] did to Harry over that girl he wanted to marry?”
“No.”
“She was the first girl he ever loved—she was perfect for him. Harry went to Father to ask his permission to marry her, and Sonny told Harry the girl was a tramp, that he’d slept with her himself. Of course it wasn’t true, but Harry believed him. I don’t think he ever got over it. Here’s something else you may not have known. I’m sure Ma was in love with Sonny all her life. She only left him because he was after some chippy. You know, when she died, she was wearing Sonny’s wedding ring. Averell had it taken off before she was buried. After she died, Harry would go up to the family plot and sit on her grave and talk to her. If you asked him why, he’d say, ‘Because I never could talk to her when she was alive.’”
“For me she was the easiest person in the world to talk to.”
Nancy looked at me. “Well, you do know about her and Eddy…”
“You mean that they had an affair? Yes. Ma all but confirmed it.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. We all assumed it…”
It had been the summer after I’d finished Yale, and I was leaving in a few days for a blowout in Greece before going into the Army. The night before, Ma and Ave had thrown a party for my twenty-first birthday at Sands Point. That morning, Ave was up bright and early, out campaigning for reelection as governor of New York. Ma had made it out of bed around eleven, finished her breakfast, and had her massage. She was now breaststroking up and down the pool.
I was standing in the shallow end, nursing a filthy hangover, when I blurted: “Ma, did you love Dad as much as Ave?”
Marie Harriman and Dad. “For Chrissake! We were very, very close!” she said when I asked about their relationship.
Ma stopped paddling. “I loved your father very much, Peter.”
“Did you ever want to marry him?”
Pause, then: “I don’t think I would have made a very good wife to a musician.”
“Come on,” I persisted, “out with it. Did you have an affair with Dad?”
Ma twisted her mouth the way she always did when she was trying to sound tough. “Darling,” she said, “for Chrissake! I said we were very, very close!”
Now, telling this story in Nancy’s kitchen, I said, “You know what? I was never so happy to hear anything in my life.”
Nancy smiled. “I bet.”