Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

“Flora Miller was a very exceptional person,” writes her cousin, talented actress Beatrice Straight — Harry’s sister Dorothy’s daughter. “Growing up as she did in a world of great wealth and to say the least a somewhat eccentric world, she might have been overwhelmed by those around her. But she was encouraged by her brilliant mother whom she adored, to develop into an amazing woman in her own right, a woman of great purpose and style. She combined the qualities of warmth and openness, a fine sense of humor, plus the ability to carry through to conclusion such a vast and demanding undertaking as the developing of the Whitney Museum of American Art, at the same time raising a lovely family. She had the vision and strength, the business acumen to continue working for the growth of all these things she loved.”

Her life as a child was unpredictable. As her parents made their plans, their children were included in trips or sometimes left with Gertrude’s mother in Newport. For example, in 1912, Harry went to England, Gertrude to France. Harry took Barbara, not quite nine, to stay with him in Little Dalby Hall, his rented house in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, where she rode and her father hunted. “Barbie rides every day & looks awfully well & is very sweet,” he reported to Gertrude. Sonny was a student at Groton, an elite boarding school in Connecticut, and Flora, fourteen, went to Paris with Gertrude. She had her own apartment near her mother’s, with a maid and governess, where Gertrude often brought artist friends to lunch or dinner before the opera or the theater. Flora wrote about her life in her journal:

January 19: We went to see Mamma’s studio. Then went to the school I am going to, to see about my lessons, Wednesday and Saturday mornings. … Had lunch with Mamma at her studio. It’s awfully nice. I loved my first day in Paris.

School, ballet lessons, modeling in clay, piano lessons, riding lessons, roller skating, church, and the opera followed quickly.

January 21: I like Madame Butterfly much the best. It’s the most lovely thing I have ever seen, the music is wonderful.

January 24: I like school much better than in New York but I don’t love it.

February 19: Lessons. After lunch I went to Poiret’s with Mamma. I helped her choose dresses. I loved to see the people come in with all the clothes on, some are awfully funny and we liked them almost all. Mamma got two coats and 16 evening dresses, suits, and afternoon dresses. I loved all of them. Then we went to get my clothes. I got 12 dresses, one suit (blue), three hats, and four coats. I love them all. We went to get a present for Mlle., had an ice cream at Rumpelmeyer’s and then came home. I had a fine day.

“I miss you awfully and wish you were still here. Paris is just about the same, only now I hardly ever go out as I work even more than ever.”

After spending that summer in Newport with her grandmother, on November 12 Flora finally went back to the Brearley, in New York, the school her mother had also attended. Except for one day, she had missed school since January 9. No wonder she had a lifelong struggle with spelling and math! But in other areas, her knowledge was above average. She had a phenomenal memory, and could recite poetry for hours. In a game they both liked to play, she or her brother Sonny would recite the first lines and challenge the other to complete the poem. I have a few volumes of poetry inscribed with her name and the date: “To Flora Whitney, Xmas 1908, from Mamma,” a small leatherbound two-volume set of The Golden Treasury, well thumbed, with pencil-marked poems by Keats, Shelley, Browning, Rossetti, Wordsworth, Byron, Blake, Burns, and others; French Lyrics, from 1910; and a blue leather Italian Skies, with “Flora Whitney, 1913,” tooled in gold on the cover, also well marked. In 1914, she probably took this with her on a trip to Italy, before entering the Foxcroft School in Virginia, where she was in the first graduating class.

Close as they were to become later, when she was eighteen Flora felt some of the same tension with her mother as Gertrude had with hers, as she wrote in a letter she transcribed into her diary:

Just now, and indeed it happens quite often, “a change came o’er the spirit of my dream” … I fell to wishing I were the daughter of different kind of people and in an entirely different environment. My life would probably have been so much more worthwhile. I have a horrid feeling that when I am old and look back on my life, there will be no feeling of any satisfaction of having been of any use in the world. The powers that have been given to me, as well as to everyone else, will have been absolutely wasted and I will die, having lived a useless, flippant, and futile life. Pleasant prospect!! I don’t know exactly what I would have done under other circumstances but at any rate I would have been sent to a public school and at 18 would have had a properly trained mind and a brain that worked a little instead of what I have now. It is disgusting! My love of music surely would have showed itself because of possessing a properly developed mind and of having been made to work hard I probably or rather might have been a music teacher and I rather like the idea. I probably would have studied music in Germany, it’s very cheap, and then I would have seen and maybe appreciated all the beautiful pictures and other works of art. … Here comes my only real sorrow. I can’t talk perfectly frankly to Mamma. I never feel that she understands or gives me the smallest bit of credit for any sense at all. She treats me as though I were about 12 and I don’t ever feel that she makes any effort to give me a chance to say what I would like to. … I really feel much worse about not being able to talk to Mamma than anyone thinks I do. … Oh! It’s awful. If only I could — I admire and respect and of course adore Mamma, but there is no companionship at all.

I really want to work hard next winter. I’d like to stay in New York and study and go to lectures and concerts, play the piano a lot and try and learn something. Then next summer coming out and Newport!! Oh!! Vile!!

Flora, then in the Adirondacks, had received a letter from Gertrude, who was in Westbury facing an operation for appendicitis:

“I would like all you girls to sleep in the camp while I am away … [rather than in the row of nearby tents, where the boys would sleep]. You take my place at the table and make everyone behave. Be very careful with the boys. You are older now and you must not be the least immodest or familiar. They will like you all the better for it. Don’t ever let them touch you even jokingly. I know you know them all so well they seem like Sonny, but you are grown up now and you must have more reserve. This is not intended to be a lecture, but only to remind you of your extreme old age!!”

Perhaps these instructions aroused eighteen-year-old Flora’s frustration and anger. But her feelings changed quickly, and by the following summer, in Newport, she confided to her journal:

“IT has happened. … Took Mamma out in motor and told her … oh! Ooh!! Oooh!!!”

She and Quentin Roosevelt, Theodore’s youngest son, had fallen in love. In the many letters they exchanged after Quentin went overseas as a World War I pilot in the American Expeditionary Forces, they copied poems they’d read and memorized together, they sent each other prayers, they fervently sang their love and plighted their troth. Soon after Quentin’s departure in 1917, after dinner at the Roosevelt’s home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, Flora wrote to his mother:

“After I left, you may have said — or thought —: ‘ah, she seems so cheerful, it must have failed to touch her very deeply — and maybe now she will forget.’ So I just want to say this. I never, never could forget for one instant; it has gone deeper than I imagined anything ever could — entirely new lands inside of me have been discovered by it. …

“I could never forget and I will never care the fraction of a feeling less than I do at present — and God knows I could not care more.”

And here’s part of a letter from Quentin to Flora, also in 1917, when he was stationed near Marseilles:

“… the life that I really live over here, the life of my thoughts, is centered in you. What I am doing now, the war and all, the misery and sorrow that it brings, is only a space between two parts of my life. Life became so very wonderful and new to me when I first knew that I loved you. Then I had to leave you, — and it was as if a window had been shut inside me, not to open until I am with you again. … I have no thoughts of the future at all that are not based on you.”

On July 14, 1918, Quentin was shot down and killed in his plane inside the German lines. Flora was devastated. In a sculpture Gertrude made of her at this time, she sits listlessly in an armchair, her head bowed, her face drawn. She drew closer to Quentin’s parents and sisters, finding courage in their quintessentially optimistic response to life — and even to death. And she discovered the traditional solace of work, beginning, as she later noted on a transcribed letter, for Theodore Roosevelt: “First letter written for the Colonel [as she always called him] while he was in the hospital and just before I was to begin regularly to work for him — a very few weeks before he died.”

After this second death, Flora stayed with Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, while working for the Women’s Republican Committee in Washington. In her diary she described the beginning of her adventure:

“Left for Washington on the 1:08 train in a state of suppressed excitement — arrived in a state of complete uncontrolled excitement and fright. Alice met me — it was too sweet of her — and informed me I was to be at ‘work’ at 9:30 in the morning at the Republican headquarters. I’ve only seen Mrs. McCormick [the head of the Committee] twice but immediately fell for her charm — oh I do hope this comes to something, it will just make all the difference in existence — to me.”

Alice expected her to be present at the parties she gave almost nightly, which, while stimulating and fun, lasted until the wee hours of the morning. Mum told me later how astounded and impressed she’d been by the eminent visitors who poured in and out of the Long-worths’ home, but, since she liked a full eight or ten hours of sleep, she also recalled being constantly exhausted.

An old beau and lifelong friend, Thomas R. Coward (who later founded the publishing company Coward McCann), was also in Washington, working for the State Department. He wrote her eloquent and ardent letters, calling her “Dearest Foufi,” sympathizing with her, and giving a glimpse of my mother at that time.

You are the one moving force in my life … don ‘t marry someone else on practical grounds. It would kill me. … Oh, Foufi, I am so sorry you are so unhappy. I know exactly how you feel and work is the only solution.

Why are you, you? And what constitutes your appeal. I think it really is partially your being a child with a woman’s sophistication and cleverness. And then, of course, you are a delight to look upon and to hear. That voice!

I believe utterly and entirely in your humanity, your generosity, your inability to be mean or petty, your fineness of perception — in a word your essential bigness of soul. If I had time I could relate that to the queer streak of the child in you which is so fascinating. It is at once your greatest charm and safe-guard.

But my mother moved back to New York, already committed to Roderick Tower, a Harvard graduate who had served in the army, and the son of Charlemagne Tower of Philadelphia, formerly United States ambassador to Russia and to Germany Rod had been friendly with Quentin, and it seems likely that Flora married him in part because he could preserve her connection to Quentin. He was an oilman whose business ventures, after their marriage in 1920, took them to live in Los Angeles, where they had two children, my half-sister and half-brother Pamela and Whitney. Flora had always wanted to dance, and now she took dancing lessons at O’Dennishawns; met and dined with Pavlova, and watched her dance every night for a week, including a performance of The Awakening of Flora; attended dances by her mother’s friend and teacher, Ruth St. Denis; and visited Douglas and Mary Fairbanks and Mary Garden. Despite these pleasures, she was lonely, as she wrote in her Line-a-Day, and delighted when an old friend, Alice Davison, came to visit: “We dined alone and talked till nearly 12 — mostly religion and sex!” She listed many books read, and kept notebooks of geology courses she took in order to share Rod’s interests. But he was increasingly unstable, temperamental, and withdrawn. Flora spent more and more time in New York, and finally, in 1924, sought a separation and then a divorce. An essay she wrote then gives some clues to the problems in her marriage:

“If married people were more intimate — more openly honest — more willing to allow the other to participate in innermost thoughts — there would be a better knowledge of human nature and therefore less misunderstanding. Sex would help and not hinder the relationship for it constitutes a supremely alive and vital portion of married life and can be regarded as a tie to a closer intimacy rather than perpetuating an estrangement.”

Flora got her divorce quietly in La Bourboule, in the Auvergne region of France, and then, with her children, spent the summer of 1925 in her mother’s studio in Paris. She began to sculpt there and subsequently in New York, exhibiting her work at the Society of Independent Artists and in the Whitney Studio Club’s Tenth Anniversary Exhibition. She lived in New York and also in a house her parents built for her near theirs, in Old Westbury, Long Island.

Later in 1925, she met a charming bachelor, who was a talented artist and businessman: George Macculloch Miller, known as “Cully.” His Miller, Hoffman, Murray, Lindley, and McKeever forebears were different from Flora’s — they were even-tempered, solid citizens from Scottish, Swedish, and English stock, with American roots in Morristown, New Jersey, and New York. Not extremely wealthy, but very comfortable, these families distinguished themselves as professionals and businessmen, and took an active part in community affairs.

Martinus Hermanzen Hoffman, the first of my father’s paternal ancestors to emigrate to America, arrived from Sweden in 1657, married Emeentje Claesen de Witte, and settled up the Hudson near Kingston and Rhinebeck. Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of their direct descendants, a Hoffman was dean of the General Theological Seminary, and yet another was a fine architect who designed the Villa Viscaya in Miami. Elizabeth Ogden Hoffman married an earlier George Macculloch Miller; they were my great-grandparents.

The first ancestor I know of on the Miller side was George Macculloch, born in 1775 in Bombay, where his father was a British major in the East India Company. Orphaned at nine, he was sent to live with his Scottish grandmother in Edinburgh, who arranged for his excellent education, including fluency in German, French, Spanish, and Italian. A businessman, he traveled widely in Europe during the Napoleonic Wars, and in 1800 he and fifteen-year-old Louisa Edwina Saunderson had their first child. After the birth of their second child, they married — in an unusual sequence of events, for those days — and two years later, emigrated to America and settled in Morristown, New Jersey. Arriving with substantial means, they built an imposing brick home, Macculloch Hall (now a museum), on twenty-five acres facing what is now called Macculloch Avenue. George soon added to the house in order to open a school in it, which he ran for fifteen years. Macculloch Hall became a gathering place for the community, where George and Louisa gave dinners and led lively discussions of politics, philosophy, and religion. George wrote articles for newspapers and magazines on such subjects as slavery, debtors’ prisons, freedom in Greece, and the political attitudes of Jérôme Bonaparte, and he especially enjoyed entertaining foreign visitors — no wonder, with all his languages! Realizing that the economy of the area was dependent on the iron mines and smelting furnaces, which, however, were devouring local forests for fuel, he designed and raised money for the Morris Canal, which for ninety years remained the principal route for bringing coal from Pennsylvania, and greatly furthered New Jersey’s industrial development.

Their daughter, Mary Louisa, and her husband, Jacob Welsh Miller, a lawyer and politician, lived in Macculloch Hall with their nine children. Their fourth child, George Macculloch Miller and his wife Elizabeth Ogden Hoffman, had a son, Hoffman Miller, who married Edith McKeever, and my father was their oldest son. My paternal grandparents died before I was born, and my father didn’t talk about them much — I wish I’d asked him more about his family, especially his mother’s side, the McKeevers, about whom I know little.

I remember being intrigued by my father’s paternal aunt, Edith Macculloch Miller, who left me in her will “one of my pins given to my great great aunt, Miss Murray, by General Washington, being a miniature of Washington set in pearls and with his hair.” It lies in its original red leather case until, occasionally, I lift it from its surprisingly well preserved creamy satin cushion to look at the familiar countenance, to glimpse strands of chestnut hair in the minute pearl-mounted locket below, and to ponder my many-times-great aunt, Mary Lindley, who married Robert Murray and lived in the Murray house, Inclenberg, on Murray Hill in New York City (commemorated by a bronze tablet in the street at Park Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street). Mary Murray entertained Lord Howe at a tea party while General Putnam made good his escape from New York — and I suppose Washington sent her the locket to thank her for saving his army. She must have had courage, intelligence, and charm to succeed in such a risky affair. Robert Sherwood commemorated it in a play, Small War on Murray Hill Staying with Aunt Elizabeth in her Brookline house at seventeen, on a trip with my future husband to a Harvard football game, I’d never seen anyone so old and fragile. With her powdery face small black-clad frame, and houseful of mementoes, Aunt Elizabeth gave me a sense of our family’s reach back into America’s history that was entirely different from the more prodigal family tales I’d heard from my mother. Rather than their forbears’ money, Aunt Elizabeth emphasized their lineage, community service, and education: she spoke of teachers, ministers, lawyers, a few businessmen. They took pleasure in their families. The women stayed at home and cared for their husbands and children. Divorce was unknown. My father took pride in the generations of his family who had done well at St. Paul’s School, a boarding school patterned on the English system in Concord, New Hampshire — one or two had even taught there after graduating. He and his two younger brothers had been known for their musical talent, and had sung together in the choir and in performances.

When Flora and Cully fell in love, my Miller grandmother, fierce and conservative, wasn’t happy about her son’s choice. The marriage would never last! My beautiful mother, as a divorced woman from a wealthy and notable family, spelled unhappiness for her beloved son.

My mother was ecstatic, as she wrote in her journal: “Haven’t been so happy in months and months and more months. Lay in bed all morning and drifted on a lovely pink cloud. I hope he lets me stay there just for a little while.”

In early 1927, Flora and her children, Pam and Whitty, sailed to Egypt with Gertrude, who wanted to study Egyptian monuments before beginning to sculpt the model for her immense stone Columbus Memorial that stands proudly in Palos, Spain. A note from Cully followed Flora:

“Oh it’s so hard to have you go my dear one. But of course when one can look forward to seeing you and seeing you and seeing you in only a month one should be grateful and patient — and I am, dearest. My ‘tummy’ is all going round inside first because you’re leaving me and next because I am so happy at the thought of marrying you. Take care of your precious self — don’t smoke too much please — in fact don’t do too much of anything dear bad one.”

Cully soon followed her to Cairo, where they were married, on February 24, with an elephant hair for a ring. After a romantic cruise on a dahabeah on the Nile, and travels through Europe, they settled down in New York, where Cully and his old friend Auguste Noel founded an architectural firm, Noel and Miller. Although my father never made working drawings or became an architect, he conceived of and drew many buildings, mostly houses, and concentrated more and more on painting. My younger brother Leverett and I grew up with Pam and Whitty — we were one family, as far as I could tell. My sister always said that she was closer to my father than to her own. She wrote about him in “Flora,” the memorial scrapbook created after my mother’s death by her friends to celebrate her life.

“My stepfather Cully Miller spread fun and humor wherever he was — never at the expense of others, but always ‘hitting the nail on the head.’ I was very conscious of those ‘vibes’ between my mother and him. They were strong!!! He was just so devoted, patient, and supportive of her that it was a wonder. And, of course, she basked in the luxury of living with someone who gave so much. I feel lucky to have had such a stepparent, as he never interfered, except when asked, and gave us all mountains of laughs and fun.”

I often look at a photograph of my father taken at about this time. He’s in the Adirondacks, sitting on a wooden bench in the cabin he and my mother had built on the shore of Little Tupper Lake, looking west, down the lake, toward the often spectacular sunsets. Bliss, they named it. What happy memories that photo brings!

Camp Bliss sat in the middle of about 100,000 acres in the heart of the wilderness of the Adirondacks. William C. Whitney had bought and developed this property, managing it ecologically with Frederick Law Olmsted’s advice, and building several camps for the family’s use. My parents loved to go there, and they took us to the camp we children used, Togus, every August until we had gas rationing and took volunteer jobs during World War II. In the picture, my father looks peaceful and ever so young — it must have been taken right after he was married. One leg is flung up casually on the bench supporting the magazine he’s reading, he has a full head of dark hair, and he wears trousers, plaid shirt, v-necked sweater, and moccasins. In one hand he holds a cigarette, probably an “MM,” a snappy gold-tipped brand made with Turkish tobacco and imported to sell in the Park Avenue store where he was a partner, also called “MM.” Behind him, leaning on the massive stone fireplace (where a fire is laid), are two aluminum cases that hold my parents’ bamboo fishing rods. These were a clue to the reason for the lovely setting of Camp Bliss: it was close to Charlie Pond Stream, the very best trout fishing river in the world. That’s what I grew up to believe, anyway. Hanging from a pole on that same bench I see my father’s fishing hat, stuck all over with flies that he’d put there to dry after using them — little creations of feathers, fur, and tinsel, representing the bugs and nymphs the fish were eating at a given time. They remind me of my learning to make them, at ten, with the doctor who often fished with my parents, Carnes Weeks, and also with the eminent authority he arranged for me to meet, Elizabeth Gregg, who sold her creations to commuting fisherfolk from a little room at Grand Central Terminal cluttered with her materials. Since I was ambidextrous and could use scissors with either hand, I could tie flies without using a vise, a feat much admired by those in the know about such things, and this ability was definitely a feather in my cap. Carnes would bring me gorgeous feathers from his travels, especially during the war when he was posted to India, Burma, or China, and I can still visualize him spilling out fabulous bits of golden pheasant, brilliant silks, or tiger fur for me from his worn leather bag.

On a table, still in that photo, I see the ice bucket, cocktail shaker, and bottles of gin and vermouth for preprandial martinis, always part of my parents’ evenings. And behind them is my father’s watercolor box, with him wherever he went. Over the mantel is the monster trout that had taken my father forever to land — he’d named the springhole where he’d hooked it “Turtle,” unable to imagine a fish so strong. I see the door leading to the kitchen, where Louis Duane, the guide who was my very favorite person for years, was probably starting the fire in the ancient iron stove so it would be ready for my father to make one of his special dishes, adding lettuce, onions, bacon, and cream to a silver can of baby Lesueur peas. With boiled potatoes and corned beef hash or fresh trout, we’d have a feast, in a very different mode from our usual meals that were cooked and served by chef and butler. How delighted I was to be able to wash the dishes, using water I’d carried from the lake, heated in the stove, and poured into a dishpan with a bit of soap. Seldom did I feel so useful. Seldom did I have such precious times with my father and mother — and Louis as a bonus.

Of course, fishing with them was also a special treat. After practicing with matchsticks and borrowed rods, the time finally came to actually cast a real fly for a real fish. I’ll always remember the early morning hush as we canoed upstream toward the springhole, mist over the water, the rising sun casting a rosy glow. Suddenly, there was a beaver, swimming toward his house with a big branch in his mouth until he saw us and dove, flapping his broad tail hard on the water. And there, around the bend, a graceful deer bowing her head to drink, then, startled, running toward the woods with her white flag up. Once a bear swam across our bow, huge and black as it climbed out and lumbered off. Big blue herons, white egrets, mallards, and kingfishers, too. As we started to fish, my parents’ flies flew straight and true, landing with scarcely a ripple, while mine, at first, made a big fuss and scared the fish away. No one complained, though, even when I “caught the bushes,” and in time I improved. How I loved to watch one of them catch a fish! My mother’s dry fly floated on top of the water, and she’d pull it jerkily across the still water until suddenly, with a big splashy gulp, the trout came right out of the stream after it. Then came the struggle, the leaps clear out of the water of the glistening speckled beauty, who’d sometimes shake free and dive deep, free again. More often, Mother would raise the tip of her rod skillfully and hold him firm, bringing him close and closer until Lou would scoop him into the net.

Until I was fourteen, my family lived in Aiken, South Carolina, in Joye Cottage, the house my great-grandfather, William C. Whitney, had bought and enlarged. Aiken was then a small village with a “winter colony” of northerners — “Dam’ Yankees” as the locals said — whose income allowed them to live comfortably in a beautiful place far from city problems. When his father died, my grandfather Harry Payne Whitney inherited the house, and after he died in 1930, Gertrude gave it to her daughter Flora. My parents considered carefully the implications of my mother’s life as a child: rushing from place to place, going to school when it suited Gertrude’s and Harry’s schedules, with one caretaker succeeding another and little consistent care, and they opted for a different way. This was to give their children the stability and continuity necessary for a beneficial life, while the adults could be satisfied as well. Aiken provided everything they wanted — it was a perfect place to ride, shoot, play golf, tennis, and bridge, and to bring up their children in a protected, healthy ambiance.

For us, Aiken was in many ways a paradise. We had a home that both spread out and embraced us, a climate that allowed us to ride every day, horses we adored, a small fine school, and few but good friends. My sister Pam gave the flavor in that memorial book compiled after Flora’s death:

“Growing up Mum’s daughter was great fun — never dull. We all moved a lot: in the winter to Aiken, where all the boys attended Aiken Preparatory School. But there was no school for the girls at the beginning of our years there. So, Mum and three of her friends started one — in our squash court!

“This traveling was an intricate business; we took all the dogs, canaries, and other pets, such as goats, all the children — we were four — nurses, a maid or two, the chauffeur, the cars. When we went to Aiken we took all the horses and all the household and sometimes ponycarts and buggies.”

My brother Leverett and I weren’t really part of Pam’s and Whitty’s fun. Being older, they had a “gang” of friends and rushed about the village in an independent way we never could. Lev and I felt distanced from our parents much as our mother and grandmother had, although I believe that they really tried to spend time with us. But our parents were so caught up in their own lives. Their friends! Their activities! Our strict British nannies loved us, and we were attached to them, too, but we always wanted more of our parents than we got. Is this a universal, unalterable situation?

How I longed, as a child, to confide in my mother! Perhaps I didn’t know how to capture her attention. Whitty was handsome, funny, a marvelous athlete with a dozen close pals. Pam was clever, beautiful, and bold, with many friends and admirers. Chubby and solemn (until my ‘teens, when I thinned out and became more self-assured), I grew to fear rejection; Mum might turn away, or laugh, or answer the telephone. Still, I took every chance I could to be with her. When the time came, though, it was Pam, not my mother, on a carefully planned buggy ride behind her high-stepping hackney ponies, who instructed me about the “birds and the bees.” A few years after that, when Mum wanted to discuss birth control and sex with me before my marriage, I felt too embarrassed to respond. The moment had passed. When our relationship became close, as it did still later, it was nourished by the Museum, and never reached the intimacy she and my sister had maintained.

About 1940, when I was twelve, my mother first took me to the Museum. Just going to New York with her was special. To begin with, I had her all to myself.

Describing how she was then, I realize that my memories are intertwined with photographs, blended with her own stories and those of others, and mixed with later images, so my picture is the inevitable composite.

Flora Whitney Miller was beautiful right up to her death at almost eighty-nine. “Look at her lovely face, with no wrinkles,” my father used to say with pride. Her carefully coiffed hair never turned completely white. Her huge hazel eyes were fringed with long eyelashes below abundant eyebrows.

Mum lavishly powdered her upturned nose, rouged her cheekbones, and wore bright lipstick on her wide mouth. She smelled deliciously of Chanel. Her room, her whole house, was fragrant with the fresh flowers that still live in my father’s many evocative watercolors.

Her laugh was infectious. The men who visited our homes seemed wildly in love with her. No one, though, more so than my courtly and humorous father. Slim, elegantly dressed in his tailor-made double-breasted jackets, he wore horn-rim glasses behind which his blue eyes danced. His use of language was meticulous — when I called a basin a “sink,” or curtains “drapes,” he made satiric verses and watercolors to tease me. Sometimes, after predinner martinis and good wine with the roast, at dinner’s end he liked to sing: “In the Wintertime, In the Valley Green” or

When I walked along the Bois de Boulogne,

With an independent air,

You could hear the girls declare,

He must be a millionaire

You could hear them sigh

And hope to die

And turn and wink the other eye

At the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo!

Despite a painful hip, my father was a wonderful dancer, in the style of his old friend, Fred Astaire.

“Cully” was also known for the funny verses any number of people and events inspired him to write and illustrate. After his death, we had his book of “Jingles” reproduced, so his descendants could also know and appreciate this aspect of him. Often about ladies, they’d surely be considered politically incorrect today. For instance, while on board the France in 1963, he wrote this jingle and accompanied it with a graphic illustration:

I’m awfully sick of women in pants

Whatever they’re filled with —

Fannies or ants

(There must be hundreds on the France)

And most of them make me look askance.

But whether it’s ass or whether it’s skance

I still hate women in tight stretch pants.

In Paris, in 1965, he drew a picture of a doctor throwing up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. It illustrated this ditty, written after their old friend “Chip” Bohlen, then ambassador to “The Court of Charles de Gaulle,” as Cully called it, had dined with them:

Everything in France, I find, is very much de Gaulle.

Politically, of course, but that just isn’t all.

One finds thus Gaulloise cigarettes

His face on boxes of alumettes.

And when I had an awful pain

The French “doc” said he would explain

With that his face grew sad and sadder —

He broke the news —

C’est de Gaulle bladder.

“My dearest bug,” Cully would say to Flora, “how is your sniffle today?” Then, looking at me, “Your mother is extraordinary, you know. She’s curious about everything! What an interest in life she has! You’ll never know anyone who appreciates things so much.”

“Nooooo!” she would exclaim, as one of her beaux — Carnes or Tim or Bruce — would describe an adventure they’d embroidered for her, just to see her wide-eyed amazement. “I don’t believe it!” Or, much later, I’d show off my new baby: “Oooooh!” she’d say, “Darling, how delicious, the cunningest baby ever.”

My father’s appreciation of her, though, gave her the solid base she needed, a setting enabling her to expand and blossom. He was actually the more outgoing of the two. It was he the servants adored, he who had many close friends, he who arranged his and my mother’s trips and parties.

Raised voices, mingled with the tinkling of ice. Angry voices. Before dinner, after dinner, words knifing through the silence of hurt feelings. Although I couldn’t bear it, I sat there, watching, listening, learning to swallow anger rather than to risk the pain of confrontation. What did they fight about? My mother usually started it, I think. Some small resentment, some forgetfulness or mistake in planning, nothing much. But those martinis released underlying devils, swelled whatever emotions bubbled under their smooth masks and idyllic lives.

At a time when, according to Popular Mechanics, trailering was so in vogue that we were on the way to becoming “a nation of nomads,” my father bought “Romanyrye,” the sleek Art Deco sleep-in trailer in which they traveled all around the country, once as far as New Orleans. He had it fitted to their taste — elegant! When it arrived in Aiken, he wrote in “The Log of the Romanyrye”:

October 17, 1934. Much excitement on part of population of Aiken. … had cocktails served on board, much to amusement of the Wilds and Elsie Mead who dined with us.

October 18. Most of day spent in loading equipment on board. Went to boys’ school and took Whitty, Pam, and some of their friends for a ride.

October 19. Left Aiken, en route New York.

Cully’s paintings hung all over my parents’ homes, especially in Aiken. Instead of the usual ancestral portrait in the living room, on the long wall over the bar stretched a large, fine oil of a young man, “J. D.” In those long-ago days when segregation was institutionalized in the South by “Colored” or “White Only” signs on water fountains and movie house entrances, when public schools and churches, life itself, were racially segregated, to render a major portrayal of a “colored” man who worked as a “dove boy” for my father when he went hunting indicated an unusually open mind. Full-length, handsome, J. D. stands in a corn field, his head held high. My father had captured J. D.’s dignity.

A pair of smaller paintings on the side walls showed Cully’s humor. One, The Night Before, all in browns. A whiskey bottle. A decanter. A half-empty glass. The other, Blue Morning, held an assortment of blue bottles: Alka-Seltzer, Milk of Magnesia, an eyecup, a water glass with a measuring spoon.

My father was always painting, whether in a New York school — where he seemed to be the best artist, an inspiration for the whole class — in his studio in Aiken, in the Adirondacks, or in Hobe Sound, Florida, where he wintered later in his life and always kept by his side a watercolor pad and paintbox.

In Aiken, his studio was in the “Spooky Wing,” as we called those otherwise unoccupied, dark, and scary rooms. You got to them down a long, wide red-carpeted flight of stairs — exactly how I still picture the entrance to hell. The room you eventually reached opened onto the garden and pool, and I can still see my father there in my mind’s eye, wearing a long white coat like a doctor’s, holding his palette, brushes bristling in his hand, emitting delicious smells of oil paint and turpentine. Swimming or playing in the garden, my brother and I knew we mustn’t disturb him — but I doubt we could have, so focused was our father on his canvas.

In the Adirondacks, he used a log cabin way uphill from our noisy, child-filled camp, which we didn’t visit unless invited. Then, he’d arrange a picnic; how many photos we have of Daddy cooking hamburgers and steaks over the wood fire outside his cabin, all of us gathered around, sitting on the cabin porch, or toasting marshmallows over the embers as loons called wildly and the moon rose over the lake, while someone told the terrifying ghost story, the “Windigo.” But peeking inside the little cabin where we didn’t go, I saw an easel, brushes, canvases, pads of Arches paper, an old smock hanging on a hook. Another life.

Later, during the first years I was married, he took me to his class in New York, where sweet Hungarian portraitist Maria de Kammerer counted on him to infuse her students with ambition and fire. Despite my lack of talent, I loved the experience of dabbing thick, sensuous oil paints on a canvas, loved seeing my father in his true element. He delighted in the models she provided, and the company, too, since he had no circle of artists in his day-to-day life in Aiken. His paintings weren’t the kind a museum would show. Not “significant” in terms of our society, not unique in style, only in the sensitivity he brought his subjects — lovely evocations of nature, people, flowers, still lives, Adirondack scenes, the rooms our family inhabited. Again and again, he painted Flora — sunbathing, fishing in the Adirondacks, doing a double-crostic in their Paris garden. When my brother Lev’s first wife, Ava, Cully’s voluptuous daughter-in-law — a favorite subject — posed naked for him, we were conventionally, ridiculously appalled. But Cully was inspired by beauty, everywhere he found it. Especially, and always, by the nude female body.

In Hobe Sound, my father did watercolors in a house by the Inland Waterway where every room was a studio, where every wall was enlivened by his images: an exuberant yellow hibiscus fills a page, a boat passes below the lawn, rooms in Aiken or New York spring to life, one can almost smell a vase of roses. In one watercolor, I’m sitting in a bathing suit by their pool, and looking at it I feel almost right there, as I was in 1972, writing a paper on abnormal psychology for college, the year Daddy died at eighty-five.

I have his hands: small, square, with soft little nails lacking my sister’s and my mother’s half-moons. I wished for long and graceful hands with hard nails shaped like almonds and painted scarlet, like theirs, and like my grandmother’s, whose right hand cast in bronze sits on a table in our bedroom, looking, I imagined, like that of an artist. But today my squat hands please me. They remind me of my father and they reinforce my sense of him as an artist.

His paintings were the first I remember. To me, they revealed the importance of art, and showed me, by his example, the commitment that is the essence of an artist. My father’s love of painting has infused my love for art all my life. My grandmother may be the source of my specific involvement in the Whitney, and for my feelings about the Museum, but from my father I absorbed the deep sense of art, its centrality to the artist, its abiding, fulfilling joy.

As I grew older, I became inwardly critical of my father’s lack of ambition, because he didn’t have big exhibitions or big sales of his paintings. I thought he was wasting his great talent, frittering it away in socializing, drinking, traveling. Never giving himself the chance to become a great artist, never concentrating on his painting above all else.

My faultfinding was, I fear, the typical arrogance of youth. My father was full of joy much of the time, more than almost anyone else I’ve ever known, and in full measure he gave that joy to others. He did this personally and socially and also in his paintings. They are enchanting, lovely expressions of his life. I wish I had realized long ago, and had told him in time, how much he had inspired me, how watching him had given me a profound sense of the meaning of art, of being an artist.

My mother’s immense charm made her the glowing center of any gathering, a magnet for friends, family, and the “beaux” who seemed accepted members of our household. Several doctors appeared instantly whenever she had a cold, or the faintest twinge, and she sat happily in bed while they fussed over her. Russian count Elia Tolstoy spent Christmases with us in Aiken, entertaining us with tales of adventure, always starting in foreboding words with his escape from the “Reds,” “When I in Gobi Desert …” My sister and brother called him “Count Tallstory.” My first “crush” was on Ronnie Bodley, the English writer who’d been a beau of both my mother and grandmother, whose little mustache and very British accent captivated my best friend, Marianna Mead, and me. We would prepare his breakfast tray with little vases of Mum’s favorite lilies of the valley, and hover, waiting for his slightest attention. We learned the hard lesson of unrequited love early. An architect adored Flora. A gifted decorator. A brilliant publisher. And others, until nearly the end of her life. When they were both in their mid-eighties, Harlan Miller, one of her first beaux, and also her last, wrote on a card accompanying a bunch of birthday flowers,

While bridge was my father’s game — and he was much in demand — my mother played Canasta, although she liked to reminisce about the high-stakes poker game in New York of which she’d become a member, a sophisticated, male, literary group that included Raoul Fleishman, owner of the New Yorker, Ralph Pulitzer, the members of the Algonquin Round Table, and other luminaries. She loved to stay up late, unlike my father, who went to bed early. After a play or a dinner or that poker game, she would go with a friend to the Stork Club or El Morocco and stay until nearly dawn. Then she’d sleep until noon.

Strangely, Flora was drawn to boxing. Why does a person want to see one man hurt another? Like the ancient Romans watching gladiators? I could never imagine my mother at ringside, fiercely rooting for Joe Louis to knock out Max Schmeling. But I still remember her excitement over that heavyweight bout. Perhaps, like her poker games and her flirting, she simply had a very human attraction to danger. Was it also the sensual pleasure she felt, watching those splendid near-naked bodies dancing their way through their bloody struggle?

Mum loved to read, everything from Conrad to the latest murder mystery. When we children were sick, she would always read aloud to us from the same books her mother had read to her — Kipling, Twain, or Conan Doyle. Sometimes, in the slanting autumn sun of a long South Carolina afternoon, I would read to her. Sitting on canvas stools in a cornstalk blind, shotguns at our sides, as we waited for doves to fly in and feed on benne seeds, we’d laugh aloud at Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine, we’d thrill to the Adventures of Tish.

As far back as I can remember, my mother was for me the essence of elegance, and as I grew up I discovered that for a great many people she represented that as well. In the country, she wore well-cut trousers with a bright print shirt. In the city, she was elegant in a Chanel suit, wedge-heeled shoes, and pearls. Suede gloves, a hat by Paulette, feathered or sequinned or veiled, and a snappy bag completed the look. Smoke perennially curled around her head from the Turkish cigarette in the ebony holder dangling from her long red-tipped fingers. Slim, with small ankles and shapely legs (my father always noticed other women’s less lovely legs!), she often received compliments about her clothes. Always going to the “collections,” as had her mother and grandmother, she ordered suits, day and evening dresses, blouses, and hats — in Paris at Chanel or Balenciaga, and in New York at Hattie Carnegie or Mainbocher.

I have often wondered why some women are obsessed with clothes. When I think of all the money those women, today as always, will spend on the latest and finest for each new season, I am bothered, perhaps because I recognize in myself the same tendency to want such garb.

“Clothes create at least half the look of any person at any moment … when you are dressed in any particular way at all, you are revealed rather than hidden,” writes Anne Hollander, in Seeing Through Clothes (Viking Penguin, 1978). But for some, “clothes,” Hollander continues, “stand for knowledge and language, art and love, time and death — the creative, struggling state of man.” Gertrude and Flora often chose avant-garde, exquisite, and daringly festive looks.

Gertrude and Flora, intimately connected to the world of visual arts, “creative and struggling,” were natural leaders in fashion.

Besides, despite all her charm and abilities, my mother, just as millions of women before her, needed the shell of fashion to cover insecurity, to insure the approbation of others. This she also taught me. As a teenager, I learned to wear a girdle and stockings with my tweed suit when we went to the races or a polo game. Later, a “little black dress,” with gloves and a hat, for lunch in New York; and a well-cut suit for meetings at the Museum. Thus garbed, I felt secure, just right for the image I wanted to project. I’m more relaxed now, but the urge for new feathers in springtime and autumn remains, and I still dress up in my best suit for meetings, or something spiffy and different for a party.

Only now do I finally perceive with clarity that I absorbed from Mum lessons in deceptive magic, passed on from one generation of women to the next. And it seems I’ve passed it on, too.

But whatever fashionable shell she chose, it could never altogether hide the woman within my mother. She was a vibrant person with strong feelings and opinions. I remember, for instance, the way our whole family would eat meals together every summer in the Adirondacks. “You can say anything you like,” Mum would tell us all, “but you must be able to argue for what you believe. You must stand up for it.” And we surely had some lively discussions at that long table — a few even better than the pies filled with juicy, wild raspberries we’d pricked our legs and hands laboriously collecting. When my brother Lev, for instance, wouldn’t eat his boiled eggs, demanding that they be scrambled instead, our mother initiated a long-term, recurring argument on the rights of children versus adults. “How do you like your eggs?” became a metaphor, in our family, debated again and again on different issues, all the way from our bedtime to whether Whitty should leave Harvard to join the Air Force before our country joined World War II.

Diana Vreeland was a childhood friend whose memory of my mother was offbeat and poetic. This is part of her contribution to the “Flora” memorial book.

Flora — beautiful, bewildering, and magnetic with an enchanting laugh. Her voice, her appearance, and her thoroughness in every form of charm was wonderful.

Flora was flirtatious and gave away charm beguilingly. She was naughty, very naughty. She loved fun and laughter as children do.

Flora was a very private person, almost mysterious. She was an elusive beauty and was not seen everywhere. Flora was unique, remarkable, and will never be replaced.

Captivated by my mother, always yearning for her approval and love, I absorbed whatever I could of her. Perhaps having her name intensified these feelings.

Despite their efforts to give us more attention than their parents had given them, my parents were often absent, in body and spirit, from us children. Before World War II, when we were small, they actively sought pleasure, fun, the good life. They ate, drank, and made merry. We often felt left out, and we were, abandoned to the strict nanny who taught us discipline, restraint, and humility When very young, feeling lonely, I’d lose myself in books and horses. Later, as a teenager, I’d found it hard to make friends at bigger schools. In reaction to my rather isolated childhood, I was determined to give my own children every chance to have a “normal” life, with lots of classmates and varied activities. Sleepovers! Team sports! Culture! But today I value solitude. Time to read, to write, and to think.

I believed in God and in Jesus. Before each Sunday, our nurse would insist that I memorize that week’s “Collect,” marked with a purple ribbon in the prayer book with gold-edged pages my mother had given me. We would walk to the big white church in Aiken for the 11:00 service, then I’d recite or listen or sing, kneeling or sitting or standing, as the stately Protestant ritual prescribed.

Because my mother had been divorced, the Episcopal church had forbidden her to take Holy Communion, so we always left before that most sacred sacrament. Nevertheless, my mother and father wanted us to grow up in the traditional faith of their families, and at thirteen I dressed in white for the solemn ceremony of Confirmation. It turned out to be much more of a rite of passage than I’d anticipated, because my very first menstrual period began at the same time. My mother, sympathetic, mixed gin and hot lemonade into a kind of reverse martini for my cramps, while she warned, “Don’t talk to men about it, not even to Daddy.”

Yet another thing to hide! But, so it was. Our female curse must be borne in secret.

Woozy from her cure, I nearly fainted when the bishop placed his hands on my head. And I was terribly aware of the Holy Spirit, descending right into me!

I felt uniquely blessed. For days, I walked around in a prayerful haze. I made certain never to eat before taking the sacred bread and wine, and, after the confessional prayer and communion, felt altogether sure that my sins were forgiven.

Like most adolescents, I was searching for meaning. Christianity seemed to offer such a moral and also artistic way to live properly in our logical, ethical universe. God had planned it all, in His “many mansioned” house. The beauty of the church’s language, of its music, perfectly suited its lofty ideals. As I understood it, human perfection was possible, with God’s help — one had only to want it enough.

Much later, disillusioned upon learning a lot more about the church’s history of intolerance, I lost my faith. But my understanding of its doctrine remained, though still lacking perspective and life experience. Nevertheless, when our children were born, my husband and I wanted them to have the same opportunities for that choice we’d had. We attended church with them and even taught Sunday school. For me, though, the intensity of my early belief was gone.

Today, I find myself thinking through all these questions once again. For, despite everything, religion still remains a powerful source of humanism and hope.

The boys’ school in town sat before us in neat gray rows in their designated pews. If we were lucky, my parents would invite one or two of the older boys to our home for Sunday lunch. That made the most boring sermon worthwhile!

Looking back, now, I see that our mother and father gave us an inestimable gift, the sense that happiness in this life is possible. That gaiety and humor and friendship and love are all-important. Yet we never connected any of this with money, perhaps because our parents were neither pretentious nor ostentatious. They gave us few material things, except for what we needed to learn what they deemed important — horses, shotguns, tennis racquets, classic books, fishing rods, bicycles — but even these came only for Christmas or birthdays. Our monthly allowances were minuscule. Movie houses and movies were rarely allowed (too germ-filled and exciting, respectively) — no candy either, and, once in a very great while, an ice cream cone. Our lives were protected, monitored, and structured. We had no fabricated entertainment. We learned early to amuse ourselves.

Yet, just as one mercifully forgets the physical pain of childbirth, so it’s difficult today to entirely recapture the full extent of the adolescent rage and frustration I remember feeling when I first became aware of the meaning of certain words that revealed a world I’d never been aware of: pellagra, segregation, concentration camp, torture, prejudice, holocaust. There were many others. All at once, the life we’d led seemed petty, oblivious to others, selfish, immoral. I can still recall how desperately, then, I wanted to take control of my life. To be a “grown-up” instead of obeying them. To begin the job of changing the world. Even today, looking back at the events of the ’30s, at Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, at the years of depression in our own country, I’m troubled by how removed we were from the suffering of that dark decade. A gauzy curtain seems to undulate between my fragrant memories of Aiken and my adult realization, now, of what life was like elsewhere. Early on, I felt that pain at the Whitney Museum, through the etchings and paintings of such artists as Reginald Marsh, Jack Levine, John Sloan, Rafael Soyer, and Ben Shahn, who illustrated graphically a wide range of societal ills and evils.

After emerging, ignorant, so long ago, into a bigger world, I’m still trying to grow up. I still have trouble recognizing and accepting the mix of good and bad in all of us. The struggle is endless. Still, I remain grateful for the firm grounding my parents provided, for their love, and for that blessed house from which we could expand and grow.

Four