The Wedding Party of Alice Vandergrift and George Gordon hosted by Joseph Kennedy, Ambassador to Ireland, at The American Embassy in Dublin, 1930.
Maman
Things Gone & Things Still Here
No one could have blamed Maman for keeping the signed photograph of Wallis Simpson in her room on her bureau and at her bedside when she traveled or was a guest anywhere. The black and white photo showed Wallis in an evening gown, turned three-quarters to the camera with her face in profile, and the picture was signed with a dedication to my grandmother Alice. Maman had seen how dear this framed photograph of Wallis was to her mother, and I would often catch her looking wistfully at it with tears in her eyes whenever she recalled her mother, as she told me the story about the fiercest friendship between Alice and Wallis, how it came to an end, and how they parted ways forever.
Both being American socialites, they shared a background of being rooted in East Coast society, though Wallis was considerably less wealthy growing up than my grandmother was. An heiress to Standard Oil of California and granddaughter of the oil baron JJ Vandergrift, she also inherited her mother Sarah Mercer’s fortune at the time. A piece that appeared in Time Magazine in 1937 was the kiss of death to their formerly close friendship according to Maman.
There was Wallis Simpson’s eventual rumored association with Nazi supporters during and after the war that ended the connection finally, and there was the article that appeared in Time Magazine in 1937 over which The Duchess of Windsor was said to be infuriated by the mention that my grandmother gave her last season’s haute couture gowns from the great Parisian houses like Paquin , Chanel and Vionnet, for her to copy the patterns because she couldn’t afford her own. Alice gave her the original designer dresses she wore every season in those days in Washington DC and Alice relinquished the friendship with much regret, until after the war.
Alice Vandergrift Gordon my grandmother was a staunch supporter of freedom, equality and justice, as well as other humanitarian values, and she mentions explicitly and with anxiety in her diaries from her time running the embassy household at The Hague, that she hid Jews in the cellar of the US Embassy at The Hague without her husband George ‘s knowledge before the German invasion until the Minister to Holland was recalled to Washington DC.
This is an excerpt from the piece that appeared in Time Magazine
The Duchess of Windsor, years ago in Washington when she was the wife of an impecunious U. S. Navy officer, used to send over her seamstress to copy Mrs. Gordon's gowns, by permission, when the latter would return from Paris with another trunkful. Of aristocratic Dutch descent, the U. S. Minister's wife, nee Vandergrift, has many friends, some relatives in The Netherlands.
In adjoining Germany, just after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, Mr. Gordon was Counselor of the U. S. Embassy during feverish weeks while the Reichstag was burned down and the Nazis pursued their bludgeoning Revolution. With the then British Ambassador to Germany Sir Eric Phipps vigorous Mr. Gordon teamed and they were long the only two diplomats in Berlin who stickled for their nationals' rights and stood up to the Nazis. They are credited with having persuaded that non-Nazi German gentleman, Baron Constantin von Neurath, that it was his duty to stay on as Foreign Minister when, upset by the havoc Nazis were playing with the traditions of the German Foreign Office, the Baron had determined to resign.
Haiti ~ Netherlands: Instead of the Marines, Monday August 2, 1937
There were days when I was home from school, and I would visit Maman in her bedroom in the house on the Calle Juncal in the Barrio Norte of Buenos Aires in the mornings before she had done her correspondence. She always sat at her mother's secretary desk before she went down to the great room, or down the hall to the breakfast room on a weekend to sit with my brother and our friends while we had our coffees and medias lunas, discussing the last night’s event and anticipating that night’s prospects. My friends adored Maman, and she enjoyed sitting with us and laughing at my friends’ stories.
Several of my brother’s companions who boarded from other countries in Quilmes at Saint George’s made our home theirs, and they had a permanent open invitation to stay on every weekend and school break, I daresay she was a mother to these boys, my brother’s schoolfriends. My friends looked to her for advice and support, which she gave wholeheartedly, and we were very pleased to have her company most of the time~ after all, we were teenagers, however Maman delighted in our company and my friends delighted in hers, so that was all.
In Argentina there is great emphasis placed on family values, and the generations tend to celebrate occasions together more than we tend to here in The North, as families live separated along generations, and couples live more isolated from community. Argentines are family oriented, and we gather for asados, tragos, picadas, copetines, cafecitos, quinceañeras, fiestas cualquieras , cumpleaños, aniversarios, para tomar el té, el café, para desayunar, almorzar, cenar, festejar, acompañar, para reir y para llorar, para amar, abrazar, además para despedir con tristeza y alegria a la vez. We gather more often to laugh and cry, to love and to hug, and we show up to say goodbyes bursting with sadness and joy.
*
Maman had almost no photographs other than of her parents and her children in her room, and these were in small frames mostly, while the portrait of Wallis was quite prominent no matter where Maman placed it. She said she remembered her mother placing it on her dresser in her parents’ permanent set of rooms at the top of the Hotel Crillon in Paris, where my grandmother took delight in leaving the windows open for sparrows to come in and perch on the furniture and wander about. I dare say she fed them and at the very least let them have the remains of teas and breakfasts and peck at the crumbs before room service took away the carts.
Maman’s room, and the room she slept in with her husband, was the largest in the house and looked over the street. Calle Juncal was a relatively quiet street for the most part unless you were there during the ever more frequent strikes and demonstrations for the cries of the people such as Peron! Peron! and Argentina Potente!
Then you would have seen and heard the weight of the will of the people walking the city ~ hundreds and thousands of workers moving as one colossal unwieldy force through the streets. Many moving as one, like the dragon on Chinese New Year in New York City’s Chinatown, twisting and turning this way and that, head bobbing, always advancing, fire spraying from its nostrils and lighting everything into sparks and flames as he passes by. The workers were singing the city into existence Bruce Chatwin might have said.
So, for this reason there was no natural light in Maman’s room. There was only the light on her desk and an enormous old French chandelier that had come from the American Embassy in Holland, before it illuminated the lofty great room of Maman’s apartment on Park Avenue. The two enormous double door windows gave out onto balconies providing access to the street and sky views at one time only now the dark green metal persianas were clapped down shut always, and there was no opportunity to open them, let alone venture out to stand above the street.
Maman noticed me looking at the photograph of Wallis Simpson while she was busy writing out the two hundred fifty odd Christmas cards she sent every year well in advance, because of the Argentine post taking longer than even Italian letters in those days, and if you have ever lived in Italy you will possibly not take offense, dear reader, and I hope you will not, and Maman wrote long letters out by hand which she enclosed in the cards, on airmail paper in ink, and the cards still weighed way more than the usual postage!
Maman liked to take up the photograph and tell the story about her mother and Wallis. I did not pay enough close attention to remember all she said, as I was distracted at the time, and I often have trouble paying attention to what someone is saying when I am thinking hard about something else. The story of the friendship between Wallis and Alice ended badly and ended over something or other that sounded like pride and narcissistic wounds.
I do understand the sensitivity about the hand me down dresses, and yet I think Alice meant well in doing so. I have never taken for granted the generosity of my friends from the time I left Argentina and a life of considerable privilege to live a peripatetic artist’s life, treading lightly if you will with few belongings or desire for them wherever I would go, and I am grateful for all the gowns and clothes lent to me before I began to work as a model and have easy access to designers as well as acquire my own pieces in my 20s.
The Duchess of Windsor, formerly Wallis Simpson.
Maman also called Wallis a Femme Fatale, a woman who wasn’t necessarily classically beautiful by traditional standards who men were mad drawn to, the definition of which she failed to impress on me, something about such women not being exactly classically beautiful or even terribly attractive, while years later at school in England I found myself an unlikely inclusion in a British magazine’s editorial shoot being on their list of current British Femmes Fatales at university in England, and I suppose no one ever impressed upon the photographer or the writer that I was American.
As I believe I have told the story of the hysterical photo shoot where I was required to sit up in a tree for a good part of the morning wearing a voluminous haute couture ball gown, jodhpur boots, a ton of jewelry, fingerless gloves, posing and smoking Gauloises for the shot, and those cigarettes smelled like a pair of old leather boots if you ask me, and my skirt kept getting caught in the tree branches. So, I was in constant peril of falling out of the tree with laughter. Other hilarious photos were taken that afternoon in Oxford and on the grounds of Blenheim Castle, and it was there I met the people who would later give me modeling work in the fashion industry that would sustain me when Maman’s husband convinced her to cut me off from all contact and family support and leave me to my own fate on the eve of my eighteenth birthday.
I sat frozen as I heard the New York City lawyer Adnan Reid on the phone say to me that I was to pack my bags and leave at the end of term as I would no longer receive financial assistance from the family after I turned 18 in September. That I was not to call or contact Maman except through his law office.
~Do you know what your mother replied when I told her you asked “If you don’t want me to finish my degree here and you say I can’t come home, what am I to do? he asked.
~No.
~ Your Mother said, tell Mignon, Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn what you do.
*
Maman never said any such thing it turns out decades later, and her husband knew what to tell the lawyer to say to me that would convince me she had approved of this plan of setting me out adrift and keeping me out of Maman’s reach while telling her I was wild and never called and didn’t want to see her talk to her or come home. Which brings me to the heart of the matter and perhaps a partial reason as to why I haven’t written lately, as instead my energies are directed at settling Maman’s affairs.
Lawyers have been solving this question ~Where is her Will? Her husband and his daughter pretend Maman died intestate, yet Maman worked on her Will throughout her life as all dowagers tend to do and even brought the subject up at table at times. Evidence that she made a new will shortly before she died contradicted the fact that no one filed anything in court and her husband tried to sell her house and property though he failed to do so before the court stepped in. She has disappeared and all memories that accompany her belongings are gone too almost without a trace, if it weren’t for her burial stone in Fort San Antonio Cemetery in Houston. I was forbidden to attend her funeral, which I see now was her husband and his daughter’s way of covering up details of Maman’s fate before she wandered off to the stars.
How she must have suffered in those last years when I was forbidden access to her and she would call me when she could on the sly when her husband was out or away, and she was lucid enough. No doubt exists that she was prisoner in a house in Texas while she believed she was in New York City, she was crippled by arthritis and tortured by dementia, full of loneliness, probably fed by a tube, and cared for by a callous man and his daughter, who may have mistreated her and worse.
Where are the possessions she held dear? Where are the books memoirs and diaries of Alice V Gordon and the journals written by her daughter, my aunt Margot Garrett de Zuberbuhler who died in a plane crash coming back from their estancia in Santiago del Estero along with her husband Mariano? She had begun writing in leather bound notebooks using both pen and pencil back at school at Sherborne in England, and the recorded memories follow her through her life as a socialite and journalist in Washinton DC all the way to Argentina where she tu-teared or used the informal Tu not the Usted when addressing the Argentine President before Peron ascended to power, and no one ever corrected her, where she sang on the radio, and went often to see the ballet at The Teatro Colon. Where are the portraits of JJ Vandergrift and original prints and paintings of Chinese Gordon?
These then are things gone and things still here. Things are often memories, and I have lost all of my possessions several times over from fire, flight, or failure, you might say, and I would like to read these family diaries again. Where, I ask to no avail, though I care much less about things bound for Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses, I do wonder about whereabouts of the Tibetan rugs from the house in Bermuda, the Louis XIVth chairs, and a little chair from Marie Antoinette’s boudoir, the paintings, British landscapes and the horses by Millais, the sets of Baccarat crystal and fine china, and the silly little china dog statues I never understood. I remember as well Maman’s collection of little ashtrays taken from the hotels she frequented, The Ritz in Paris, The Dorchester in London, The Pierre and The Carlyle in New York, The Palace in St Moritz, The Baur au Lac in Zurich, The Brenner’s Park Hotel , Villa Stephanie in Baden-Baden, and more…same as the sets of Gorham silver place settings for 250 people from the US Embassy in Holland that Maman kept in her house in Rhinebeck on the Astor Estate in the former carriage house. Where is her jewelry, her Chanel her Ferragamo, her Burberry, her sturdy beautiful Louis Vuitton travel cases and trunks, and a wardrobe that was collected with exquisite taste?
Where are Maman’s beloved books? First editions of Bonjour Tristesse and Beatrix Potter’s The Tales of Peter Rabbit collection, a first edition of Alice in Wonderland, as well as some beautiful editions of French authors and Argentine authors, and her beloved collection of history not to mention the volumes and collections of books from the library in the house on Juncal in Buenos Aires? Where are her beloved books about The Civil War?
Where is the correspondence that began in boarding school between Maman and Lee Bouvier Radziwill and her sister, the photos and the letters from Jackie Kennedy and a thank you note Jackie wrote to Maman after her husband was elected President.
I recall an embossed folded card from Crane’s, handwritten in blue ink and a round boarding school script like Maman’s and Aunt Mab’s, on her personal stationery imprinted with her name at the top, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and read as follows though I only remember the first line…
Dear Audie,
Thank you so much for all your support of Jack and me!
Much Love to you and Chester,
Jackie
*
There is much to be sorted, including the situation with JPM Chase trustees who administered her finances and would not help me arrange for her safety and care. Would not let me use her own liquid assets to give her a decent quality of life in her declining condition Lies can be fatal, and there is such a thing as an innocent victim though Maman positioned herself very badly in life once she landed in the grip of her final predator her last husband whose name I have yet to bring myself to type for fear it will bring on another bout of nausea, dread, shaking, fever, chills, and vertigo.
I wonder about the things Maman loved and kept close, the tiny portraits in silver frames, the ubiquitous exhibition of photographs of me I’ve heard she kept about her ever since I left Argentina. The little pearl covered prayer book and her Book of Common Prayer? Where is the portrait of Wallis Simpson? These matters concern me though not as greatly as bringing to justice the husband and predator who is responsible for the circumstances surrounding her death.
A Note to my very dearly appreciated Subscribers:
~ As I have been on an unannounced extemporaneous hiatus since August for the last three months, I am placing your paid subscriptions on hold going forward for the same length of time. I remain immensely grateful for your patience and support!
My heart breaks for you. How beautifully you write!
My friend,
First there is the story, told in your silky, mesmerizing artistry, drawing us, ever closer, in order to hold each syllable and its meaning nearer.
Then, the range of emotions, all yours but shared so intimately that we feel them as our own.
Masterful, honest and painted with the words and presentation of a Borges.