Real Lace (36 page)

Throughout the story of the Irish in America runs the theme of money—money and, with it, social acceptance. If anything, money has been more a preoccupation with the Irish than it has been with the Jews, who tended, when they made money, to spend it more on philanthropy and cultural endeavors than on high living, great houses, and fast cars. Second only to the Church, and
keeping the Faith, has been the importance of making money to American Irish families. J. Patrick Lannan, the multimillionaire industrialist, has recalled how, as a child, his Irish father drummed into him the necessity of making money, getting ahead, making more money. Whenever old man Lannan was approached by one of his children for money, he would wail, “Sure, an' it's a beggar's ass I'll be scratching when I'm ninety!”

Scott Fitzgerald himself liked to point out that on one side of his family, the Fitzgeralds, was aristocracy; the other side was peasant. “I have a streak of peasant vulgarity that I like to cultivate,” he said (and in his celebrated drinking bouts he certainly managed to achieve his aim). His mother, Fitzgerald used to say, was “a rich peasant,” Milly McQuillan. She kept telling him, “All this family stuff is a lot of bull. All you have to know is where the money is coming from.” And John O'Hara, through all of whose novels the money theme runs strong, remained embittered that his father, a prosperous doctor, died without leaving enough money for his son to go to Yale. O'Hara had to go out and get a job instead. O'Hara complained so bitterly, and so often, about this deprivation in his life that, many years later when O'Hara was in his forties, a friend commented, “Let's take up a collection to send John to Yale.”

Chapter 26

“ROBERT THE ROUÉ”

Probably the circumstances that distress the founding fathers of the First Irish Families—if they are indeed watching their voluminous broods from their Catholic heaven—would involve the many instances of divorce, mixed marriage, and subsequent lapses from the Church that have occurred among members of the later generations. Of the fourteen children of James Francis McDonnell, four have been divorced, although only one—Anne Ford—has remarried, and to a divorced man. (Her brother, Gerard McDonnell, divorced his wife, and then remarried her a week later.) Today, even the site of the great Ford wedding is gone—washed out to sea in a great Northeaster storm. In 1956, Jeanne Murray and Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt were divorced after eleven years of marriage and two children, and Vanderbilt married another Jean—Jean Harvey, related to the Chicago Cudahys. Jeanne Vanderbilt, though she has been “romantically linked” in the press with a number of men, from
Joseph L. Mankiewicz to Pete Rozelle, has never remarried. Her brother, Jake Murray, has been married three times, divorced twice (his second wife died), and has left the Church.

Others have had marriages of which the older generation would most certainly have disapproved. The two “perfect convent girls,” the Ford sisters, have both entered into unions which cannot have pleased the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Mary who taught them: Anne to an Italian stockbroker, Giancarlo Uzielli, whose mother was a Jewish Rothschild; Charlotte to the Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos after his divorce from his second wife, Eugenie (whose sister Tina had divorced another shipping tycoon, Aristotle Onassis, five years earlier). The Niarchos yacht
Creole
, if not the largest in the world, is certainly the most lavishly decorated, with a three-million-dollar art collection purchased from the late Edward G. Robinson which includes several Van Goghs, Renoirs, a Gauguin, and a Rouault. The Niarchoses, who were married hastily by a judge in Juarez, Mexico, have since been divorced, after one child, and Charlotte Ford, after resuming her maiden name for a while, has remarried. Niarchos, meanwhile, has married his second wife's sister, Tina, after her divorce from her second husband, the Marquis of Blandford. What—if he is looking down from above—can Great-Grandpa Murray be thinking of such proceedings? He who would not even permit his children to date a Protestant. And what would he have thought when one of his grandsons, H. Lester Cuddihy, Jr., married his sister's governess, Gabrielle? Gabrielle, however, received her mother-in-law's usual gift of a mink coat, just as all the other girls in the family did.

Perhaps the most unusual F.I.F. marriage of all occurred in 1972 when another of Thomas E. Murray's great-grandchildren, Jeanne Murray Vanderbilt's daughter Heidi, was married to young Jones Harris, the son of the producer Jed Harris (né Jacob Horowitz) and Ruth Gordon, the actress. A year earlier, Heidi
Vanderbilt's brother, Alfred G. Vanderbilt, Jr., married a girl named Alison Platten. He is the first Vanderbilt to be a rock musician, and plays the electric bass guitar with a group called the Fine Wine, which he helped found. The couple were married in the Presbyterian Church.

“We are all victims of the Ecumenical Council,” says Charlotte McDonnell Harris, referring to the Church's recent, more relaxed stand on divorce and marriage to non-Catholics. “We were brought up to think that divorce was unthinkable, that marriage was for all eternity. There were some people who could manage to get their marriages annulled in Rome, but it took years and cost a fortune. Now it can be done quickly and inexpensively in a matter of weeks. It's very difficult, when all your life you've been taught that something is a sin and then, all at once, you're told that it isn't.” Another in the family says, “It used to be all so simple—simple and beautiful. A thing was either black or white, right or wrong, a sin or not a sin. It used to be lovely. If you lost something, you prayed to St. Jude, and you were sure that you would find it again. Before the girls' basketball game at Sacred Heart, you prayed for your team to win, and you prayed again at timeouts. You took no chances. If God saw every sparrow, wouldn't he also see a set shot from midcourt? It made no difference that members of our rival team at Blessed Sacrament were praying for their team too. For every sin or shortcoming, there was punishment, a moral. If a girl did not bathe every day and wash her hands before meals, she would get leprosy. First her fingers would rot, then her toes, then her nose. One by one, the parts of your body turned yellow, smelled horribly, and then dropped off. If a boy cursed and used profanity, he would get cancer of the tongue. If he repented, his last words before his tongue was cut out would be ‘Jesus, Mary, Joseph.' The mystery and magic of the Church have been taken away by this modernization, the Latin gone from the liturgy. The Church has changed a lot in the last ten years, and in my opinion
the change has not been for the good.” The Church still will not condone remarriage after a divorce, and so those who wish to remarry must leave the Church—or accept the fact that they are living in sin.

Not all the younger members of the First Irish Families have drifted away from the Church, of course. When Auntie Marie Murray celebrated her eightieth birthday at the Windham Mountain Club not long ago, more than a hundred of her grandchildren were in attendance, and Mrs. Murray was proud to point out that every single one of them was attending a Catholic school. Another of Grandpa Thomas E. Murray's granddaughters, Mary Jane Cuddihy MacGuire, remains a staunch and devout Catholic “right down the line,” despite her husband's early death. Mary Jane MacGuire not only adheres strictly to her religion, but she has inherited an Irish temper, and is something of a firebrand. In New York a few years ago she attended a theater which was presenting a revue called
Beyond the Fringe
, One of the skits included a pantomime of three figures standing with arms raised, one actor wearing a halo, which she deemed to be a parody and mockery of the Crucifixion. She telephoned the producer and threatened to set fire to the theater if the skit was not dropped. When this didn't work, she telephoned the Chancery office and lodged a caustic formal complaint. Eventually, she succeeded in getting to Father Laurence McGinley, the president of Fordham, who threatened to send down the whole Fordham basketball team to break up the place if the sketch was not stopped. It was stopped.

Several years ago, in an economy move, the City of New York announced that it would discontinue the traditional practice of painting a green line down the center of Fifth Avenue for the annual Saint Patrick's Day parade. This news made Mary Jane MacGuire indignant; it seemed a slight to the Irish. Her daughter Bea was also irked by the city's move and, with a group of her teenage Irish Catholic friends, the girls decided that they would paint
the green stripe down Fifth Avenue
themselves
. Mary Jane MacGuire helped the girls mix the green paint in her Park Avenue kitchen.

The girls went out on the night before the parade with their paint cans and brushes, started to paint, and were promptly arrested for malicious mischief. They were herded into a paddy wagon and marched into New York's Women's House of Detention, proudly singing “The Wearin' of the Green.” The arresting officer turned out to be an Irish Protestant. The judge was black. But Mary Jane MacGuire had engaged a Jewish lawyer, and the girls were soon released and the charges dropped.

The most glamorous and in many ways the most bizarre of all Thomas E. Murray's grandchildren was Mary Jane Cuddihy's younger brother Bob. Of all her brothers, Mary Jane loved Bob the most—loved him, even though she was often critical of him. Tall, slender, and dazzlingly handsome, he possessed a wild Irish sense of humor and fun, and an even wilder Irish temper. He loved girls, sports, parties, adventure, and in the late 1930's and 1940s he was the personification of Flaming Youth and, at the same time, frequently the despair of his family. Still, the warmth and glow of his charm were of such intensity that it was impossible not to forgive his pranks. Everybody loved Bob Cuddihy, and he flashed across the lives of his friends and family like a playful star. His cousin Jake Murray made Bob the hero of his novel,
The Devil Walks on Water
—a turbulent, fast-moving, unpredictable, and overwhelming character named Briney Mitchel. But the family has always felt that the novel never really did Bob justice.

Bob Cuddihy seemed to have been born in the eye of a hurricane, and, in fact, his name first hit the newspapers in 1937 when he was rescued by a Rhode Island state trooper and a fire chief after drifting for an hour in a leaky rowboat in choppy seas off Narragansett Bay. He was then a freshman at Portsmouth Priory, and had grown tired of playing with the rowboat on shore and so
had just let himself drift off on his own. That night he was the center of attention among his fellow students with the tales of his adventure. A year later, his name was in the papers again. Thirteen-year-old Bob Cuddihy and a young classmate had disappeared from Portsmouth during the 1938 hurricane. The youths were gone for days, and were feared dead. During the search, a young man who looked very much like the missing Cuddihy boy turned up at the Hancock Pharmacy at Seventy-second Street and Madison Avenue in New York, not far from his family's house, and ordered an ice cream soda. “Aren't you the boy they're looking for?” the druggist asked him. “No, that's my brother,” the young man replied.

It turned out that the two boys had been on an extended junket up and down the East Coast, walking for miles over washed-out roads and through flooded cities, having the time of their lives. They had hitchhiked to Providence, Boston, up into Maine, had tried to get to Canada, had come back to New York, and had, in all, covered more than a thousand miles in their travels. They were finally found asleep on a bench in the Baldwin Long Island Railroad station. They hadn't liked the school, they explained, and had figured that in the middle of a hurricane was the perfect time to run away.

Bob Cuddihy didn't like schools of any variety, and, in all, he was enrolled in—and escaped from—some thirteen different schools, including Portsmouth, Canterbury, Cranwell, Lawrence Smith, Georgetown—every Catholic school his parents could find. Cranwell, his mother used to note, was the only school that ever paid her the tuition back. At one point, he even ended up in a school for retarded children. A priest whom the family had consulted about the situation had mistaken the nature of the problem, and recommended the school. “What kind of a school
is
this, anyway?” he asked his parents on the telephone after a day or so. “There's one guy here who does nothing but bang on a drum all
day long.” His parents, however, decided to keep him there. After all, they reasoned, at least it was a school. He did not stay long.

The last school tried was Loyola in Montreal. From Loyola he ran away and enlisted in the Canadian Army. He was only fourteen, but, because he looked older than his years, he was taken in. Army life bored him, and so he deserted. The Canadian Army tried to court-martial him for desertion, but, when they discovered that he was under-age, there was nothing they could do. In his car in Southampton he would drive across lawns, between trees and hedges, to take short cuts to his cousins' houses, where he would park outside windows, toot his horn, and gather up all the children to take them to Corwith's Pharmacy for sodas and ice cream. If Corwith's happened to be closed, he would bang on the door so loudly that one would suppose a prescription was needed for a dying man. Once the door opened a crack, Bob would insert a foot and then argue and wheedle so attractively that eventually the manager would relent and let the group troop in. Once his sister Mary Jane discovered that she needed dinner rolls before a party at her house in Rye. Gristede's was closed. “Don't worry, I'll open Gristede's for you,” he said cheerfully, and did. There was a song of the period called “Robert the Roué from Reading, P.A.,” and that became Bob's nickname. Later, it was shortened to “The Roo.” Some of his friends also called him “Fearless Freddie.”

Robert the Roué disliked work as much as he disliked school, though a succession of jobs was tried. Nothing stuck and, at one point, his mother took him to Children's Court—to scare him, more than anything else. Gaily he telephoned his girl friend before departing for court, “Don't worry—this is just a put-up job. I'll see you tonight.” Nonetheless, for a while a parole officer called at his house each morning to escort him to his place of employment. When his father tried cutting off his spending money, he promptly sued his father for nonsupport. While his parents spent the weekdays in their New York house, Bob and his raft of friends
took over the Southampton place, where they passed most of their time partying and running up bills at local shops and liquor stores. His sister remonstrated with him. “Look,” she said, “you're suing Daddy for nonsupport. But you've got him supporting you
and
all your friends.” For spending money, he took etchings off the walls of the Seventy-third Street house and sold them. How did he manage to get away with such behavior? Because of his great good looks and bursting charm.