3
VANESSA’S MOTHER, EVELYN COLE, HAD LONG FEARED THAT her daughter was insane, but Dr. Cole would not hear of it. For years they had fought over whether to have Vanessa committed: Mrs. Cole arguing that it would save not only their daughter’s life but their marriage as well; Dr. Cole insisting that Vanessa’s periodic threats and occasional attempts to kill herself and her wildly reckless behavior — the flagrant sexual involvements with married men, the arrests for public lewdness, the spending binges on clothes and jewelry and the shoplifting that often accompanied them, the drug and alcohol abuse, even the two sudden elopements and the divorces that quickly followed — were high drama designed mainly to gain attention.
“Attention from whom?” Evelyn would angrily demand.
“From us,” he would say. And sigh, “Mainly from me, I suppose,” confessing once again that he had failed Vanessa when she was a child, that he had been consumed in those years by his work and consequently had neglected his daughter. “Though she’s brilliant and talented, a trained musician and actress, and a gifted writer, too, if she wanted to apply herself to it, mentally she’s still a child,” he explained to practically anyone who would listen, but especially, when they were alone, to his wife, who seemed determined to blame Vanessa’s behavior on Vanessa herself.
As if invoking a higher authority, he would say to her, “People who are deprived of certain emotional necessities in childhood often remain stuck there.” And then confessing yet again, as if it gave him hope, “When she was very young, I was mostly absent, physically and emotionally. Even you know that. Then, during the war, when she was only eleven and twelve, I was off in France and left her in your care. And you, my dear, were often ill yourself. You were drinking heavily then, as you’ll recall. No, the servants raised our daughter. We were both off in our separate worlds. And you know it, and I know it. Nannies and housekeepers and babysitters raised Vanessa. First servants and then boarding school headmistresses and then college deans. And now there’s no one left to raise her but us. And because she’s an adult, it’s too late. The difference between you and me is that you won’t admit it. We reap what we sow, Evelyn.”
But he insisted that he did not blame his wife; he blamed himself. Dr. Cole was not one to shrug off responsibility. Evelyn, as he liked to say, had her own problems, of which alcohol was only one. As a young woman in her twenties and thirties, Evelyn Cole had suffered from what was called nervous exhaustion and was subject to fainting spells and long periods of lassitude and depression, hypochondria and extreme mood swings, which her husband, the doctor, treated with small doses of paregoric and other drugs, and she treated with gin. It wasn’t until four years ago when she was approaching fifty and on an extended European family vacation and could not stop weeping and could not leave her Zurich hotel room that she put herself in the care of Dr. Gunther Theobold, the famous Swiss psychoanalyst, who took her off all forms of medication, including alcohol. It was he who finally convinced Dr. Cole that Mrs. Cole was correct. For their sake and hers, he told them, their daughter should be institutionalized. “Not confined like a prisoner, but psychoanalyzed. She will of course be required to reside at the institute for at least a year,” he explained.
Dr. Cole warned Dr. Theobold that Vanessa’s accounts of her childhood would doubtless sound bizarre and were likely to be wholly invented, but the psychoanalyst smiled and said that he had been told all kinds of fairy tales and listened not for the facts but for the truth. “When the patient learns the truth, the emotional truth, she will be freed of her delusions and will cease the behavior that has been based on those delusions.” They followed his advice and committed her then and there to the Theobold Institute, where Vanessa was indeed confined, kept behind high brick walls until, after meeting with her daily for thirteen months, Dr. Theobold pronounced her cured, no longer a danger to herself or others, and sent her home to New York, bearing what she said were the manuscripts of a surrealist novel and a Shakespearean sonnet sequence that she had written at the institute.
But she was not cured. Dr. Theobold confided to his assistant, Dr. Reichold, that the girl was probably incurable, at least by conventional means. He would not be surprised if before long she was back. Within weeks of taking up residence in her parents’ apartment, she was arrested at the Carlyle Hotel for refusing to leave the hallway outside the penthouse suite where her ex-husband, Count Von Heidenstamm, lived when in New York. The count, who had recently remarried, was in Monte Carlo on his honeymoon. Though there was no reason to think the newlyweds would return for months and the nickel-plated revolver found in her purse suggested otherwise, Vanessa insisted to the police that she only wanted to be there to congratulate the couple when they returned to New York.
Days later, she wrecked her father’s Packard in Westport, Connecticut, driving home drunk at 3:00 A.M. from a party, given by the members of a secret society at Yale, where she had been the only female guest. She was arrested and spent the rest of the night in jail. The following morning Dr. Cole rushed by train to Westport. He posted bail for his daughter, purchased a replacement Packard, and drove her back to New York, relieved to learn that the party had been given by Wolf’s Head, not Skull and Bones.
She told her friends and her parents and their friends and a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune that she had been asked by the American Olympic Committee to solo all forty-four national anthems in their native tongues at the upcoming winter Olympic Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, after which she would be doing a series of programs for the BBC on the “New American Opera.” Later, she attributed her absence at the winter games to the Nazi party’s insistence on having a German operatic soprano sing the national anthems. The BBC series, she claimed, was canceled when it was learned that Vanessa had once been a friend of Wallis Simpson, the American divorcée whose attachment to the new king Edward VIII was scandalizing all Britain. “Attractive American women need not apply,” she explained.
At the Stork Club one night she told Walter Winchell that she was sleeping with Ernest Hemingway and had been invited to join him on safari in Kenya, and Winchell reported it in his column the following day, although he did not reveal her name or Hemingway’s, merely referring to her as a “Gorgeous Gotham Gadabout” and the author as a “Titan of the Typewriter.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, there’s nothing to it,” Vanessa said when her parents challenged her on these and other outlandish stories. “It’s only a goddamn joke. I’m tweaking their noses, that’s all. Giving bored people something interesting to talk about.”
But her dangerous, erratic behavior and wild exaggerations and outright lies kept Dr. and Mrs. Cole in a state of constant anxiety and dread — which did not altogether displease Vanessa. She enjoyed keeping them in that state. Consequently, when after a few months her parents began to ignore her reckless and threatening ways, as if they’d grown accustomed to them, she would suddenly turn into the good daughter again — a calm, lucid, sociable, and controlled young woman of the world. Soon the three Coles, father, mother, and daughter, were seen going out to dinner together again, spending weekends at the house in Tuxedo Park, entertaining friends and colleagues and distinguished New Yorkers from the worlds of art, medicine, and commerce at their apartment, and in early July heading north to the Adirondack wilderness for the annual Independence Day gathering of ’08 Bonesmen and their families at Rangeview, the Cole camp on the Second Tamarack Lake.