Make It Nice

by Dorinda Medley

“I do understand,” Richard said. “I really do.” He had kids himself, so I believed him.

  Not long after TAO, Richard invited me to the Met Gala. The Met Gala. I nearly died. But in the same hour he invited me, he also shot himself in the foot. Within thirty minutes of me saying yes, several dresses arrived at my apartment. I called him up and pretended like I hadn’t even opened them.

  I didn’t want to give Richard the impression that I was a woman who needed to be dressed for an event—because I wasn’t that woman. I was familiar with how to appear at fabulous events. I’d been hanging out at Buckingham Palace! And so I said, “Richard, I am not six years old. Do you not trust me? Do you think I’ll wear jeans to the Met Gala?”

  Really, this was a test. If Richard was an asshole, he would have dumped me right then. But he wasn’t an asshole. “I thought it would be a nice gesture,” he said. “But I don’t care what you wear. I just want to spend the evening with you.”

  I ended up wearing my own Alexander McQueen gown—which was made by Alexander McQueen himself. It was so on point. All night, Richard kept checking the time to make sure I wouldn’t be late for Hannah’s babysitter. This was more evidence that he truly understood my life and wanted to be a part of it.

  The morning after the ball, I woke up to the most enormous bouquet of flowers. It was so big that it needed to be hauled up to my apartment on a luggage cart. Hannah, who was ten years old at the time, saw it and said, “Momma, I think this one really likes you.”

  “I think this one really likes me, too,” I said.

  Richard was giving and amenable. He asked me out a lot and didn’t mind when I said no. He made things convenient for me. He had two children—Paige, fourteen, and Aidan, eight—from his previous marriage. Paige went to school at Spence, which was across the street from Hannah’s school. If I wasn’t available in the evening, Richard would say, “Why don’t we meet before school to drop off the girls and just have a coffee?” Or, if I said no to a dinner, he’d invite me to breakfast. We spent many mornings at the Carlyle Hotel eating the most beautiful breakfasts together.

  After about three months of us dating, Richard met Hannah. We went to a restaurant for french fries and chicken fingers. They hit it off like a house on fire. Hannah was like a chameleon. How much she revealed was based on how comfortable she felt with the person. She was her biggest self almost instantly. I had literally warned Richard about her being shy, and she was pretty much giving a TED Talk to Richard on lemurs that very first night.

  Watching Hannah and Richard form a bond made my heart sing. They quickly became incredibly close, so much so that I sometimes felt like a third wheel. He and Hannah used to sit together and read for hours. Hannah was a questioner and Richard had all the patience that I didn’t have to help her find the answers. From the moment they met, there was an overwhelming sense that Richard and Hannah had known each other for decades. It didn’t take long for me to realize that Richard Medley was meant to be in my life. The way he loved my daughter made me love him even more. There was never a sense that it was Richard and me, with Hannah on the side. It was all of us, together.

  Ralph also loved Richard. They’d met many times, and Ralph’s wife was also now a part of the family, and a big part of Hannah’s life. Richard and Ralph had Hannah in common; they had shared interests. They bonded over the ancient Greeks. “Ralph, I hear you’re rethinking the philosophy of Aristotle,” Richard would say, and I would wonder how I had gotten here. What were these people talking about? I might not have known, exactly, but I appreciated that it was bringing them closer. On some level, I think what bonded Richard and Ralph most was their love of Hannah. There was never a sense of jealousy or competition. It was as though they both recognized that they each had important roles to play in her life, and that made all the difference.

  As time went on, Richard and I became inseparable. I started going to his house in the Hamptons even though I hate the Hamptons, and Richard started coming up to the Berkshires with me. He met my parents, who adored him. I showed him the house on the hill I’d always wanted to buy: Blue Stone Manor.

  And then one day he bought it for me.

  “I want you to have something that has nothing to do with me,” he said.

  Once it became clear that Richard and I would get married, Ralph and I officially divorced. On the day the divorce papers finally came through, Richard and I looked at each other and realized that there was no longer anything stopping us from tying the knot. And so we called a minister and got married in the living room.

  But it wasn’t until later that we were publicly married—in a huge celebration that spanned an entire weekend. It was fantastic. First, we got married at the Brick Church. Richard was actually a deacon there. It was a Presbyterian church, which was a lot more relaxed than the Catholic churches I was used to. When I went for the first time I thought, Where’s all the ceremony? I love rituals. I love the dance of Catholicism. You stand; you sit; you kneel; you do it all over again. It’s kind of like the Hokey Pokey. Presbyterians don’t do this. They stay seated for communion and dress like they’re at the country club. Over time, I came to appreciate Richard’s church, and more, I loved who he was at church. He became his most Ohioan self, shaking hands and greeting people like he lived in a small town.

  It was a beautiful, traditional wedding. I wore an elegant custom-made gown in champagne silk. We held the reception and dinner at The Grill in the iconic Seagram Building in New York City, and transformed it into a water-inspired wonderland. The 1920s architecture of the restaurant is stunning, as are the details of the main room. At the center is the fountain area, and all around the room the windows are covered by blinds made of superlight transparent beads that look like water when they move. I hired the supertalented Bronson van Wyck as my wedding planner, and together we took this water theme and ran with it. I should tell you that Richard loved the water, so much so that he kept his Hinckley yacht in New York from April to November. It had a sleeping cabin, so we’d sometimes take weekend trips together to the Hamptons, or we’d just cruise around the Statue of Liberty. I never felt more in love with Richard than I did when we were sharing a glass of wine on the back of the boat. It was as if when we were on the boat nothing else mattered.

  In the spirit of our water-inspired theme, we turned the entire restaurant into an enormous aquarium by installing projectors to give the impression that fish were swimming around the room. Instead of flowers, we had fish in glass balls filled with water and suspended from the ceiling over the dining tables, and we covered the tables with huge Victorian-style vases—all of which were filled with fish. We built a stage behind a series of curtains that opened up at different times, and behind them we installed an opera singer, a Frank Sinatra impersonator, and an aerialist, who all gave performances throughout the dinner service. It was whimsical, lighthearted, and fun.

  Richard stood up during the dinner and gave a beautiful and moving speech that ended with him saying, “You are my due north, always there to guide me. No matter how stormy it gets, I look to my due north.”

  There was never a day that I wasn’t proud to be Mrs. Medley. Richard wore many hats and had lived what seemed like a hundred lives. He’d grown up outside Columbus, Ohio. His father was a train conductor and his mother a stay-at-home mom. He had worked his way up the old-fashioned way, slow and steady. After joining the Air Force, he went to Ohio State on the GI Bill. He went to Yale for graduate school, where he earned a PhD in philosophy, and after working as a Democratic speech writer and as a consultant for George Soros, Richard started his own company, Medley Global Advisors. Basically, what he did all day was geopolitical analysis. The goal was to analyze information, then write up a report, which he would then sell to hedge funds and banks, who used it to inform their trades in the stock market. At the time, I didn’t realize how unique this was. There hasn’t really been anyone else who has done what Richard did.

  When he first took me to his office for Medley Global A
dvisors, I thought it was like a playhouse. There were arcade games and Ping-Pong tables, and offices were spread out across an open floor plan. There was a chef who would come cook lunch for the team and a massage therapist for the employees to use to reduce stress. If someone needed to bring their child to work, Medley Global Advisors would call a babysitter to come take care of the child at the office. This was way before Google or Facebook, and to me (and most others) it was a wild concept.

  Richard understood the importance of community and collaboration and valued that above all else. He was never someone who breathed down his employees’ backs or sent cold emails. As a boss, he believed that the key to success was creating an environment where people felt valued and comfortable. He turned the office into a place where you wanted to go. And meanwhile, he was in the business of making predictions that would fundamentally shape how some of the world’s biggest financial powerhouses acted. He made it look easy. For all the pressure, you never saw a crack.

  My life with Richard was incredibly dynamic. We traveled a lot and spent a good amount of time in Washington, DC, where Richard seemed to know people from all walks of life. The draw of this wasn’t power or nice things, necessarily. It was seeing Richard interact with people with whom he felt a mutual trust and regard. Richard was a person who could command the attention of people who commanded the attention of others, and he did it without puffing his chest out or making a spectacle. Great people like Henry Kissinger would pull Richard aside at cocktail parties to pick his brain. The best thing about Richard, though, was that he had no airs. He treated Henry Kissinger in the same way he treated the valet guy. Richard truly valued every person equally. He used to say, “Everyone has a lesson to teach you.”

  As important as he was, Richard always made me feel like I was the important and indispensable element in our equation. Standing next to him, I was never arm candy or “the wife.” We were partners in life and love. It was an honor to be his wife.

  My attraction to Richard was one I’d never experienced before. It was physical, spiritual, and mental: the whole package. From the very start, we understood each other. It felt comfortable and familiar. It was as if I’d known him for a long time. It was an intense connection, a fire that burned hard and fast.

  Richard had a relentless belief in the power of possibility and it had everything to do with his success. The entire world could be falling apart and Richard would be sitting in his chair with his laptop, writing a report contemplating the possibilities that the moment presented. He was like a trunk of a tree, the part that keeps the tree in place when it’s whipped around by the worst of storms, and this was great for me, because I worry about everything.

  At some point, a few years into my relationship with Richard, I was asked to be a Housewife. I knew some of the women on the show. We traveled in the same circles. Richard wanted me to do it, but I said no. I wanted to devote myself to being his wife and Hannah’s mother. I didn’t want to devote myself to being on television or, quite frankly, to anything other than my new life with Richard and our now-blended families. It simply didn’t fit into my life at that point.

  For the next few years, life moved fast. We lived mostly in New York and went to the Berkshires as often as possible. We decided to purchase a place in the Bahamas. I was busy running our lives and redoing both of our homes, and Richard was busy with work. We had all sorts of people over to the house for parties and dinners and other events that I would plan. This was when everything I’d learned in London really came in handy. I am great at planning a party, and Richard knew that. He would defer to me. He trusted me to take care of this realm of our lives.

  Our dinner guests included prime ministers, political figures, special agents from the CIA, actors, singers, speakers. Hillary Clinton came to dinner, as did Desmond Tutu, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, and Norah Jones. Richard was friends with the Kennedys. Richard knew all these people I was in awe of—people who made even me nervous—and he made it look so casual. No matter who you were or what you had, you always got the same Richard. When he spoke to you, he really spoke with you. And in those moments, however long or short, you became the center of his universe.

  Honestly, it made me jealous sometimes. I was used to being the life of the party, and now that was my husband. And yet, when Richard was away on business or out of the house for too long, I really missed him. I wanted to be around him all the time. He was fun, and he was my partner and husband and I loved spending time with him.

  In a lot of ways, he was all the things I wanted to be. He was freethinking and fun-loving, and he found the good in everything and everyone. He could see light in the darkest of rooms, and create an expanse in the smallest of places. Just by being his wife, my life became brighter, and my world became bigger.

  But, I repeat, Richard was more fun than I was. Sometimes too fun. That meant I had to be stricter to compensate for his lack of discipline. With the kids, he was always the good guy, and I became the villain. I accepted the role because I thought it was best for my family, but I certainly had less fun than he did.

  The kids loved Richard because he was like a kid himself. He’d be advising Ben Bernanke in the morning, and in the afternoon he’d be coordinating Ping-Pong competitions and playing paintball with his kids. He would dance and dress up in costumes. One day, he dressed up in a bear costume and knocked on the door while I was in the kitchen cooking. I opened the door and there he was, my important husband, dressed like an animal for no reason.

  Richard somehow became a VIP everywhere he went, including Kmart. He used to take the kids there like it was Bergdorf Goodman. They called it The Great Kmart Adventure. The employees knew him. The manager would come out and say, “Hello, Mr. Medley, how many carts will you be needing today?”

  Can you guess what my response was to this?

  “Stop spending so much money at Kmart!”

  So, Richard was fun and I was a police officer. Richard was Disney and I was the IRS. He was always on the hunt for the next adventure, and some of our adventures were lavish. He would book the craziest trips. He booked a boat for a week to take us around the Bahamas. He took my parents, Hannah, and me on a trip through Europe. We spent New Year’s in the Maldives in pavilions on stilts hovering over the water. We flew in private planes. I needed only to look at something in the window of a store and he would buy it for me a day later.

  I wanted to make sure Hannah maintained some sense of reality, but Richard made it hard. He didn’t make any of these lavish choices for himself, though. The joy of his success was rooted in his ability to share it with others. I think that’s the part of it that kept Hannah somewhat normal. There was always a sense of giving and gratitude that came with everything we did, and there was, too, Richard himself, who didn’t put a lot of stock in nice things. He was a man who was thoroughly content eating macaroni from a box or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with no crusts, his favorite. The constant acknowledgment of how special our experiences were brought awareness to the fact that it wasn’t normal. And if I ever sensed any entitlement in Hannah, I vigilantly nipped it in the bud.

  Hannah had a mixture of basic and extravagant clothes growing up. I never did the in-between. Either we were going to H&M or she was getting something special to treasure for as long as it fit. (In fact, she still wears some things from her teenage years to this day.) Normally, Hannah appreciated her things and treated them well. Once, however, while on holiday in Aspen, Hannah, while trying frantically to get dressed, shoved every article of clothing under her bed in a massive wrinkled pile. What she didn’t realize was that she hadn’t properly tucked it away. As I was walking by her room, I noticed a piece of clothing peering out from under the bed skirt. When I found all the beautiful clothes that I’d bought her tossed under the bed, I took most of them to the Goodwill. When she came home, I acted as though nothing had happened. Then, about five minutes after she went up to her room, she came bounding down the steps in a panic.

  “What
happened to my clothes, Mom? All my clothes are gone!”

  “Well, did you put them away nicely?”

  Her face went red.

  “You obviously don’t value what you have, and seem to think that it is disposable and not worth taking care of, so I gave them away to someone who would appreciate them.”

  Hannah lost her mind and begged to earn the clothes back. There was no earning them back, though. I told her she had everything she needed: her school uniform, several outfits for special occasions, a couple pairs of jeans, T-shirts, sweatshirts, a few nice sweaters, a few nice pairs of shoes, boots, and a pair of sneakers. For months after that, Hannah wore white T-shirts and jeans on repeat, and she put them away very neatly in her closet when she wasn’t wearing them.

  While I tried to keep Hannah down-to-earth, I went wild renovating Blue Stone Manor—possibly a little wilder than I should have. I hired my dear friend the interior decorator Marshall Watson to help me bring the house back to its glory. Marshall knew me and understood my vision for the house, and over the next three years we painstakingly reviewed every inch and every detail together. Phil Timpane was the lead contractor on the project, and because he is an artist himself he was a huge asset in bringing our visions to life. What could be restored was restored and what could be replicated by an artisan was replicated. We went through hundreds of drawings, pictures, paint colors, and fabrics. Marshall Watson and I spent many nights walking through the grounds with a bottle of wine, discussing ideas.

  Blue Stone Manor sits on eighteen acres. When we bought the house, there was zero landscaping. It was just an open plot of land. Lucky for me, Marshall is not only a fantastic interior decorator. He’s also an expert landscaper.

  As you approach the hedge-lined entrance and enter the gates of Blue Stone Manor (which I designed) the first thing you see is a huge cornfield. This sort of protects the house and adds to the country manor feel. The landscape includes beautiful hedges that surround the house, amazing hyacinths and lilac bushes, a hedged pathway that leads to the cornfields, and a small maze—which we felt would add not only a sense of whimsy but also a sense of being, perhaps, in Europe rather than in Great Barrington.