by Nyna Giles
Then, whenever The Red Shoes played on television, we made sure to watch. It was one of my mother’s favorite movies. In the film, Moira Shearer plays Vicky, a prima ballerina who has the starring role in a ballet based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Red Shoes.” Early in the story, Vicky falls in love with a young composer, but finds herself torn between her love for him and her devotion to the ballet impresario Lermontov. Forced to choose between her lover and her dancing—and knowing she can’t have both—Vicky eventually breaks down. Before a performance in Monte Carlo, she dances out into the streets, spinning uncontrollably, unable to stop, as if bewitched by her shoes like the girl in the fairy tale, until she jumps or maybe falls in front of a passing train.
The film ends with Vicky lying close to death on a stretcher. Her legs are broken and bloody—she will never dance again. She asks her lover to remove the red shoes.
This was life’s tragedy, the film seemed to say: that art and love were incompatible, for a woman at least. I remember the tears in my mother’s eyes as she watched.
At the time, I thought my mother loved The Red Shoes for the same reasons I did—the gorgeous colors of the costumes and Vicky’s red hair, the dance sequences that looked like vanishing dreams. But in hindsight, I’ve come to believe there was another reason she felt such a strong attachment to Vicky’s story and to the ballet in general. I think she understood the stories viscerally. Out on Long Island, she, too, was held captive by her life’s circumstances, caught in a spell cast long ago, without any way to break it.
CHAPTER 9
Carolyn
Like so much of my parents’ marriage, their wedding day remains something of a mystery to me. When I was a child, no one ever talked about the ceremony or reception. The anniversary was never celebrated. While I could go to my mother’s closet and find the bridesmaid’s dress from Grace’s wedding in Monaco, I never saw her own wedding outfit—she had given it away to her cousin. Many years later, when I started to look into my mother’s story, I had to hire a researcher in Florida to go to the city clerk’s office to track down their marriage certificate in order to even know the date of the wedding: Monday, March 14, 1949.
My parents were married at the First Presbyterian Church in Miami Beach. A local newspaper report explains that Malcolm’s cousin and his wife served as witnesses; they lived nearby. After the short ceremony, the couple went to the North Shore Hotel for the reception.
Most women chose to have a maid of honor or a bridesmaid or two to stand alongside them on such a day. But Grace was busy in New York appearing in her graduation play, The Philadelphia Story, so Carolyn was completely alone, stepping into her new life without a friend by her side.
Only one photograph from the wedding survives. In it, Carolyn and Malcolm are carefully making the first cut in a small, three-layered wedding cake. Malcolm’s hand is resting on Carolyn’s as she holds the knife. With a model’s professionalism, my mother has wrapped her other hand gently around his arm, so that her new wedding band can be seen. She’s wearing a pale tailored suit, with a jacket that buttons up to the neck, and a straight skirt that falls to midcalf. Malcolm wears a gray business suit, with a tie and boutonniere. Carolyn looks calm and tender; Malcolm is the only one smiling. When the celebrations were over—and the wedding night survived—the couple took a honeymoon trip, first stopping in Palm Beach and then at Sea Island, just off the coast of Georgia. After a week, they drove back to New York to start their life together. Carolyn had already packed up her belongings at the Barbizon so she could go directly to her new home—Malcolm’s apartment on the East Side in Tudor City.
Grace was also packing her bags and leaving the Barbizon, but for a very different reason.
Earlier in the year, she had started seeing someone new: Don Richardson, her acting professor in her final year at the Academy. Like Malcolm, Don was an older man, recently divorced. Don lived in a small and sparsely furnished apartment in an old unheated brownstone on Thirty-third Street. With Don, Grace saw a very different side of New York from the one she had experienced with Alex. Don was a professional actor and theater director. He didn’t care about nightclubs or money; he was an artist, living for his craft, a bohemian. When Grace went to visit him on Thirty-Third, she would have to help him collect firewood from old packing cases left in the street by the local rug dealers, so that Don could light a fire to keep her warm.
Initially, she kept her relationship with Don secret, not only from others at the Academy—they likely would have been shocked that she was dating a member of the faculty—but also from her parents.While Carolyn was away, though, Grace decided to take Don home to meet her family. Grace knew that her parents would most likely disapprove of her new boyfriend but was hopeful that Don could still win them over. If they just gave him a chance, she reasoned, they might discover they loved him just as much as she did.
For Grace’s Catholic family, however, Don was instantly unsuitable. There were three strikes against him in their eyes: he was older, divorced, and Jewish. The visit did not go well. By the time the weekend was over, Jack Kelly had told Grace to end the relationship and move back to Philadelphia. “I cried so much,” Grace wrote in a letter to a friend after the weekend was over. “Hell just can’t be much worse than what I went through.” Grace was permitted to return to Manhattan for the day, to clear out her room at the Barbizon and bring home her belongings, but essentially she was forbidden to return to New York for the foreseeable future. For better or worse, Grace’s family had intervened in a relationship with a man they found unacceptable.
Carolyn had no such protection.
* * *
NOW THAT SHE was married, Carolyn set aside her own interests and happily focused on those of her husband. Back then, Carolyn was at the height of her success—making far more money as a model than Malcolm was in his advertising job—and the couple could afford to live well. Malcolm wasn’t interested in the ballet, so Carolyn no longer went to City Center each week to see Balanchine’s dancers. Her new husband preferred to eat at expensive restaurants and go to fashionable nightclubs, so Carolyn stopped going to the Automat for her lunches. Malcolm loved tennis, so she tried to take up the game, but she couldn’t keep up with him. On Friday evenings, the new Mrs. Reybold climbed into the cream-colored Buick Roadmaster convertible that Malcolm had bought her as a wedding gift. Malcolm drove, and she snuggled next to him on the bench seat, wearing sunglasses with a silk scarf wrapped around her hair. The car was just as elegant and modern as the good-looking couple behind the wheel. Malcolm had married his ideal girl—gorgeous, lively, successful, social.
They were headed for Long Island and Sherman Fairchild’s castle, Eastfair, on the edge of the Long Island Sound. At Eastfair, days were long and romantic, spent sunbathing by the pool (for Carolyn) or playing tennis on the clay courts (for Malcolm). There were cocktails and intimate dinner parties in the evenings, everyone gathering in the living room with its two grand pianos, a wide fireplace, and high ceilings. Fellow guests included actors and actresses, fashion models who had come to Eastfair to work on their portfolios at Sherman’s photography studio, and jazz musicians who recorded in the castle’s recording studio by day and entertained the guests by night. Photographs from that summer show Carolyn and Malcolm very much in love, Carolyn smiling over at her new husband on a friend’s boat, or Malcolm wrapping her in his arms in a movie-star clinch.
For Grace—still grounded in Philadelphia—Carolyn had achieved a kind of ultimate freedom. As a wife, Carolyn could go anywhere she pleased. Meanwhile, Grace’s parents remained determined to prevent a reunion between their daughter and Don Richardson: after the disaster of the Barbizon, Jack and Margaret Kelly weren’t taking any risks. When Grace won a part in summer stock in New Hope, thirty-five miles away, Mr. and Mrs. Kelly made her drive there and back each day rather than find lodging of her own nearby. It was while performing in New Hope, however, that Grace heard she’d been cast in a new production of Str
indberg’s The Father. The play was opening in Boston before transferring to Broadway in November. Grace’s parents could hardly expect her to drive back and forth to Boston and New York each day during the run of the show. Finally, Grace wore the Kellys down. They were forced to let her go.
On opening night on Broadway in November, both Carolyn and Malcolm were in the audience. “When Grace first walked out onstage, she looked so fresh and pretty and breathtaking,” Carolyn later remembered. “I think that’s when I first realized she was going to be someone.” Grace played Bertha, a young woman whose parents are unable to agree on her future. The mother wants Bertha to stay at home and become an artist; the father wants her to move into town so she can study to be a teacher. As fighting between the parents escalates, Bertha becomes increasingly bewildered and heartbroken. In the role of a daughter with excessively controlling parents, Grace could draw on her own experience.
Although Grace received good reviews in the press, the play failed to capture the imagination of theatergoers. It closed in early February 1950, after only sixty-nine performances. For the first time since she had graduated from the Academy, Grace was out of work. She was single, living with her parents, and not at all happy about it. Malcolm and Carolyn decided to do something to lift Grace’s spirits. They invited her on a weekend road trip to Canada in the new Buick. Malcolm’s plan was to return the favor and play matchmaker for Grace. He invited his friend Jack Duff along for the ride. Jack had a reputation as one of New York’s most eligible bachelors; he was also a member of the exclusive Seigniory Club, in Quebec, where the four friends were planning to stay on their weekend away.
The group arrived at the Seigniory in time for dinner. In the morning, they woke to views across the Ottawa River and mountains frosted with snow as bright as wedding cakes. That weekend they skated on the frozen lake and hiked in snowshoes into the hills. Grace and Carolyn also ventured out together for an afternoon drive, leaving the men behind, so they could have time together to talk. Grace informed Carolyn that she had no interest in Jack, and Carolyn understood.
That same afternoon, Carolyn realized that she had forgotten to affix the new car registration to the window, so she asked Grace to look for it in the glove compartment. Grace handed the registration to Carolyn, who noticed that Malcolm’s license was pinned to the back. This was how Carolyn discovered that her new husband had lied to her about his age. He had told her he was thirty-two. In fact, Malcolm Durbec Reybold had been born on February 25, 1910. It wasn’t difficult for Carolyn to do the math. Her own mother had been born that year. That meant he was nearly forty, the same age as her mother.
Grace and Carolyn drove back to the lodge, where Grace urged Carolyn to confront her husband. They found Malcolm at the bar and asked him to explain the license and the birth date. Malcolm didn’t flinch as Carolyn explained how hurt and betrayed she felt. Instead, he laughed loudly, slapping her on the back and claiming it had all been a great joke. For the rest of the weekend, he made a point of bringing up the license often, laughing again at Carolyn’s foolishness in taking him seriously.
After they left Canada, Carolyn tried to put the subject of Malcolm’s age aside. Perhaps her new husband was right. Maybe it was just a joke, nothing important in the greater scheme of things. Besides, she was too busy—and too happy—to dwell on it much. Work was going so well. For the next year, she appeared each month in Mademoiselle’s “Scoops of the Month” feature, as “Joan,” the magazine’s quintessential reader. In the coming months, she traveled to Washington, D.C., to Princeton, and to Puerto Rico for her new job. For the magazine’s Christmas issue of 1950, she stood in a window at Lord & Taylor’s department store posed beside a mannequin. By now, she was completely at ease in front of the camera, radiating a kind of effortless joy. The editors at the magazine took note: marriage agreed with Carolyn.
Grace had still not been cast in another Broadway show, but she was faring better going up for parts in plays being staged for the new medium of television. It turned out that Grace had the kind of subtlety and looks that played well on camera. In 1950, she appeared in eleven televised plays, shuttling back and forth from Philadelphia to New York for rehearsals and shoots. Meanwhile, a producer at 20th Century Fox had seen Grace in The Father and invited her to audition for a tiny role in the movie Fourteen Hours. She won the part and accepted, but all the travel between New York and Philadelphia was wearing on her nerves. Reluctantly, her parents finally agreed she could rent an apartment of her own in the city. In October of 1950, Grace moved into the Manhattan House, a sleek new building on East Sixty-sixth Street that her father had helped to construct, providing the gleaming white bricks for the exterior. Mr. and Mrs. Kelly demanded that Grace find a roommate, so she asked a friend from the Academy, Sally Parrish, to move in with her.
Although it wasn’t easy to gain entry to the Manhattan House—references were required, and family background was taken into account—Grace informed the management company that when the final apartments became available in the New Year, she would like to put in a good word for her friends the Reybolds.
Malcolm and Carolyn were going to need an extra bedroom: Carolyn was pregnant. Grace had been among the first to know. The baby was due in June 1951. Malcolm was the proud husband; Carolyn was glowing. She had always loved children and had a special affection for them. Growing up, her half brother and sister were so much younger that she babysat them often, wiping their little faces and tending to their scrapes and bruises with a mother’s care. Pregnancy felt like a fulfillment of purpose, the tiny fluttering of the baby inside her a prediction of future joy. Since the wedding, they had been living in Malcolm’s bachelor apartment overlooking the construction site of the new United Nations building. It wasn’t nearly big enough for a family, and Carolyn was grateful that Grace stepped in to help them find the apartment at the Manhattan House.
In the new year, Carolyn and Malcolm moved into their new home on the eighteenth floor, with Grace downstairs on the ninth. The Reybolds’ apartment had views looking out across the city from wide, long windows. Malcolm picked out the furnishings, all of them custom made and in the latest modern style. The walls of the living room were painted a daring azure blue, offset by an accent wall covered in plaid wallpaper and a plush beige carpet. The couch was striped in blue, pink, and orange sateen. There was a tall rust-colored easy chair for Malcolm, sleek mahogany wood furniture, and rows of shelves to house his collection of books. The master bathroom was tiled in white, with deep red walls and towels monogrammed R in a matching red. Their neighbors at the Manhattan House were a young and accomplished crowd: architects, advertising and television executives, journalists, musicians, and actors. Manhattan House was being written about in the newspapers and nominated for architecture awards, considered ahead of its time. Malcolm—who coveted all that was modern and fashionable—took enormous pride in their new living arrangements.
In the mornings, Carolyn kissed her husband good-bye, and he strode out of the building and along Sixty-sixth Street, walking to his offices at J. Walter Thompson on Madison Avenue; his suits, ties, and shirts kept beautifully pressed by the couple’s new housekeeper, under Carolyn’s clever supervision. Now that she had begun to show, she began to phase out her modeling jobs. That June, she appeared in Seventeen, modeling matching scarlet lipstick and nails, shown only from the shoulders up. Soon after that, Eileen took her off the books at the agency, at least until she got her waist back.
In her current state, going out to parties and restaurants simply wasn’t done. There were no more weekends at Sherman’s, no evenings at the Stork Club or the Colony. When Malcolm went out, he went alone or with his work colleagues and clients. Like all women of a certain class and income, Carolyn knew a proper pregnancy should be a discreet affair, kept between a husband and wife and close family and friends, not something in which the outside world should share. Usually so stylish, Carolyn bought herself comfortable wrap dresses, smocks, and shirtwaists to wear at
home. In her confinement, she began decorating the baby’s nursery, picking out the crib, the curtains, the rugs, and the dresser with elaborate care. Often alone in the evenings now, she stood in the living room of the Manhattan House, looking across the glittering towers of the city, in her nest in the sky.
Grace’s new apartment was downstairs, number 9A. It had parquet floors, its own terrace, and a wood-burning fireplace, with long windows overlooking the private landscaped courtyard in the center of the complex. Everything about the apartment was modern and new, but as if to counteract its glamour, Grace’s mother had furnished it on Grace’s behalf, and the resulting decor was awash in shades of brown, filled with bland and practical family furniture shipped from Philadelphia. It didn’t matter to Grace. She was back in New York. It was as if her Barbizon days had been restored, this time without the curfew.
Grace’s apartment became the hub of their social lives. In the middle of the living room sat a large round black Formica table, which doubled for dinner and drinks: you could swivel it up for food and then down again for coffee or cocktails. Grace cooked for her friends, serving up hearty meat-and-potato dishes, with home-baked lemon pie for dessert. Carolyn often joined these gatherings, either alone or with Malcolm. She was grateful that despite her swelling figure, she could still see friends at Grace’s. After dinner, there were jokes and confidences, charades, and their favorite activity, fortune-telling.
It was Malcolm who had introduced the group to astrology, and the Manhattan House friends quickly adopted horoscopes as a kind of faith. Malcolm had given them a book, The Pursuit of Destiny, written by an occultist by the name of Muriel Bruce Hasbrouck. Like other astrologers, Hasbrouck believed that the movement of the planets and human fate were intimately connected, but hers was a new approach. Instead of assigning twelve astrological signs by birth date as other astrologers did, she divided the year into ten-day cycles, each of them represented by a card in the tarot pack. To read your fortune, you found the ten-day cycle that included your birthday, then read the description that followed.
