The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

by Flora Miller Biddle

  She greeted us with the same smile, the same love, the same interest in all our doings. In other words, with the same spirit. When a doctor told her she had an aneurism that, at any time, might burst, she asked every possible question about the effects, whether it would hurt, and how long she would last before she died. I’d thought her reluctant, in her life, to face many unpleasant realities, but now she showed a radiant courage. Facing the ultimate reality, she was as down-to-earth as she was about her grandchildren’s or her nurses’ romantic entanglements.

  I was profoundly moved by my mother’s strength, and by her beauty, both physical and spiritual. But I hated seeing her so old and weak. Her children and grandchildren drew close, saving stories to entertain her. I told her about things at the Museum, I read aloud to her, talked of family and old friends. She always pretended interest, but I could see she was really somewhere else, much of the time. And her efforts to walk or go out for a car ride were becoming more and more uncomfortable.

  Mum enjoyed a piece by Robert Becker in the April Art and Antiques, entitled “All in the Family,” illustrated by a photograph of her, Fiona, and myself at the Whitney, in 1986. Fiona is wearing a blouse her great-grandmother Gertrude had brought from China in 1896, on her honeymoon, and the article is subtitled “Four Generations of Whitney Women Grow Up with a Museum.” Now we were four: four women, four generations; probably unique in major American institutions.

  Becker quotes me: “Americans don’t have the kind of respect for their own culture, for themselves in a way, that they have for European culture. Most don’t see what is right under their noses, which is probably the highest level of creative achievement in our times. My role, like my mother’s, has been to support the Museum through fund-raising, helping to bring together two elements of our culture — society and art. My daughter, like my grandmother, is concerned more with the art itself.”

  And here is Fiona: “I rebelled against a career in the arts for quite some time. All I ever heard about at dinner when I was growing up was talk of boards and trustees and meetings. Eventually I realized there is more to museums. I chose the other side, so to speak. Of course, it does make me happy that I can do some of the things my great-grandmother loved. … My grandmother Flora still believes that someone from the family should be involved. She always speaks to me about the Whitney with the hope that I will work there. I think she still thinks of the Museum as a family institution.”

  I see these generations weaving in and out of each other. I look at a daughter and see my grandmother; one granddaughter becomes my mother, another seems like myself in some long ago past. The wheel of life turns, and I’m blessed to have experienced so much love. Nothing else matters as much.

  Becker writes of the Vanderbilts and Whitneys as they once were: powerful, patriarchal families. Odd, almost the only thing left of all the power and wealth is the museum Gertrude created. What does that say? Powerful men today, no doubt, recognize what it says. If they want to be remembered, aim at the long-term. Buy a museum.

  ***

  By the time Mum came to see Michael Graves’s new design for the Museum, in June, she looked tiny and ate very little — just a few bites of even her favorite puddings or ice cream. It was pitiful to see our mother, our once vibrant, enthusiastic, wonderful mother, diminished and dependent. Sad, worried, my siblings and I took turns visiting her, hoping she’d improve, planning for her eighty-ninth birthday, on July 29, at the Studio, now Pam’s home. Exceptionally devoted, Pam arranged every possible comfort for Mum, making sure she had food she liked, visiting many times a day, organizing nurses and doctors.

  We knew she was very ill.

  I was absent from the July trustees meeting because Mum had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance the day before, with one of a series of severe nosebleeds. Doctors didn’t seem to know the reason. They put her in intensive care, where she was cold and lonely, and didn’t understand why she was there at all. We were angry at the insensitivity of both nurses and doctors, but once Mum was in the hospital, it seemed impossible to regain control of her care. We took turns visiting her, five minutes every hour, but could do little but hold her hand and assure her we loved her, and that she’d be out soon. With tubes in her nose and mouth, she could hardly speak. We felt helpless. Miserable.

  Pam had Mum’s own nurses ready to be there, once she was out of intensive care, and, in a couple of days, she was established in a regular room. She seemed better, so, after stopping at the hospital for a visit on July 17, Sydney and I drove on to our rented house in Wainscott for the night. I’d been reassured by seeing Mum watching her beloved Mets on television, although she drifted in and out of sleep.

  We had told the doctor Mum did not want extreme measures of resuscitation, and he had assured us he’d given that order. And yet, when she became desperately ill later that night, doctors and nurses did all they could do to restart her heart. Her life.

  Pam called in the early hours of morning and told me Mum was dead.

  Dawn, its intense pinks and oranges blurred by mist rising from the ocean and from my own eyes, seemed irrelevant, its beauty almost offensive. I drove toward my sister’s house through the tender green of potato fields whose burgeoning life seemed to reproach death. Strange, what images remain of significant moments — that dawn remains as vivid today as it was then, the lonely road, the racing car, my racing thoughts. I wanted only to think of Mum, but other thoughts intruded: who to call? a funeral? an obituary? who to write it? I must ask Mum, flashed through my mind, her loss still unreal. Her absence took so long to accept that I still want to call her on the telephone at times of major family or Museum joys or crises. The death of one’s mother breaks the most fundamental tie of all. Its meaning is the same at any age: I’m really on my own. If a mother and child have been close, how much more conscious the realization, how much deeper the grief. Answering hundreds of condolence letters that summer, trying to express the loss I felt in just a few words was impossible — but it helped, I think, to increase my awareness and to bring my sorrow to the surface.

  We were all submerged in details immediately. My brothers and sister and I telephoned, arranged, and talked, until after the funeral, to which we only asked close family. Pam thought it best, thought Mum would have preferred it. We chose things for her to wear: her Cairo wedding ring — the elephant hair encased in thin gold; a gold duck pin my father had given her; a blouse Sydney and I had brought her from Venice. A simple stone marks her grave in the Quaker cemetery in Westbury.

  We drifted back in time, deciding what to do with her clothes, her art, her photograph albums. Recently, she’d filled fat scrapbooks with articles about the Mets, her family, and other things that interested her, still poignant reminders today of Mum’s curiosity, her vibrancy, her great capacity for love.

  Never, in her humility, would she have believed the numbers of letters we each received, nor how much people had cared for her.

  One day, we assembled all the granddaughters at Mum’s house, so they could choose things from her wardrobe. She had kept all her clothes forever, it seemed, in huge closets and dressers on the third floor. Pam and I, thinking we’d be too sad, hadn’t planned to be there, but we couldn’t stay away, and when we saw our daughters and nieces in Mum’s suits and dresses, we were captivated. Each one, of vastly differing size, age, coloring, and personality, had found the perfect fit and style for herself.

  My brother Leverett’s oldest daughter, beautiful Maria Flora with her long blonde hair, was stunning in the pants suit covered with black paillettes that her grandmother had worn for special parties at the Whitney. I could picture my older daughter Michelle singing the blues in her sweet husky voice, in the gray and white Balenciaga gown Mum had taken to London for the ball her cousin Jock Whitney and his wife Betsy had given when he was ambassador to the Court of St. James. California nightclub audiences, I imagined, would wonder at that dress. Pam’s and my younger daughters, Pamela and Fiona, found perfect Chanel s
uits, and we suddenly recognized our “babies” as elegant and mature women. Frances, Whit’s and his former wife Francie’s younger daughter, a trained nurse and midwife, perched a Paulette hat on her blonde curls and became a gamine, while Susie, Pam’s expert rider and show judge, found that an ancient shooting jacket and trousers from London, soft now from many cleanings, were an exact fit. Whit’s older daughter Alexandra was enchanted by a pair of buckskin pants and a fringed, beaded jacket, acquired by Mum on a long-ago trip out West.

  They wept a bit, and laughed with each other, too, as they preened in all the finery, adding huge ostrich fans, fine leather pocketbooks, silk and chiffon scarves, kidskin gloves in white and in dazzling colors, negligees, bedjackets trimmed in swansdown, and dozens of hats — veiled, feathered, sequinned, beribboned, with tassels and furbelows. One granddaughter even fit into Mum’s custom-made shoes, almost as wide as they were long, high-heeled or wedge-heeled, brilliantly colored or sober black.

  All the different facets of Mum were assembled before us, creating a vivid image of the extraordinary woman who was our mother and grandmother. That deeply touching moment recurs whenever I see a daughter or a niece wearing anything reminding me of Mum.

  I thought often of my last real conversation with Mum, before she went to the hospital. She was having breakfast in bed, as she always did: orange juice, toast with a little honey or jam, and coffee. I sat on the bed, we chatted, and she talked of my father, Cully, whom she looked forward to seeing in another world. “Who will live in my house?” she asked, looking around at the room, once her mother’s, with the same painted furniture Gertrude had commissioned, including the huge bed richly painted with animals and plants by artist Max Kuehne; tiny bronzes by Cecil Howard, paintings by my father, cat andirons, and all the other objects, unchanged since my grandmother’s time. “Will you?”

  Alas, I thoughtlessly said I didn’t think I could afford to. I’ve regretted that ever since. She loved her house so much. It symbolized all she cared for most. Family, above all. Warmth, love, continuity, beauty. Happiness, that elusive sprite whose pursuit was guaranteed us by our forebears.

  Tom had adored my mother. Distressed that he couldn’t attend the funeral, since we’d only asked the family, he’d made a plan right away and set it in motion. We would do a book in honor of Mum, a kind of scrapbook with pictures and words by her family and friends. A marvelous way to memorialize her. A way to mourn, but an active way.

  Joan Clark, by now a close friend who had liked and admired Mum, supported the project from the very beginning. We wouldn’t have been able to do it so lavishly without Joan’s help, and I’m grateful to her forever. “To realize dreams is one aspect of Joan Clark’s generous, creative nature,” I wrote in the Introduction, and this is true. Phyllis Wattis, a member of the national committee and good friend, contributed, as well. And Joan Weakley was key to the project.

  Joan Weakley: assistant, friend, and confidante, she and I shared an office in a Museum brownstone for many years. She’s young, slim, and pretty with becoming, prematurely gray hair. Her husband, Rob Ingraham, who once worked at the Museum, is a writer, and adores Joan even more than the rest of us. Joan was beloved by all the Whitney’s staff, from Nelson, who cleaned our office, to Tom himself. She’s incredibly thoughtful, remembering everyone’s joys and sorrows, illnesses, and birthdays. She knew everything that was going on, but was entirely discreet. She wrote the best minutes of meetings ever, and the best letters — but she always made me feel it was I who did that. People gravitate to Joan, wanting to confide in her, seek her advice, be nurtured.

  For about a year, Joan and I worked with Tom on this project. We called it the “Flora” book, and no one could possibly have made a more elegant, professional, loving tribute to Mum. I can still visualize the long tables and folding metal supports holding the hundreds of photographs for which I’d searched Mum’s house and my own, for which Tom went through Museum files. We both asked people to write their memories of Mum — and every one answered. Bob Friedman wrote “A Brief Biography and Personal Reminiscence” to start it off, and it was perfect, eloquent, placing Mum within her time and her family. Tom creatively envisioned the different aspects of my mother’s life, from her childhood to her old age. He found a superb designer, Karen Salsgiver, who combined Tom’s ideas with her own expertise to produce a beautiful book. We felt that yellow, Mum’s favorite color, must be on the cover — and we visited 10 Gracie Square for ideas, finding just the right floral edge on a yellow curtain. On this, Karen superimposed Mum’s distinctive signature, just “Flora,” in green.

  The book captures Mum’s quicksilver self, and I am grateful to Tom for this enduring portrait of her. We sent copies to all members of the Whitney. The response to it was astounding, both from those who knew Mum and from those who had never even met her.

  Tom felt it crucial to the Museum’s future that people have a sense of its roots, in order to better understand the Museum’s character and mission.

  I will quote from two more pages of the “Flora” book, the last two. The first, by my daughter Fiona, sits across from a photograph taken at the Whitney, of Mum, Fiona, and myself:

  “When I look at this photograph, I imagine my grandmother, having noticed the photographer, warmly cooing in her inimitable fashion, ‘Ooooh.’ Among other attributes, this sound, like my grandmother, was full of elegance, wonder and curiosity, as well as humor and empathy. She said it while watching TV (which she loved), observing the Mets (whose games she never missed), hearing intriguing news of her family and acquaintances, and even eating ice cream. She was a cheerful confidante to her grandchildren — interested in hearing about all aspects of our lives and thoughtfully giving advice, while sharing with us colorful stories about herself. She had an eye for charming people and beautiful objects, especially painting and sculpture. She was of course particularly interested in the Whitney Museum. When I visited her she seemed fascinated to hear about the variety of exhibitions and events taking place there. Through amusing anecdotes about her mother’s place in the art world, as well as her own, she instilled in me a sense of pride at having the opportunity to be involved in the Museum founded by my great-grandmother. …”

  The last picture in the book shows one end of my mother’s living room in Old Westbury, with the yellow sofa (now facing me in our living room in New York), where, late in her life, Mum always sat. From her seat on that sofa, she greeted guests, served tea, and ate most of her meals. Sculptures by her mother and favorite watercolors by my father Cully surrounded her; on the sofa we can glimpse a Mets baseball cap and Mum’s needlepoint pillows.

  Across from that photograph, Tom wrote:

  To those who knew her in the last decade of her life, Flora Whitney Miller might have seemed removed from the daily events of the Whitney Museum of American Art. But in my sense of the history of the Museum, she always will be the most vital and essential part of the evolution of the institution. …

  As I sat with her, next to the sun porch filled with sculpture from her mother’s era, it was impossible not to recognize that even though Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney will always be revered as the founder of the Whitney Museum, it was Flora who accomplished a more difficult task — to bring it from the domain of private wealth and personal concern for artists into the ranks of major public institutions, enjoyed and acclaimed by international audiences. …

  The party we had for the “Flora” book was a touchstone of those late ’80s, when we floated in a kind of limbo, somewhere between euphoria and desolation. The gathering in her honor brought an outpouring of affection, respect, and sorrow from hundreds in the Museum community, and from her family and friends, all invited by the three directors still alive with whom she’d worked: Lloyd Goodrich, Jack Baur, and Tom Armstrong.

  Within a year, Lloyd and Jack would both be dead. Links with the Museum’s very beginnings were to be abruptly severed. The Museum’s living history was wiped out, quickly, irrevocably.

&nbs
p; For now, though, a wonderfully diverse crowd talked of Mum and toasted her. Brooke Astor, Peter Duchin, C. Z. Guest, and others from the social whirl joined the art world, represented by art historians, directors, and curators, writers, and many artists. Old-time Whitney faithfuls, such as Louise Nevelson, Paul Cadmus, Isabel Bishop, John Heliker, and Elsie Driggs, came, along with younger artists, such as Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, and Michael Heizer. Swizzling the bubbles from my champagne, as Mum had always done — we both preferred it flat — I wondered if she’d have liked the occasion, the book … and decided, yes, she would have, especially since the book was made by the Whitney, and the party was there, too.

  ***

  I missed Mum more, as time passed. Once in a while, I felt I had somehow betrayed the trust handed down to me by my grandmother and mother, and had nowhere to turn, now, for counsel. I went over the past years, hunting for the moment I’d taken a wrong turn, but it was like groping through a murky fog. The building project? The new trustees? Tom? Bill? Control of the Museum was passing to others, but that was necessary, if we were to survive financially. Or was it? I was no longer sure it was either necessary or right, or the best thing for the Museum. No one seemed willing or able to give it the time and nurture it needed so desperately.