Real Lace

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  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.

  Naturally, he loved night life and was a popular figure at such bright spots as Armando’s and the old E1 Morocco. Once he confided to a reporter that he had vowed never again to taste anything stronger than ginger ale, and yet, a few nights later, he was at El Morocco with his friends drinking champagne.

  In 1945, when he was barely twenty-one, he announced his marriage to a beautiful socialite-actress named Betsy Ryan—Scotch-Irish Protestant, and no kin of the other Ryans. He had met Betsy at a party at Armando’s, and Nancy Randolph, society editor of the Daily News, learned of the secret even before Bob’s dismayed parents. Earlier that year his cousin Jeanne had eloped with Alfred Vanderbilt, and, the following year, both the Vanderbilts and the Bob Cuddihys were dropped from the Social Register.

  The marriage was, as might have been expected, tempestuous, stormy, though party-filled, with many nights at night clubs. Once, after a party, when Bob Cuddihy was stopped for speeding and was asked to show his license and registration, the policeman threatening to take away both, Betsy hit the patrolman over the head with the heel of her high-heeled slipper. There were quarrels, separations, reconciliations. Bob Cuddihy became jealous of the attentions paid to Betsy by Marion Hargrove, the writer. Finally, in 1951, from his fourteen-room house in Southampton, Bob Cuddihy announced that he and Betsy were getting a divorce. They had been married just six years, and there were five small children. “She’s left me several times before,” Bob told a reporter at El Morocco, “and now she’s left for good.” He added wearily, “I’m sorry to have taken so much of your time. I wish I could say that at least I’d known you before spilling my troubles to you. I wish I could say we’d even met once. In fact,” he sighed, “I wish I could say I even read your column.”

  Seven months later, Betsy Cuddihy married a Southampton real-estate man named Lawrence Godbee, who had four children of his own by a previous marriage. At the time, she surrendered custody of her own children to Bob Cuddihy. The children adored their father, and spent several years living alone with him. There was always excitement of one form or another. Once the garage burned down, and, when he had collected the insurance money, Bob Cuddihy asked the children if it wouldn’t be more fun to have a swimming pool than a new garage. The children agreed, and so the money was used to build the pool. Then, in 1956, Bob Cuddihy announced his marriage to a Knoxville, Tennessee, girl named Mary Smiley, a coolly blonde and beautiful television and fashion model—and another Protestant—whom the family promptly nicknamed “the unsmiling Miss Smiley.” Unsmiling or not, the new Mrs. Cuddihy took her husband’s children under her wing.

  Not quite nine months later, at quarter of eight on a summer evening, Bob Cuddihy was driving his car—fast, as usual—along the Dune Road in Westhampton Beach. He was traveling east and ahead lay the Surf ’n’ Sand Restaurant when his car went out of control. It skidded, sidewiped a telephone pole, skidded again, turned over, and burst into flames. In the crash, the driver was thrown fifteen feet from the car. At first he seemed unhurt, cheerful and nonchalant as ever. But he was taken to Riverhead Hospital, where he died four hours later of internal injuries. Robert the Roué was dead at the age of thirty-two.

  One of the first to hear the news was his sister Mary Jane. Their mother was spending the summer on the Jersey shore, where she was recovering from a heart attack. Mary Jane decided that she must break the news to her mother as gently and as gradually as possible, lest she suffer another attack. She telephoned her and said, “Mother, there’s been an accident, and Bob’s badly hurt. He may not live.” Immediately her mother asked, “Has he seen a priest?” Mary Jane—who at that point did not know the answer to the question—replied, “Yes.” “Did he receive the Last Rites?” Mary Jane replied again, “Yes. He’s back in the Church.” Her mother sighed, relieved at least of that anxiety.

  Next Mary Jane telephoned Riverhead Hospital and asked, “Did my brother see a priest?” Yes, she was told, a priest had visited him, and she was given the priest’s name. She then got the priest on the telephone—”a dumb Irish priest,” she says—and asked him if he had administered the Last Rites. “No,” the priest told her. “I looked in on him, but he didn’t seem sick enough. I didn’t do anything.” “You fool,” she said, “would it interest you to know that he’s dead?” She slammed down the phone.

  She had lied to her mother. But she decided that she would have to let the lie stand. After all, she could not bear to have her mother g
o through the rest of her life believing, as she would have to believe if she knew the truth, that her son was in hell, and forever.

  The trouble was, of course, that a Catholic who is known publicly to be living outside the Church, and who has not been received back, cannot be buried in consecrated ground. Mary Jane telephoned the pastor at St. Thomas More Church in New York, Monsignor Philip J. Furlong, and explained the situation to him, asking him whether, out of consideration for her ailing mother, her brother could not have a Catholic burial. No, Monsignor Furlong replied, he could not; it was absolutely out of the question. The next morning, since there was no time to be lost, Mary Jane Cuddihy MacGuire herded her brother’s five small children into her car and drove to New York, and to Monsignor Furlong’s office, where she sat the children down before the priest. She began asking the children questions. “Who took you to Mass every Sunday?” They replied, “Our daddy did.” “Who taught you your catechism?” They replied, “Our daddy did.” She continued with the questions, and each time the response was the same. She asked, “Where is your daddy now?” They answered, “Our daddy is in heaven.” Suddenly the priest rose from his chair, eyes brimming, and excused himself. He came back a few minutes later and said, “I’ve just talked to the Chancery, to Cardinal Spellman. It’s all right.”

  And so Bob Cuddihy was buried a Catholic, and the secret of the lie lived on, locked in Mary Jane’s heart.

  Bob Cuddihy’s death touched off a terrible court battle for custody of the children. Their mother, Betsy, now Mrs. Godbee, wanted them back. Bob’s widow swore that his dying words to her had been “I’m dying, Mary—please take care of the kids.” Mary Smiley Cuddihy’s lawyers contended that Betsy Godbee was an unfit mother, that she was an alcoholic. Bob’s brother confirmed this. Betsy’s lawyers contended that she had reformed and no longer drank, and there was confused testimony as to whether she had ever been an alcoholic or whether she had suffered, instead, from a form of epilepsy. A nurse, Stella Gray of Southampton, testifying in Bob’s widow’s behalf, said, on the contrary, that Betsy had often given the children liquor “for their colds,” and that she had once crashed her car into a tree and emerged from the accident “so drunk she couldn’t walk a straight line.” On another occasion, the nurse stated, Betsy had spent over two hours in the Southampton house, raging drunk and smashing windows. In the end, however, the court awarded the children to Betsy, who, after all, was their natural mother. At one point while all this was going on, two of Bob Cuddihy’s brothers were walking on the road at Westhampton, not far from where the accident had occurred, when one of them spotted a matchbook cover fluttering in the wind. He picked it up and saw that it advertised the Federal Pacific Electric Corporation of Long Island of Long Island City, their brother’s last employer. He had been the firm’s district sales manager. The matchbook cover appeared weathered at the edges. “I’ve kept the matchbook cover, and put it in a frame,” John Murray Cuddihy says. “Very black Irish of me I suppose, but I keep it as a reminder of what happened to Bob.”