Ethel Merman, Mother Teresa...and Me. Tony Cointreau
hugs and kisses. After she left us, I was floating on air until I noticed the scuffmarks on my little leather jacket—a stark contrast to her perfection—and I hoped she hadn’t noticed. I wondered how I could avoid ever wearing the jacket again.
I never felt the need to be perfect for my father the way I did for my mother. Father was a gentle, distant man whose only interaction with his children was to pat us on the head when he came home from the office. Only once, when I was little, do I remember having the audacity to climb onto his lap. We were at the seashore in New Jersey, and the Fourth of July fireworks had frightened me. While trying to run away from the noise, I found Father in the hotel bar, smoking a cigar and drinking brandy with his friends. His arms felt so comforting, but within moments I heard him call for my nurse to take me away.
Despite his disinterest in small children, I thought of him as a god whose word was infallible. When I was three or four, old enough to fear the terrors of World War II, I overheard him say to his guests that the Allies would win and we would soon be safe. I believed him implicitly and never worried about it again.
My older brother, Richard, instead of trying to please our parents and be a perfect little person the way I did, put on a tough veneer and rebelled. This was his main form of expression, the best way he knew to make himself noticed.
Throughout my childhood, Richard was also verbally and physically abusive towards me—a situation that everyone else, including Lucy, chose to ignore. I’ll never know the reason for his resentment. Maybe he blamed my birth for having taken away what little attention he had had from our parents for the first two years of his life. I grew up not having any idea that his degree of bullying was not normal behavior for an older sibling.
When I entered the first grade at the Browning School for Boys, I longed for a new mahogany desk that I had seen in a store. I had outgrown the tiny table with baby-sized chairs I had previously used for writing or drawing pictures, and the mahogany desk would be perfect for doing my homework. My parents gave it to me for Christmas—it was my main Christmas present that year—and I cherished it. I loved looking at it, touching it, sitting in front of it, and even the way books and paper and a yellow pencil contrasted with its surface. In less than twenty-four hours, my brother had carved my name across it with a knife. I was heartsick. As usual, our parents said nothing.
And I said nothing more about it; I knew it was futile for me to say anything. By then I had learned that I would simply have to endure whatever hostile acts he invented as retribution for my having been born.
But as I grew older, his abuse became more dangerous to my physical self.
I can never forget the morning he shot me. I got out of bed at six a.m. to go to the bathroom. As I walked away from my bed, which was only a few feet away from Richard’s, he pulled out a BB gun that he kept within reach of his bed. While my back was turned, he took aim, without getting up, and shot a BB into my left buttock.
My screams of pain brought a furious Mother running into the room. Rather than comfort me, she berated me for waking her up, and then she dug in to extricate the BB. Although I had no doubt that she loved me, she had little patience for any disruption in her life.
I was eight years old then, and it took me until the age of eighteen to realize that Richard was never going to be my best friend and buddy. It was time for me to declare my independence and no longer accede to his demands that I be his slave. It was then that he made a move that would be a red flag for any psychiatrist.
After coming home from school one afternoon, I decided to take a leisurely bath. While I was soaking in the warm water on that cold winter day, my brother casually walked into my bathroom, unzipped his pants and urinated on me. I was livid, but my parents, who were having a cocktail in the library, barely responded to my fury at this final insult.
Not long after that, my brother informed me, “You’re the only person I ever wanted to kill!”
It took years after that, during which time we went our separate ways, for both of us to come to terms with our relationship and become real brothers.
But my need to be perfect to please my mother was something that would affect me for the rest of my life. It is something that you can come to terms with, be aware of, and even think you are free of it, but at some level it never really leaves you, and it will pop up again when you least expect it.
One of the things I enjoyed most about living in New York City was that I could be near my maternal grandmother, Martha Richardson, whom I called Mémé. Although Mémé lived in Boston, she would come and stay with us on holidays such as Christmas or Thanksgiving.
Mémé had been born and raised in Boston and had already shown evidence of an extraordinary singing voice at the age of five when she sang the role of “Little Buttercup” in Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore at the Boston Opera House. Throughout her years in convent school she longed for a career in grand opera, but it was out of the question for a well-brought-up young lady of that era to consider a life on the stage. However, her parents, who themselves loved music, eventually allowed her to study singing at the New England Conservatory of Opera.
In the late 1890s, while continuing her studies at the Conservatory, Martha did what her family expected of her and married Samuel Richardson, a reliable older gentleman of English descent. She bore him two little girls, Dotie and Ashie.
Although Martha appeared in recitals and concerts throughout the Boston area, she wanted to become an opera star, and the only way to accomplish that was to go to Europe and study with the great teachers. Already fluent in French, in 1905 she left her husband in Boston and, accompanied by her mother, went to Paris with her two daughters to continue her musical training. Today, it is almost impossible for us to comprehend the shockwaves such actions created in Boston a century ago.
According to one of the newspaper clippings in her scrapbook, now disintegrating with age, my grandmother, without even a letter of introduction, managed to reach the preeminent teacher of the time, M. Juliani, for an audition.
Juliani had listened to hundreds of hopeful and highly recommended singers from around the world, and accepted few of them as students. “Sing!” he ordered Martha.
As her first notes filled the room, Juliani’s eyes opened wide and he half rose from his chair. At the end of her song, he threw his arms around her neck and cried, “Come tomorrow! Don’t fail to come tomorrow for your first lesson!”
On December 17, 1910, Martha Richardson made her debut with the Paris Opera as Leonore in Verdi’s Il Trovatore. The international reviews were unqualified raves. They praised the purity, sweetness and power of her voice and described how, on that evening, the French and American flags hung outside the Opera House in her honor.
During the thunderous ovation, her two little girls, Dotie and Ashie, who were sitting in a box close by the stage, were heard happily crying out, “Maman—Maman!”
After four years of international acclaim, it looked as though my grandmother’s success would go on forever. Little did she know that World War I would abruptly change her life in ways she never could have imagined.
According to newspaper reports, she had been on the streets of Paris with her two children when a German aeroplane overhead dropped a bomb that exploded on the sidewalk in front of her, killing two women.
The very last clipping in her scrapbook is eerily similar to my mother’s story when she too would flee France with my brother, Richard, for the safety of America at the outbreak of World War II. My grandmother told the reporter:
I had not intended to leave Paris immediately, but when I learned that the French Government was removing