— Chapter Two —

I N LINE WITH my father's “map of life,” the time was right for him to turn his attention to public service. In the immediate years before my birth, he had begun to play a semipublic role in New York. In 1913, he had been elected to the board of governors of the New York Stock Exchange and had worked hard to effect the kinds of changes and reforms he had been espousing in financial circles. He was active in helping manage the various panics that hit the stock exchange as the threat of war in Europe loomed larger, and then later, as the likelihood grew of America's involvement in the war.

By the fall of 1914, for example, the war in Europe threatened the textile industry, largely because the German dye cartel at that time supplied at least 90 percent of our dyes. My father loaned Dr. William Gerard Beckers, a German-trained chemist, the money for plant facilities and a much-needed laboratory to continue his experimentation with manufacturing dyes. In 1916, Beckers's company merged with two other corporations to create the National Aniline and Chemical Company, and a few years after the war, my father negotiated a merger of National Aniline with four older companies. The integrated company thus created, the Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation, never missed a dividend throughout the Depression. By 1931, his holdings were worth $43 million, and the dividends were later to help cover losses suffered by The Washington Post .

Despite several financial setbacks, and even before the huge success of Allied Chemical, my father's wealth was considerable. By 1915, his fortune was estimated at around $40–60 million. But making money, satisfactory as it was, was never his primary objective. As he did throughout his life, he looked for ways to make his money work for the public good. He had become engaged in many welfare organizations. He was also president of Mount Sinai Hospital, and his interest in mental health was already evident in his support for building clinics. He had set up a fund at his alma mater, Yale, to train young men for public service. At the same time, he was beginning to hanker for some opportunity to serve the government himself. Being Republican, and having contributed to Republican campaigns and causes, he could see no immediate opportunities, since President Wilson was in office. He got involved in Charles Evans Hughes's campaign against Wilson in 1916, which, of course, was narrowly unsuccessful.

Shortly after the election, my father, even more eager to work for the government since he was certain America would be pulled into the war, offered his services to his friends Justice Louis Brandeis and Bernard Baruch, and even to Wilson himself. With no specific assignment, he went to Washington as a dollar-a-year man, and, after a few false starts, he eventually got various appointments and high-level government assignments under seven presidents, beginning with service on the Raw Materials Committee and the General Munitions Board, both eventually leading to the War Industries Board.

My father left New York for Washington early in 1917. My mother stayed in Mount Kisco that summer, following my birth in June. In October she joined him in Washington in a large rented house on K Street. For several vague reasons—Washington was crowded, there was a pneumonia epidemic at one point, they viewed their stay as temporary—they left us children in New York for the next four years, three of which they spent mostly in Washington with occasional visits back and forth. It's odd that they claimed not to have known how long they would be staying, since as soon as he got to Washington my father resigned as a governor of the stock exchange, gave up directorships in several companies, and sold all stocks that might involve him in a conflict of interest. In fact, in August 1917 he decided to dissolve his investment banking firm completely, since he knew even then that he would get deeply involved with the United States Treasury. He left only a small office for his personal business and several people who worked for him buying and selling stocks and paying taxes.

In 1917, we were occupying the entire top floor and half of the floor below at 820 Fifth Avenue, which is where I was born. We—“the babes,” as Mother often referred to us in her diary—lived with Powelly in this Fifth Avenue apartment. A governess, Anna Otth, had been added after Bill was born. I can't remember the years in New York, and since I was a baby, those very early years of separation and substitute parenting had the least effect on me of any of the children. Only psychiatrists can guess about their effect on my older siblings. Much later, my brother, when he was in the process of being analyzed to become a psychoanalyst himself, got very angry thinking about the separation and testily asked my mother how she could have left her children in New York for those early years. She said, “Well, you were all in school.” But the older children were two, four, and six, and I was a few months old, when our parents first left for Washington.

W HEN SHE WENT to Washington, my mother's life changed drastically—and for the better. She was part of a team for the first time, going into a strange city in which she and my father were both new. There seems to have been less anti-Semitic prejudice in Washington than in New York. And in Washington, unlike the many women who to this day find the city distasteful because they are regarded as appendages of their husbands, my mother found a wide canvas on which to paint.

She continued to maintain her old interests, particularly in Chinese art, even admitting in her autobiography that “I was so engrossed in translating Chinese texts and in writing a book on the philosophy of Chinese art that it never occurred to me to make any active contribution toward the war effort. In plain truth I sat out the First World War.” At the same time, however, she threw herself into Washington's social life in a determined way, partly because she enjoyed it but also because she saw immersion in social life as the way she could help further my father's interests.

Mother began another diary at the time they moved to Washington, which makes it clear how devoted she was to him. She often worried that his talents weren't sufficiently recognized, and she constantly noted the progress of his career and her faith in his abilities: “He is so big that I want him to be of more help in this terrible situation of chaos produced by incompetence and politics mixed.”

Although she never quite said so, and often claimed the contrary, she clearly thrived on the range of new and varied people she met. My parents, separately and together, attended dinners, lunches, and teas almost nonstop—including the famous Ned and Evalyn McLean Sunday lunches for eighty or a hundred people entertained by a full orchestra, held at Friendship, the McLeans' “country” place on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, where McLean Gardens is located today. The names she mentioned in her diary escalate in both prominence and interest as the months mount, starting with Cissy Patterson, then known as Countess Gizycki. She fascinated my mother, who wrote of her: “Pugnose, red hair, a ready wit and charm, what more can a woman have? As she is extremely feline I shall see to it that I do not get scratched but with that in mind I intend to see what there is in it.”

As she had done in Paris, my mother rapidly got to know extraordinary people: Baruch, Brandeis, Frankfurter, who took her to see Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Elihu Root, and Charles Evans Hughes. She met and, as she said, tried to impress H. G. Wells. She began a flirtation with Shrinivasi Sastri, a delegate from India to the nine-power peace conference that took place in Washington in 1922. She is very self-analytical in the diary, and mentions feeling not always mentally at her best, “but when I like people I have a silly wish to glitter that no one really could satisfy.”

She also got to know Alice Roosevelt Longworth and her husband, Nick. She was always ambivalent about Mrs. Longworth, and Mrs. L., as we all always called her later on, returned the feeling. My father and Mrs. L. became good friends and, later, bridge-playing companions, but my mother kept her distance. “What a brilliant but sterile mind!” she wrote after one meeting with her. “It is exactly like her father's and helps me to understand T.R. perfectly.… The thought of her undoubtedly makes my winter look more interesting.” After one party that they both attended early in 1920, my mother described Alice as having been in a “very carnal sort of mood. She ate three chops, told shady stories and finally sang in a deep bass voice: ‘Nobody cultivates me, I'm wild, I'm wild.’” Mother kept halfway admiring her, though, while also constantly criticizing her. “There is something depressing about her very keenness,” she wrote.

Despite her seemingly happy immersion in the social whirl, her diary is peppered with critical comments, both about the city and its people: “Washington is not in the least intellectual. Of that there is no doubt whatever”; “Roosevelt [Franklin—then Assistant Secretary of the Navy] is very pleasant but his wife [Eleanor] like all officials' wives is terribly aware of her position”; “I came home very blue as the dinner party as a form of human intercourse seems to me very poor indeed.”

She may have scorned dinner parties, but she took great delight in the “breadth and depth” of her life. At one point she exclaimed, “At last je m'en fiche de Mt. Kisco. I really believe that complex is eliminated”—the only reference to the fact that the social snobbery there had hurt her.

What the diary also indicates is that motherhood was not exactly Mother's first priority. She rarely mentioned any one of us children individually. I appear in the diary for the first time by name (or by initial, I should say) in February 1920, two and a half years after my birth: “The babes (Bill and K) take some of my time this week. At breakfast yesterday Euge said: ‘K will be a big woman.’ Bill (4½): ‘She isn't going to be a woman, she's going to be a lady.’ K: ‘No I'm not, I'm going to be a woman.’”

There are sporadic mentions in the diary of visits to Washington by the children, or of parental visits to New York. These references focused on how much we were learning, and our development under the care of Powelly and Mrs. Satis N. Coleman, a teacher who later became well known for her program for the early musical training of children—she believed that music education should make a contribution to character building, home life, and society. My sisters played the violin, which she helped them learn by first teaching them to make violinlike instruments out of cigar boxes, and I did things like tap on glasses filled with varying amounts of water. In December of 1918, my mother noted, “The children delighted me with their progress and their happiness under Mrs. Coleman's influence.” When Mother visited New York, she would often have a few people in, and we—especially Flo and Bis—would dance or perform for them in some way. Mother seemed to view this kind of thing as the essence of a happy childhood, making passing comments about everybody being pleased with the children and “their unconscious joy,” or that everyone was “enchanted with the accomplishment, the promise and all pervading atmosphere of childish happiness.” These remarks typify her talent for seeing things as she wanted them to be.

In the absence of a mother's day-to-day affection, we grew devoted to Powelly. She supplied the hugs, the comforting, the feeling of human contact, even the love that my mother did not. She was kind and wise and, above all, warm. Powelly was always there, sensibly solving our problems and salving our hurts, even if her methods were somewhat unusual.

My mother didn't much believe in doctors—I hardly ever saw one through most of my youth—and Powelly was a devout Christian Scientist, so illness wasn't acknowledged by her. If we said we had a tummy ache or a cold, she would say, “Just know it's going to be all right”—and off we'd go with any disease or even a fever. I did stay home from school briefly with the mumps and was permitted to lie down on the couch for half a day. Another medical problem was a sprained finger the size of a good cigar from a basketball bouncing off the end of it. My mother sent for her masseuse. The lovely Swedish lady took one look and suggested a doctor, who put it in a splint. My freshman year in high school, I had a loud, racking cough the entire winter. This was overlooked at home but much discussed in a deafened school as I barked my way through the year. Finally, toward spring, my mother decided that a weekend away in Atlantic City would be beneficial, so she dispatched me with the governess, Mademoiselle Otth, to a hotel on the boardwalk for a cure. A cold rain fell the entire time, and we ran out of money. Only thirty years later, when I was diagnosed with tuberculosis, was it observed by the doctors that the scars on my lungs indicated I had had a previous attack. Whatever it was, I got over it.

Luckily, I have always had rugged good health and a really strong constitution. The happy result of having Powelly's philosophy embedded in me was that, if I did get anything, I, too, tended to disregard it, and have always been able to keep going through minor afflictions. Year after year went by with perfect attendance at school, and no doubt many germs spread generously around.

When you outgrew Powelly, there was Mademoiselle Otth, who was somewhat disorganized but did her best and meant well. She was sweet but unable to ride herd on us as we grew older. Another much-loved influence on our early years was the family chauffeur, Al Phillips, known as Phil. He was our friend, colleague, supervisor, and protector.

After the first year in Washington, my mother went with us to Mount Kisco for the summer; then she returned to Washington to live in Mrs. George Vanderbilt's house, “a much more charming milieu than that of last year.” She again decided to leave the children in New York, fearing the Washington winters. She wrote her justification in the diary: “The influenza has been raging all over the country with very high mortality, but here in W. [Washington] the conditions were disgraceful. People died right and left from pure neglect, and bodies were lying about everywhere because there were no undertakers and no grave-diggers to dispose of them.”

She returned to a new round of people and dinners. And she helped start a ladies' lunch club and wrote of the first meeting in 1920: “We discussed ‘What is the most outstanding figure developed by the war?’ Mrs. Hard supported Lenin and Mrs. Harriman, Hoover. The feelings flew on occasion.… We decided to discuss at the next meeting ‘Decided that the Russian blockade should be lifted.’ It was great fun on the whole and among the women are the most intelligent in Washington.” Alice Longworth was pointedly omitted from the invitees.

Making himself helpful in Washington, my father had moved through the War Industries Board and the War Savings Committee, and in January 1919 he had been made chairman of the War Finance Corporation. When its work came to a halt for a while in May 1920, my parents briefly moved back to New York one last time, but Washington, with its allure of politics, had captivated them both. They were drawn to its openness and what she called “the tenseness of interest that the life here has for us.” In New York he toyed with buying the Missouri Pacific Railroad, or joining Adolph Ochs, who invited him to come on The New York Times on the business side, but that side alone didn't interest him.

When the Republicans were elected in 1920, there was talk of my father's returning to Washington. After a congressional struggle precipitated by the opposition of much of Wall Street, which viewed it as too much government interference, the War Finance Corporation was revived and my father was appointed to it by President Harding and was elected its managing director in March of 1921. This new appointment finally made my parents realize they would be in Washington for some years, so, when they returned to Washington that fall, we were at last brought down to live with them.

My mother threw herself into the social and political scene with renewed vigor, having found that she had to re-establish their position after their absence and, of course, a changed administration. For instance, she made three hundred social calls in a relatively short period of time, which meant leaving calling cards with one corner turned down, signifying that she had personally left them. She despised doing this, saying she did it “not only because of Eugene's much wider associations, but because I have to put us back on the social map.… This game takes more persistence and courage than anyone will admit.” She confided to her diary that “I cannot hide the fact that my sympathies are deeper, my interests more serious than those of most of these women.” In fact, that was true; they were.

As for me, when I reached the age of four, Washington became my home and remained so forever. At first, we moved into a large, dark, red-brick house on Connecticut Avenue, described by my mother in her diary as a “big, old-fashioned barn.” She added: “The children are happy in their semi-country life, and we are all glad to be living together again.” My earliest memories are of this house, where I was quite content. The house was a sprawling Victorian mansion with a stained-glass bay window in the dining room. It was rented from the Woodwards of the Woodward and Lothrop department-store family, the Lothrops having built an equally large stone house a block away. The land around the house extended the length of the block, and the yard became a playground for the whole neighborhood.

One of the earliest transactions I had with my father about the future took place in this Connecticut Avenue house when I was about eight. He kept asking if, when I grew up, I would be his secretary. I had no idea what a secretary was or did, but the whole idea struck me as distasteful. At the time, my father himself seemed to me a rather remote and strange male figure whom I liked from a distance but thought very different. My answer was a constant and firm no. Although I had an awareness that this was a tease, I knew it was something I didn't want to do. However, I had a bank in which you inserted nickels, dimes, and quarters, and when it reached the vast sum of $5.00 it would spring open. I had been collecting coins for months on my tiny allowance, and finally I needed only one nickel to have all this vast wealth at my command. When I asked my father if he would give me a nickel, he said, “Well, now will you be my secretary?” I agreed. I sold out for a nickel. My father would occasionally refer to this future, making me slightly puzzled and anxious, but I never thought of reneging on the bargain and was always referred to as his future secretary.

I N LARGE FAMILIES , it seems it is hardest to be either the first or the last child. That was certainly true in ours. Florence, the first—conceived on the honeymoon trip and born in 1911—was the only Meyer girl who was beautiful in the classical sense. Flo was both smart and vulnerable. Her tastes were artistic and literary: she could often be found reclining with a book in her hand. According to my mother's ideal, Meyer girls were supposed to be competitive and athletic. Flo was neither. She always wore a large picture hat on the tennis court to indicate that she wasn't seriously trying. Instead of sports, she immersed herself first in music, later—much too late, as it turned out—in dance, making her professional debut in Max Reinhardt's The Eternal Road in 1935. Despite my parents' interest in and support of her dancing, Flo never received from them the emotional support she needed while growing up. She had an especially difficult time with my mother, no doubt because of Mother's inexperience with motherhood and her lack of interest in it. An attempt to elope at sixteen was foiled by the chauffeur, Phil. Throughout my childhood, Flo was a distant though appealing figure to me. For Flo, I didn't exist until we were both grown up.

Whereas Flo may have bent, however unwillingly, to my parents' wishes, Bis—born two years after her—lived in a state of constant rebellion. “My whole life was malefaction,” Bis later told me. “I was against adults.” She resented the power our parents had over her and met power with power in whatever way she could—and she found a number of ways. As she said many years later, “I led an illicit life to a rather large degree.”

Bis had an expression—“you haven't lived until …”—that both got her into trouble and led her into great adventures. Her life-sustaining escapades included attending a burlesque show and a wrestling match. When she was very young, Bis decided she would not have lived until she had hocked something, so she pilfered a necklace from my mother's room and asked Al Phillips to drive her and a friend across the Potomac River to Rosslyn, Virginia, which was then a dusty semicountry crossroads with a strip of pawn shops. “My good man, what will you give me for these jewels?” Bis demanded authoritatively of the bemused pawnbroker. “Little girl,” he replied, “I suggest you return that necklace to your mother.” When Bis and her friend turned around, they found Phil doubled over with laughter at the door.

Bis was popular with boys. She entered Vassar at sixteen and later went on to study in Munich and at Barnard. She often brought glamorous figures home for house parties, where my pedestrian young male friends paled in their shadow.

In 1915, along came Eugene Meyer III. Any boy with that name was going to have a hard time, and Bill, as he was always known, did, especially as he got older. Being the only boy of five children would be difficult in any family, but it was particularly so in ours, both because of my father's unapproachability and prominence and because of my mother's awkwardness with men. But my mother was elated at his birth. She had wanted nothing but sons and she felt, as she admitted, “a ridiculous sense of achievement.”

Even as a young child, Bis found, or recruited, a companion rebel in Bill. The two of them formed a team; like Bis, Bill assumed a defiant stance toward the grown-up world. We were all away once on a yacht trip and Bill had stayed home, learned to fly, and gained his pilot's license. He told my mother he had something to show her. She held her breath, fearing it was a marriage license, in comparison with which a pilot's license seemed benign. He then “showed her” by buzzing our house in Mount Kisco, dipping his wings in acknowledgment.

From as early as I can remember, I adored my older siblings, but particularly Bis and Bill. I was desperately eager to be part of their adventurous life and terribly envious of Bis's nonconformist image. I really even wanted to be her. I envied her self-assurance, her independence, her daring, her willingness to cut up and row with the family. I would have liked to be a dashing law-breaker, but I didn't have the proper instincts or the courage, and I was always scorned for passively going along. Where Bis was a rebel, I followed the rules. I was Goody Two-Shoes, begging to be taken along with Bis and Bill wherever they went. Naturally, they considered me a pain.

Worse, when I was very young I was the world's most ignoble tattle-tale—without even realizing what I was doing. I didn't tell on the older ones to be mean, get even, or ingratiate myself with my parents. I simply had no idea that I had transgressed. I shared their lives so little that I didn't understand that their activities were meant to be secret, and was merely reporting. After one episode when I was about four, Bis, Bill, and Flo took me into a bathroom at Mount Kisco and carefully taped my mouth shut. As Bis remembers, “The big tears on those very fat cheeks almost undid me. It was so sad, but the cause was just.”

As the fourth of five children, I was oddly shielded from the rigors of living with parents who demanded perfection and from some of the eccentricities of our curious upbringing. More so than the older children, I was supervised by our parents from afar. This was in certain ways lucky, because, growing up somewhat alone, I didn't experience the rules and heavy hand to which the older children were subjected.

By the time I was growing up, the battles between the children and the parents had already taken place. Not only were our parents busier and more preoccupied than ever, but my impulse was always to please. Only later did I observe that this curious passivity left me freer than both my older sisters and brother: their rebellion somehow left them more enslaved and affected by the family's myths and wishes. Somehow, in their defiance, my siblings were more captives of the negative part of our upbringing. So my position in the family turned out to be a lucky one; I bore neither the brunt of my mother's newness to parenthood nor the force of her middle-aged traumas, as my younger sister, Ruth, did. I was somehow protected. Luck helped me be a survivor and gave me strength, but at the time what I really wanted was a place in the remote and exciting world of my older sisters and brother. As Bis succinctly put it later, I was “safe but gypped.”

My difficulties were much more tied to a lack of guiding personal relationships, for I had more or less to bring myself up emotionally and figure out how to deal with whatever situations confronted me. At the same time that I was surrounded by extreme luxury, I led a life structured and in many ways spartan, circumscribed by school and lessons, travel and study. The only person who was physically affectionate with me was Powelly, whom I emotionally outgrew when I was about seven. From then on I was on my own.

The youngest of us, Ruth, was born in Mount Kisco in July 1921. I was led in to see the new baby lying on the bed in the guest room. I hadn't the remotest idea how the baby arrived or whence it came and don't remember being curious. I was just in awe of her, with her tiny curled-up fingers.

Ruth's birth, the last in our family, sealed my separation from the older three, who viewed Ruth and me as a pair of infants. Ruthie was an enchanting child and I was jealous that she was blonde, blue-eyed, and beautiful, whereas I was dark and pudgy. I once tested family members by suggesting that if a fire broke out we'd all meet in Ruthie's room because we'd rush to save her first. No one contradicted this thesis or got the point of my test.

Ruthie and I were set apart as a duo in other ways. We both remained under Powelly's care as the older ones outgrew her, even sharing a room until I was twelve. When guests were present at dinner, which was nearly every night, Ruthie and I had to eat alone at an earlier hour. Every summer until I was nine and allowed to join the older contingent, my parents took the three of them on a trip to Europe or, in alternate years, on a camping trip out west. While the others were off enjoying exciting adventures, Ruthie and I were left in Mount Kisco with our governess.

As the fifth and last child, Ruthie received even less in the way of parental attention and interest, and more in the way of being attended to only by a governess or nurse. Naturally, because we were always considered a separate unit and I was four years older, I became a sort of parent to her, or at least an important mentor. She grew increasingly shy, gentle, and unassertive. For the most part, she lived in a world of her own, eventually becoming a gifted, devoted horsewoman. Her attention was focused on a Springer spaniel named Cricket and the governess, Mademoiselle Otth, whom she loved very much. When Ruth was fifteen, the dog died and the governess was sent away at about the same time. Needless to say, Ruth's heart was broken. When Mademoiselle left, Ruth wrote me:

I understood only too well how she felt. My mother later wrote up these events in a story that she tried to sell to one of the women's magazines. I was indignant that she was using her daughter's grief and wounds in this way, but she calmly replied that she'd shown it to Ruthie and that Ruthie had liked it. I didn't believe it at the time, but she proved to be right. When Ruthie and I were going over my mother's papers after her death, the story reappeared. I stupidly tore it up, my anger returning at the sight of it. Years later Ruthie told me she had resented my tearing it up and thought I was jealous because it was about her, not me. The complexity of family relations is too deep to comprehend. This incident certainly testifies against moral certitude—mine.

M Y LIFE AS a child was centered in the house in Washington and in our summer home in Mount Kisco. At that time it was an eight-hour train trip from Washington through New York and on into the country, but we made the trip regularly, those treks engineered by Mother, traveling with five children, several canaries, and all the baggage. The horses went separately.

The ambience of the huge country house was wonderful, making up in gaiety what it may have lacked in warmth. As a bachelor, my father had bought an old farm and had added to it over the years until his property reached seven hundred acres at its peak, which was most of my childhood. Originally, there was a beautiful old farmhouse, which he had used and where the family lived in summers in the early years of my parents' marriage, before they decided to build a larger home.

Designed in 1915 by Charles Platt, the architect my mother's friend Freer had selected to build his Oriental-art gallery in Washington, the new stone house was built to be lived in year-round, so that my father could commute to Wall Street by car or the excellent commuter train. Since my parents moved to Washington in 1917, we used it only from early summer until early fall.

The new house—surrounded by enormous trees, all transplanted—stood on top of a previously barren hill overlooking the old farmhouse. In the other direction, the house overlooked Byram Lake, a New York City water supply, but also our boating-and-fishing hole in a once-a-summer event. We always referred to this neoclassical country house as “the farm,” because my parents thought of it as that and because it was a regular working farm. There were pigs and chickens, as well as Jersey milk cows, from which we got unpasteurized milk, buttermilk, and rich cream. There was a large and bountiful orchard and a garden at the foot of the hill, from which we ate fresh vegetables and enjoyed magnificent bouquets of flowers all over the house, refreshed and replaced every day. Flowers were even sent to Washington for our successive houses there, and in winters, many of the farm's products were delivered by truck to our Washington house. The care of the gardens, at least in summer, took a dozen men. Another dozen ran the farm. They all lived at the old farmhouse in a bachelor establishment.

The house itself was large but simple in lines. Though it was very grand in concept, it managed to retain a feeling of informality. Made of rough-hewn pinkish-gray granite blasted out of huge rocks from a quarry on the place and chipped and carved into immense brick-shaped slabs by stonemasons, it took two years to build. Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, had to be summoned to settle a jurisdictional dispute between two unions involved in the construction—stonecutters and bricklayers, I believe.

The rooms were all big. Most of the bedrooms had screened sleeping porches attached. There was an indoor swimming pool and a bowling alley, as well as a tennis court. There was a beautiful formal garden next to the house at one end, which was completed by a separate large, classical orangery. Two massive Italian birdbaths were situated on either side of a pond containing large lotuses at both ends and water lilies in the middle.

Most surprising was a big organ with pipes that wove through the house on every floor. My father loved to blast us out of bed on Sunday mornings by playing “Nearer My God to Thee” at its loudest, saying, “Everybody up!” We also had a grand piano, and both the organ and piano had mechanical attachments for playing rolls of music. We had scores of piano rolls, including many by Paderewski, a great friend of my mother's. One of my principal childhood memories is hearing one of the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies waft throughout the house.

My mother prided herself on not having had a decorator. She and Platt together had chosen the furniture, with curious and not very practical results. Since both of them were tall, they had naturally chosen chairs for the living rooms that were quite large. In several, my father's feet barely touched the ground, since he was a few inches shorter than she. None of the rooms had proper reading lights near the beds, or desks with appropriate chairs and lights. My father complained loudly that he didn't have a reading light in his bedroom—I think he finally managed to secure one by buying it himself. My mother's bedroom was the only room in the house that was both beautiful and livable, in the sense that it had proper lights and comfortable chairs.

No room on the ground floor had enough chairs for a cozy group to sit and talk, except for an outdoor porch off my father's study. We just about lived on this porch, which was open but roofed. It was in my father's study that we always gathered after dinner. There, too, there were only two large chairs, placed on either side of the fireplace. My father's desk and chair and a sofa were way off in opposite corners, so the conversation group had to be created anew each evening by bringing extra chairs in and pulling them close to the fireplace.

Not only did my mother never have a decorator, but she never changed anything once it was in place, except as we children grew up and altered our room arrangements. At first, I lived with Ruthie and a nurse, later a governess, in a room with a porch off it, on which we slept, and a playroom next door. Flo and Bis and their governess lived in a similar arrangement. My parents had a suite at the end of the hall. Bill and his tutor lived up on the third floor.

The whole house was lined with large Chinese paintings. In the biggest living room was a table on which sat many of my mother's beautiful bronzes, vases, and other objects. In her study stood two Brancusis— Danaïde on the mantel and The Blonde Negress at the door. In the library there was the large white marble Bird in Space , on a wooden base that Brancusi had carved in our garden on his first visit to the United States, when he had stayed with us at Mount Kisco. I remember sitting around watching while Brancusi hacked away and chatted with us simultaneously.

As Ruthie and I got older, meals were mostly taken together, the whole family gathered, especially on weekends, when my father arrived from Washington. We had two dining rooms. If there were a lot of us, we used the larger, more formal, marble-floored inside dining room, which was rare and special. When it was just the family and a few friends we would eat in what we called the “outside” dining room, which could still seat about twenty. It had a green Venetian dining-room set and was enclosed by large glass windows that provided views of the terrace and woods beyond the house. The only decoration in this room was a sculpture by Brancusi, his rendition of my mother. Needless to say, this was a very abstract black marble, which he called La Reine pas Dédaigneuse , or The Not-Disdainful Queen . Many people laughed at it, describing it, among other ways, as a horse's swollen knee. Only once was it shown in a Brancusi show, at which my sister Bis heard someone remark, “What the hell is that thing?” She turned to the poor baffled stranger and said, “Sir, that is my mother!” I've always found it extraordinarily beautiful.

In my early childhood, there was a household staff of roughly ten to twelve servants. Most of them stayed a long time and became acquaintances, confidants, and sometimes friends. There were two bells in each of the bedrooms by which you could summon a maid or the butler. I never did, but I think my older sisters did, and my parents certainly did. In addition, there were the chauffeur, Phil, and the groom and his assistant, who cared for as many as eight or nine horses.

All this was supervised first by a farm superintendent named John Cummins, and after him by the head gardener, a Scottish gentleman named Charles Ruthven, who lived in a nice white farmhouse on the place. His daughter, Jean, and her younger brother, George, were my playmates when we were in Mount Kisco. The groom and his wife lived in another cottage, and Al Phillips and his wife lived in an apartment over the garage. Their son, Tom, was another of Ruthie's and my playmates. We all had a happy time together, picking fruit in the orchards and riding on the hay wagons in the afternoons, after mornings spent on lessons.

All my life I had ambivalent emotions about Mount Kisco. On one level I deeply loved it and had happy times there when I was young, largely because there were children on the farm. As I grew older—say, from twelve to eighteen—I went on thinking of the farm as wonderful because as a younger child I had thought it was, but in reality, throughout my later childhood I had no friends in the neighborhood and felt completely alone there.

It was not until I was much older that I realized we were almost totally isolated. Though we had many visitors for weekends or longer, there was little or no local social life. Only later did I learn that my parents had suffered from local anti-Semitism. They had, I believe, been warned when they first started to build the large stone house that they would be snubbed socially. And, in fact, they were never invited to their neighbors' houses and were excluded from the country club until it went broke, at which time they were asked to join (and, I think, may have, just to help). But I never went there or even saw it.

Until the end of my mother's life, after countless return visits either with my children, who adored the farm, or later to visit one or both parents, I looked forward to being there, only to have painful realities return five minutes after entering its beautiful large front hall. The older I got, the more I disliked the loneliness of the farm, but in my childhood days, it was, as I wrote my father when I was ten, “a great old Place.”

D URING THE YEAR I was in the fifth grade, we moved out of the Woodward house, which had been sold, and into a red-brick house on Massachusetts Avenue, a couple of blocks from Dupont Circle. My commute to school was a little longer. I used to walk up the avenue every morning, about eight blocks uphill, carrying my roller skates. Coming back was easy—I simply whizzed home downhill, carrying my book bag in one hand and reserving the other to grab the lamppost at each corner in order not to go flying into the street.

After a two-year interim on Massachusetts Avenue, we moved to a large house owned by Henry White, an ex-ambassador to France, at 1624 Crescent Place, just off 16th Street. I was then in the seventh grade, and this was the real house in which I grew up, my home in Washington, and where my mother lived for the rest of her life.

The house on Crescent Place, which my father rented for several years before eventually buying it in 1934, was designed in 1912 by the well-known architect John Russell Pope and initially had forty rooms. It was a very grand and rather formal house. The only somewhat cozy room on the main floor was the library, in which we spent most of our time. My sister Ruth and I again shared a large room, but as the older girls left for college, the house was done over and I was allowed to choose my own room and decorate it. I said I would like it to be modern. A special modern designer created a plaster fireplace, painted white, with no mantel, and the room had quite beautiful made-to-order modern furniture. It was a strange contrast to, and an odd oasis in, a period house full of Chippendale furniture as well as paintings and sculpture—Cézannes, a Manet, a Renoir, two Brancusis, a Rodin, and, in the upstairs hall, the Woolworth water-color series by Marin. In the front hall there was a beautiful Chinese screen, a bronze Buddha, and a gilt mirror, which later went to the White House to join its twin, already there.

Although I didn't realize it at the time, the atmosphere of the Crescent Place house intimidated some of my friends. One of them remembers lunching in the vast dining room, just the two of us and my governess, attended by the butler and a maid. When my mother was there, she was served first and ate at once and so quickly that she would finish before the last person had been served. We called that unfortunate seat “Starvation Corner” and tried not to sit there. We learned to keep a hand on our plates; otherwise they would be removed before our forks returned from our mouths. To this day, I eat much too fast. It's odd how long childhood habits stay with us.

When I was in high school, one friend, Mary Gentry, came home with me for the weekend and remembers coming down to breakfast alone. She was seated in the huge dining room when the butler approached and asked what she would like. She was so terrified that all she could think of was Grapenuts. The Grapenuts were brought and set before her by the butler, who stationed himself behind her chair. Mary remembers her horror as the sound of each bite echoed from every corner. She says she just stopped coming down to breakfast, even though she spent several weekends with me when her father and mother were away.

Wherever we were living, in Washington or at the farm, we were invariably busy. We always existed on a strict regimen of lessons and a multiplicity of planned activities after school and during the summer, too. We spent a lot of time riding, especially on the miles of trails surrounding the farm, or in Rock Creek Park in Washington. When I was nine, the Washington Evening Star carried a photo of me on Pete, my small horse, giving me credit for being an “accomplished equestrienne.” I actually wasn't very good at riding and didn't like it much, either. Nonetheless, riding was part of our routine, and I had to do it.

There were music lessons, carrying on the traditions of Mrs. Coleman. There were even posture lessons, for I was thought to stoop too much—and still do, despite the lessons. We also all received instruction in the Dalcroze method, a kind of dance that gave you a sense of rhythm. One thing I remember is using my arms to a one-two-three beat as my feet were marching to a one-two beat. It wasn't easy.

There were also French lessons, with a woman who lived with us for years at a time to teach us. She was not a relative, but her last name was the same as ours, Mademoiselle Gabrielle Meyer. On weekends we would be called on to give recitations in French. To this day, nearly seventy years later, I can still recite bits of La Fontaine's Fables and certain speeches from Cyrano de Bergerac , which I adored. For some reason, Mademoiselle Meyer departed for France when I was nine. Even though I went on with French through high school and my French today is fairly fluent, it remains nine-year-old French.

Sports were a major part of our program. In summers, there were tutors for my brother, one of whom organized the making and flying of kites. Bill even had a wrestling teacher, and my sister Bis occasionally inserted herself into his lessons. As we grew older, there was tennis all the time. For a few years in the very early 1930s, a tennis professional lived with us in the summer and worked as a coach, mostly for Bis. I had one short lesson a day.

My mother was more actively involved with us on the every-other-summer camping trips we took, although at least one of the governesses usually came along. My father never took to camping the way my mother did; he didn't like the cold and was uncomfortable in it. He would ride for about ten minutes into the wilderness, then turn to the guide and demand, “Is there a phone anywhere around here?” (Of course, now there would be.) One night, on a later trip, the full moon lit up the sky so brilliantly I heard him call out, “Someone turn out the moon.”

My mother's diary about Bill's first camping trip contains some of the few negative notes she ever wrote about the children. This time, they—I was still too young to go—were described as quarrelsome and “need much careful handling. I had not realized that they have been getting rather selfish and spoiled.” She was distressed at the difficulties of three as opposed to two children, comparing them to a basket of eels.

Mother saw these trips as bringing us closer to the realities of life and making us more independent. She once said that this was a way to show us life outside large houses. I suppose it did, but the lesson had its limits. There were five ranch hands on the trip to California, eleven saddle horses, and seventeen packhorses—not exactly roughing it.

I was taken on the last of these camping trips, one to the Canadian Rockies in August of 1926. We rode through the mountains on Western saddles and camped at night, with occasional fishing excursions. Again, there were a lot of packhorses carrying our gear and cowboys to put up the tents. We children and our guides caught fish, and my father caught colds. Mother kept a brief diary of this expedition, too, and the following excerpt represents an aspect of her philosophy that she imposed on us:

Mountain climbing was one of Mother's favorite occupations, but she never succeeded in inculcating this passion in any of us.

Some years we would make trips to Europe, my first when I was eleven. One of the few diaries I ever started and kept was from this trip to Europe in the summer of 1928. We went from France to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and back to France. My diary reflects all the interests of an eleven-year-old: noting that our cabin on the old British liner the Berengaria was the “Prince of Whales suite,” giving the number of steps between floors on the Eiffel Tower, and retelling the story of the opening of Napoleon's casket when it was moved to Les Invalides. I remember being reinforced in my idea of being separate from the older children by having to stay with Ruthie in Switzerland in our hotel while my mother climbed to the top of the mountain with Flo and Bis, as well as staying on in Switzerland when the older children and my parents went to Italy. Ruth and I were deemed not old enough to appreciate museums; instead, we were parked in a resort hotel with the governess, where we took part in diversions created by the hotel to occupy their little guests. One old photo shows a fancy-dress party, which I actually remember enjoying; I went as a goosegirl with Ruthie as my goose.

Despite swimming in the Marne and visits to Notre Dame and Versailles, my only really vivid memory of this entire trip is of the suffocating, swirling cigar smoke in the car with all the windows closed as I rode with my father. He smoked only cigars, long rich expensive cigars made of Cuban tobacco, and had one lit pretty constantly. It was almost unendurable in small spaces, usually cars or trains with closed windows, but I gradually got used to it or at least came to terms with it. He had a private keg at Dunhills, where they kept his special brand of tobacco. He also had his own brand of extremely strong bourbon, with his name on it. I still have the top of one of the barrels.

Three years after this first trip to Europe, we returned, this time spending a lot of time in Germany. Most memorable for me was a visit to Einstein at his home, which I described in a letter to my father, who had remained at home at work:

In 1929, my father bought a ranch in Kelly, Wyoming, in the Teton Valley. The ranch, Red Rock, was beautiful, and in those days very remote, reached only after a two-hundred-mile drive from Rock Springs, the last thirty miles over winding mountain roads. Red Rock Ranch's seven hundred acres lay right at the foot of the beautiful Tetons, a dramatic red clay range. Dad took Flo, Bill, and me there in September of the year he bought it, when I was twelve, and we spent time riding, fishing, hiking, and target shooting. Because we were teenagers or soon to be and preoccupied with our various activities, we were somewhat unenthusiastic about going, although we loved it once we arrived. It makes me sad that my father sold the ranch after some years because he couldn't get us interested in it.

All of these trips and lessons did a great deal for our informal education. Our more formal education developed in some ways as oddly as did our informal one. The older children had started at the progressive Lincoln School in New York. When we moved to Washington, they went to the Friends School. I began my education in a Montessori school, another progressive school, where we were encouraged to pursue our own interests at our own pace—in other words, to do the things we liked most to do whenever we wanted to. I started by learning to tie shoelaces and progressed to reading a lot, which I enjoyed, and avoiding math, which I didn't. As a result of a rhythmic-dance class, using fancy tie-dyed scarves, I became adept at standing on my head and turning cartwheels. I spent the years from kindergarten through the equivalent of the third grade there and left happily proficient in acrobatics and sadly delinquent in arithmetic.

At the age of eight, I entered the fourth grade at Potomac School, only two blocks from our house. Potomac was a private conventional grammar school, and so I went from a free-form, permissive society to a completely structured school where the desks were in rows, the school day was programmed, there was homework, and—worst of all—they were starting fractions, which looked like a foreign language to me.

Entering Potomac as a new girl was difficult. I think of my life in my early years there as being solitary. I felt awkward, out of place, and different, especially in the ribbed socks that no one else wore. It was the last class in which there were both girls and boys; from fifth through eighth grades, beyond which Potomac didn't go, there were only girls, as was the case at Madeira, where I went to high school, and for my first two years of college, at Vassar.

Potomac School proved to be my first big adjustment—one that helped me with a basic lesson of growing up: learning to get along in whatever world one is deposited. I had to observe what was done, to imitate. I had to cope with my loneliness, my differences, and become some other person. I was more or less alone until my second year there, or fifth grade, when I figured out how to start making friends by inviting people over to the house. Rose Hyde became my best friend, despite the way I extended my initial invitation to her: “Rose, I've called everyone else and nobody can come over. Can you?” She could, and it was the beginning of a long friendship.

By the seventh and eighth grades, I had made some other friends: Julia Grant and Madeline Lang—both daughters of army officers, and Julia the granddaughter of President Grant. When we studied the Civil War in sixth grade, the students brought in pictures of their relatives who had fought in the war. Rose brought one of her great-grandfather, who was a clergyman in the Confederate Army. Julia came with the famous photograph of General Grant leaning against a tree. “Guess why he's leaning up against that tree,” Rose cracked. “Because he's too drunk to stand up.” Julia socked her, knocking her down in the playground. Rose's mother had to write a note of apology to Mrs. Grant, and peace was restored.

Julia and Madeline visited me at the farm in Mount Kisco when I was twelve or thirteen—my first houseguests, an exciting event. I didn't exactly know what to do to entertain them, so I kept asking my mother, “What shall we do?” I remember being solidly scolded for asking such a stupid question when we were surrounded by swimming pools and tennis courts and bowling alleys. Mother's point of view was understandable, given the environment of luxury, but I felt ill-at-ease entertaining and unable to cope.

My early dancing and acrobatics helped me athletically. By the fifth grade, I was fairly coordinated and had become proficient at team sports. Potomac was divided into two groups, the Reds and the Blues, which competed fiercely in games, races, volleyball, and other sports. I was on the Red team and was inclined to be bossy, a trait of which I was quite unaware until Miss Preisha—the gym teacher, on whom I had a crush—pulled me aside one day and told me she thought I might be elected captain of the Reds if I didn't tell people what to do so much. Suddenly I could hear myself egging people on or giving orders. I took her advice and, miracle of miracles, it worked! I became captain. This small triumph gave me great secret satisfaction. I had had my first social success, a sign that something was working.

When I got to the eighth grade, I was sent to Miss Minnie Hawkes's dancing school. My shyness made the class an ordeal to begin with, but adding to my torture was my height. I had grown tall—one of the tallest in the class—and had feet that were pretty big, too. During this time, my mother had a sudden fit of economy—or it may have been a genuine inability to shop—so I went off to dancing school in two hand-me-down dresses of Bis's. I still remember that one was pale-peach velvet and the other was red silk. Since the back of the latter was thought to be too low, it was filled in with other material in a not inconspicuous patching job. To complete the ensemble, my governess bought me gold kid shoes. The other little girls had flat pumps and puff sleeves. My shoes were high heels—that's all the store had in my size—adding at least two inches to my height. This odd apparition, of course, towered over the little boys, with the expectable disastrous results.

At about this period, we girls were all sending away for samples of soap and shampoo and trading them in the playground. Like my friends, I also collected photographs of favorite movie stars, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, whose movies I saw on weekends. I memorized—in German—“Falling in Love Again,” a song from The Blue Angel . And we voraciously read movie magazines.

Also like most young people, I had fantasies, but I recognized them even then as being just that. One was that it would be great to be a model. I once expressed this notion to my high-school friend Nancy White, who returned me to reality by asking, “What of? Houses?” The other fantasy I suppose I shared with many children was that of being “famous”— maybe not a movie star (although I had wispy visions of entering a room like Dietrich)—but in some way being successful and having people know who I was. The strange thing is that after Watergate to some small extent the fantasy came true. I always found this hard to believe—both pleasurable and a little embarrassing—but the shadow of my mother's enormous ego lent the whole thing a healthy reality check.

For high school, I attended Madeira, which, when I was a freshman, was located in Washington, near Dupont Circle. My father greatly admired Madeira's founder, Lucy Madeira Wing, and was involved in helping her finance the school and move it to a beautiful new site in Virginia in my second year, when I became a five-day boarder, returning home on weekends. (Much later, my parents donated to the school the 178 acres they owned adjoining its original land.)

The Meyer girls were all automatically sent to Madeira. Miss Madeira had some advanced ideas and attempted to broaden our horizons. She believed, for instance, that God was a woman. Under the guise of Bible class, she attempted to enlighten us about poverty. She used her bully pulpit to try to mold us into some species of “Shavian Fabian,” as Rose Hyde called it. The school itself evidenced a very egalitarian spirit. Our uniforms helped obscure our differing financial backgrounds, and we generally didn't know or care about anyone's social standing. But, not surprisingly, we were rather narrowly cast. The Depression raged all around us at Madeira, but rarely hit home hard. A “Poverty Party” was held, with the proceeds donated to the Social Welfare Fund.

Miss Madeira ran a tight ship in a strict age. Her motto, which she often included in her talks to the school assemblies, was full of puritan drive: “Function in disaster. Finish in style.” Boarders were allowed to go into town to shop at one department store, though a chaperone had to stand guard in the shoe department because a man held your foot. One of my friends, Jean Rawlings, was invited to have lunch with her roommate and her roommate's father. “Impossible,” said the housemother, “you can't go out with your roommate's father.” Apparently, several years before, a girl had run away with another student's father.

Despite my penchant for law-abiding ways, I participated in one illegal activity. I joined a secret society, Vestes ad Mortuum, or Virgins Unto Death—an odd goal, I must say. In the middle of the night, we virgins arose, donned heavy rain-capes that Miss Madeira had procured from a French monastery, hiked a mile into the woods, and buried a pair of galoshes—the significance of which is unfortunately lost on me now. Vestes ad Mortuum flourished for several years after I graduated, until one envious girl who had not been tapped for membership squealed to Miss Madeira.

Dances were held at school about twice a year. Of course, no boys were allowed, so all the girls put on their evening dresses and corsages and danced with each other. The taller girls, who led, as I did, often found it difficult adjusting to male dancing partners in later life.

Social progress came slowly. I didn't get around to boys for years. One New Year's Eve during high school, when I was about sixteen, I went with my family to one of the famous dances given by Evalyn Walsh McLean. My brother was nice enough to cut in on me. Since I knew virtually no one, we danced on and on together. The lights finally went out, an electric sign lit up saying “Happy New Year,”“Auld Lang Syne” was sung, and my brother looked at me and said, “This is the last New Year's Eve I'm ever going to spend with you.”

When I was about seventeen, I made a determined effort to learn how to appeal to the boys in the stag line at parties and dances. I noticed that if you laughed uproariously at the silliest joke and acted lively, as though you were having a wonderful time, the boys thought you were attractive and appealing. I applied this knowledge shamelessly. I faked it, but achieved a passing measure of popularity. So I gradually made my way through parties in Washington, at which I managed not to get “stuck” with one boy, which was the nightmare. I knew one or two of my brother's friends from his Washington school days, and there were boys who occasionally took me to the parties and sometimes to movies. While at Vassar, I was invited to a few weekends at male colleges. But not until I got to the University of Chicago, years later, did I finally find real male friends and occasionally beaux, many of whom I frightened away through diffidence and not knowing how to cope.

I worked hard to be like everyone else at Madeira. I played on the varsity team in basketball, hockey, and track. I sang in the glee club. I was made to take piano lessons and practiced the same Beethoven sonata, the second movement of the Appassionata , every day for about a year. My schoolmates came to dread the never-changing clanging that emanated from my practice room, but I did learn something about musical structure in the process. I also appeared in a one-act melodrama produced by the Dramatic Association. My role was that of a handsome duke who was the cause of numerous deaths.

I was interested in journalism and joined the staff of the school magazine, appropriately called Tatler . Although we aimed to be “influential and stirring,” our editorials focused as much on the weather as on social issues. Many advertisements appeared as well, including one with a headline that read: “Give those developing curves a good home in a Redfence corselette.”

At Madeira, as an upperclassman, I also had my first certified success of a worldly kind. To my stunned amazement, I was elected president of the senior class. I had no idea of anything approximating general liking and/or approval of me by others. It gave me inordinate pleasure, but it gave my father even more.

At school we were much more concerned with sports, friends, and vacations than with the real world. In fact, my interest in politics was nil through most of my early school years. I remember one debate during the presidential campaign of 1932, in which, following the Republican pattern of my parents, I spoke for Hoover. I couldn't have known what I was talking about; I only knew that my father worked in the Hoover administration, and I believed in my father. My classmate Robin Kemper, daughter of James Kemper, a prominent Chicago Democrat, spoke for Roosevelt. It seemed almost automatic that we should all espouse our parents' views.

Despite my successes in high school, I left Madeira with scant training for the life I was later to lead. I still felt fairly different and shy and believed I had only a few friends. Apparently my classmates didn't see me the way I saw myself. My senior yearbook entry describes a girl known for her laugh and her manly stride. My class prophecy read: “Kay's a Big Shot in the newspaper racket.” But I envisaged no such future for myself or, in fact, any specific future at all. Rather than creating my own way, what I was trying to do all the time was figure out how to adjust to whatever life I found. I would have preferred to be trailblazing, and of course adventurous and daring like Bis, but the poem chosen to accompany my class picture at Madeira reveals a different kind of person: “Those about her from her shall read the perfect ways of honor.” In other words, Goody Two-Shoes.

I N 1921, my mother had met William L. Ward, one of the last of the great old-time enlightened political bosses. He pretty much ran Westchester County, where Mount Kisco was located, and he lured her into more active involvement in the county's Republican politics. Bill Ward became her mentor, her supporter, her leader, and her close friend, and persuaded her that she should get more involved in civic affairs. Her passionate acceptance of this idea and espousal of public service, added to that of my father, meant that we grew up with the belief that no matter what you did professionally, you automatically had to think about public issues and give back, either in interest in your community or in public service—you had to care.

Soon Ward had created a county Recreation Commission, consisting of five women, with my mother as chairman. Under her leadership, the commission started summer camps for underprivileged children. She helped found choral groups all over the county, and she organized a big annual music festival for adults and children, which at first took place under a huge tent. Then, largely at Mother's instigation, Bill Ward built a County Center, which opened in May of 1930, a large, all-purpose auditorium in White Plains that is still in use. The center housed everything from plays and concerts to poultry and other animal shows. Over the years my mother presided at various events held there, including a performance by the Metropolitan Opera that coincided with the annual poultry show in the basement. To ensure that the roosters wouldn't be crowing at the same time as the divas, she rigged up a system whereby cardboard was put in their cages so they couldn't raise their heads to crow.

Mother also went to work in Republican politics, and with such vigor that by 1924 she became a delegate to the Republican Convention. Later, as she became even more involved, she traveled in support of her candidates and causes. We composed a poem during the 1924 campaign year: “Coolidge and Dawes, Coolidge and Dawes. When Mother's away, they're the cause.” When she was invited to state office and urged by women to run for Congress, she refused, on the grounds that “my husband and my family must come first.” I went with her to Franklin Roosevelt's first inaugural in 1933 and watched Roosevelt come out in front of the Capitol and make his famous address. I distinctly recall Mother looking at the pathetic departing figure of Hoover contrasted with the triumphant Roosevelt, who appeared beaming on the platform just as a rain shower ended, the clouds parted, and a strong ray of sunshine illuminated his handsome, glowing face. She turned and said to me with remarkably little foresight, “Just wait. We'll be back in four years.” Mother was an especially emotional Roosevelt-hater.

My father was also involved in Republican politics, though in a less active way. He, in fact, worked for both parties on nonpartisan things, from the War Industries Board to the Farm Loan Board to the Federal Reserve Board. By the mid-1920s, he had helped revive American agriculture through his work on the War Finance Corporation, which had special authorization to make loans for the benefit of farmers and livestock growers. He liquidated the corporation early in 1925 in an achievement that was widely recognized as remarkable. As Merlo Pusey described it in his biography of my father:

During my childhood, when my father was busy with his series of government jobs, my parents were mostly absent. When they were home, there were formal moments when we would see them. My mother always had her breakfast in bed, and my father usually had his in her bedroom, on a small table beside her. We went upstairs to see them for a little while before we went our separate ways. Mother sometimes took one of us for a drive in the park in the afternoon or had us in for a talk in her bedroom, but these occasions were few and far between, and more often than not the exchanges were one-way. Nonetheless, I loved these times and once commented that since she was so busy, perhaps we should make appointments to meet—a story she used to repeat as quaint.

My parents went out to dinner most evenings, or entertained elaborately at home. Sometimes I visited with Mother as she dressed, or when she was being massaged or manicured. My mother impressed me as being incredibly glamorous, regal, and beautiful, and I was secretly proud when she appeared at school functions elegantly dressed. But though I was deeply fond of her when I was very young, I was awed by and terrified of her at the same time. With the rarest exceptions, I was much too scared ever to consider disobeying. On the few occasions I did, the results made a lasting impression. On my first trip to Europe, when I was eleven, Mother told Bill and me to go to the ship's barber to get our hair cut. We had another plan. Bill told me to tell her there was a line waiting and that we would go later, and I mindlessly carried out his order, something I tended to do too much throughout my life. Mother somehow found out there wasn't any line at the barber's and severely reprimanded me for lying, which I wasn't even aware I was doing, and put me alone in my cabin. I was crushed, but the episode made an indelible impression on me about the importance of telling the truth.

A few years later, as a freshman in high school, I transgressed again on the coiffeur front—I cut my long curly black hair against my mother's will. I awaited her reaction with fear and trepidation and was puzzled and a bit humiliated when she failed to notice the change until at last I called her attention to it. She then shrugged it off, leaving me confused. It had taken such courage to do.

Children watch and listen to their parents, sometimes critically but sometimes unquestioningly. Each of my parents influenced us in large ways and small. Certain of their habits rubbed off and left their mark. One very peculiar habit I picked up unconsciously from my mother was a tendency to be suspicious and tight and ungenerous about small things. Though she was very lavish in some ways, she would complain about small bills she received, certain that people were cheating her. She would buy a fur and say, “You have to be careful, because you can choose one and they'll substitute another.” She said, “If you have your pearl necklace restrung you have to sit and watch to be sure you get your own pearls back.” She was mean about raises for people in the house. She literally hated to give things away, even praise or encouragement. I, too, developed an inability to spend money, along with a dark suspicion that people were taking advantage of me and an inability to enjoy giving.

Many of these habits were overcome when I married Phil Graham, who was exceedingly generous and imaginatively giving. Some habits I have never overcome are odd ones I inherited from my father. Despite the vast scale on which we lived, my father had peculiar fixations on certain small expenses. He preached tiny economies with zeal—using things up completely, never wasting, never phoning if you could wire, or better still, write. The compulsion I am still left with is turning out every light before I go to bed at night. To this day, alone in a house I am totally unable to leave a light on—I will go up and down halls and staircases if I know a light is on. I tell myself to stop, that it doesn't matter, yet then I go and turn it off.

Some lessons were impressed on me by reverse example. When I was young I perceived grown-ups behaving quite oddly at times. I remember being shocked or dismayed by things I observed and making silent vows not to behave as they did when I grew up. For instance, my mother, when confronted with a line waiting at the movies, would go up to the box office and say, “I am Mrs. Eugene Meyer of The Washington Post,” and demand to be taken in and seated. At that time, she did indeed get in. I cringed with embarrassment and hoped the ground would swallow me up. It had such a lasting effect on me that I have never been able to deal with headwaiters in restaurants who put you “in Siberia” rather than the better part of the restaurant. I just go meekly to Siberia.

As the years went on, my mother seemed to have a more and more difficult time emotionally. She became increasingly engrossed in her friendships with the series of men in her life, only one of which, I believe, may have been a true affair—the one with Bill Ward. She was constantly beset with colds, pneumonia, or various other illnesses, and she reacted to each one with the greatest amount of care, self-pity, and drama, demanding and receiving constant visits, with all of us dancing attendance. In retrospect, I wonder if depression contributed to this intense concentration on her health.

She also started to drink more heavily, sometimes starting as early as ten in the morning, at least during one period in her life. This was a problem that greatly worried my father and was an escalating burden to him and to all of us. Even her drinking was done in a somewhat eccentric way. There was an old-fashioned locked whiskey-and-wine closet in the basement to which only my father had the key, so he would have to make repeated trips to the cellar and therefore knew exactly how much she was drinking. Of course, admonishments on this score never had an effect. The surprising thing is that she never bought whiskey herself or asked him for her own key.

My mother's effect on us was often contradictory. We received every encouragement for what we accomplished, yet her ego was such that she trampled on our incipient interests or enthusiasms. If I said I loved The Three Musketeers , she responded by saying I couldn't really appreciate it unless I had read it in French, as she had. Mother herself read constantly until the week she died—philosophy, history, biography, and all the English, American, French, German, and Russian classics. She had only scorn for people who read light novels, let alone trash or time-wasters.

The summer between fourth and fifth grades I spent almost entirely by myself reading in a room on the third floor of Mount Kisco, where I went through all of Dumas, eight volumes of Louisa May Alcott (starting with Little Women), Treasure Island , and a stirring adventure series by a man named Knipe. I counted up at the end, found that I had read around one hundred books, and wrote my parents that I was “positively floating in books.” I couldn't have been happier. Unfortunately, this early passion for reading somehow diminished after the fifth grade, until I read only sporadically. A little later on I was concentrating on movie magazines, Redbook , and Cosmopolitan . Later still, I resumed reading, particularly loving Dickens's Great Expectations and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment .

Mother set impossibly high standards for us, creating tremendous pressures and undermining our ability to accomplish whatever modest aims we may have set for ourselves. Fundamentally, I think we all felt we somehow hadn't lived up to what she expected or wanted of us, and the insecurities and lack of self-confidence she bred were long-lasting. But despite whatever personal doubts about us she may have had, the picture of her family she presented to the world was unblemished. She created and then perpetuated the myth of her children's perfection. From her point of view, we were all happy, bilingual overachievers. Indeed, on some levels she was proud of us. She used to compare us to the characters in a then-popular novel called The Constant Nymph , about an eccentric, boisterous, and madly funny family known as the Sanger Circus. Other myths she propagated about us were that Meyer girls were brighter, more attractive, funnier, smarter, more successful, this or that—in short, better than anyone else. Most important, she felt we should be different, more intellectual, eccentric even.

In addition, there were expectations of us for social success, also difficult to define and deal with. Popularity at school or parties was thought to be a necessity for Meyer girls. I always said I had a wonderful time at a party whether I did or not, and quite often I didn't. If one of my parents came to school or college, I thought I had to assemble a group of friends so that I could at least give the appearance of being in an acceptable swim.

When we were very young, the McLeans, who then owned The Washington Post , gave children's parties at which expensive favors—even watches—were given to their guests. Mother told me in what poor taste this was, and that she wouldn't let my sisters go. A friend of hers suggested that perhaps it was important to be seen there, to which my mother responded, “I want my children to be the ones to want to be with.”

Her predisposition to think this way also meant that she condescended to the average, to the pedestrian, to the everyday. This negative view of the commonplace became very much a part of me and my confusion. I knew that I wasn't any of the things that were held out as desirable. I also knew that I wanted to fit into the world—to be liked by people around me. Yet I adopted a lot of the family's philosophy, as did my older sisters and brother. I remember in college saying to my friend Mary Gentry as we crossed the Vassar campus, “Do you like the girls here?”“Yes,” she said, bringing me up short to the possibility that my criteria were suspect. I thought I should be condescending toward nice, normal people and only like the brilliant eccentrics. It took me a long time to stop thinking that I had to be different and that there was something wrong with being normal or average, and to get to the point of enjoying a variety of people for what they were.

I can't say I think Mother genuinely loved us. Toward the end of her life, I was a success in her eyes, and perhaps that is what she loved. Yet, with all her complexity, I felt closer throughout my early childhood to my mother than to the very distant and rather difficult figure of my father. I liked him, but always from a distance. Actually, he delighted in children and was rather jolly with us, but a little awkward. At most, he would take one of us as a small child onto his lap and dangle a watch at our ear. When Ruth and I were very young, he would come into our bedroom before breakfast for a short period of roughhouse play.

But though he lacked the gift of intimacy, in many ways his supportive love still came through to me. He somehow conveyed his belief in me without ever articulating it, and that was the single most sustaining thing in my life. That was what saved me. I realized this only in retrospect, however, since our relationship took time to grow.

S ENSITIVE SUBJECTS were rarely mentioned at our house, but three were particularly taboo—money, my father's being Jewish, and sex. None of the three was ever articulated by any of us in the family; in fact, nothing difficult or personal was discussed among us. There was such an aversion to talking about money or our wealth that, ironically, there was, in some odd ways, a fairly spartan quality to our lives. We were not showered with conspicuous possessions, elaborate toys, or clothes. At one point, when Florence was eleven, my mother wrote in her diary that she had gotten Flo very modest presents for her birthday—“books, pralines and other simple things.” Though Mother felt that she had been a bit mean, she also felt that “it is the best way to continue their chance for happiness to restrain the desire for possessions.”

I had less than most of the girls in my class—certainly fewer clothes. My spare wardrobe in grammar school consisted of one or two jumpers and blouses for school, and one best dress. We were also treated strictly in the matter of allowance. I still remember a telegram Bis sent my father from Vassar: “Allowance early or bust.” He wired back, “Bust.” The only discussions I do remember relating to wealth had to do with being told that you couldn't just be a rich kid, that you had to do something, to be engaged in useful, productive work; you couldn't and shouldn't do nothing . Working was always a part of my life. I remember one Christmas vacation, when I was probably about fifteen, spent at the Federal Reserve Board learning to draw graphs.

My mother's ambivalence about money and what it brought to her no doubt contributed to her own unwillingness to talk about it. Once, in 1922, after a visit to a Utah copper mine that had yielded my father great financial gains, she wrote in her diary: “[The mine] was an interesting sight but the village that led up to it appalled me.… This is where [the money] comes from and I spend it on Chinese art but it was a shock to think that we live on money that is produced under such conditions.”

Remarkably, the fact that we were half Jewish was never mentioned any more than money was discussed. I was totally—incredibly—unaware of anti-Semitism, let alone of my father's being Jewish. I don't think this was deliberate; I am sure my parents were not denying or hiding my father's Jewishness from us, nor were they ashamed of it. But there was enough sensitivity so that it was never explained or taken pride in. Indeed, we had a pew in St. John's Episcopal Church—the president's church, on Lafayette Square—but mainly because the rector was a friend of the family. When I was about ten, all of us Meyer children were baptized at home to satisfy my devout Lutheran maternal grandmother, who thought that without such a precaution we were all headed for hell. But for the most part, religion was not part of our lives.

One of the few memories I have of any reference to my being Jewish is of an incident that took place when I was ten or eleven. At school we were casting for reading aloud The Merchant of Venice , and one classmate suggested I should be Shylock because I was Jewish. In the same way I had once innocently asked my mother whether we were millionaires—after someone at school accused my father of being one—I asked if I was Jewish and what that meant. She must have avoided the subject, because I don't remember the answer. This confusion about religion was not limited to me: my sister Bis recalls that at lunch in our apartment in New York once, with guests present, she blurted out, “Say, who is this guy Jesus everyone is talking about?”

My identity as Jewish did not become an issue until I reached college and a discussion arose with a girl from Chicago who was leaving Vassar. She had been asked if she would see another acquaintance, a Jewish girl, also from Chicago. “Oh, no,” she replied, “you can't have a Jew in your house in Chicago.” My best friend, Connie Dimock, later told me how horrified she was to have this said in front of me. Only then did I “get it”—and this was 1935, with Hitler already a factor in the world.

About the third thing that was never discussed in our family, sex, I knew nothing for a surprisingly long time. I had no idea what sex was or how babies were conceived. In fact, it was as if our rigorous schedules and exercise and athletic program were constructed to keep us from thinking too much about it. I once asked my mother what really happened during sex, telling her I'd read about the sperm and the ova but wondered how it all worked. She responded, “Haven't you seen dogs in the street?” Although unfortunately I hadn't, I naturally said, “Of course,” and that was the end of the conversation. Mother finally brought herself to speak to me about having periods, or “becoming a woman.”“Don't worry about it, Mother,” I replied, “it happened months ago.”

Because these matters were never discussed, I was almost totally unaware of all of them—money, religion, and sex. It's peculiar: I realized, of course, that the houses were big and that we had a lot of servants, but I didn't know we were rich any more than I knew we were Jewish. In some ways it was quite bizarre; in others, quite healthy. Equally odd was how little we were taught about the practical aspects of life. I didn't know how to manage the simplest tasks. I didn't know how to dress, sew, cook, shop, and, rather more important, relate to people of any kind, let alone young men. My governess and I did some minor shopping, but as I grew up I mostly inherited party dresses from my sisters, until, when I was eighteen, Mother took me to Bergdorf Goodman for French clothes of staggering beauty and sophistication, which were well beyond my years and whose quality was wasted on young people who dressed appropriately. There was nothing in between for everyday.

I was always well fed and cared for, of course. In fact, my mother was constantly reminding us of how lucky we were, how much we owed our parents, how far-seeing and wonderful my father was to have taken care of us all. And we were indeed lucky. We had vast privileges. We had parents with solid values. Our interests were aroused in art and politics and books. But to all of this I brought my own feelings of inability and inferiority—not only to my mother, but to my older sisters and brother. I was, I thought, realistic about my own assets and abilities as I grew older. I was not very pretty. I grew tall early, and therefore seemed ungainly to myself. I didn't think I could excel, and was sure I'd never attract a man whom I would like and who would not be viewed with condescension by my parents and siblings.

In all the turmoil of the family and our strange isolation both from our parents and from the outside world, we children were left to bring ourselves up emotionally and intellectually. We were leading lives fraught with ambivalence. It was hard to have an identity. An early example of this came one day when the telephone rang in the playroom and there was no grown-up present. Bis very fearfully picked up the phone and said hello. A male voice impatiently asked, “Who is this? Who is this?,” to which Bis replied, “This is the little girl that Mademoiselle takes care of.” That was the only way she could think of to describe herself to a strange grown-up.

So the question of who we really were and what our aspirations were, intellectual or social, was always disquieting. The more subtle inheritance of my strange childhood was the feeling, which we all shared to some extent, of believing we were never quite going about things correctly. Had I said the right thing? Had I worn the right clothes? Was I attractive? These questions were unsettling and self-absorbing, even overwhelming at times, and remained so throughout much of my adult life, until, at last, I grew impatient with dwelling on the past. 4Qad9fZ3RZ804uhlHub0KNnV3bFTFuu7MkR1LdRe8HjOghKiCR80y21QPEfLcCXW