The Number Two Kid
My mother was elegant, charming and intelligent, and had no formal education of any kind, but she had very definite ideas about “educating” her two daughters. In her mind, education was more than mere schooling. Book learning, she reasoned, was for boys. Girls needed special skills of another sort. Unfortunately, many of those skills were not natural to me.
Unlike many parents who give the greatest attention and training to the most gifted of their offspring, my mother operated in a very different way. Equality was the key to her philosophy. Bring the laggards up to par.
Don’t think that I’m bitter, just curious. They say that one’s pecking order in a family is important. A study has shown that the eldest child is more likely to be gifted or successful than its younger siblings. (That word “siblings” has a nasty, hissing sound.) The youngest child has a pretty good future, too. I think that this rumor must have reached my mother, for she seemed Hell-bent on determining that I, the Number Two Kid of four, would be accomplished and successful, despite my rank.
As the only child of older parents, my mother had had an unusual childhood, much of it spent in Europe. Her formal education stopped at the age of six when she caught a bad cold in Rome and her parents panicked and withdrew her from the convent school. For the rest of her life her father had been her only teacher and she had a great respect for him and for all kinds of learning. For her children she wanted good schools, travel, and certain social skills.
She must have studied her four children and seen that the boys were natural students, who later excelled in writing and teaching. My sister Ann and I were not brains and would need grooming in the social skills. College education was for men, it was thought by my family, but for women, certain arts were deemed very important. Music dancing, tennis, golf, bridge playing and conversation were vital attributes for a well-rounded modern woman.
As I said, most parents believe in aiding and encouraging a child who has special gifts. My sister was graceful and athletic, and was a natural dancer. I was awkward and dowdy. Guess which one of us was given dance lessons at a school for professional children? Me, the gawk. Naturally, this made my sister angry. “ I’m the one with the talent,” she would whine. She was too young, at ten, to understand the strange workings of my mother’s mind: be happy if you have one talented child. Now put your efforts into helping the untalented one.
It was just that kind of reasoning that gave me two deadly years with Miss Moore. She was a lady of an uncertain age, with dyed pinkish-red hair, and a swan-like neck, which she veiled in floating scarves of chiffon. Year after year she attempted to teach me how to master the piano. I remember only two pieces that I could play without making a fool out of myself: the Ave Maria and a showy number that involved a lot of cross-over hand motions, Sur La Glace a Sweetbriar. I always was puzzled by that name. I think it had something to do with skating. It had a sort of gliding rhythm. Poor Miss Moore, she tried valiantly, but all of us knew the truth: my mother, my self and my teacher were wasting each other’s time and money.
I was a musical dud, but on the other hand, my Brother Billy had already shown signs of promise. For a while my mother had even toyed with the idea of giving him lessons with a young man who was a popular pianist at the Casino in Central Park, Peter Duchin. I don’t know if her idea was ever presented, or if she simply returned to her usual theme, help the neediest.
Playing a decent game of tennis was another one of the social skills that mattered in those days. There again the Number Three Kid, Ann, had a formidable forehand at an early age. Naturally she never had a lesson, but every Wednesday morning I was out on the clay courts of the local club, working on my backhand with a young schoolteacher who taught tennis in the summer. I did finally achieve a fairly respectable backhand, but I never could compete with my sister’s awesome forehand.
Ballroom dancing was by far the most daunting obstacle in my progress towards social perfection. The whole learning process at the pre-teen dancing classes was a torture, but by the time I was going to more mature parties, I really enjoyed myself. My sister could never understand this. “How come,” she would challenge, “You’re such a lousy dancer, yet you have such a good time!”
The answer is simple. Despite the futile lessons that I was given by my mother’ s efforts to bring me up to par, nobody ever tried to meddle with my only gift, a natural joie de vivre.
Having had a very sketchy education my self, I was always fascinated by the education, or lack of it, in my family members. My brothers, William and John, were the family scholars. William, the Number One Kid, became an author and a popular professor at Columbia University, and John, the last of the foursome, had an interesting career as a writer and editor. I attended his St. Mark’s graduation where he gave the valedictory address. He also became the family’s only member of Phi Beta Kappa.
From the moment of their births it was assumed that they would attend Harvard. Their father, William H. Appleton, was a member of the class of Harvard ‘06, where he excelled socially, if not academically. Appleton was a magic name at Harvard, whose Appleton Chapel had been named for some distant and wealthy relative. Anyone with the surname of Appleton qualified for a $300 scholarship, in those days.
My Johnston grandfather was just as gung-ho about Yale as his son-in-law was about Harvard, but this time Harvard beat Yale. John Taylor Johnston, his father, a founder and first president of the Metropolitan Museum, was one of the early graduates of New York University, and was the son of John Johnston, a Scottish immigrant who had prospered in America, and was a member of a group of business men who had started the small business college, which became the world famous institution of today. The son of the village miller in the small Scottish town of Moffat, John Johnston started as a clerk in a New York shipping firm, rose to become a partner, and eventually gained financial status as what was then known as a “merchant prince.”
His son was an equally astute businessman. John Taylor Johnston became a banker, a lawyer, and eventually the president of the Jersey Central Railroad, but when it came to educating his son, J. Herbert Johnston, he snubbed NYU in favor of Yale. Nothing but the best would do.
Ironically, my grandfather never made use of the privileges which came to him as a member of Yale, Class of 1877. Like my father, he seemed to have flourished in the social life of the college. There are no records of any academic or sports awards. The only souvenirs of his college days, preserved in old scrapbooks, are dance cards and faded class pictures. He kept meticulous records of expenses, however. (His Scottish ancestry, no doubt.) It seems that his bill from the photographer was higher than his tuition fees, and the cost of coal to heat his rooms.
Though a man of intelligence, my grandfather did not fret about becoming a workaholic like his father and grandfather. After graduation he was quite content to spend his bachelor years traveling in Europe and cultivating his interests in literature, the theatre, music and collecting antiques. He also treated himself and friends to salmon fishing in Canada. He was almost 40 when he fell in love with Celestine Noel who was acting in a French amateur production of Moliere’s “Le Bourjeois Gentilhomme.” As the eldest of seven children of French parents, “Teenie” as she was called, was almost 38, and close to 40 when they married and had their first and only child, my mother, Emilie Noel. (She had always hated her first name and in the future was called Noel.)
Her father must have been a very fine home-teacher, for in later life, Noel excelled in a number of ways: in addition to speaking French, Italian and German, she was smart enough to run a modest sized dress design business, did a short stint in substituting for a well-known fashion writer, and had an article on Jane Austen printed in a university publication. Like Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront”, had she had the opportunities that she deserved, she “coulda been a contender.” This highly intelligent woman could have been a writer, doctor, lawyer, or anything she chose.
Having no knowledge about private schools in New York, she took a friend’s advice about where to send me when I reached school age. Miss Hewitt’s school had a fairly good reputation, so I was entered there. My memory of the place is rather vague as my stay was so short. I was speedily removed after a month or two when my mother believed that her friend’s child had been taught to do mirror writing. “This is no place for you,” she told me, “Sara’s learning to write upside down and backward.” Apparently she had never heard about neurological problems in some children.
For the rest of the year I was home-schooled as she had been. The two of us struggled with “Run, Dick, run” and “Jump Spot jump” until my mother wearied of the routine and made plans to enroll me in the Nightingale School on upper Fifth Avenue. It was actually called Miss Nightingale’s in the genteel fashion of those times. (There were also Miss Spence and Miss Chapin schools. Only the Brearley School was simply called “The Brearley.”)
My memory of those two years at Nightingale is rather fuzzy, but I recall a rather cozy place with gas logs in every room, and a kindly teacher named Miss Hellman. I had a problem fitting in with my classmates as my mother’s coaching had put me far ahead of my peers, and my mother was eventually informed that “Tina’s an incredibly bright little girl.”
That did it for my mother, who promptly withdrew me from a school that could have been so lacking in judgement. The next year I entered the Brearley School where they immediately cut me down to size. Of all the private girls’ schools in town, The Brearley was the leader. Perhaps it was a notch lower in social prestige than Chapin or Spence. (Its student body included a limited number of Jewish girls – but only the elite like the Warburgs and Rothschilds.) The Brearley had always prided itself on its more liberal admission policy as well as its reputation of attracting the type of girls who were high achievers. In spite of my so-called smarts, I could barely keep up with the homework, and I came down with so many Monday morning “sore throats” that my mother called my bluff and had my tonsils removed. She engineered a special deal with the family doctor to operate on my brother William (Billy) at the same time.
It was at St. Luke’s Hospital at the age of 14, while recovering, that I wrote a short story and sent it to a competition in Collier’s Magazine. I think Billy inspired me to do this. Seventy- six years later, I have yet to hear from the magazine. At that period writing was not my main interest. Acting was something that I really enjoyed, and at the Brearley the high mark of my years there was performing as “Dead Eye Dick” in the school’s production of “Pinafore”. I lurched about on the stage, one eye screwed up in a fearful grimace. A knockout performance.
Granted that Brearley was an outstanding school, and still is, it was not a happy place for me, especially after it moved to its new location on Eighty-third Street overlooking the East River. I have always been in love with ships and at first the views of the river traffic was truly exciting, but after a while the scene paled, and I began to find the grim, high-rise building, (the first such school architecture in the city) very depressing and intimidating. The place was more like a factory, where one punched in on entering or leaving. Though the ninth and tenth floors were given over to gyms where we played dodge ball and basketball, the place on the whole was as confining and cheerless as Alcatraz. Years and years later, I still have nightmares about running up and down the stairs in my attempt to escape.
In 1932, the decision for me to leave the Brearley and go to boarding school was particularly welcome as my parents had divorced and my mother had remarried. It seemed like a good idea to make things less complicated for my stepfather, David King, by sending me off to school. My older brother was already attending Harvard.
There were a number of girls’ boarding school under discussion, but when I heard the nautical sound of the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, I had no desire to visit any others. In contrast to the stark, urban atmosphere of my former school, Shipley was located in a lovely old Georgian house on a suburban street across the way from Bryn Mawr College. From the moment I stepped into the entrance hall with its tall case clock, well-worn antique rugs and its comfortable, rather shabby furniture, I felt right at home. The red brick architecture, so like my family’s houses, also charmed me.
Shipley was founded by Quakers as a preparatory for Bryn Mawr and as such had good credentials, but it did not aspire to the same academic goals as Brearley. I was enormously cheered to find that Shipley offered two study choices: the Academic for less gifted students like myself, and the College Preparatory for the more ambitious. In those Depression Era days, only about half the girls signed up for the college course. (Strangely enough, very few girls were attracted to Bryn Mawr. “Familiarity breeds etc, etc?”)
After stumbling along at the Brearley, it was heavenly to be able to choose Art History and Music Appreciation instead of Physics or Biology. Much as I enjoyed my Shipley studies, my career there as a scholar was also without distinction. Honor Roll achievers were allowed to study in their rooms instead of the study hall. My roommate, Jo, never sat in the study hall. In my three years at Shipley I made the Honor Roll just once, and in the Latin class they all but declared a school holiday when I actually rated a B on a paper. History. French and English were enjoyable, but I was a solid, but hardly outstanding student.
There was only one area in which I excelled: dramatics. In my second year I stayed that summer for an extra two weeks of special coaching with Samuel Arthur King, famed then as the dramatics teacher of Katherine Hepburn when she attended Bryn Mawr. Nora Joan King, his daughter, was slated to be Juliet in the school’s annual Shakespeare production. She was lovely, and perfect for the part. I stayed with the King family where I sweated over the role of Romeo. Yes, it was a giant step up from my part as “Dead Eye Dick” at the Brearley, but not nearly as much fun. It was at the time unprecedented for a student to have that kind of special training. Perhaps, like my mother, Mr. King believed in giving the weaker one, extra attention, pulling me up to par with his talented daughter. Nora Joan was so gifted that, months later, during the performance, I got so enthralled during the famous balcony scene that I forgot my lines. It was to be the last male part I ever played, thank God.
That year the French Club put on a production of the very play in which my grandmother had played the part of the saucy maid, Nicole, but I was less lucky and was stuck with the role of the wife in “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.” A dull part, but at least it was female. It was acted in French, of course.
In addition to acting, I also majored in extra-curricular activities, as president of the French Club, the Dramatic Club and was voted vice-president of my class. The class vice-presidency was generally won by the most agreeable, least challenging girl. I was ideal for this as I was not the best looking, nor the brightest, richest or best athlete in the class. As an athlete I was extremely competitive, but not very well coordinated. In short, I was likeable and non-threatening.
After three very happy, productive years at Shipley it came as a shock to every one when I left school and returned to New York at the end of my junior year. Most of my friends were in the class above and had left so I did not feel too badly about becoming a high school “drop out.” To this day, however, I am chagrined to think that I missed all the fun of being a senior and enjoying all the hoopla of graduation week. Why did I leave a place in which I had been so happy? Partly, I think, because of my ego. My mother had persuaded me to believe that my acting talent deserved more intensive training in New York. A family friend, Clayton Hamilton, a second string drama critic, encouraged me to enroll in Columbia University’s drama department, which was planning to produce a modern dress version of “The Taming of the Shrew”.
Soon after my return to New York I began to suspect my mother’s true reason for wanting me to come back home: her two- year marriage to David King was beginning to erode. Of his four step children, I was the only one with whom he was comfortable, and the others were away at school. (Though only ten, John was attending the first form at St. Mark’s, Ann had followed me into Shipley and Billy was still at Harvard.) It seemed that my role was to serve as a sort of buffer state between my mother and stepfather. It did not work. David and his valet, Aurelio, walked out, a year and a half later. (His beautiful yacht, a 36’ ketch, also left the scene, to my sorrow.)
Meanwhile, as the shrewish “Katherine,” I starred on Broadway, if you could call Columbia’s Macmillan Theatre on 116th Street and Broadway the real “White way.” I wore a provocative red dress and acted with such gusto that friend Clayton Hamilton wrote a nice piece in the Herald Tribune about the show, in which he described “seven curtain calls.” It pays to have friends in high places, as they say.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t kid myself into thinking that Columbia’s drama was anything but second-rate, and soon became far more interested in various writing courses. The exception was a course in play direction, which came in handy when, a year later, I applied for a job as a director in the Amateur Theatre Guild of Boston. That was undoubtedly the most educational experience of my life and will be described in a following section, “A Southern Odyssey.”
Did I resent my mother for luring me back to New York? Not really. After all, it had long been a family tradition for the females to be uneducated. In future years I would proudly watch my granddaughters, Stephanie and Katie receive their diplomas from Harvard and Hobart and would applaud as Stephanie received her commission as an Ensign in the Navy, but in my day women were trained in the social graces, and ranked very low on the intellectual ladder.
My grandmother, my role model for all of her life, was an intelligent, remarkably well-organized woman, who ran a hotel-sized household, but I never recall her talking about her school days. Perhaps in the French colony near Washington Square they had their own schools as well as their church and hospital. Neither she, her sisters nor or her three brothers (who went directly into the family glass and mirror factory) had any advanced education or gave any hint of school life. Never mind, my grandmother, “Tante Teenie” was beloved by all. She couldn’t quote Shakespeare, like her husband, but she was no dummy.
It took me 60 years to repair the gap in my high school education after I left Shipley. At the age of 77, through the Adult Education department of the Greenwich High School, I was awarded a GED diploma. It wasn’t easy, and I still consider it an achievement as important to me as publishing my first novel at 90. By then, after 47 years of marriage, Denis had died, and I had married Richard Bishop seven years before. (Our marriage will be dealt with in the final section, “A Recycled Bride.”)
Dick was an incredibly kind man who always indulged my whims. Twice a week he would drive the six miles from our backcountry house, drop me off at the class and return at nine to pick me up. I was spoiled rotten for almost nine years until his death, at 82. Without his encouragement, I doubt if I could have survived back-to-back math courses for a year and a half.
The decision to return to high school came about by accident. Among my many volunteer activities, I had become a literacy volunteer. My first assignment was to assist a beautiful Haitian woman, named Michael Thomas. Her real name was something that sounded like Michelle, but had been lost in translation. When I learned that my goal was to help her achieve her high school education, I had to confess my own lack. The literacy folk urged me to take the course my self. She was good at math. I was good at English and I still had enough French in my brain to help with coaching her English. In the mornings at ten thirty we used to study together at in a booth at McDonald’s in nearby Stamford. It was a very quiet period then, and far more pleasant than the stuffy little room in the Stamford Library where we had first started. We each worked from thick yellow volumes that contained the entire subjects, math, geography, science, history and English, which were to be studied before our final examination at the Wright Technical School in Stamford.
We must have been an odd couple when we appeared for the examination: a stocky, elderly, white-haired woman, and a very tall, strikingly handsome black woman. Unfortunately. Michael’s English, as I feared, was not good enough to pass, but later I did succeed, with further tutoring, to help her gain her citizenship. We have remained good friends for the past 15 years.
Ironically, by the time I returned to high school in 1984 I had led a very busy life as the long time volunteer chairman of Public Information at the local Red Cross chapter during a period when I also served as a writer and editor of the Greenwich Social Review (forerunner of the Greenwich Magazine) and some years later edited a quarterly newspaper, the Senior Outlook. During those years nobody checked my educational credentials. No doubt my acting talent helped me to present myself as a poised, well educated woman. I have always been a true believer in the power of the bluff.
When I showed up at the Greenwich High School on that first evening, my fellow students must have been puzzled at the sight of a 77-year-old woman with a lah-de-dah voice. They were far too polite to ask questions, but as time went on, one or two of them would shyly tell me, “You know, you’re kinda a role model for us.” To them, I was an enigma, a strange creature from another planet, but when it came to coping with math, I was just as dumb as the rest of them. From the first grade math had always been a challenge for me, which is why I elected to double my agony by taking those two back-to-back courses. (I skipped the English, geography and history sections.)
Both my math teachers were excellent. The woman was a dynamo. After some furious scribbles on the blackboard she would whirl swiftly, with the grace of a dancer and confront the class. Mrs. P. had a sharp and humorous mind that dared one to learn. Mr. G. of Latino background, had a quieter method of teaching, and he delighted in showing us shortcuts, most of which I’ve since forgotten. His class was attended by four very pregnant Latino women, who giggled and chattered together, until the teacher would politely entreat, “Please, ladies, no speak the Spanish.”
To my astonishment, I found myself actually enjoying both classes, and I told Mrs. P., “My school life would have been so different if I’d had a math teacher like you.”
Who could have believed that on my final examination, when the scores came in from Hartford, I would score higher in math than in the English section where one had to interpret a poem. Of course, I had always found poetry as puzzling as math. As expected, I did rate very high in the essay phase of the examination, where the subject was “Describe the job which you would least enjoy.” That was an easy one: being a waitress. There were two reasons cited: First, I was clumsy, and secondly, I was a snob.
Diplomas of any kind are handy to have, but they can’t compare with some life-changing experiences!