Me (second from left) with a few of my cousins
I come from an unusual family. My father wrote quiz show music themes; my mother, Susan, is the daughter of an Austrian charactor actor and an heiress who died when my mother was 12. Susan spent her life surrounded by stars of the theater and screen. On any given day, she would come home from school and find Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power, one of the Gabors, Melvyn Douglas, Helen Hayes or any one of dozens of lesser lights sitting in the living room. Therefore, she was very comfortable with adults early on. Before she was sixteen, she had traveled to Europe several times. She married an Italian director After a short marriage to my father (I was 5) and had two other children when I was 7 and 12. When she and the director divorced, she moved to California and my brothers (who have Italian names) spent the summers with their father in Italy.
Somehow, though I should have felt like the odd man out, I never really have, and I suppose that’s one of my mother’s great gifts. She treats everyone, be they royalty or floor washers, the same. She never met a stranger. It shouldn’t be a surprise that she favored all of her children. It is for this reason that my brothers and I enjoy a closeness today. Each summer, as soon as my brothers were on the plane and she had stopped crying, she’d say, “Okay, let’s do something outrageous.”
When I was 18, my father told me a family secret. He said that my mother hadn’t really loved him, though he loved her. The first time he saw her really, truly happy was the day she found out she was pregnant and the day I was born. Her stepmother (a Tony-winning actress) had more or less pushed her into the marriage at a frightfully young age. Was it to get her out of the house, was it out of jealousy, was it to keep her from making a mistake far worse than marrying someone she didn’t love, we’ll never know. What we do know is that my grandfather was against the marriage, and the ensuing argument ultimately broke up his own marriage. Looking at my mother and given her background, she was probably a little too street-smart, and her stepmother feared a scandal. Or, as my mother’s half-sister hinted once, and refused to discuss again, had my mother been discovered “necking” in the parlor one afternoon with a family friend? It remains a subject of great speculation.
Susan could have done anything with her life and did. A little modeling, writing, publicist/spokeswoman work in LA, European socialite. She fit in perfectly with the beautiful people and still does; at age 69, she is taken for many years younger. For her, it’s all on the surface. I never had a nanny, I didn’t go to boarding school, she didn’t take off for months at a time and leave me behind like all of her friends did. When there was a school event, she and my father were always there.
Marriage never gave her the happiness she sought. She grew up in too frenetic a home and therefore was easily bored with a day-to-day domestic routine. She was finally widowed by her third husband in 1991 and didn’t bother again. My own father died in a plane accident when I was twenty. She attended the service with my two brothers and her third husband, a wonderful man. It didn’t matter whether she had wanted to marry my father or not. He was my father, and the whole family had to respect him for that.
My mother considers Mother’s Day a manipulation of the card companies, so she never lets us give her gifts on that day. She used to say, “Give me something at another time of the year, when you don’t feel like you have to.”
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.
Top: Today; Left: model portfolio; right Halloween circa 1970s; center (last from left to right), reception line 2007
Worth's While 
