Paris: The Memoir(19)
When I told Carter about it, we laughed until we cried.
“Maybe it was the ferret,” he said. “That could be a health code violation. And a liability issue.”
Because that’s how my husband’s beautiful, nerdy, sexy, compulsive fixer brain works. He really wanted to make it about the ferret.
“Sure.” I patted him on the knee. “I bet that was it.”
I don’t know how much Mom and Dad talked with Grandma about my life in Palm Springs, but they must have been comfortable with it, because I stayed there for about a year. My parents visited on a regular basis, took me on a couple of family vacations, and eventually decided to bring me home.
I was thrilled to be going home to my family but heartbroken at the thought of leaving my grandma. During that year that I lived with her in Palm Springs, both our lives had been turned inside out, but we got through it together. That’s what made it bearable.
I don’t know if she already knew she had breast cancer. If she did, I’m not sure she told my mom, and I know Mom didn’t tell Nicky and me until it was obvious that Gram Cracker’s fierce red hair was falling out. I was a grown woman living on my own by that time, but I was scared. Those are scary words, breast cancer, and I was crushed by the thought of saying goodbye to Gram Cracker. She was unbreakable. Or maybe I just saw her that way because I couldn’t stand the idea of losing her.
She powered through it for a while, and I let myself believe everything would be fine. But it wasn’t. The treatment was hard on her. The last time I saw her, I cried and clung to her. I said, “I don’t want to leave you here. I’m scared I’ll never see you again.”
“Get over it,” said Gram Cracker. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Promise! Promise you’re not dying.”
“Well, I’m not dying today—unless you drown me in all these tears.”
She handed me a Kleenex and helped me fix my makeup. Before I left for the airport, she took my face between her hands and kissed my forehead.
“I’ll always be with you,” she said. “Every time you see a hummingbird, that’ll be me.”
Kathleen Mary Dugan Avanzino Richards Cartain Fenton was born in Nebraska in 1928. She was the single mom and manager of three extraordinary daughters. She was outrageously loving and relentlessly herself. In the series American Woman, produced by Aunt Kyle, Alicia Silverstone played a character based on my grandmother, and there’s a great scene where she challenges a guy who’s messing with her daughter: “You know, Jerry, I see you. You’re just a dark, rainy storm cloud hovering over a beautiful tree, and you try to scare everyone with your thunder and your lightning, but you know what? My daughter can take anything you rain down on her. Because she’s that tree. She’s a goddamned redwood.”
The show is fiction, but that moment is true to her character—true to her fierce belief in her daughters and granddaughters.
Gram Cracker died in 2002, when The Simple Life was still in development. She never got to see the psychic’s vision come true, but she didn’t need to. It was her own vision that made all the difference; she had faith in me right down to the last beat of her heart. Whenever I see a hummingbird, I feel her arms around me, and when I did my first NFT drop—trying to bring fierce, talented women artists into this powerful new space—I collaborated with Blake Kathryn on “Hummingbird in My Metaverse,” which featured planets in flux and a hummingbird in flight.
Shout out to Gram Cracker.
Wherever she is now, I know she’s watching over me.
5
Papa told me that for more than a decade, his father kept a picture of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel under the glass on his desk. On this yellowing photograph, Connie had written “The Greatest of Them All.” The story of how Conrad Hilton studied, pursued, purchased, and restored the Waldorf is like Moby-Dick with a soaring limestone monument to art deco instead of a great white whale. You can read about it in Conrad Hilton’s memoir Be My Guest.
Short version: He saw it. He wanted it. He kept grinding until he made it happen.
The Waldorf is forty-seven stories high and occupies an entire midtown block bordered by Park and Lexington Avenues between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets. If you come in by the Park Avenue entrance, you’re welcomed by The Spirit of Achievement, a gracefully aggressive art deco sculpture by Nina S?mundsson. Every time I swing a business deal, get an idea, or score a victory that makes me feel like a boss bitch, I think of her outward-and-upward wings. I love the way she stands on tiptoes, her body long and strong, her face composed and focused.
The hotel is a stunning work of art and architecture, home to countless treasures. The 1893 World’s Fair Clock has gone to the New-York Historical Society now, but it used to stand in the Waldorf’s Peacock Alley, where Mom taught me and Nicky all the etiquette of high tea the way they do it at Kensington Palace. Everywhere I looked, there was a priceless painting or Ming vase. Tucked in a corner on the mezzanine level was Cole Porter’s piano.
The list of world leaders, royalty, Hollywood stars, and industry magnates who’ve resided at the Waldorf is longer than the building is tall. Marilyn Monroe lived in suite 2728, the same suite where a diamond smuggler was found murdered forty years later. John F. and Jackie Kennedy spent their honeymoon there. My family lived in 30H. Michael Jackson lived in 30A with his kids. Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra were also in the building. You couldn’t pass through the lobby or get on the elevator without bumping into a foreign dignitary, movie star, or Rolling Stone.