Diamond Girl (2 page)

At the time my mother, Ellen, married my father,
Kells, she was a successful model for Dior and her passions, if she had any, probably revolved around clothes and nightclubs. But once a Kelleher, she adapted with lightning speed to Daddy’s life and became an accomplished equestrienne and a nine-handicap golfer. Her interest in clothing was refined down to front row seats at the Paris collections where she flew twice yearly on the Kelleher corporate jet. She was smart, though, my mother. She was willing to risk losing her size two figure to quickly produce the Kelleher heir, so I was born eleven months after their wedding, the Kelleher
heiress
as it turned out, a name I would be known by my whole life, long after it became not only inappropriate but a lie.

My father was only twenty-six, and he and my mother were still in love. She had enough coal left in her then to still have some soft edges. The diamond hard bitch that she would grow into was still a few years down the road and I think for a little while she might have been as happy to meet me as he was.

My birth coincided with a crossroads time in Daddy’s life. He had quickly realized that being an artist wasn’t for him, and five months into my mother’s pregnancy with me, he had opened negotiations with the National Football League to buy the Carolina Lions franchise. The whole negotiations thing was a disaster for Daddy who, once having decided that he wanted to own a football team, refused to let his lawyers interfere in the money talks and ended up paying a hundred million over the original asking price.

He didn’t care. The Lions gave him a new identity and purpose. In
those early exciting days, when owning a football team and having a little girl were still a novelty, he chose my name to commemorate his new persona, Kells Kelleher, team owner. One of my favorite possessions is a picture of him holding me up with a tiny Carolina Lions hat on my head. The Lions made the play-offs the year I turned two, and Daddy told a fawning sports world that I was his golden girl. He really loved me, I know he did. For a long time he loved me best of anybody.

My father was a quiet, not very tall, buttoned-up, thin, blond man with a distinctive left side dimple. All the Kelleher men had that dimple and I did too. Though he wasn’t very distinguished or tall, I can’t remember a room he ever walked into where he wasn’t the focus of everyone’s eyes and attention. Unimaginable wealth and a great family name gave him plenty of stature. There is an old joke that when Kells Kelleher stood on his wallet, he was always the tallest man in any room.

My mother, who was not born a Kelleher but was nearly six feet tall in her stocking feet, was looked at too, but not with the fawning admiration that Daddy drew. Women eyed her, wondering what she had that had allowed her to capture one of the country’s great names and fortunes, and men stared at her because she was beautiful and because she had been dusted in gold by her grand marriage. At first I don’t think she liked the scrutiny too much; it made her fidgety. Later, on any night that she wasn’t the most watched woman in the room, it could send her into a depression which lasted for weeks. Fortunately, thanks to Daddy’s wallet, those occasions were few and far between. Ellen Kelleher’s jewels alone would always make her the focus of every eye. I’m not sure when things like that started to matter to her more than anything else, but it must have happened early on because, until my sisters and I were old enough for parties and the attention of photographers, she usually acted like she had forgotten we even existed whenever she accidentally ran into us.

*  *  *

I don’t remember the first few years of my life in Florida. We moved to New York right before I turned three. That was the year my father’s mother died and the legendary Kelleher Apartment at 800 Fifth Avenue fell into his hands. It was also the year that my mother was pregnant for the second time with what everyone assumed was the fifth Kells. Instead, my sister Kelly was born in the Kelleher pavilion at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. My Aunt Georgia later told me that my father had not wanted my mother to name his second daughter 'Kelly'.  He had told her it would be confusing when the inevitable John Kelleher, to be called Kells VI, was born. 

Back then I don’t think it occurred to him that my mother might not give him a son. It occurred to her, though, and that was the first year that she began to be afraid. Being afraid made my mother mean, and meanness doesn’t work with my father, it’s foreign to him, and what is foreign to him he withdraws from. None of it is my sister’s fault. Kelly was, and is, a beautiful girl, and she had the Kelleher blond hair and my mother’s striking facial features. Not me. I was a female copy of my
father, from my round dimpled face to my petite stature, and that is what Daddy mentioned to any admiring adult who looked at me if they didn’t say it first. “Look at my Carey. Isn’t she a Kelleher through and through?”

I was indeed a true Kelleher, and like all members of the Kells descendants, I would grow up in a castle high and unreachable to ordinary humans. In my case, the castle was the family apartment at eighth and fifth. My great-great grandfather had been the second tenant to buy in after the Rockefellers. He was a competitive man, my great-great grandfather, and, not wanting to be outdone, had created a larger living space than the apartment’s founding family.

Our apartment rose three stories and the principal windows looked out at the polar bears in Central Park Zoo. There were five family suites, three guest suites, a ceiling painted to look like the Sistine Chapel, and a staircase that my great-grandfather had purchased from King George when Sandringham was being remodeled.

At first we had a staff of eight, but by the time I was six, it had been increased to fifteen. They all lived in and no one was crowded. I’m sure of that because one of my earliest memories is wandering around the huge downstairs rooms in the early dark of New York’s winter and never finding anyone at all to talk to me.

For my mother, though, thirty thousand square feet of living space could feel cramped by the presence of at first two little girls and then a disastrous third, and so, at my mother’s urging, my father purchased Tamerlane, a massive old estate in Connecticut. Using the excuse of fresh air, we were shipped out to the country for most of our infancy. Later, when school started, we were always at Tamerlane on the weekends. Christmas was a family holiday, though, even in families like ours, and my mother made sure that wherever we were at Christmas - Connecticut, New York or Palm Beach - no matter how busy her social calendar was, she always made the time to come to us, accompanied by the photographer from
Town and Country
, to have her picture taken with us by the tree. It was our one unbreakable holiday tradition.

Chapter 3

I didn’t know that my parents had a bad marriage until the year I turned eight. When I was really little, my life was pretty regimented. I think now that might be one of the reasons I haven’t done so well at anything I set myself up for. Born rich usually means born protected, born surrounded, and I’m guessing might be where the phrase ‘born fool’ comes from too. 

My nanny, Elizando, would wake me up at seven every morning in my pink Mackenzie Child’s bedroom. My bed had been custom-made for me in their studios. It was a replica of Kelleher’s Rest on the outside and the walls inside my bed-playhouse were hung with watered pink silk from the Fortuny factories in France.

Elizando would quietly open the curtains of my floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the polar bears in the zoo and tap lightly on the outside of my bed house.

“Miss Carey, the sun is up and it’s time for you to be too.” 

If I didn’t answer her right away, she would slide open the door to my little sanctuary and smile at me with her tired brown face.

Usually, since I never did wake up easily, she would end up carrying me into my adjoining pink bathroom where she would prop me up on the toilet and put me into the warm bubble bath she had drawn for me before waking me. After my bath, she would wrap me in my own big monogrammed towels and carry me back into my bedroom to dress me in my small Chapin uniform. If I was lagging too badly, she would feed me toast upstairs, but if the morning went well without me having a tantrum or trying to fight her about putting on my clothes, I would be taken downstairs to eat in the special round yellow dining room designed for breakfast only.

I did hate to wake up, but most mornings I tried my best to cooperate with Elizando so that I could have that half hour downstairs alone with Daddy. He would look up from the paper and wink at me, and pretend to ignore me until Elizando had seated me in my chair and withdrawn upstairs. Then he would look at me over his paper.

“Good morning, Carey K. I must say you look lovely today.”

I would pretend to be serious. “Good morning, Daddy. Thank you. You look lovely today too.”

He would grin and ring for my morning chocolate and his third coffee, and we would eat in compatible silence. He wasn’t much for conversation in the morning and neither was I - it’s just another thing we have in common - but I loved being near him in the sunny yellow room that overlooked the Central Park morning joggers below.

Right before Elizando would come back for me to escort me downstairs, he would lay down his paper and put his chin on his hands and stare at me as though he was surprised I was still there. I would imitate his gesture, and that made us grin at each other, our mutual pleasure reflected in identical blue eyes and left side dimples.

He always asked me, “So, Carey K, any plans today?” 

“I thought I might go to school, Daddy, unless you want me to stay home.”

Ninety-nine percent of the time he would pretend to think it over, and sigh and say that he thought I might as well go to school, and he might as well go to work. But if we were having breakfast during football season, he might surprise me and ask if I wouldn’t rather go see the team play instead. Those were the best times ever, just me and Daddy and Elizando, of course. George, our chauffeur, would grin if he saw us coming out the doors of 800 Fifth, me wearing my Carolina Lions baseball cap, because he knew that instead of driving me to Chapin, he would be driving us to the mayor’s heliport, if the game was local, or to Teeterboro in New Jersey to catch the plane to wherever in the country our team was that day. Elizando had to come because Daddy was an owner and the games were work for him. He would check up on me all day, though, and usually bring people back to the box with him.

They would act excited to meet me. “Is this her, the famous Carolyn Kelleher that the team is named after?”

I had been taught excellent manners by Elizando and Chapin, and would always stand up when adults came, saying
Hello, sir or ma’am, yes, it’s really me
. They would glance at Daddy and laugh, and he would laugh too and hoist me up into his arms and shove my cap up. I honestly didn’t know until years later that it was the other way around, that I had been named after the team, not vice versa.

Most of the time, though, instead of flying around the country with Daddy, I would only be taken down in the elevator by Elizando and handed off to George for my morning ride to school. Every Friday afternoon George picked me up and I would climb into the back of the limousine where my sister and her weekend nanny, Stacey, would smile at me and we would make the drive out to Tamerlane for the weekend.

Stacey was the nanny for both Kelly and me on the weekends. Since Elizando was married and had her own little boy, my parents let her have the weekends off and she would go home to her family. My sister’s weekday nanny, Consuela, did not have a family but she used the weekends to work in her brother’s grocery store in Brooklyn. I only knew that because I had overheard my mother talking to one of her girlfriends on the phone.

My mother and her friends did not have very interesting conversations. As far as I could tell, they were mostly about two things: where to eat lunch and how terrible and demanding the help was. It was pretty boring but I tried to eavesdrop on her every chance I got anyway since, sometimes, I learned things that helped me understand the people I lived with. That is how I found out about Consuela having a weekend job, by listening to my mother whine to her friend Sherry about how ridiculous it was that the servants needed outside income since they “are already completely overpaid, and are probably all stealing from me besides.” 
Hearing her talk that way about the people who took care of us and lived with us made my stomach hurt.

If it was true, then they were bad people and it also meant that they didn’t really like me or my sister at all; they were just faking it because it was their job and they were paid a lot of money to pretend to like us. I worried too that maybe Consuela, and even Elizando, might start stealing my things. I started yelling at Elizando after that whenever she would pick up my toys. I told her I knew she wanted to steal them and give them to her sons, or maybe sell them.

Elizando ignored me when I said things like that but her sad eyes would look even sadder, and she would mutter in Spanish and shake her head. I wanted her to teach me Spanish, which I thought sounded so pretty and seemed like a secret language, but Elizando knew for sure that would get her fired. My mother said Spanish was the language of maids and her daughters would be fluent in French. To accomplish this, I had classes at the Lycée Français after school twice a week. I also had dance classes, modern once a week, and ballet and art appreciation. By the time I was seven I could tell the difference between a Chagall and a Monet, and why that is important to know before you lose your first tooth, I’m still not sure.