Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/734526
T racking a great under-known talent in the wilds of the American West, a remarkable saga unfolds. Catherine D. Anspon visits Doubleday heiress Neltje at her home and studio outside Sheridan, Wyoming, on the eve of the release of an unflinching autobiography — a cathartic tell-all published by St. Martin's Press, an imprint of her family empire, Doubleday. The painter and writer, who has emotionally and legally dropped her last name, is a 21st-century feminist meets frontier woman. She's less glamorous or notorious perhaps than Mabel Dodge Luhan, is as tenacious as Georgia O'Keeffe, and more tender-hearted and free-spirited than the reader might suspect from the portrait that emerges within her book, North of Crazy: A Memoir. Neltje, and her revelatory volume, touch down in Houston this month. As exposés go, this one is a page-turner: a brave riff on a life of privilege and a childhood bracketed by the World Wars; when WASP hegemony reigned supreme but it was nigh impossible for a woman of the upper crust to find happiness or purpose in life without following a constrictive social code. Add to that the extreme dysfunction of her family, a dynamic riddled with the virtues of entrepreneurism, wealth, and style. Estates on Oyster Bay, Long Island, and a plantation in South Carolina mix with self-absorbed, bordering- on-cruel parents, betrayal, alcoholism, childhood sexual abuse (with a Navy pilot who was never punished), old-school nannies, and two bad marriages. Marriage number one was to an emotionally unavailable man that her Machiavellian mother sided with as he rose in her family's company and fought her for her own stock; the second marriage, to a charmer who began a new life with her in the wilds of Wyoming while almost bankrupting her … At times heartbreaking and other times redemptive, North of Crazy: A Memoir is as riveting as it is brutally honest. The details are particularly rich, conjuring up a glamorous world from the perspective of an insider who felt like an outsider. Of her early childhood memories of Barberries, the family's Long Island estate in Oyster Bay, Neltje writes, "In the evenings, after our supper, and before my parents have dinner, we might get to have a visit with them. Nana gets us all dressed up. I wear a dress. [Brother] Nelson [Doubleday Jr.] wears short pants, a shirt, and sometimes a tie … Nana walks downstairs with us to the landing, where the cannonball sits by the grandfather clock. 'The cannonball is special,' my father told us last year. 'General Abner Doubleday, your great-great-uncle, shot the first cannonball from Fort Sumter. That was the beginning of the Civil War in America …' Nelson and I both touched the cannonball, but I could not read the inscription on the brass plate. I was four then." The author relays the rituals of the wealthy household, which we read with concern, knowing her dashing father's struggle with alcoholism and her own recovery from it. The cocktail hour was a beloved but lethal portion of the day. "My father comes out of the library leaving the door open because he has a drink in each hand. 'Here is your Tom Collins,' he says, handing the drink to my mother … Later they will have old- fashioneds for the real cocktail hour. This drink time is now called a 'prelude.' When they have old-fashioneds, my father occasionally gives me the maraschino cherry as a treat … does that mean he loves me a bit? I wonder. He talks to Nelson more than to me. And he takes Nelson on many more drives in the car." The stories of the nannies are vivid, recalled 70 years later in excruciating detail. "This is Nana's last summer. Next week she will move away to a Roosevelt family to take care of their newborn baby. She tells Nelson that is what she is trained to do. Nelson is seven and I will be six in October. The fear of being along and uncared for swallows me up … On the appointed day, I watch as she leaves the nursery. The good-byes and the clinging kisses I give her, the lingering tears and pleadings, none of it helps. Beside me, Nelson sobs. Earlier, he tried to steal and hide her glasses so she would not leave, but she found them. As Nana goes down the stairs with her small brown suitcase, the butler Tony ahead with her large case, we two stand at the top railing waiting for her to turn around and say, 'I love you' or wave a good-bye. She doesn't. She just goes away." Nana's replacement makes a scene etched in the reader's mind. "Mademoiselle Van Toch is our new French governess. We have French lessons every day. She is tougher and meaner that Nana and her voice is sharp. But a least she doesn't think Nelson is such a prince, doesn't tell him how wonderful he is, as Nana did daily. One morning, I felt sick. I said I didn't want to go to school From Privileged Progeny to Painter and Activist, a Publishing Heiress Remakes Her Life on the Plains of WYOMING By CATHERINE D. ANSPON 74