WEBVTT - The Red Potion 0:00:00.200 --> 0:00:08.559 Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio. I 0:00:08.600 --> 0:00:11.080 grew up for the first fourteen years of my life 0:00:11.200 --> 0:00:16.720 on a roughly eight hundred acre British style estate about 0:00:16.760 --> 0:00:20.680 a half hour from Philadelphia. It was an extraordinarily beautiful 0:00:20.760 --> 0:00:23.639 piece of land that had been pieced together by my 0:00:23.720 --> 0:00:26.560 great grandfather in the years leading up to and immediately 0:00:26.600 --> 0:00:30.040 after World War One. It had been farms before, so 0:00:30.120 --> 0:00:34.199 there were old stone farmhouses dating back to the seventeen hundreds, 0:00:34.240 --> 0:00:41.320 some of them in ruins, stone barns, rolling hills, pasture, cornfield, soybean. 0:00:41.800 --> 0:00:45.400 There was a herd of three hundred Airshire cows, so 0:00:45.479 --> 0:00:48.440 there was a functioning dairy farm. But basically it was 0:00:48.560 --> 0:00:52.920 a sort of British style gentleman's estate, kind of plucked 0:00:53.000 --> 0:00:56.000 from the pages of Jane Austen and Henry James and 0:00:56.160 --> 0:00:59.520 floated across the Atlantic and plunked down in the suburbs 0:00:59.520 --> 0:01:04.480 of Philadelphia. That's Jenny Scott, a longtime journalist for The 0:01:04.480 --> 0:01:07.959 New York Times. Her recent book is the memoir The 0:01:08.000 --> 0:01:14.120 Beneficiary Fortune, Misfortune and the Story of My Father. Often 0:01:14.360 --> 0:01:17.080 we long to unlock the puzzle of our parents, but 0:01:17.200 --> 0:01:21.000 most of us never do. We wonder we posit, we 0:01:21.120 --> 0:01:24.720 have series, and when our parents are gone, there's a 0:01:24.760 --> 0:01:27.400 tinge of regret that we didn't get to know them better, 0:01:27.920 --> 0:01:30.720 that we didn't ask questions or dig deeper while we 0:01:30.760 --> 0:01:37.440 still could. But Jenny's is a story ultimately of literally 0:01:37.680 --> 0:01:42.760 unlocking a puzzle, the puzzle of her father, Robert Montgomery Scott. 0:01:51.240 --> 0:01:55.080 I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets 0:01:55.080 --> 0:01:57.640 that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, 0:01:58.000 --> 0:02:04.600 and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I remember there 0:02:04.640 --> 0:02:06.600 was a hill that my father took us to toboggan 0:02:06.680 --> 0:02:09.399 on where he had clearly tobogganed as a child. There 0:02:09.480 --> 0:02:12.720 was a a hollow tree that he had used as 0:02:12.760 --> 0:02:15.640 a kind of fort, which was still, of course hollow 0:02:15.919 --> 0:02:17.920 when we came along, and we were able to use 0:02:17.960 --> 0:02:21.600 it in its slightly decaying state. But mostly it was 0:02:21.680 --> 0:02:27.760 a deeply visceral experience of a wild piece of land 0:02:28.280 --> 0:02:33.080 of extraordinary beauty. It was a degree of rootedness that 0:02:33.160 --> 0:02:37.120 I now see it was kind of unusual in certainly 0:02:37.120 --> 0:02:40.480 in suburban American life, maybe rural American life more so, 0:02:40.760 --> 0:02:42.880 But I wasn't really conscious of that at the time. 0:02:42.960 --> 0:02:49.000 I just experienced it the way a child would. As children, 0:02:49.040 --> 0:02:52.240 we accept our lives as being normal. Whatever they are, 0:02:52.400 --> 0:02:56.720 they're ours, especially back them in pre internet days, there 0:02:56.760 --> 0:03:00.560 was simply no basis for comparison. But later, as a 0:03:00.639 --> 0:03:04.840 young working journalist, Janni was acutely conscious of her family's 0:03:04.840 --> 0:03:08.040 extreme privilege, and she would avoid telling her colleagues about 0:03:08.040 --> 0:03:10.800 her childhood home. She would tell them she and her 0:03:10.800 --> 0:03:15.400 siblings grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania. The estate 0:03:15.480 --> 0:03:19.200 had a name, ar Drassm. This was just outside Philadelphia, 0:03:19.520 --> 0:03:21.920 an area that had been developed in the late nineteenth 0:03:21.919 --> 0:03:24.880 and early twentieth centuries with the wealth that was pouring 0:03:24.880 --> 0:03:27.720 out of the city in its industrial heyday. But among 0:03:27.720 --> 0:03:30.960 the big houses, Ardrassen stood out as an estate that 0:03:31.000 --> 0:03:33.720 had remained in a family spanning one Gilded age to 0:03:33.760 --> 0:03:37.400 the next. It had been built by Janni's father's grandparents, 0:03:37.760 --> 0:03:43.080 his maternal grandparents, and generation after generation raised their families there. 0:03:43.960 --> 0:03:47.720 The summer Jannie turned fourteen, her family moved away to London, 0:03:47.920 --> 0:03:50.600 where her father had been offered a four year political appointment. 0:03:51.320 --> 0:03:53.880 By the time they returned home, she was in college. 0:03:54.520 --> 0:03:57.360 She never lived at Ardrassen again, though she would return 0:03:57.440 --> 0:04:02.200 to it time and again in her mind. Describe your 0:04:03.280 --> 0:04:07.480 mother for me. My mother, it was a very i 0:04:07.480 --> 0:04:12.840 would say, beautiful, redheaded woman from Boston, from a different 0:04:12.960 --> 0:04:17.480 part of the country, but sort of socially in sync 0:04:17.600 --> 0:04:20.440 with the world of my father. In fact, they met 0:04:21.160 --> 0:04:26.040 at a wedding at age eighteen. She was very musical. 0:04:26.200 --> 0:04:31.560 She became ultimately a pianist, teaching and doing some performing, 0:04:31.760 --> 0:04:37.240 not on a large scale, kind, relatively soft spoken, good 0:04:37.240 --> 0:04:44.039 sense of humor, not highly certainly adept socially, but was 0:04:44.160 --> 0:04:47.719 not a hugely gregarious person who loved to be in 0:04:47.960 --> 0:04:51.240 at parties and that sort of thing, you know. A thoughtful, 0:04:51.320 --> 0:04:57.200 well read, musical kind mother and your father. My father, 0:04:57.720 --> 0:05:01.400 um was in some ways a much more seemingly more 0:05:01.440 --> 0:05:06.599 outgoing person. He appeared to be very gregarious, He knew 0:05:06.600 --> 0:05:08.359 a lot of people. I mean, he was out in 0:05:08.400 --> 0:05:11.120 the world more than my mother because she was a 0:05:11.160 --> 0:05:13.599 stay at home mother. For quite a while, my father 0:05:13.960 --> 0:05:16.760 worked as a lawyer, and then when we went to London, 0:05:16.760 --> 0:05:20.120 he worked for the Ambassador to the Court of St. 0:05:20.160 --> 0:05:22.560 James from the United States for four years as in 0:05:22.640 --> 0:05:25.640 special assistant. And then he came back and he became 0:05:25.680 --> 0:05:29.720 increasingly involved in civic and cultural institutions in Philadelphia. He 0:05:30.320 --> 0:05:33.200 ran the Academy of Music for seven years, and then 0:05:33.240 --> 0:05:36.240 he was president and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of 0:05:36.360 --> 0:05:38.640 Art for fourteen years. So he had a very public 0:05:39.000 --> 0:05:43.320 life as a sort of patrician figure in Philadelphia, a 0:05:43.440 --> 0:05:47.040 kind of throwback to an old world which he sort 0:05:47.040 --> 0:05:51.520 of played humorously. He dressed rather well in kind of 0:05:51.640 --> 0:05:55.520 Saville Row suits after we'd been in London. And he 0:05:55.640 --> 0:06:00.000 had a slightly British accent, which was partly just from 0:06:00.440 --> 0:06:03.839 growing up in mainline Philadelphia and partly from and and 0:06:03.960 --> 0:06:06.799 the specifics of his family which was very connected somewhat 0:06:06.839 --> 0:06:10.800 to Britain, but also by living in England. So he 0:06:10.960 --> 0:06:14.440 was a very colorful, well known figure compared to my mother, 0:06:14.480 --> 0:06:21.120 who was more private and um less visible. He was funny, 0:06:21.160 --> 0:06:25.560 extremely charming, you know, a person who seemed gave every 0:06:25.600 --> 0:06:29.799 impression of kind of being born into a rather charmed 0:06:29.880 --> 0:06:34.039 life and living it out just like that. In contrast 0:06:34.080 --> 0:06:38.840 to his gregarious, extroverted personality. Robert Montgomery Scott was an 0:06:38.839 --> 0:06:43.400 inveterate keeper of diaries journals. Jenny had always been aware 0:06:43.440 --> 0:06:46.000 of these journals. They were simply a fact of life. 0:06:46.440 --> 0:06:49.799 Her father always carried around a small loose leaf binder. 0:06:50.560 --> 0:06:53.200 As a child, she never went looking for the diaries, 0:06:53.520 --> 0:06:58.120 something that now surprises her given her repertorial instincts. After all, 0:06:58.240 --> 0:07:00.680 her father was a bit of a mr she longed 0:07:00.720 --> 0:07:04.560 to unlock. But then, in her twenties, at the end 0:07:04.560 --> 0:07:06.839 of a long distance bike trip abroad with her father, 0:07:07.440 --> 0:07:10.640 he turned to her, seemingly out of nowhere, and told 0:07:10.680 --> 0:07:14.360 her that someday she would be the recipient of his journals, 0:07:14.800 --> 0:07:16.920 that he would leave them for her when he died. 0:07:18.120 --> 0:07:20.640 I was fascinated by my father from I think a 0:07:20.640 --> 0:07:24.680 pretty young age. I admired him and um to some 0:07:24.760 --> 0:07:29.240 extent emulated funny things about him, and I wanted his approval. 0:07:29.440 --> 0:07:34.680 And he was somewhat enigmatic, a bit elusive. I don't 0:07:34.720 --> 0:07:36.880 think I could have articulated that as a child, but 0:07:37.160 --> 0:07:41.160 it was as though he were slightly out of reach. UM. 0:07:41.240 --> 0:07:45.360 So the thought that he, out of the blue would 0:07:45.880 --> 0:07:48.640 tell me that I could have his diaries when he died, 0:07:48.840 --> 0:07:50.840 not at some point in the future, but when he died. 0:07:51.480 --> 0:07:55.880 UM was stunning to me, and of course a source 0:07:55.920 --> 0:07:59.440 of great interest. But I also didn't know how to 0:07:59.480 --> 0:08:01.760 take it. And it's in the nature of my relationship 0:08:01.800 --> 0:08:04.960 with my father that for some reason I couldn't interrogate 0:08:05.040 --> 0:08:08.080 him at that moment as to why. So I said, well, 0:08:08.480 --> 0:08:12.040 why me, and he said, you're the writer and just 0:08:12.240 --> 0:08:16.679 tossed it off like that. The conversation ended, um, as 0:08:16.720 --> 0:08:19.680 far as I remember, and I really never dared bring 0:08:19.680 --> 0:08:24.679 it up again, because I was so enticed by the idea. 0:08:24.760 --> 0:08:26.880 I didn't want to run any risks that there was 0:08:27.040 --> 0:08:31.400 that he might withdraw the offer, change his mind. Um, 0:08:31.440 --> 0:08:34.520 you know, that I might somehow seem to be eagerly 0:08:34.559 --> 0:08:39.640 awaiting his demise. And another thing about Robert Montgomery Scott, 0:08:40.320 --> 0:08:44.240 he liked to drink a lot. If someone had told 0:08:44.240 --> 0:08:45.920 me that there were people who didn't drink, it would 0:08:45.960 --> 0:08:47.840 be like saying that there were people who didn't use 0:08:47.880 --> 0:08:53.400 soap um. It just was so common and every event, 0:08:53.559 --> 0:08:57.720 and you know, every funeral involved repairing afterward to drink. 0:08:58.080 --> 0:09:00.960 It was just ubiquitous. And of course it was a 0:09:01.000 --> 0:09:05.839 time in American culture, particularly in that society, that men 0:09:05.920 --> 0:09:08.880 would come home from work and have a bunch of 0:09:09.000 --> 0:09:12.440 drinks and wine with dinner, and so it was just 0:09:12.559 --> 0:09:16.720 a fact of life. Eventually, as a college student, Jenny 0:09:16.800 --> 0:09:20.240 makes a decision not to drink, an unusual decision for 0:09:20.240 --> 0:09:23.440 a college student who isn't in trouble with alcohol. She 0:09:23.480 --> 0:09:25.760 had had a bad experience around freshman year when she 0:09:25.840 --> 0:09:29.720 got very drunk. Can you imagine if every college freshman 0:09:29.760 --> 0:09:33.280 who drank too much one time quit drinking, half the 0:09:33.320 --> 0:09:35.160 bars in the world would probably have to shut down 0:09:35.240 --> 0:09:39.160 for lack of business. I don't know why I stopped. 0:09:39.559 --> 0:09:42.920 It wasn't precipitated by any kind of crisis. So I 0:09:43.040 --> 0:09:45.400 like to think that somewhere in me, I would like 0:09:45.480 --> 0:09:48.160 to believe that, somewhere in me, I sensed that in 0:09:48.280 --> 0:09:51.960 my family, where drinking was very common. In my father's case, 0:09:52.000 --> 0:09:56.000 I now know he was well long as an alcoholic 0:09:56.040 --> 0:09:59.200 at that point, but it went back generations too. I'd 0:09:59.200 --> 0:10:01.760 like to think that I somehow sensed that this was 0:10:01.800 --> 0:10:04.920 a bad idea and had the good sense to just 0:10:05.960 --> 0:10:08.720 make it all very clear for myself by ruling it out. 0:10:08.920 --> 0:10:12.200 But I don't know that for sure that seems right, 0:10:12.400 --> 0:10:17.120 because why else would a college girl that's without out 0:10:17.200 --> 0:10:20.520 in a huge inciting incident beyond oh, I drank too 0:10:20.600 --> 0:10:22.280 much one night, and I didn't like the way I felt. 0:10:23.520 --> 0:10:26.440 I think the other factor was that I had become 0:10:26.480 --> 0:10:29.280 aware that it was difficult to have conversations with my 0:10:29.360 --> 0:10:35.160 father after you know, six o'clock, and it was maddening 0:10:35.240 --> 0:10:39.840 to me. While he wasn't a nasty drunk, he would 0:10:39.880 --> 0:10:46.120 sometimes say things that were, um inappropriate under the circumstances, 0:10:46.240 --> 0:10:48.240 things that you might have confided to him, he might, 0:10:48.600 --> 0:10:51.680 you know, say in the presence of somebody else. So 0:10:52.360 --> 0:10:55.200 we became, i would say, much more conscious of this 0:10:55.240 --> 0:10:59.120 and attempted to talk to him about it, um completely unsuccessfully. 0:10:59.160 --> 0:11:01.480 A number of time is around the kitchen table after 0:11:01.520 --> 0:11:04.640 dinner when we were all there, and invariably he would 0:11:04.720 --> 0:11:08.760 talk circles around us. He seemed to make the case 0:11:08.880 --> 0:11:11.200 that while he understood that he drank a lot and 0:11:11.240 --> 0:11:13.240 he liked to drink, it was not out of control. 0:11:13.400 --> 0:11:15.760 And thank you very much, and now I'm going off 0:11:15.760 --> 0:11:19.680 to bed. Was your mother in those meetings, Yes, she was, 0:11:19.880 --> 0:11:24.880 And I think she was in a difficult position because, uh, 0:11:24.960 --> 0:11:28.560 my mother's posture with my father for a long time, 0:11:28.600 --> 0:11:31.959 I think had been somewhat to sort of intermediate between 0:11:32.080 --> 0:11:35.040 us and him. She wasn't an apologist for his drinking. 0:11:35.080 --> 0:11:37.440 She clearly understood there was a problem. She was dealing 0:11:37.440 --> 0:11:41.400 with it in her own way, which probably varied over time. 0:11:41.800 --> 0:11:44.360 When I would come home from college and after that, 0:11:44.960 --> 0:11:49.440 UM my father, for whatever reasons, that dynamics between us. 0:11:49.720 --> 0:11:52.559 We would end up having bad arguments about often about 0:11:52.559 --> 0:11:55.760 politics or something like that. And my mother told me 0:11:55.880 --> 0:11:57.960 later that she had come to dread my coming home 0:11:58.080 --> 0:12:01.480 during that period. So I think it began to play 0:12:01.520 --> 0:12:04.920 out in our adult relationships with him in a way 0:12:04.960 --> 0:12:08.400 that it had been submerged when we were children. As 0:12:08.440 --> 0:12:11.400 a child, I thought my parents had a a good 0:12:11.440 --> 0:12:14.160 marriage and that we were a happy family. As an 0:12:14.200 --> 0:12:17.240 adolescent and as a young adult, it became more clear 0:12:17.280 --> 0:12:21.480 to me that there was um tension in the household, 0:12:21.720 --> 0:12:26.359 passive aggressive stuff. Never that I was conscious of knockdown, 0:12:26.480 --> 0:12:33.719 drag out fights, but um just uh an uncomfortable quality 0:12:33.840 --> 0:12:37.080 to some of the time that we spent together. I 0:12:37.160 --> 0:12:40.000 now know that what they had in common was background 0:12:40.640 --> 0:12:44.360 and that he came to feel I now know, although 0:12:44.360 --> 0:12:47.400 I didn't know this then, that that that was an 0:12:47.400 --> 0:12:52.319 insufficient basis for a happy marriage. It was no secret 0:12:52.400 --> 0:12:55.840 from an early on my father. I guess you would 0:12:55.840 --> 0:12:59.720 have said in that world liked women. We knew the 0:12:59.760 --> 0:13:03.480 way children know that he was flirtatious, and whatever that 0:13:03.559 --> 0:13:07.280 implied was not entirely clear. But the notion that he 0:13:07.360 --> 0:13:11.400 was somehow um faithful to his marriage vows, that was 0:13:11.480 --> 0:13:16.760 not a kind of given um. It was just something 0:13:16.880 --> 0:13:20.400 we sensed in the way he interacted with people, and 0:13:20.400 --> 0:13:24.079 and particularly with someone who we knew very well, who 0:13:24.120 --> 0:13:26.720 was a friend of the family. The two families were close. 0:13:27.240 --> 0:13:30.280 It became a kind of private joke between the children 0:13:30.520 --> 0:13:34.880 of the two families that maybe the two families would merge. 0:13:36.400 --> 0:13:41.680 But later, you know, when we were out of the house. Um, 0:13:42.000 --> 0:13:44.160 I now know, and I guess I sensed it at 0:13:44.160 --> 0:13:46.160 the time that there were other women too that he 0:13:46.200 --> 0:13:49.760 was involved with. In fact, a moment when I was 0:13:50.360 --> 0:13:52.520 just about to graduate from college and I went to 0:13:53.080 --> 0:13:56.400 with a friend, my then boyfriend, to the island of 0:13:56.520 --> 0:14:00.200 Nantucket where my parents had a house. Um, this is 0:14:01.320 --> 0:14:04.480 during must have been in the late spring, and I 0:14:04.559 --> 0:14:07.240 called my parents to say I'd like to go, and 0:14:07.320 --> 0:14:10.040 my mother said, oh, you'll encounter your father there. He's 0:14:10.080 --> 0:14:12.880 there with a friend, you know, go ahead. When we 0:14:12.960 --> 0:14:16.240 got there, I called the house and he answered the 0:14:16.280 --> 0:14:20.920 phone and he said, well, where are you? And I said, oh, 0:14:20.960 --> 0:14:22.920 we just got off the ferry, and he said, I'm 0:14:22.960 --> 0:14:28.040 not alone, and of course, you know, endlessly obedient said, oh, 0:14:28.080 --> 0:14:30.520 don't worry, we'll we'll stay in a motel and and 0:14:30.560 --> 0:14:33.160 he said no, no, um, come on, come on back. 0:14:33.160 --> 0:14:34.800 And so we were going to go get some breakfast. 0:14:34.920 --> 0:14:37.360 We go to get some breakfast, and all of a 0:14:37.400 --> 0:14:42.280 sudden he emerges in the restaurant, red faced and very 0:14:42.280 --> 0:14:45.400 bluntly says, her name is Linda. And we proceeded to 0:14:45.400 --> 0:14:49.920 spend the weekend with my father and Linda. Did that 0:14:50.000 --> 0:14:52.240 put you in a position of them keeping a secret 0:14:52.280 --> 0:14:57.360 from your mother? I believe it did. Um. My father 0:14:57.480 --> 0:15:00.560 never asked me to keep the secret from my mother, 0:15:01.080 --> 0:15:05.640 but I don't know how I would have told her. Yes, 0:15:05.800 --> 0:15:12.520 I became a colluder, an unwitting or unintentional colluder, uh 0:15:12.560 --> 0:15:19.240 in my father's um complex extramarital life. But it isn't 0:15:19.280 --> 0:15:22.720 only her father's affairs that require collusion. It's also his drinking. 0:15:23.600 --> 0:15:26.000 I think one of the precipitating things that led us 0:15:26.240 --> 0:15:29.960 to take the problem more seriously and get organized to 0:15:29.960 --> 0:15:32.160 try and get him into treatment was that my brother 0:15:32.200 --> 0:15:35.080 and I went on a trip with him, a biking 0:15:35.120 --> 0:15:38.280 trip with him. I was in my very early thirties. 0:15:38.840 --> 0:15:41.040 We went to New Zealand with him with a group 0:15:41.400 --> 0:15:44.880 biking trip, and for two and a half weeks or 0:15:44.920 --> 0:15:48.080 so we biked very hard, um long distances. It was 0:15:48.120 --> 0:15:51.160 a fantastic trip. My father was great fun and he 0:15:51.240 --> 0:15:54.960 took us and um we we loved the daytime part 0:15:55.480 --> 0:15:58.680 enormously and New Zealand was of course spectacular. And then 0:15:58.720 --> 0:16:02.000 at night he would drink heavily and get so drunk 0:16:02.040 --> 0:16:05.320 that on like night number two or three, a complete 0:16:05.360 --> 0:16:08.400 stranger on the trip came to us and said, why 0:16:08.440 --> 0:16:13.280 haven't you helped him? It was a sort of shocking moment. 0:16:13.600 --> 0:16:17.920 Um what could we say, Well, we've tried ineptly, um, 0:16:17.960 --> 0:16:21.320 but I think we were kind of shamed into or 0:16:21.440 --> 0:16:26.880 jolted into acting. So then we returned back to Pennsylvania 0:16:26.960 --> 0:16:30.040 and we we both wrote him letters about what we'd 0:16:30.040 --> 0:16:33.000 witnessed and how we felt about it, and how we 0:16:33.440 --> 0:16:36.480 loved him and wanted him to take it seriously. And 0:16:36.560 --> 0:16:39.840 in the letters responding to us, he particularly to my 0:16:39.960 --> 0:16:44.160 brother who did drink uh, and he assumed my brother 0:16:44.240 --> 0:16:47.080 would understand better than I would. I think he never 0:16:47.160 --> 0:16:49.720 thought I could understand what he was talking about. He 0:16:49.800 --> 0:16:53.000 explained how much he enjoyed drinking, how much of a 0:16:53.080 --> 0:16:55.480 part of his life it was, And I also know 0:16:55.680 --> 0:16:57.480 from other things that he said to other people that 0:16:57.520 --> 0:17:00.440 he felt he was a total bore when he did drink, 0:17:00.760 --> 0:17:05.520 and that it was somehow this sort of magic elixir 0:17:05.680 --> 0:17:09.720 that made life tolerable. And now I never thought my 0:17:09.800 --> 0:17:13.320 father's life would have been intolerable. But I also know 0:17:13.440 --> 0:17:15.399 that at a very young age he had had a 0:17:15.520 --> 0:17:20.920 dream um in which he dreamt of some red potion. 0:17:21.040 --> 0:17:22.720 This was that, like I think he said, he was 0:17:22.760 --> 0:17:25.840 like five years old, and it was a recurrent dream 0:17:25.880 --> 0:17:29.119 of this sort of magic potion that made him feel 0:17:29.160 --> 0:17:34.000 differently and behave differently. So whatever it was that made 0:17:34.080 --> 0:17:36.760 him love it so much, it was very deep seated, 0:17:36.800 --> 0:17:39.080 but we didn't understand at the time what that was. 0:17:40.160 --> 0:17:43.359 So Jenny's father manages to white knuckle it for a while. 0:17:43.800 --> 0:17:47.600 He goes for stretches of time without alcohol, including weddings 0:17:47.640 --> 0:17:50.639 and large gatherings where he certainly would have been drinking, 0:17:51.359 --> 0:17:56.560 but it doesn't last. Finally, at the two year mark um, 0:17:56.600 --> 0:17:58.480 when it was clear that he was fully back to 0:17:58.560 --> 0:18:02.359 drinking and we were not around. My mother had a 0:18:02.400 --> 0:18:05.080 confrontation and with him and said, you know, I want 0:18:05.119 --> 0:18:07.640 you to go back into treatment, and he walked out 0:18:07.640 --> 0:18:11.880 of the house and never returned. After a brief stay 0:18:11.960 --> 0:18:14.280 in a hotel, he decides to move back to our 0:18:14.359 --> 0:18:18.280 dressing into a different house, what was called the Big House, 0:18:18.760 --> 0:18:22.200 the one his grandparents had first built. The fifty room 0:18:22.240 --> 0:18:27.040 house is at this point largely uninhabited. Jenny's cousin lives 0:18:27.040 --> 0:18:30.160 on the second floor and is raising prize winning bull 0:18:30.320 --> 0:18:34.280 terriers in a kennel on the lawn. Jenny's father decides 0:18:34.320 --> 0:18:36.639 to move into what had been the nursery where his 0:18:36.720 --> 0:18:39.320 mother had been raised, and turned the nursery into an 0:18:39.359 --> 0:18:43.080 apartment for himself. He moved into the top floor of 0:18:43.119 --> 0:18:48.719 that house and embarked upon rather remarkable restoration of the 0:18:48.760 --> 0:18:52.200 top floor that then spread to the ground floor, and 0:18:52.600 --> 0:18:57.080 over the next decade he restored every one of the 0:18:57.119 --> 0:19:01.520 public rooms on the ground floor to men condition for 0:19:02.280 --> 0:19:05.679 and including replacing the roof of the house for millions 0:19:05.720 --> 0:19:07.880 of dollars. This was a house that he didn't own, 0:19:08.440 --> 0:19:11.639 but the house also had for him all sorts of 0:19:11.680 --> 0:19:15.840 emotional resonance, Having you know, known his grandparents and grown 0:19:15.920 --> 0:19:17.800 up there and knowing what it meant to his mother, 0:19:18.000 --> 0:19:22.840 and so the whole exercise was very, i would say, 0:19:22.880 --> 0:19:28.880 emotionally complex. My father would have these fantastic Thanksgiving dinners 0:19:29.040 --> 0:19:31.800 the day after Thanksgiving, not to interfere with anybody else's, 0:19:31.840 --> 0:19:35.320 in which he would invite every family member and all 0:19:35.359 --> 0:19:37.840 sorts of other people, and the cast would rise to 0:19:38.000 --> 0:19:41.879 close to a hundred by the time that he finally died. 0:19:42.880 --> 0:19:46.280 What do you think that was about those last years 0:19:46.880 --> 0:19:51.280 in regard to both the restoration and your father wanting 0:19:51.400 --> 0:19:56.719 to have these huge gatherings have everybody come to this 0:19:56.880 --> 0:20:03.160 restored home. His parents had just died after very long lives, 0:20:03.200 --> 0:20:07.760 his marriage just ended, and he had resigned or retired 0:20:08.160 --> 0:20:12.880 from his his job, possibly under some pressure. Um so 0:20:13.600 --> 0:20:17.320 everything had changed. He had grown up in this world 0:20:17.359 --> 0:20:20.280 of big houses, some of which had fallen by the wayside. 0:20:20.320 --> 0:20:22.440 One was a ruin where his father had grown up 0:20:22.440 --> 0:20:27.000 in Landsdown, Pennsylvania. One had been a so called cottage 0:20:27.000 --> 0:20:29.520 in bar Harbor in the period when bar Harbor was 0:20:29.600 --> 0:20:32.960 sort of like Newport that ultimately had been torn down, 0:20:32.960 --> 0:20:36.639 a place he'd gone every year as a child and ultimately, 0:20:36.720 --> 0:20:39.960 the family couldn't unload it after the war, after the 0:20:40.000 --> 0:20:43.119 depression and the war, and had to basically dismantle it. 0:20:43.920 --> 0:20:48.200 So he'd seen this sort of grand life and he'd 0:20:48.200 --> 0:20:51.320 seen its decay. I think he thought that if he 0:20:51.359 --> 0:20:54.639 could make the house what had once been, because it 0:20:55.760 --> 0:21:00.000 was really pretty much the only one of those huge 0:21:00.000 --> 0:21:03.400 Bourbon Philadelphia Manson's that was still occupied by the original 0:21:03.440 --> 0:21:06.160 family and had all the original stuff in it, if 0:21:06.160 --> 0:21:08.840 he could make that into something a house, museum, or 0:21:08.920 --> 0:21:11.879 something that could become somewhat self supporting, maybe some of 0:21:11.880 --> 0:21:14.199 the land would be preserved too. So I think it 0:21:14.280 --> 0:21:18.240 was an act of duty and loyalty and love and 0:21:18.440 --> 0:21:23.159 also hope for preservation. And finally it fed something in 0:21:23.240 --> 0:21:26.080 the way he had come to see himself, perhaps what 0:21:26.200 --> 0:21:28.919 he had been bred even to do. And he was 0:21:29.600 --> 0:21:32.320 constantly being written about in the restoration of the house 0:21:32.359 --> 0:21:34.639 as sort of the lord of the manor, which he 0:21:34.760 --> 0:21:38.160 was ironic about that, but he was willing to play 0:21:38.160 --> 0:21:43.600 that role. It's ironic too, or or poetic maybe that 0:21:44.359 --> 0:21:49.760 as he's creating this or attempting to preserve this, this 0:21:49.920 --> 0:21:56.879 monument to history, he's also decaying himself. He is self destructing, 0:21:56.880 --> 0:21:59.960 and doctors are saying to him, if you keep this up, 0:22:00.760 --> 0:22:04.320 you're going to die. Yeah, and and he can't stop. 0:22:04.600 --> 0:22:08.760 That's right, yeah about you know, just a few years 0:22:08.800 --> 0:22:13.359 into this process, he clearly did not look well, and 0:22:14.240 --> 0:22:17.480 we persuaded him to see a new doctor because his 0:22:17.920 --> 0:22:20.159 longtime doctor had been telling him he was the picture 0:22:20.160 --> 0:22:24.280 of health. One summer, the thing that sort of precipitated 0:22:24.320 --> 0:22:26.679 this was seeing him on the beach and Nantucket with 0:22:26.800 --> 0:22:30.800 his his belly distended. He was not a fat man, 0:22:31.240 --> 0:22:34.119 but something had gone awry and it was like a 0:22:34.160 --> 0:22:38.560 basketball And so he finally agreed to go to a 0:22:38.600 --> 0:22:43.880 different doctor who had understood alcoholism and also understood the 0:22:43.880 --> 0:22:46.240 world that my father was from, because he was somewhat 0:22:46.280 --> 0:22:50.639 from it himself. And he diagnosed him very quickly as 0:22:50.680 --> 0:22:54.200 having cirrhosis of the liver, and while he wasn't willing 0:22:54.240 --> 0:22:56.520 to say how long he would last, he referred him 0:22:56.520 --> 0:22:58.800 to a specialist who said, you've got two to four years, 0:22:59.320 --> 0:23:02.360 so you can either stop where you can be dead 0:23:02.400 --> 0:23:06.480 in two to four years. And he didn't stop. No, 0:23:06.640 --> 0:23:13.520 he didn't, despite argumentation from me and others. He um 0:23:13.720 --> 0:23:15.800 felt that at that point he no longer had a 0:23:15.880 --> 0:23:17.639 job that he had to hold down, and he was 0:23:18.080 --> 0:23:22.600 not married. He was living with a woman who apparently 0:23:22.760 --> 0:23:26.040 tolerated it, and he said sort of felt like, you know, 0:23:26.160 --> 0:23:31.560 I'm I'm in my um early seventies and I'll I'm 0:23:31.560 --> 0:23:35.879 gonna do what i want. Now, people who know a 0:23:35.880 --> 0:23:38.359 lot about alcoholism would say, well, that's not a choice. 0:23:38.520 --> 0:23:41.560 It's you know, it's an illness, and that's he may 0:23:41.600 --> 0:23:43.679 have phrased it that way, but it wasn't a choice. 0:23:48.680 --> 0:23:59.120 We'll be right back. Janny's father dies at the age 0:23:59.119 --> 0:24:02.240 of seventies six, and in the aftermath of his death, 0:24:02.760 --> 0:24:06.680 Jenny looks around for his diaries. They aren't in his apartment, 0:24:07.240 --> 0:24:09.400 and at this point, as a working journalist and mother 0:24:09.440 --> 0:24:12.120 of young children, she's not in a position to really 0:24:12.119 --> 0:24:15.640 go digging for them. It's been decades since his promise 0:24:15.680 --> 0:24:18.240 on the bike trip that he would preserve safe and 0:24:18.359 --> 0:24:21.480 leave them to her and only her, and of course 0:24:21.560 --> 0:24:25.000 she's never forgotten, but now they're nowhere to be found. 0:24:25.960 --> 0:24:28.560 She asks his girlfriend, who says she'll take a look. 0:24:29.040 --> 0:24:31.439 A couple of weeks later, his girlfriend calls Janny and 0:24:31.480 --> 0:24:34.640 says she found a few, but when Janny sees them. 0:24:34.920 --> 0:24:39.280 They're not what she'd been looking for, just four slim volumes, 0:24:39.400 --> 0:24:41.480 more like the kind of journal he kept on trips, 0:24:42.080 --> 0:24:45.360 not revealing, not clues as to the mystery of her 0:24:45.359 --> 0:24:50.320 father and his demons, not the real deal. Jenny wonders 0:24:50.359 --> 0:24:54.080 if perhaps the lifetime of journals had been destroyed. But 0:24:54.200 --> 0:24:56.960 then she happens to be in her mother's basement, the 0:24:57.000 --> 0:25:00.919 house her father had left two decades earlier. At this point, 0:25:01.200 --> 0:25:04.199 she isn't looking for anything. After all, her father wouldn't 0:25:04.200 --> 0:25:06.080 have left his personal papers in the home of the 0:25:06.080 --> 0:25:08.960 woman he had left twenty years earlier, would he have. 0:25:10.200 --> 0:25:11.760 My mother said, you might want to just see if 0:25:11.760 --> 0:25:14.600