Ethel Merman, Mother Teresa...and Me. Tony Cointreau
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father, Jacques, was a descendant of Edouard Cointreau, who had started a liqueur business in Angers, France, in 1849. One of his two sons, also named Edouard, took over the company in 1875, and created the orange-based liqueur we know today as Cointreau. Under his leadership the company became a worldwide enterprise. I shall always be grateful for being one of his great-grandchildren.
My mother, Dorothee Richardson, whom everyone called Dotie, came from an old Boston family of Irish descent, the Dowlings; I suspect they had a much more impressive lineage than bank account—more “breeding,” as they called it then, than money.
The main difference between the Dowling and the Cointreau families seemed to lie in the fact that one was impoverished nobility while the other was a working class family who created an international business. One worked very hard “keeping up appearances” while the other worked very hard creating a family fortune.
Money had always been scarce in Mother’s family. Therefore she decided at an early age to capitalize on her looks and natural dramatic ability, and become an actress. Soon her extraordinary beauty and presence helped her to land her first role in a Broadway play called Deburau, at the Belasco Theater. From there she went on to star in silent films under the name of Dorothy Richards.
Since the driving force of Mother’s ambition was the financial security she had been missing for most of her early life, she abandoned her acting career to marry Lawrence Wilder, a wealthy shipping magnate who, she claimed, was twenty years older than she. She always laughingly said that she married him because she fell in love with his Hispano Suizo car, “the Rolls Royce of the 1920s.”
Mr. and Mrs. Wilder led a glamorous life, traveling on the great ocean liners and entertaining international dignitaries at their homes in Washington, D.C., and New York. Their lavish homes, photographed for the fashion magazines of their day, were filled with the museum pieces with which Mother decorated her homes for the rest of her life.
My beautiful mother was born with a strong sense of style and was always particular about her looks and her clothes. After her marriage she traveled with an army of wardrobe trunks, one of them especially made to carry her shoes. Her private ladies’ maid—only one of the large staff that was required to maintain their lifestyle—was always there to look after her. Even when she went for a stroll, the chauffeur followed her slowly with the car, in case she tired.
Mother never really explained why she eventually divorced Larry Wilder. The most she would say was that although she was very fond of him she could no longer live with a man who drank to excess. I’ve often wondered, however, how much the fact that Mr. Wilder lost a great deal of his money in the stock market crash of 1929 had to do with the breakup of their marriage.
I believe that Mother loved her first husband in her own way, but did not fall in love until she met my father. Many men had fallen in love with Mother, and some of them remained in love with her for the rest of their lives. She once admitted to me that the physical side of a relationship was not important to her; and it suited her that, for these men, she simply represented an untouchable princess. I came to believe that my father was wise enough to understand his wife’s chaste affection for them all.
Jacques Cointreau, of course, had lived all of his life in France, dividing his time among an apartment in the exclusive Sixteenth Arondissement in Paris; his family’s summer home, Château Brillant, in the Loire Valley, where they spent only one month each summer; their seaside home, La Villa des Cerises, near La Baule in Bretaigne; and Angers, the seat of the Cointreau business, where he went to school.
After his graduation, his two uncles, André and Louis Cointreau, welcomed him into the family business and sent him around the world to promote Cointreau liqueur. It was on one of these travels that he eventually met my mother.
The first time my parents met was at a gala in New York City in 1935, celebrating the maiden voyage of the ocean liner the Normandie—the ship that my father forever considered the most beautiful of all time.
Ethel Merman, who was already a star, sang that night when my parents met—many years before she would become like another mother to me. In retrospect, it seems almost prophetic.
Jacques was actually Dotie’s sister Ashie’s blind date for the party on the Normandie. But Ashie was not taken with him the way my mother was. Later that evening, Mother told her, “I’m going to marry that man.”
Dotie was not really religious, but once she made up her mind that she was going to marry Jacques, she went to St. Vincent Ferrer church in New York City and made a novena (nine days of prayer) to St. Anthony. On the ninth and last day of the novena, she was coming down the front steps of the church when she saw Jacques walking by. He had just arrived in New York on another business trip and was as delighted as she was at the chance encounter.
On January 14, 1936, Dotie and Jacques were married in a civil ceremony in Paris, with only the Cointreau family in attendance. Instead of the usual reception, they celebrated with a costume ball at the Hotel Meurice.
A few months later, after the sudden death of Larry Wilder, they quietly re-married, this time in front of my mother’s family at St. Vincent Ferrer church in New York City.
My mother and her older sister, Ashie (a name that stuck when Mother as a child could not pronounce her sister’s real name, Agnes), had spent nine years in a convent school in France, while their mother studied singing and went on to become a star of the Paris Opera. After she married my father, Mother moved back to Europe for the second time in her life. This time it was to Angers, where her new husband worked in the family liqueur business.
From Jacques’ mother Geneviève they rented a large house with a gated entrance and gardens, in the middle of the city of Angers, where they lived with a butler and a staff to care for the two of them. Mother had the antiques from her first marriage shipped over to Angers, and decorated the house, with its high ceilings and oversized rooms, in exactly the same style as her former homes.
The newlyweds were devoted to each other. He adored her and she adored being adored. They were both approaching the age of forty and frankly admitted that children were not a priority in their lives and that they did not particularly care whether they had any or not. Therefore, when my brother Richard was born on January 27, 1939, they placed his full care in the hands of a Swiss nurse, Lucy. My parents had picked her out of a photo of the latest graduating class of a school for baby nurses because she was the only one looking down and smiling at the infant in her arms. Little did they know that this might not have been the best criterion for choosing a baby nurse.
Although my parents were aware that Hitler’s army was advancing through Europe when their first child was born, they had no idea that by June of 1940 the idyllic world they were living in would soon come to an end.
It was only as an adult, going through my parents’ personal papers and letters after their deaths, that I came to realize what extraordinary events they had lived through before my birth. The people that I had thought of as just my parents, involved in international business and a seemingly frivolous social life, had actually survived two world wars in Europe, and, like many people of their generation, had had experiences as dramatic as any that I had seen in the movies.
My father was well over the age limit to re-enlist when France entered World War II, but in 1940, at the age of thirty-nine, he managed to convince the French army that he would be a welcome addition to their ranks.
He knew he might have to leave the family at any moment to join his battalion, but my parents’ main concern was for the safety of my brother, Richard, who was only a year old. As reports came in that the Germans were approaching Angers, my parents decided that the wisest—but by far the most difficult—course of action would be for Mother to take Richard to America. This meant that she would have to drive through France, Spain, and Portugal