In Praise of Kindness

It’s probably the ugliness of the current political scene that got me on this topic.  That and the fact that I never met Edie Windsor, the fiercely courageous rights advocate who died last week.  Perhaps I wanted to celebrate the living, rather than waiting to eulogize.  Whatever my motives, here is my story:

In the late 1970s, I met Gloria Vanderbilt at a cocktail party.  I traveled in fancy circles in those days.  In fact, Doris Duke was also a guest at that party.  Ms Duke was playful, and great fun.  She is said to have enjoyed gay boys, and I was sufficiently young and gay.  And cute enough to pass muster, if I do say so myself.  And I had been accepted at Duke University! (deciding instead to attend Wake Forest.  Don’t tell Charlie Rose.)  We talked, and laughed, and flirted.  It was delightful.

But what I remember best about that evening was meeting Ms Vanderbilt.  She was wonderful looking, of course.  Even up close.  But there was an unforgettable sweetness about her that shown through all the very careful artifice and the slightly distant look behind her eyes.  I know other things about her, too.  I met her again a few years later at an event to celebrate the latest release in her jeans empire.  She worked that crowd as effortlessly—or so it seemed—as if she had been a guest at a cocktail party with a handful of showbiz folk.

And I knew another socialite who had been the blonde bridesmaid, paired with Ms V as the brunette bridesmaid, in a fairly important society wedding in the early ’60s.  The blonde, who I will not name, told me that Vanderbilt was remarkable, that she knew exactly what to do at every turn.  Rita (oops!) was especially impressed that Vanderbilt knew precisely when and where to schedule bathroom breaks (makeup checks, etc.) in all the right places.

This is all ancient history, of course, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on the source of the little lump in my throat whenever I think of Gloria Vanderbilt, until I heard Anderson Cooper say (probably in the HBO documentary Nothing Left Unsaid) something like this:  “My mother taught me that we must always be very kind to people.  Terrible things can happen in a life, and we can never really know exactly what another person is experiencing.  The only way to deal with others is with kindness.”

Enough said.

Bruce