* * *
AFTER I RETURNED to New York, I went on with my research. I spent hours searching for my mother’s image in magazines. I traveled to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to the libraries at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, going through dozens and dozens of back issues. I learned that during the years of her career—1948 to 1956—Carolyn Scott appeared in hundreds of advertisements, and catalogs. I connected with a fashion historian who told me that Richard Avedon had taken the photograph of my mother from the cover of McCall’s—the one that I kept on my dressing room wall. The historian confirmed that my mother was one of the first Ford models and that her success had helped Eileen Ford to build her agency.
I made contact with Eileen herself, then in the last months of her life. I knew that she must remember my mother because Eileen had been interviewed for the Hard Copy segment about my mother’s story back in the 1990s. In the interview, Eileen described my mother as “one of the most successful junior models we ever had … a sort of a golden girl, living that wonderful life.” When the interviewer asked why she thought Carolyn was living at the shelter now, Eileen said she believed Robin’s death had a lot to do with it. “She was just destroyed,” Eileen explained. “And it’s hard for me to sit here and talk to you and not cry, because it really is a tragedy.”
After I reached out to Eileen, she invited me to visit her at her apartment on the Upper East Side. Although she was in her nineties by then, frail, with her memory fading, she was still dressed immaculately in a white blouse, pale pink slacks, and a pink sweater. She remembered my parents in their Manhattan House days, how my father always knew exactly what to order at restaurants, and how they went out dancing, all of them together, sometimes until four in the morning. She could recall coming out to our house on Long Island many times in the early years. And she remembered seeing my mother around the neighborhood when Carolyn was living at the Park Avenue Armory shelter. Sometimes Carolyn would recognize Eileen; other times not.
“She used to go to the ladies’ lounge at Bergdorf’s to wash,” Eileen told me.
A pained look came across Eileen’s face at the memory. Later, as I got up to leave, Eileen took my hand.
“You’re Carolyn’s little girl,” she said. “She would have been so proud.”
As I thanked Eileen, I had tears in my eyes. This compliment from her, someone I admired so much and who knew my mother in her modeling days, meant more to me than I could say.
That day, I left Eileen’s apartment and walked the few short blocks south to East Sixty-third Street and the Barbizon Hotel. The hotel itself closed its doors in 1981, its modest single rooms now converted into luxury apartments. At the lobby and mezzanine levels—where my mother had once taken afternoon tea with the other residents—there was now an Equinox gym. Gone were the gilded revolving doors where Carolyn first spotted Grace all those years ago, replaced by flat glass panels instead. Of course Mrs. Sibley, the hotel manager, and Oscar, the doorman, were gone, too, the lobby area reduced to a small entryway with elevators. I had read somewhere that a handful of former Barbizon residents still lived in the building, grandfathered in when the hotel had been converted into condos. I asked the doorman if I could leave my name and number with him on the very slim chance that someone remembered my mother. The following week, I received a call from a woman who had lived in the building since 1965—for more than fifty years—but not long enough to remember Carolyn.
Before I left the Upper East Side that day, I knew there was one more place I needed to visit. I walked back uptown, passing the diner on Lexington Avenue where I used to meet with my mother for our lunches, until the Armory’s tall redbrick towers came into view. I stood on the corner of Sixty-sixth Street and Lexington; the Barbizon was just a few blocks south, the Manhattan House to the east. Until this moment, it had never occurred to me that these significant landmarks in my mother’s life—the Manhattan House, the Barbizon Hotel, and the shelter—were all within five minutes’ walk of one another. Their locations were fixed points in the constellation of my mother’s greater journey. No wonder she wanted to live at the Armory all those years, and no one could persuade her to move. These few blocks of the Upper East Side were the place where she had made her mark and where she had been happiest. To her, this was home.
* * *
I KEPT SEARCHING for new insights, more information, but as hard as I tried to put the parts of my mother’s life back together, there were some pieces that still wouldn’t fit. I knew that in order to fully understand her story, I needed to figure out the point at which my mother first began to show symptoms of her illness. From my reading about paranoid schizophrenia, I knew that in the vast majority of cases, symptoms of the disease begin to show in late adolescence or one’s early
