Lives of the Wives by Carmela Ciuraru

Author:Carmela Ciuraru
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

In Elaine’s autobiography, her recollections of motherhood conjure a close relationship with her daughter (“Tracy was, daily, a most profound illumination and revelation”). She portrays herself as an imperfect but loving mother. Tracy’s 2016 memoir, Wear and Tear: The Threads of My Life, tells a very different story of a childhood marked by sadness, neglect, and poor self-esteem. The cover of the book features a black-and-white photograph of the dashing Tynans in the living room of their Mount Street flat, both dressed in faux-leopard-skin pants, sitting on a chaise longue, gazing into each other’s eyes. Behind them is an oversized reproduction of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, which Elaine called a “conversation piece” but had always frightened Tracy.

She recalls living with “my often irritable, unpredictable mother” and “my nervous, chain-smoking father who was forever struggling to meet deadlines,” and in whose company she spent little time alone. If her father wasn’t home writing and smoking, he was out eating, drinking, theater-going, party-going, or cheating on his wife. Neither he nor Elaine were present for Tracy’s sixth birthday. Instead, they were off in Spain, drinking and watching the bullfights. Their daughter was left to spend the day with her au pair, one in a series of women along the way who raised her. Upon her return, Elaine’s birthday gift to her daughter was a box containing two pairs of frilly underwear, yellow and orange. (Tracy had hoped for a doll or stuffed animal instead.) “I wanted parents who weren’t always going away or going out,” she later wrote. Her almost criminally negligent parents were not “present” even when they were around, and she felt deprived of the emotional safety that every child craves. She and her mother seldom hugged, so on the rare occasions when her mother embraced her, the encounters were awkward. There were no sit-down family meals and Elaine did not cook. Tracy was left to eat meals alone or with an au pair. Most days, when she woke up for school, her parents were still sleeping. They were rarely home when she returned.

Late one night, she woke up to hear her parents screaming. It was not an unusual event in the Tynan home, but this time Tracy was startled by the sight of her mother standing in her doorway yelling, “Your father’s trying to kill me!” Eventually Tracy fell asleep again, and the next day her parents proceeded as if nothing had happened.

There were similar scenes to come, with drunken screaming matches, plates smashing, and ashtrays hurled. Each parent seemed to draw energy from provoking fury in the other, and both were oblivious to the deleterious effects on their daughter. They were far too consumed by the important people in their orbit, such as “Larry” Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Marlene Dietrich, Cecil Beaton, Kingsley Amis, and John Osborne. (Dietrich was more of a frenemy to Elaine. She recalled that Dietrich once offered to babysit for her, but Elaine had a cynical response. As she later told a journalist: “Dietrich had been monopolizing my husband .

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