There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

outside the social boundaries, and to an (American) commoner. My royal grandmother married a tennis player–actor from New York City, my dad married a woman from Newark, and I first married a tennis player from Vegas. Dad would comment on this when I was about to marry Andre. (Clearly, none of the couplings ended well.)
    A few years later it was said that my grandmother was in love with a married man. While on her way from the wedding of her nephew in Italy to the reception, she was killed in a horrible car crash. It was rumored that she purposely did not ride in the same car with her secret love so as not to create a scandal. The sad irony is that this man’s son, Roffredo Gaitani Lovatelli, would die the same way. More grim, however, was that Dad’s mom was decapitated and her only son, who was just eighteen years old, was forced to identify the body. In Italy, the firstborn son is considered the next of kin, and because she was divorced at the time, he had to fly over from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a freshman, to Italy to identify the body.
    It must have been a very sad time in my father’s life. I don’t think he was ever the same after his mom died. Even though he had been at boarding schools and often not with his mom, she was a prominent figure in his life. She lived the life of a royal and jetted all over Europe. Mom once claimed she saw postcards from Dad’s mother from placeslike Gstaad, where she wrote she was sorry she could not be with him for Christmas but was skiing and would see him soon.
    Like Dad’s mother, my mom was tall and statuesque. His mother would be considered more of a “handsome” woman rather than the beauty my mother was, but they each had a strong presence. Marina was strong and obviously in control. Maybe my dad saw something of his mother in my mom? I’m sure he was drawn to her power and seeming confidence as well as her beauty. He did not seem to have any qualms about my mother’s age. She was eight years older than he was and this was not common in the sixties. I guess he couldn’t resist the gorgeous spitfire who made him laugh. However, Mom’s upbringing and background would later be a prominent obstacle.
    But at the time, even though she wasn’t a college graduate or an upper-class society debutante, I’m sure Dad found Mom’s charisma and humor refreshing. She was known for her energetic personality and game attitude. It appeared that she could converse with people from all walks of life and could blend into a variety of different social settings seamlessly. But he wouldn’t have known at first that she was also quite volatile and frequently prone to drama in her relationships. He was no doubt going to be confronted with his own version of the fur-coat incident if he stayed around long enough.
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    Soon Mom discovered she was pregnant. When she told my dad, he must have felt a sense of panic—and rightfully so. He wasn’t ready to be a father. He was just starting his life in business and was forced to travel a lot. He had less money than one would think, and he was still a baby himself.
    Dad really did not know how to handle this. He must have told his dad, who took it upon himself to try to persuade my mother toterminate the pregnancy. I was told my grandfather called my mother to meet with him to discuss the situation. Mom met Pop-Pop at his apartment and he sat her down to talk. He requested that mom terminate the pregnancy, explaining that having a child out of wedlock would risk my father getting kicked off the Social Register.
    Mom explained that she hadn’t meant to corner my father into marrying her and would not hold him accountable for the child. Personally, I believe my mom really did want to be married to my dad but would never have purposely gotten pregnant to do so. She wanted a baby. Period. She craved unconditional love. Pop-Pop (rather hypocritically) alluded to the fact that because Mom and his son Frank came