Two Inheritances: My Family History
“Will Mama’s Irish genes save me? How many times have I thought about changing my name?” - a quote from Chapter Two of “Surfing The Interstates”
My birth in 1952 brought together two vastly different family traditions. The Saint Phalle lineage traced back to 1240, to the very first André de Saint Phalle, known as Andre I—a knight of the Order of Saint-John of Jerusalem.
The family motto—”My cross binds me to God, my sword to the King”—reflects centuries of military and religious service.
By contrast, the Furlong line embodied Irish immigrant resilience, built on survival rather than nobility. My maternal grandfather Alexander sailed from Dublin with a 6th grade education and became a janitor at an Irish men’s club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before sending for his wife Ellen and daughter Betty. My mother Joannie was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1931.
The Saint Phalle Banking Legacy
My grandfather, André Marie Fal Pierre de Saint Phalle, arrived in New York in 1925 as part of a wave of seven aristocratic brothers seeking American opportunities. By 1929, Saint-Phalle & Co. had grown to command $33 million in capital ($0.5B in 2025 dollars) and introduced the world’s first automated electric quotation system at the NYSE. The firm operated internationally with offices from Wall Street to London, Paris to Brussels.
The 1929 crash severely damaged but didn’t destroy the family’s position. My grandfather André AKA Grandpop, rebuilt through various ventures: managing the American branch of the family bank, founding André de Saint-Phalle & Co. in 1940, serving as president of California Eastern Airways in 1947.
His most significant later partnership came in 1957 with Charles F. Spalding, JFK’s close friend and former Harvard roommate.
From their Grand Central Building office, Saint Phalle-Spalding participated in major American business deals. The firm was involved in financing McDonald’s early expansion and facilitating the Washington Post’s acquisition of Newsweek in 1961. My father John worked alongside them during this period of genuine proximity to power—one degree of separation from the presidency itself.
The partnership also connected the family to Dr. Max Jacobson, known as “Dr. Feelgood,” who treated New York’s elite with his “vitamin shots,” which contained a variable mixture of methamphetamine, steroids and other undisclosed ingredients. Spalding had introduced JFK to Jacobson, and the president received an injection before his debate with Nixon that reportedly enhanced his performance. Between 1961 and 1962, Jacobson visited the White House over thirty times. Grandpop was among the doctor’s loyal clients, and it’s possible my father received these shots as well. When Grandpop died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age sixty in Chocorua, New Hampshire, on August 16, 1967, questions about these treatments remained unspoken but present. Jacobson’s practices weren’t exposed until 1972 when he was dubbed “Dr. Feelgood,” five years after Grandpop’s death.
The family Grandpop left behind carried deep wounds.
His daughter Niki de Saint Phalle alleged childhood sexual abuse—claims my father disputed, suggesting she fabricated them for attention.
Whatever the truth, the family produced two suicides: Elisabeth shot herself at age 35 in an upstairs bedroom while her mother and sister sat in the kitchen below; Richard later divorced and died from an overdose of champagne and Tylenol at his Stinson Beach home. Both Niki and Elisabeth had required psychiatric hospitalization.
The Furlong Bedrock
My maternal grandfather, Alexander Joseph Furlong, died the day after Christmas 1943, leaving Ellen Cannon Furlong—Nana—to raise three children alone in Cambridge. She’d crossed the Atlantic with her young daughter Betty after her husband established himself in Boston, a journey requiring remarkable faith. His death could have destroyed the family. Instead, Nana worked full-time, raised her children, and built a bedrock on pragmatism rather than pretense.
My mother Joannie inherited this resilience. Pretty enough to catch a Harvard man’s eye—the engagement was announced in the New York Times—she believed marriage to my father would add stability to the Furlong bedrock of survival.
Instead, she found herself navigating between her working-class Irish roots and my father’s French aristocratic expectations.
Ledge Acres: The Convergence
Our family settled at 38 Oregon Road, Armonk, in 1960—an 1865 farmhouse on 25 acres that represented the height of my father’s professional success. During the Spalding partnership years, money flowed freely. Sunday dinners followed a rigid pattern: my mother attended 10:30 mass, my father noon mass, us six kids splitting up on a random basis, then formal dining with all six children.
My father attempted to recreate a Kennedy-style Camelot in Westchester. Us kids played touch football on the lawn, engaged in mandatory political discussions at dinner, and all learned to ski. The early 1960s felt flush with possibility—my father might become ambassador to France, the business was thriving, the family was growing.
Yet darkness threaded through the golden years. Grandmother Jacqueline AKA “Goms” observed to me that my father had “put his heart in the deep freeze.” His control manifested in daily reading requirements for me—fifty pages, fifteen for the Bible. He cut my essays apart with scissors, rearranging paragraphs on shirt cardboard to teach structure. When pitcher Juan Marichal caught his attention, he forced me to pitch despite the arm I had broken four years earlier—a compound fracture at the elbow that still ground with cartilage and bone when I threw.
Two movements shaped the household’s spiritual atmosphere. Grandparents André and Jacqueline evangelized for Moral Rearmament, the Mount Kisco-based movement targeting wealthy families. They persuaded my parents to visit Mackinac Island, introducing them to MRA’s four absolutes: honesty, purity, unselfishness, love. For my father, this provided divine sanction for his perfectionism beyond his already devout Catholicism.
More mysteriously, my mother was required to administer “hayfever” shots in my father’s upper leg—an unusual location for allergy treatment. Given the family’s connection to Dr. Jacobson through Spalding, these injections raise questions in my mind about whether these might have been Dr. Feelgood’s special formulations.
Patterns of Damage
The household’s combination of rigid control, religious absolutism, and possible pharmaceutical enhancement created systematic damage. Three of six children eventually attended Hyde School in Bath, Maine, where Joe Gauld had pioneered a radical approach that placed character development above academic achievement, using confrontational methods to ‘toughen up’ troubled students. This wasn’t a family with one troubled child but a system producing casualties who needed Gauld’s character-first intervention.
My father’s ritualized punishments followed a predictable pattern: the transgression, the talk, dropping pants, the belt or hairbrush across bare skin, his pronouncement that “this hurts me more than you.” He promised me a golden signet ring with the family crest just like the one he wore, that never materialized after I rejected his plans for my life—a symbol of noble status forever withheld.
The women found small freedoms within the constraints. My mother occasionally shared afternoon drinks with neighbor Chris Murphy by the pool while the men worked in the city. She encouraged my interest in photography, bought me that sailing ship wallpaper I treasured.
(Nana and Alex in Dublin with mama’s big sister Betty circa 1929)
When Nana arrived in the mid 1960s, she brought pranks and irreverence—hiding us kids in the toy closet when our parents came home early and caught us all staying up past our bedtimes, teaching us silly songs about monkeys and flagpoles. Her occasional retreats to her room with a bottle, and the “silent treatment” she used on us when we hurt her feelings, showed me other ways to cope with overwhelming circumstances.
The Partnership’s Collapse
The assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963 may have signaled the beginning of the end. Grandpop and I flew from NY to DC and spent two days attending the wake and funeral procession. I was eleven years old. I will never forget watching the President’s casket roll by followed by his riderless horse, with his boots placed backwards in the stirrups.
The Saint Phalle-Spalding partnership dissolved with such acrimony that Grandpop and my father stopped speaking. I was instructed to tell Grandpop that my father was ‘taking a shit’ when he called—a crude rejection of everything he represented, whether it was the failed business partnership, the family’s dysfunction, the evangelical fervor for Moral Rearmament, or likely all three.
Spalding moved to Lazard, taking his connections. John landed at PaineWebber, developing shopping centers for decades—a sobering step down from financing McDonald’s and brokering media deals. Each professional diminishment intensified his need to control his family, but even that was failing. By 1973, three children had dropped out of college. When his last hope, the biology prize winner, became pregnant at 18, and dropped out of college before the first day of class, my father essentially abandoned his plans for his children.
The divorce was already in progress. Ledge Acres was sold. The family scattered. Joannie and the younger children faced real hardship. John’s final act of rejection: successfully petitioning the Catholic Church for an annulment after twenty years and six children, claiming he “didn’t know what he was doing” when he married her. He quickly remarried, ironically to a Jewish woman which wears against Church teachings, invested in racehorses, lived comfortably on the water in West Palm Beach and Bellevue, Washington—but left absolutely nothing to his six children when he died in 2022.
Understanding the Inheritance
Looking back, one can trace how these two bloodlines shaped my early life. The Saint Phalle legacy brought proximity to power, intellectual ambition, and a destructive perfectionism that manifested in suicide, psychiatric hospitalization, and emotional withdrawal. The Furlong bedrock provided a different set of tools: showing up the next morning, making do with less, finding small joys where possible—but these survival skills came paired with their own costs: emotional distancing, self-medication with alcohol, and a sharp edge of sarcastic humor as both shield and weapon.
The Saint Phalle men sought transcendence through chemicals, but each generation chose its own path. Grandpop and his circle turned to Dr. Feelgood’s amphetamine-laced ‘vitamin shots’ and mysterious medications administered by doctors in Manhattan offices. These were socially acceptable, even fashionable among the elite. When my generation discovered our own chemical enlightenment through LSD and marijuana—substances that promised spiritual revelation rather than mere energy—the hypocrisy became stark. John, who may have received his own injections for ‘hayfever,’ saw my use of psychedelics as criminal degeneracy.”
By 1973, at age 21, I stood on the side of an interstate with my backpack and guitar—a literal crossroads that perfectly captured my position between these two inheritances. Behind me: Ledge Acres sold, family scattered, promises broken. Ahead: the open road, a different kind of education, the chance to build something new from the fragments of nobility and the bedrock of survival. The golden signet ring would never arrive, but perhaps that was its own kind of gift—freedom from a legacy that had destroyed as much as it created.