My father had sayings. He collected them the way other men collected tools — sturdy, practical things he could pull out and apply to any situation, whether they fit or not.
“You can accomplish anything you want in life. You just have to want it badly enough.”
He told me that one early and often. It was his core belief, the engine of his worldview. Want it. Work for it. Get it. The formula was simple, and he delivered it with the absolute conviction of a man who had gone from Choate to Harvard to Columbia Law School, who’d worked on Park Avenue alongside men who shaped the country, who’d raised six children in a farmhouse on twenty-five acres and called it Camelot.
He also told me I should marry a rich woman because I had expensive tastes.
He told me to attach myself to a man who is going somewhere and become indispensable to him.
He told me that he wore Brooks Brothers suits and rode the commuter train because that’s what it took to make the money — and if he had to wear long hair and smoke weed to make the money, he’d do that too.
He told me I could catch a skirt anytime.
He told me that sex was the greatest source of sin in the world.
If you’re keeping score, that’s a man who believed you could accomplish anything through sheer willpower, but also that you should attach yourself to someone more powerful. Who believed in self-reliance, but also in marrying money. Who wore the uniform of the establishment without question, but claimed he’d wear any costume if the price was right. Who acknowledged that his son wanted women, but warned him that wanting women was the devil’s work.
Every one of these sayings contradicted the others. He believed them all simultaneously. That was my father.
• • •
But I need to say something else first, before the rest of this, because the rest of this is hard.
He kissed us goodnight. Every night, when we were small. He sat on the couch and sang songs with us. He was physically affectionate in a way I didn’t fully appreciate until I met Veronica decades later and learned about her childhood — parents who never hugged or kissed any of the children, who told them to go outside and play. My father wasn’t that. When we were young, when we were still small enough to be his, he held us. He was present in a way that was warm and real and not performed.
It didn’t last. As I grew and began to resist his blueprint — as I grew my hair and wanted Bergman instead of West Point, as Jacques became an incorrigible rebel drawing increasingly severe physical punishments, as the family started flying apart — the affection withdrew. Not all at once. Gradually, the way a tide goes out. But it had been there. That’s the thing I need to say plainly. He loved us. I still love him. What follows is not an indictment. It’s a portrait of a tragic man, and the tragedy is that the love was real and it wasn’t enough.
• • •
His name was Jean Marie-Samuel de Saint Phalle. He had a gold signet ring with the family coat of arms — a shield with a cross and a lion, and the Latin inscription “Cruce deo gladio jungor.” My cross binds me to God, my sword to the King. Supposedly, a distant ancestor had saved the King of France’s life in battle. We were once twelfth in line to the throne, he liked to remind me. Noble extraction. That phrase hung over my childhood like a weather system. Noblesse Oblige. Duty and responsibility hung over me in the form of my father’s shadow.
I remember him combing my hair before church one Sunday morning. I was probably ten or eleven. He was working through the tangles, and when he got to the back of my head — the nape of my neck where the curls were thickest, the heavy Irish curls I’d inherited from my mother — he paused. His hands slowed. I could feel him looking at the back of my head with something I couldn’t name at the time. Disapproval. Or maybe something deeper than disapproval. Regret.
My mother was Agnes Joan Furlong — Joannie. The orphaned daughter of an Irish immigrant. Nana had crossed the Atlantic with nothing, raised three children alone after her husband died on Boxing Day. My mother was pretty, warm, devoted. But she was not noble French. She was not what a de Saint Phalle was supposed to marry. And there I was, his firstborn, his namesake, his project — and the curls at the back of my head were proof that the bloodline had been diluted. That the throne of France was receding with every generation.
When he was finally free of my mother — after the divorce, the annulment that erased twenty-two years and six children in the eyes of the Church — what did he do? He married Meryl, a brash little Jewish woman who brought his slippers. Not noble French. Not even Irish Catholic. The pattern repeated. Twice he chose women who didn’t fit his own mythology, and twice he seemed surprised by the result.
• • •
He was vigilant about masculinity in ways I didn’t understand until much later. I picked out a blazer once — nice fabric, a faint purple stripe in it. He refused to let me buy it. The implication, unspoken but unmistakable, was that a boy who liked color in his clothes might be something other than what a de Saint Phalle should be. Another time, my cousin Edme talked me into buying a pair of Beatle boots in the city — beautiful leather, stylish. My father made me go back the next day and return them. Too expensive, he said. But I think the real objection was the same. Edme, it turned out, was gay. My father didn’t know that yet, but his antennae were always up. Any hint that his eldest son might not be performing masculinity correctly set off alarms.
Jacques picked this up and ran with it. Jacques was the second son, the football player, the carpenter, the guy who worked with mob-connected Italians and ate hash to save us from a state trooper. Jacques was a man’s man in a way my father recognized and approved of. I was the sensitive one, the artist, the kid who liked Bergman and the Grateful Dead and psychedelic wonder. Jacques would mock me for years — decades — with this cooing imitation: “Oh, wow, man.” The line between my father’s anxiety and my brother’s contempt was a straight one, drawn early, and it never wavered.
• • •
He taught me chess when I was young. He taught me the Avalon Hill war games — Gettysburg, Battle of the Bulge, the kind of hexagonal map simulations where you moved cardboard counters and calculated odds of attack. He loved strategy. He loved the architecture of winning.
I was never able to beat him. Not once. Not at chess, not at the war games, not at anything.
I kept coming back to the table. That’s the part that breaks my heart now — the boy who kept sitting down across from a man who would never, ever let him experience what winning felt like. The boy still believed the saying: you can accomplish anything you want, you just have to want it badly enough. So he wanted it. He wanted to beat his father at chess. He wanted it badly enough. And it never happened.
I don’t think it was pathological, exactly — not a conscious need to prevent his children from surpassing him. It was more that the only version of success he could recognize was the one that followed his blueprint. Win the way I win. Think the way I think. Wear Brooks Brothers. Ride the train. Marry well. Serve God. And when I refused that blueprint — when I grew the curls and chased the cameras and dropped the acid and put my thumb out on 684 — I became illegible to him. He couldn’t read me anymore. And a man who can’t read his own son has only two options: learn a new language, or double down on the old one. My father doubled down. Every time.
• • •
He was a man who charged into things without preparation, with total confidence and no expertise, and expected the world to arrange itself around his will.
One summer at Lake George — I must have been thirteen or fourteen — he decided that we were all going to learn to water ski. He had never water skied in his life. He’d rented a flimsy little outboard motorboat and had no idea how to use it properly. He had me stand in knee-deep water with the skis flat on the bottom and told me to let him know when I was ready.
I said go.
He gunned the throttle and pulled me straight forward, face-first into the lake. Water up my nose, skis everywhere. We tried again. Same result. I gave up. Eight-year-old Jacques took over — Jacques always took over the physical challenges — and tried it maybe half a dozen times, nearly drowning each attempt, refusing to quit because that was Jacques. Finally another boat went by, and the driver yelled across the water: “Put your tips up!”
Put your tips up. The one piece of information that would have made the whole thing work from the start. My father hadn’t known it. Hadn’t thought to ask. Hadn’t consulted anyone or read anything or done thirty seconds of preparation before putting his sons in the water. He just went. That was him. Total authority, sometimes zero knowledge. The confidence of a man who believed you could accomplish anything, even things you’d never bothered to learn how to do. It was the same story with the annual summer vacation — he’d pack everybody into the car and wing it. No reservations, no plan, frequent disasters.
Years later, at my sister Fal’s wedding in 1979 — a backyard ceremony at Pound Ridge, six years after the divorce — he showed up with French champagne. A generous gesture, and I think he meant it warmly. But then after the ceremony he wanted to play touch football, and Jacques — being Jacques — dove over a stone wall trying to catch a pass, risking serious injury, somehow coming up victorious. My father at fifty-one, still competing, still needing the game, still turning everything into a contest. And Jacques at twenty-three, still trying to impress him, still willing to hurt himself for a catch.
• • •
My grandfather André had a saying too. “Leave no stone unturned.” He was the patriarch — the banker who’d arrived from France in 1925, who’d built a firm on Wall Street, who’d partnered with JFK’s inner circle. He left no stone unturned. He also left a family in wreckage. Two of his children committed suicide. His daughter Niki accused him of sexual abuse. His wife told me he’d put his heart in the deep freeze. He had been receiving amphetamine shots from Dr. Max Jacobson, the infamous Dr. Feelgood who treated the president. Leave no stone unturned — even the ones that should stay buried.
My father inherited more than money from that man. He inherited the conviction that control was love, that discipline was devotion, that winning was the same as being right. And he inherited the deep freeze. The emotional shutdown that allowed him to annul a twenty-two-year marriage and six children with a single petition to the Archdiocese. The shutdown that allowed him to go after his dead sister’s children’s inheritance, four years after she’d shot herself in his other sister’s house. The shutdown that allowed him to train racehorses while his sons painted houses and demolished triple-deckers for a living.
• • •
He’d loved thoroughbred racing since he was a boy. He used to take us to the track, though most of us didn’t enjoy it. He had a card table set up in his bedroom where he’d work on his racing form, index cards everywhere, his ever-present roll of Ben Franklins on his dresser, a system for handicapping that he refined obsessively. He burned incense in that room and listened to Gregorian chant. He was a solitary man in a house full of children, and the betting mathematics were his real companions — the ones who performed on command, who could be studied and predicted and bet on, who never talked back or dropped out of college or borrowed eighty dollars from a closet.
• • •
He used to make me read fifty pages a day. Fifteen for the Bible. He’d edit my school essays with scissors — cutting paragraphs apart, rearranging them on shirt cardboard, teaching me structure through disassembly. He forced me to pitch like Juan Marichal until my damaged elbow screamed. He drove me to West Point for an interview I didn’t want. He forbade me from going to Woodstock. He flushed a hundred hits of acid down a dormitory toilet and left without asking a single question about what I’d experienced.
He hit my mother in the laundry room and I kept walking.
And he kissed us goodnight. And he sang songs on the couch. And he took us fishing at the reservoir, and those afternoons were the best hours of my childhood — just the rod, the line, the water, and a father who was, for once, not performing anything. Just present.
He was a complicated man. That word gets used as a euphemism for cruelty, and I don’t mean it that way. I mean that he contained genuine contradictions that never resolved. He believed in education but wouldn’t pay for the one his son wanted. He believed in family but annulled his own. He believed in God but married outside his faith. He believed you could accomplish anything, but he could not accomplish the one thing that mattered most — being present for the people who needed him. Except sometimes he could. That’s what makes it so hard.
• • •
My grandfather said leave no stone unturned. My father said you can accomplish anything you want. And what I learned — what took me twenty-eight years and a lost decade and a factory floor and a paint truck and a summer in Providence to learn — was simpler than either of their sayings.
He wasn’t coming.
Not to USC. Not to Providence. Not to the chess table as an equal. Not to the conversation I’d been trying to have with him since I was thirteen. The man who had to win could never find his way to the one thing that didn’t require winning at all — just showing up, just being there, just letting his sons be who they were instead of who he’d planned for them to be. It wasn’t malice. I don’t believe it was even conscious. He was a man shaped by a brutal inheritance — a father who may have been a sexual abuser, a mother who dealt out pieties and slaps, a family that produced suicides, a religion that sanctified his rigidity — and he passed the damage forward because that’s what damaged people do when they don’t know they’re damaged.
I was twenty-eight when I stopped waiting. I had a truck, a dog, a paintbrush, and no ambitions beyond the next job. It was a small life. But it was mine. And for the first time, nobody was going to pull the rug out from under it, because I’d built it on the ground.
A month later, a woman walked into my sister’s dress shop and everything changed. But that’s the next chapter.
The man who had to win died in 2022. He was ninety-four. He’d outlived his first wife, all four siblings, and the patience of most of his children. I don’t know if he was still handicapping horses at the end. I hope he was. It was the one thing he did that made him purely, uncomplicatedly happy.
I never beat him at chess. He told me once, when I turned twenty-one, that when I was old I would look back and see that every decision I made caused me to become who I was. But I think, in the end, I became something he never expected — a man who stopped competing altogether and found that the life on the other side of giving up was better than anything either of us had imagined.
I genuinely loved him. He genuinely loved us. The tragedy is that both of those things are true, and it still wasn’t enough.
That is the greatest and at the same time most heartrending portrait of a human being I’ve read in all my 63 years. Your father’s lasting impact on you is a fascinating read.