Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,33

Mexico, standing in the barn where she and her husband, the artist Peter Hurd, painted, and seeing Hurd take her two little girls on a hike to look at the orange trees and the sagebrush that made little Margaret sneeze. Or having breakfast with the legendary conductor Maurice Abravanel and choreographer Agnes de Mille (who, like Georgia O’Keeffe, showed extraordinarily little interest in young Margaret and Mary). Or watching Don as he sweet-talked David Rockefeller into funding the Federation’s new public television project.

They made new friends, too, like the oil wildcatter Samuel Gary, whose 1967 strike in Bell Creek Field in Montana tapped an estimated 240 million barrels of oil—the largest oil strike west of the Mississippi at that time. Sam relied on Don and the Federation for help in building out Bell Creek into a town that could support hundreds of new oil workers. If the main drag of Bell Creek needed a new traffic light, Don Galvin was a phone call away. Through the late 1960s, with Margaret and Mary in tow, the Galvins visited with the Garys at their house in the refined Cherry Hills section of Denver. Sam and his wife, Nancy, had eight children, and a few of the girls were close in age to Margaret and Mary. The children would play together while the grown-ups would play tennis or talk politics. The Garys loved watching Don with his falcons; Don’s fame as the Air Force Academy’s falcon man preceded him. Once, in Colorado Springs, Don and Mimi enlisted young Donald to teach Sam and Nancy and some of their children how to rappel off the cliff at Cathedral Rock. Another time, when the Garys flew Don and Mimi to Swan Lake in Cedar Springs, Idaho, in their tiny, unpressurized private plane, Mimi got dizzy during the flight and passed out.

Back home, Mimi and Don became regular guests at dinner parties, where Don held forth with authority on politics and industry and the arts. All eyes were on her accomplished husband. Mimi felt she had it all on those nights. Don was handsome, intelligent, and a little flirtatious. Her friends would call him Romeo.

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NOTHING IS FREE, and before long, Mimi put her finger on the price. More than Don, she saw how her nose was pressed up against the windows of this world. She had no college education, and she and Don had no wealth. Her own pedigree, Grandfather Kenyon and his levees, mattered very little among the millionaires of the new West. At best, they were the help. Even at their most benign, Sam and Nancy Gary, their new multimillionaire friends, were living reminders that the world that Mimi and Don were traveling in—the world of the Federation and governors and oil wildcatters and world-class artists and dancers and celebrity orchestra conductors—was not really their world at all.

And, of course, their world was not as perfect as Mimi had wanted. She would not have admitted this to herself at the time, much less told another soul about it. But if she needed reminding, she only had to wait for visits home from her oldest two boys. Donald and Jim continued to fight, with each other and with their younger brothers. Every visit to Hidden Valley Road—Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas again—ended in bruises. Richard remembered once watching as Donald ran down the road after Jim, caught up to him, and knocked him to the ground with an uppercut. He had never seen anybody punch someone so hard in his life.

Mimi had surprised herself by being relieved that her two oldest boys were out of the house, on the pretense that Donald and Jim were, in theory, nearly adults and capable of making their own decisions. Each time they came home put the lie to all that. But she also was aware that the slightest acknowledgment that all was not well in her family risked coloring everything else about her life—Don’s new professional prospects, the standing of the other children, the reputation of them all.

And so Mimi tended to agree, most of the time, when her husband said what he’d always said when there was something wrong with the children: that the boys should not be coddled; that they should leave the nest, make their own mistakes and learn from them, take responsibility for their