Introduction

The great-great-great-great granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt takes a look at the decline of her wealthy blue-blooded family in this irreverent and wickedly funny memoir

For generations the Burdens were one of the wealthiest families in New York, thanks to the inherited fortune of Cornelius "The Commodore" Vanderbilt. By 1955, the year of Wendy's birth, the Burdens had become a clan of overfunded, quirky and brainy, steadfastly chauvinistic, and ultimately doomed blue bloods on the verge of financial and moral decline-and were rarely seen not holding a drink.

When her father commits suicide when Wendy is six, she and her brother are told nothing about it and are shuffled off to school as if it were any other day. Subsequently, Wendy becomes obsessed with the macabre, modeling herself after Wednesday Addams of the Addams family, and decides she wants to be a mortician when she grows up. Just days after the funeral, her mother jets off to southern climes in search of the perfect tan, and for the next three years, Wendy and her two brothers are raised mostly by a chain-smoking Scottish nanny and the long suffering household staff at their grandparent's Fifth Avenue apartment. If you think Eloise wreaked havoc at The Plaza you should see what Wendy and her brothers do in "Burdenland"-a world where her grandfather is the president of the Museum of Modern Art; the walls are decorated with originals of Klee, Kline, Mondrian, and Miro; and Rockefellers are regular dinner guests.

The spoiled life of the uber-rich that they live with their grandparents is in dark contrast to the life they live with their mother, a brilliant Radcliffe grad and Daughter of the American Revolution, who deals with having two men's suicides on her conscience by becoming skinnier, tanner, blonder, and more steeped in bitter alcoholism with every passing year.

We watch Wendy's family unravel as she travels between Fifth Avenue, Virginia horse country, Mount Desert Island in Maine, the Jupiter Island Club, London, and boarding school, coming through all of it surprisingly intact. Rife with humor, heartbreak, family intrigue, and booze, Dead End Gene Pool offers a glimpse into the eccentric excess of old money and gives truth to the old maxim: The rich are different.

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Excerpt

Thirty-one Moons

“Your attention, pleasewhoops!” The head stewardess, a beehived blonde, dropped her microphone. While she grappled for it on the floor of the DC-4’s galley, the resultant screech and the disclosure of her pneumatic bust ensured all eyes were directed her way. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” she began again, “we have a little problem. In a short while, the captain will ask all of you to . . . ah . . . to assume the crash position as illustrated in the safety information located in the seat pocket in front of youexcuse me . . . ah please, your attention againPLEASE!”

The words crash position had thrown a switch. People began twisting in their seats, trying to figure out why such a measure was deemed necessary when the plane had not changed altitude for the last half hour and was, in fact, chugging nicely along. “Huh?” became “What’s happening?” which then turned to “Just what the HELL is going on?” Finally the stewardess lost it and yelled, “QUIET!” which was the cue for the captain to assume control from the flight deck.

“Now, ladies and gents,” he began, “there’s nothing for y’all to get worked up about. This is a standard safety procedure we instigate whenever there is the little ol’ bittiest chance of an incident acurrin’.” His voice was creamy, with just the right amount of manly authority. But no one was buying that sky commander crap if the plane was going down.

A roar swelled up. Women cried out, babies squalled, and businessmen grabbed at the sleeves of the stewardesses, pleading for information and emergency cocktails.

“Oh, great,” I muttered, folding my arms, “we’re gonna miss My Favorite Martian.”

“Well, if the plane crashes, maybe we won’t have to go to school tomorrow?” my brother said helpfully.

“There’s no way the plane’s crashing, stupid. You gonna drink the rest of that Coke?”

j

My brother Will and I were en route from Washington, DC, to New York’s LaGuardia Airport to visit our grandparents. In spite of our youth—I was seven and Will eight—we were traveling alone, as we’d been doing for as long as I could remember. Our grandfather’s secretary, Miss Pou (satisfyingly pronounced pew, as in pee-yoo), had been forced to book us seats in the midsection of the cabin. The humiliating rear, that quarantine semicircle reserved for losers and the grandchildren of safety-conscious men who sat on the boards of TWA and Pan Am, had already been taken by a group of dark, glittering Indian women and their children. Will and I were thrilled not to be back there and, up until this recent announcement, had been deliberately out of control—which is understandable when you’ve consumed five Coca-Colas in under an hour.

I couldn’t decide whether to cry or hit my brother. I’d been in a horrible mood ever since that morning when I’d noticed our tickets were printed out as “Master William A. M. Burden IV and companion.” Being a girl meant squat in my father’s family. Honestly, you’d think I’d been born to Chinese peasants. So there hadn’t been any of us for a couple of generations; you’d have thought everyone would be delighted. I liked to think that my grandmother was, but her efforts were curtailed by my grandfather. It was obvious that he would have preferred me to have Will’s quieter disposition—and vice versa. He was forever telling me to stop talking and let my brother speak, and wanting only Will with him in the photo when my grandmother pulled out her Brownie.

My mother’s advice was to (quote) shut up and put up. Leslie Lepington Hamilton Burden (and eventually Beer and Tobey) was not one to coddle her children with parental guidance. She’d lectured me one evening while I was lying on her bed making snow angels on the striped Mexican bedspread.

“The sooner you figure out how to deal with being a female in your father’s family, the better.” I’d admired her covertly as she’d cinched a wide calfskin belt over her narrow black sheath, yanking it into an extra hole with a slight grunt. Her waist was smaller than mine and she made sure I knew it.

“I’ll figure it out, I guess,” I’d grumbled. My mother’s way of dealing sure wasn’t going to be mine. On the rare times I got to see her around my grandparents, she was weirdly unlike herself and acted as sweetly subservient and dumb as Snow White. It was so fake.

“If I were you, Toots—”

“Don’t call me Toots!” I said. I hated the nickname she used interchangeably on my brother and me. It was like some stupid moll-speak. But she had her own little language, a kind of lexicon she substituted for the vocabulary of humor she lacked; adages and names and twisting up of words that I guess she thought were funny. I found it unfunny and embarrassing. And I was already missing her. These days, it seemed I only spent time with my mother when she was getting ready to leave. My brother and I had recently come to view her as a glamorous lodger who rented the master bedroom suite.

“Why do we have to visit Gaga and Granddaddy so much, anyway?” I whined. “I feel like I live on Eastern Airlines.” Dusty Springfield sang from the phonograph in the corner and I waggled my legs in time to “Wishin’ and Hopin’.” Ever since our father had abruptly died the year before, Will and I had become virtual commuters shuttling back and forth from our home in Washington to those of our grandparents in New York, Maine, and Florida.

“Oh, don’t be so bratty,” my mother replied, blacking in her eyebrows with a red Maybelline pencil. “There are lots of little girls who’d give up growing tits for a chance to hang out on Fifth Avenue and be waited on by servants. Hand me my lipstick?” She passed the frosted tube across her mouth and smacked a Kleenex to set it. Fabergé Nude Pink was her lifelong color of choice, a pastel shade that brings to mind Sun Belt drag queens and leather-faced Junior Leaguers. She would die wearing it.

“Anyhoo,” my mother said, giving a blast of Final Net to her French twist, “you know your grandparents have insisted on this visitation schedule ever since your father turned up his toes. And so have their goddamn lawyers.” She walked across the room and stood over me then, a tanned blond bombshell in a cocktail dress, fishnets, and stilettos, reeking of Diorissimo. When she leaned down, I was afraid she was going to kiss me or something, but instead she remarked with disbelief, “That can’t be a pimple on your chin already!” I clamped my CREEPY comic book down over my head as the doorbell chimed.

Then she and Dusty sang their way down the stairs, leaving me to search my reflection in the mirror for the dreaded signs of preprepubescent acne.

j

It never occurred to our mother when she left us at the airport that we might not be returned in the same condition. The notion that our chaste little bodies could be taken aside and fingered by unfamiliar hands didn’t cross her mind. Nor did thoughts of Tunisian white slavery, the narcotic courier trade, Lower East Side sweatshops, or abduction by green pedophiles in silver pods. Or maybe they did.

She would leave us at the departure gate, Will in a blazer and clip-on bow tie, me in a scratchy plaid jumper from Best & Co., and then stride off. In the beginning, I pretended she was only going to the restroom, and that the line there was so long that by the time she rushed back, we’d already boarded. I imagined her lingering until the plane departed, blowing kisses and waving to our tiny portholes as the props whined us out to a speck in the sky. I pictured her driving home in her humpy red Volvo to an empty and joyless house where, in despondency, she’d spend the weekend organizing our rooms and planning vacations to Disneyland until she picked us up on Sunday night. But I got over that pretty quick.

Truth be known, our mother delivered us to any person wearing any semblance of a uniform standing anywhere near the gate, and left without waiting for the plane to board. From the “Standing Only” spot she had parked in, she could make it downtown to Trader Vic’s in less time than it takes to put on a pair of sheer black stockings and get the seams straight.

In the early 1950s everyone married early, and my parents had been no exception. My mother had been a nineteen-year-old anthropology major at Radcliffe, and my father had been twenty-one, and a junior at Harvard. Now, a decade later, she was a young widow, and was she ever making the most of it.

“Surprise!” she would say to us at breakfast on the mornings after her returns. She’d take her hands from behind her back and plunk down some huge, hairy arachnid suspended in an alcohol-filled jar.

“Wow,” we would slur through our Froot Loops, “you went to Haiti again.”

“Look what else I brought you!” she’d say, holding out batik swimwear you’d rather get rat-bite fever than be seen in.

“Thanks,” my brother and I would say as we grabbed our book bags and headed out the door like we were worried about missing the bus.

The presents our mother brought were our only clue as to where she’d been. Ice plants meant California. Live alligators in shoe boxes meant Miami and the Roey Plaza Hotel. Dead ones on handbags meant Tijuana. So did jumping beans. Gardenias were routine; they came from an evening of scorpions at the Outrigger Bar at Trader Vic’s. We would open the fridge to get out the orange juice and find them, bruised and dog-tired from floating around in rum and dodging the straws of my mother and her date. You could see the little stab marks all over them.

For the sake of convenience, I’d learned to do a passable forgery of my mother’s signature by second grade. The teachers mostly let it slide (it was a liberal primary school for the children of Washington diplomats), but when I okayed four Ds and an F in a parental note, they reeled me in.

“I’m truly sorry about your daddy,” my homeroom teacher said, addressing me across her desk with compassion. “And I know your mommy is frequently out of town, no doubt dealing with her own . . . grief. ” She adjusted her glasses. “That must be very difficult for you and your brother.”

I nodded and gave a little sniff for good measure. Ha. Was she kidding? It was completely cool to have a dead father. I was the class celebrity. And I loved it when my mother was away. I hung out in the basement with my governess, Henrietta, lying on her double bed, inhaling secondhand smoke and watching Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour or The Ed Sullivan Showshe with a tumbler of whiskey, and I with a bag of Wise potato chips. One thing my mother knew how to do was pick out a good governess.

Henrietta and I had a running joke about my mother’s schedule.

“So when’s Mommy coming home?” I’d say.

“When she’s darker than Sambo, lassie,” Henrietta would say back, laughing and choking on her own phlegm. Lighting a fresh Winston off the glowing butt of the last, she’d reach over and tousle my hair. “A wee more dip with those crisps, lassie?” We absolutely understood each other.

Over the PA system, the captain came on again. “I’m sure y’all have noticed we’ve been circling. We’re trying to use up some a that big ol’ tank a gas before we come on in.” He proceeded to tell us that there was a little ol’ problem with getting the landing wheels to go down. That got everyone thinking. Now all you could hear was the vibration of the propellers slicing evenly through the dark, and the muffled terror of people mentally preparing to die. Only the Indians in the back appeared unconcerned; what did they carethey’d be back.

My brother had gotten the window seat, despite my efforts to scratch and bite my way into it first, and since the captain’s announcement, he’d been springing up and down, calling out numbers. Every time I told him to shut up, he said he was counting the moons.

“Fifteen . . . sheesh! I can’t believe how many there are,” Will said to his tiny oval aperture. He had his nose flat against its own reflection. The cabin lights had been dimmed for landing (or whatever), and an eerie column of light from the reading lamp bounced off my brother’s crew cut.

“George is gonna be mad we’re late,” Will said to the glass.

“He’s probably hoping the plane’ll crash and we’ll be dead, so he won’t have to drive us anymore.” I was trying to sound tough, even though my heart was starting to make weird little jumps in my chest.

Will turned from the window. “You think we have time for one last Coke?”

j

At LaGuardia (or West Palm Beach, the gateway to our grandparents’ house in Hobe Sound; or Bangor, ditto for the summer house in Maine), we were always met by George, our grandparents’ marzipan-pink, chrome-domed, unsmiling German chauffeur. He treated my brother and me like medical waste, propelling us through baggage claim by the back of our collars with a gloved vise-grip, out to the waiting Cadillac limousine. In magnanimous moments I reasoned that because George had never married, he was unable to appreciate children, let alone share our enthusiasm for acrobatics in the back of his car. Chaperoning us was clearly beneath his dignity, but he couldn’t afford to lose this job because George was a Nazi escaping justice. I knew he was a Nazi because one of my uncles was into Hitler. Uncle Ham–Uncle Ham (we called him that because he said everything twicelike “Hitler was a good man! A good man!”) was my father’s younger brother. He liked to neutralize the effects of his Thorazine, which he took for an as yet undiscovered but clearly out there mental condition, with coffee, Coca-Cola, chocolate bars, NoDoz, and four packs of Parliaments a day. This made him more than a little chatty, even to a kid. Over the course of a weekend with Uncle Ham–Uncle Ham, you could, through osmosis, learn enough about the Third Reich to write a dissertation on the Nuremberg Rallies.

A Jewish friend of mine from summer camp had told me that German people liked to cover their lamps with lamp shades made from the skin of Jews gassed at Auschwitz. She was three years older than me, and I believed her.

You think my grandfather’s shofur has some? I’d written her by return post. (No way could I spell chauffeur.)

Duh, she had written back, and had gone on to graphically describe all kinds of atrocities on several sheets of Snoopy stationery, the visualization of which had kept me awake at night for a month.

I’d asked Uncle Ham–Uncle Ham if he thought George had human-skin lamp shades in his apartment, and he had laughed and nodded his head vigorously.

“You mean the green ones with the circles and squares on them?”

“That’s right! That’s right!” he had chortled, blowing smoke out through his nose while guzzling a highball of straight Coke.

“But that’s gross!”

“Yes! Yes! The color was unfortunate! Unfortunate!”

After that revelation, I resolved to behave as badly as possible on George’s watch, and I warned my friends that if anything fishy were to happen to me, like my skin got removed for redecoration purposes, to tell the police the chauffeur did it.

The stewardesses were demonstrating the crash position. Miss Bossy Beehive stopped and clucked her tongue at me. “Sweetheart, where is that seat belt? I know this is all terribly exciting, but I want your belt securely fastened. Now, show me the position you need to be inin case we CRASH. No, sugar pie, all the way down . . .” With a hook like Cassius Clay, she slammed my head down so hard I got a carpet burn from my dress. She turned to my brother, saying, “Buckle up, little man!” Strafing me with her concrete bosom, she leaned over and nipped in his waist so hard, his rib cage shot out over the metal fastener. She nodded to herself and moved on.

“What d’you think it’ll be like?” I heard Will mumble in a nasal voice. His head was turned on his lap away from me.

“What?”

“To die.” He turned toward me, one eye on the retreating back of the stewardess.

“Messy, I guess.”

Will sat up and grinned. “I think it’s going to be pretty cool. I think we’ll make a gigantic fireball and everyone will see it, from California even, and we’ll get our names in the papers. Maybe they’ll even name a ride at Disneyland after us.”

It didn’t sound so bad the way he envisioned it. In fact, it did sound sort of cool. Dammit, he would probably get to die first.

j

Number One Son got everything before me. Even psycho-analysis.

On Saturday mornings Will went to see Dr. Berman. He had started going after our father died. According to my grandfather, it was necessary for the son to talk to someone but not the daughter. When Will returned from his appointment, I sniffed him all over like a dog checking out a mate who’s been to the vet. “So?” I would demand. “Did he ask you any weird questions? Did he stick needles in you? Did you have to take down your pants?”

“Naw. We just played games,” Will said.

“Well what kind of games, idiot? Cards? Mouse Trap? Stratego? Does he have Creepy Crawlers?” After jigsaw puzzles, I was obsessed with Creepy Crawlers. It was a control freak’s dream set with a baking unit that could leave scars worthy of an acetylene torch. You put this liquid Plasti-Goop into molds carved with half reliefs of things like cockroaches and stinkbugs and silverfish, and scorpions and millipedes and bats, scratching the stuff into the antennae and spindly bug legs with a needle. Then you baked them in the cooker right there on the flammable shag carpeting of your bedroom floor.

“I don’t knowjust games!” Will didn’t recognize his hour with Dr. Berman as the spotlit, center-of-attention shower of love I knew it to be.

I was burning up with curiosity; I needed to know what I was missing. But inevitably, my weekly joust for the dirt ended with no answers, and Will punching me in the stomach and declaring, “Dr. Berman says you’re acting out ’cause you’re jealous.” No shit.

j

Anyway, that stewardess was wrong. I did not find the present situation exciting. Tragic would describe it more appropriately, because I was going to miss my eighth birthday party.

My birthday was the single day out of the year when my mother behaved like a mother. In fact, she behaved like she was running for Mother of the Year, though that didn’t make up for the 364 other days when she either embarrassed me, ignored me, or was geographically elsewhere. I summoned a birthday hostess image of the Merry Widow: she was wearing her signature black stretch pants, Beatle booties, and favorite swirly Pucci blouse. Her skin was as toasty golden brown as a pretzel, her shoulder-length lemon-colored hair side-parted like a starlet’s, and she held out a layer cake of heroic color and proportion, and questionable flavor. She was fond of maple or tutti-frutti cake mixes, which she enhanced according to whim, with whatever was on hand, like adding to the batter tinfoil-wrapped charms that you broke your new molars on. She wasn’t great with presents either. She was the kind of person who told you on the gift card outside exactly what was on the inside. However, she made up for it with her contagious enthusiasm. And her decorations and games were truly inspired. No insipid Pin the Tail on the Donkey for us; it was a real donkey and a real horse tail that you had to slap on the animal’s butt with masking tape. Or, in the case of my brother’s most recent birthday party, a thumbtack, which caused the donkey to place his hind feet on the ribs of Brian O’Donahue and send him flying backwards into the library bookcase.

She really was the best. All the kids in my class were so jealous of me.

Overwhelmed, I began to cry, which put me close to drowning in my mayday position.

“Twenty-three . . . Hey, look down there on the ground! They’ve put Crazy Foam all over the place!” my brother squealed. He was having a blast.

“Shut up, dumbbell,” I hissed, and bit his elbow for good measure.

j

I stared at him with self-indulgent hatred as the airplane droned steadfastly in its orbit over Queens. Will was only a year and a half older than me, but my grandparents treated him like he was off to college. This past Christmas, instead of a pony, which was what I’d begged for, Santa had brought me an Hermès scarf printed with Lipizzaner horses, a fawn-colored cashmere Hermès cardigan with velvet appliquéd horse heads, and a topaz bracelet in a velvet box from Tiffany’s. Nothing you crow about to your second-grade classmates when school reconvenes. My brother, in addition to a television, an electric typewriter, Davy Crockett pajamas, a four-lane slot-car racetrack, and Rock’em Sock’em Robots, had gotten the pony. After all the presents had been unwrapped, I had raged at my mother, who was making a rare Yuletide appearance on a stopover between Palm Springs and Tenerife. We were in one of the guest bedrooms of my grandparents’ apartment in New York. My mother was in a pink striped bikini, stretched out on the carpet in a contorted pose beneath a couple of carefully positioned sunlamps.

“Why does stupid Will get a pony when I’m the one who takes all the riding lessons?” I’d sobbed from the bed where once again I had flung myself.

My mother had done her best to comfort me. She totally got the horse-love thing. Speaking in a monotone without moving, so that her eye protectors wouldn’t shift, she said, “I’m sorry, Toots, I know how you feel, but your grandparents gave him the horse. Don’t look at me.”

“Why didn’t you stop them? You should have told them he hates horses!”

“Oh, get over it. They decided he should have a horse. End of story.” She was done comforting. “And listen, if I were you, I’d get over potato chips too. Oink, oink.”

I put my hands up to my chipmunk cheeks. As if she could see this, my mother smoothed her own hands over her nutmeg-colored, flat-as-a-cow-pie abdomen. She flexed her painted toes a few times to ease the strain of the peculiar tanning position she was in.

“Hey. Sometimes that’s just how the cookie crumbles.”

I got up to leave. I had a mind to go finish the bag of Cheetos I’d hidden in the help’s pantry.

“I know where your stash is, Toots,” she said as I was doing my best Indian walk out the door. “And hey, tell Adolph, or Albertwhatever the new butler’s name istell him to bring Mummy another daiquiri, would you? There’s a good girl.”

The following afternoon I attempted to snuff out my brother by shoving him out of the limo into midtown Manhattan day-after-Christmas-sale-mania traffic. He had swung out like a cartoon character, holding on to the handle of the huge door with the tenacity of a booger, while it yawned out over the whizzing tarmac of Fifty-seventh Street. We’d traveled that way for several blocks until George braked to avoid mowing down a police officer.

Yeah, I got in trouble, but it was worth it.

j

“What d’you think the Crazy Foam’s for anyway?” Will said to me now. I sat up and unbuckled myself, after checking to make sure the stewardess wasn’t looking. “Let me see,” I said, shouldering him out of the way.

“I’ll tell you what the foam’s for.” The passenger across from us put out his hand and laid it on the armrest of my vacated seat. He was so tall it was no effort for him to lean across the aisle. Will and I, crowded into the window seat, stared at the huge boney paw, the veins raised and the knuckles lumpy, and then at his long pale face. The man’s tortoiseshell reading glasses were pushed up onto his forehead like they were surfing a wave of mangy caterpillars.

“The foam,” he said, “is to cushion the plane’s fuselage when we land on the runway without the aid of wheels. The pilot will attempt to slide the aircraft down the asphalt runway without it, and us, igniting into a ball of fire.”

“Oh” was my response. That, and a little spurt of pee into my Carter’s.

“Coooolll,” breathed my brother, turning back to the window. “There’s another! That makes thirty-one. I gotta tell my science teacher about this.”

Engrossed in his moon tabulation, Will was oblivious to what the rest of us knew to be happening. I felt a swell of affection for him, like he was a dumb puppy or something, and I pressed close beside him at the window. I looked out into the apocalyptic night. As we glided slowly over the airport, I could see emergency vehicles clustering below, their red and white lights like the beating hearts of cornered mice. They were alarmingly visible even from our height of ten thousand feet.

I had never known real fear before. No person, no thing had really frightened me. When my brother had led me downstairs to the policemen in our living room, on the night our father’s body was found, I hadn’t been afraid, just confused. But something about those flashing lights below terrified me, because they validated the certitude of death in a way my father’s could not. This was real, because this was for me. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

“In the future, I’d be able to resolve all kinds of things by invoking the proverbial “suffering is redemptive” theory. Like if my mother hadn’t married that dictatorial sphincter, I wouldn’t have acquired a sense of self so early in life. Or learned to drive a stick at twelve. And if my father hadn’t killed himself, I wouldn’t have inherited a few million at twenty-one. But that philosophy wasn’t working for me then, and I was as tortured as St. Augustine” (p. 151).
An Introduction to Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden
For the average kid, a father’s suicide is pretty high on the list of things that can screw up your childhood. But for Wendy Burden, a great-great-great-great granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, it was just one of a mind-boggling series of tragedies and dysfunctions that characterized life along her branch of the fabulously wealthy—and fabulously doomed—Vanderbilt dynasty.
By the time Wendy was seven, she and her brothers, Will and Edward, were pint-sized frequent fliers, shuttled off to visit their paternal grandparents while their jet-setting mother pursued the perfect tan and searched for a new male companion. Of course, Mr. and Mrs. William A. M. Burden II were more than happy to host their only grandsons at their palatial Manhattan apartment, winter getaway in Florida, and avant-garde summerhouse in Maine—but it was clear that a Burden granddaughter was a second-class citizen.
So, despite her mother’s characteristically blunt advice that, “there are lots of little girls who’d give up growing tits for a chance to hang out on Fifth Avenue and be waited on by servants” (p. 12), Wendy just wanted to stay at home with her beloved, chain-smoking Scottish governess, Henrietta. Her protests ignored, Wendy consoled herself by playing tricks on the servants, turning her Easy-Bake Oven into a crematorium, and otherwise channeling her “soul sister,” Wednesday Addams (p. 34).
Yet, it was more than her grandfather’s blatant misogyny that disturbed Wendy. Even a child could see that all was not well in the opulent Burden household. Her father, William A. M. Burden III, had been his parents’ shining hope, and his death paved the way for what became their round-the-clock cocktail hour. The family fortune was still significant, but diminishing, and none of the three remaining
sons were interested in bolstering it. Drinks in hand, the Burdens tried to groom Wendy’s brothers into worthy heirs.
Meanwhile, Wendy’s mother was charting her own course toward oblivion.
After being cut out of the Burden will, she teetered in and out of marriage to an arms dealer while subsisting on a diet of Bacardi and raw hamburger dipped in Lipton’s Onion Soup mix. During their occasional family vacations, she’d criticize Wendy’s figure while chiseling souvenir chunks off of famous landmarks like Stonehenge and Plymouth Rock.
Dead End Gene Pool is a darkly hilarious, compulsively readable memoir filled with jaw-dropping details from the ultimate insider. Equipped with unwavering honesty and an acerbic sense of humor reminiscent of David Sedaris, Wendy turns the poor-little-rich-girl trope on its head in this riveting, tragic-comic account of growing up amid the not-so-glittering ruins of one of America’s richest and most prominent families.
Suggested Questions for Discussion
1. Wendy exhibits a dark sense of humor. How do you think this affected her perception of the events of her childhood?
2. What do you think saved Wendy from the pitfalls that plagued her brothers and uncles?
3. Were either Wendy’s grandparents or her own mother adequate child custodians? Do you think the courts would have questioned their custody if the family hadn’t had so much money?
4. How could Wendy and Will’s mother and grandparents better handled explaining the suicide of their father to them?
5. Wendy writes, “rich people behaving badly are far more interesting than the not so rich behaving badly” (p. 5). Do you agree or disagree with this statement?
6. If the Horatio-Algeresque rise of Cornelius Vanderbilt embodies the fulfillment of the American dream, why is it so pleasurable to read about his heirs’ descent into decadence and failure?
7. There are a lot of stories about lottery winners and inheritors of great wealth either burning through their money, or winding up really unhappy. Why do you think unearned money is so often a curse?
8. How, if at all, does the wealth of Wendy’s grandparents affect your reading of their final years?
9. If you could ask Wendy one question left unanswered by her memoir, what would it be?
10. Dead End Gene Pool is both touching and funny. Would Wendy’s narrative have been as compassionate if she’d written it in her 20’s or 30’s?
11. Why does Wendy choose to end the book with the information she discovered about Charles Thomas, her mother’s former lover?
12. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “The rich are different from you and I.” And Ernest Hemingway’s famously replied, “Yes, they have more money.” Whose statement do you find yourself in agreement with after reading Dead End Gene Pool?
An Interview with Wendy Burden
1. What spurred you to write this memoir, now?
People dying like crazy is what spurred me to write it. It forces you to try to make sense of your life.
2. Gloria Vanderbilt and CNN’s Anderson Cooper are distant cousins of yours. Overall, how have the other branches of the Vanderbilt clan fared?
I’ve never known the Burden side of the family to intertwine with others, but this spring I’ve been invited to attend the annual Vanderbilt bulb planting/clean up of the Commodore’s tomb, so I’ll let you know.
3. You’ve certainly experienced more than your share of tragedy. And, if you read the tabloids, it seems as if the rich are more prone to spectacular tragedy. What are your thoughts?
First of all, I don’t see it as “tragedy.” I was never hungry, I was never raped by a relative; that is tragedy. Everyone experiences adversity; people just like to read about misfortune affecting the wealthy because it shows that their money can’t protect them.
4. During your time in England, you spent a lot of time with the working-class Dorans. In retrospect, do you think you would have had a happier childhood growing up in their family?
No, but certainly not less happy.
5. In describing your grandparents’ household, you write that, “the most important person in the household was the chef” (p. 66). Did this influence your decision to become a chef and restaurateur later in life?
I cook to eat! I am a total glutton.
6. In an interview you did before Dead End Gene Pool was published, you share that it was initially conceived as a cookbook. How did it become a memoir?
I became increasingly anecdotal, and on top of that, the sudden cluster of deaths within my family…certainly food for thought, no pun intended.
7. Was your grandfather a foodie ahead of his time, or have the rich always had an obsession with eating and drinking? If you could prepare and serve your grandparents one final meal, what would it be?
It’s not that the rich necessarily enjoy it more, I mean look at all the wealthy anorexics you see in restaurants or in pictures in the social columns. I think historically the rich could afford to cultivate food and drink, and could travel to different countries and experience French or Italian cuisines in their own environment. The final meal I’d cook for my grandmother would definitely be a big fat steak. She loved red meat. For my grandfather I’d make Terrapin à la Florham, which is an incredibly labor intensive dish his grandmother’s chef used to make. It’s probably illegal now.
8. You very casually recount two instances of what would now be called sexual abuse: being bitten on the butt by Arturo, the Italian chef, and being fondled and kissed by the captain. Your mother dismissed your complaints about the captain by saying, “Let an old man have some fun! Anyway, he got his nuts shot off in the war, so it’s not like he can really do anything” (p. 97). How do you feel, if at all, it has affected you later in life?
I don’t see the butt-biting as sexual abuse; I honestly think that’s what they did in his country when they were really pleased by something a kid did. What happened with the Captain, well I kind of shelved it at the time, and frankly, compared to things that were done to so many women I know, from all different socio-economic backgrounds, I got off pretty lucky because that was the only transgression that ever really happened to me.
9. How did your relationship with your mother affect your views on parenting?
I could only do better!
10. Your Uncle Bob exposed you to the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allen Poe the same day that you discovered newspaper obituaries. Would it be fair to say that literature saved you?
If the cartoon captions of Charles Addams is considered literature, then definitely.
11. In your opinion, what is the most important character trait a child born to great wealth needs to avoid being warped by all the money?
Self-sufficiency.
12. Do you have plans for another book?
I’m working on a book about great love, great loss, and learning to fly an airplane.
Wendy Burden is a former illustrator, zoo keeper, taxidermist, owner and chef of the bistro Chez Wendy, and the art director of a pornographic magazine—from which she was fired for being too tasteful. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
www.wendyburden.com

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»	Author Wendy Burden's web site
»	You Tube Video Interview with author Wendy Burden
»	Gotham Book's Facebook Page

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