The Red Potion

Janny Scott grew up on an 800-acre British-style estate outside Philadelphia with a loving, gregarious father who was always the life of the party. But underneath her father’s light exterior was a darkness he struggled to keep at bay—a lifelong effort that would eventually cause him to self-destruct.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio. I
grew up for the first fourteen years of my life
on a roughly eight hundred acre British style estate about
a half hour from Philadelphia. It was an extraordinarily beautiful

(00:20):
piece of land that had been pieced together by my
great grandfather in the years leading up to and immediately
after World War One. It had been farms before, so
there were old stone farmhouses dating back to the seventeen hundreds,
some of them in ruins, stone barns, rolling hills, pasture, cornfield, soybean.

(00:41):
There was a herd of three hundred Airshire cows, so
there was a functioning dairy farm. But basically it was
a sort of British style gentleman's estate, kind of plucked
from the pages of Jane Austen and Henry James and
floated across the Atlantic and plunked down in the suburbs
of Philadelphia. That's Jenny Scott, a longtime journalist for The

(01:04):
New York Times. Her recent book is the memoir The
Beneficiary Fortune, Misfortune and the Story of My Father. Often
we long to unlock the puzzle of our parents, but
most of us never do. We wonder we posit, we
have series, and when our parents are gone, there's a

(01:24):
tinge of regret that we didn't get to know them better,
that we didn't ask questions or dig deeper while we
still could. But Jenny's is a story ultimately of literally
unlocking a puzzle, the puzzle of her father, Robert Montgomery Scott.

(01:51):
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I remember there
was a hill that my father took us to toboggan
on where he had clearly tobogganed as a child. There
was a a hollow tree that he had used as

(02:12):
a kind of fort, which was still, of course hollow
when we came along, and we were able to use
it in its slightly decaying state. But mostly it was
a deeply visceral experience of a wild piece of land
of extraordinary beauty. It was a degree of rootedness that

(02:33):
I now see it was kind of unusual in certainly
in suburban American life, maybe rural American life more so,
But I wasn't really conscious of that at the time.
I just experienced it the way a child would. As children,
we accept our lives as being normal. Whatever they are,
they're ours, especially back them in pre internet days, there

(02:56):
was simply no basis for comparison. But later, as a
young working journalist, Janni was acutely conscious of her family's
extreme privilege, and she would avoid telling her colleagues about
her childhood home. She would tell them she and her
siblings grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania. The estate
had a name, ar Drassm. This was just outside Philadelphia,

(03:19):
an area that had been developed in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries with the wealth that was pouring
out of the city in its industrial heyday. But among
the big houses, Ardrassen stood out as an estate that
had remained in a family spanning one Gilded age to
the next. It had been built by Janni's father's grandparents,
his maternal grandparents, and generation after generation raised their families there.

(03:43):
The summer Jannie turned fourteen, her family moved away to London,
where her father had been offered a four year political appointment.
By the time they returned home, she was in college.
She never lived at Ardrassen again, though she would return
to it time and again in her mind. Describe your
mother for me. My mother, it was a very i

(04:07):
would say, beautiful, redheaded woman from Boston, from a different
part of the country, but sort of socially in sync
with the world of my father. In fact, they met
at a wedding at age eighteen. She was very musical.
She became ultimately a pianist, teaching and doing some performing,

(04:31):
not on a large scale, kind, relatively soft spoken, good
sense of humor, not highly certainly adept socially, but was
not a hugely gregarious person who loved to be in
at parties and that sort of thing, you know. A thoughtful,
well read, musical kind mother and your father. My father,

(04:57):
um was in some ways a much more seemingly more
outgoing person. He appeared to be very gregarious, He knew
a lot of people. I mean, he was out in
the world more than my mother because she was a
stay at home mother. For quite a while, my father
worked as a lawyer, and then when we went to London,
he worked for the Ambassador to the Court of St.

(05:20):
James from the United States for four years as in
special assistant. And then he came back and he became
increasingly involved in civic and cultural institutions in Philadelphia. He
ran the Academy of Music for seven years, and then
he was president and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of
Art for fourteen years. So he had a very public
life as a sort of patrician figure in Philadelphia, a

(05:43):
kind of throwback to an old world which he sort
of played humorously. He dressed rather well in kind of
Saville Row suits after we'd been in London. And he
had a slightly British accent, which was partly just from
growing up in mainline Philadelphia and partly from and and

(06:03):
the specifics of his family which was very connected somewhat
to Britain, but also by living in England. So he
was a very colorful, well known figure compared to my mother,
who was more private and um less visible. He was funny,
extremely charming, you know, a person who seemed gave every

(06:25):
impression of kind of being born into a rather charmed
life and living it out just like that. In contrast
to his gregarious, extroverted personality. Robert Montgomery Scott was an
inveterate keeper of diaries journals. Jenny had always been aware
of these journals. They were simply a fact of life.

(06:46):
Her father always carried around a small loose leaf binder.
As a child, she never went looking for the diaries,
something that now surprises her given her repertorial instincts. After all,
her father was a bit of a mr she longed
to unlock. But then, in her twenties, at the end
of a long distance bike trip abroad with her father,

(07:07):
he turned to her, seemingly out of nowhere, and told
her that someday she would be the recipient of his journals,
that he would leave them for her when he died.
I was fascinated by my father from I think a
pretty young age. I admired him and um to some
extent emulated funny things about him, and I wanted his approval.

(07:29):
And he was somewhat enigmatic, a bit elusive. I don't
think I could have articulated that as a child, but
it was as though he were slightly out of reach. UM.
So the thought that he, out of the blue would
tell me that I could have his diaries when he died,
not at some point in the future, but when he died.

(07:51):
UM was stunning to me, and of course a source
of great interest. But I also didn't know how to
take it. And it's in the nature of my relationship
with my father that for some reason I couldn't interrogate
him at that moment as to why. So I said, well,
why me, and he said, you're the writer and just

(08:12):
tossed it off like that. The conversation ended, um, as
far as I remember, and I really never dared bring
it up again, because I was so enticed by the idea.
I didn't want to run any risks that there was
that he might withdraw the offer, change his mind. Um,
you know, that I might somehow seem to be eagerly

(08:34):
awaiting his demise. And another thing about Robert Montgomery Scott,
he liked to drink a lot. If someone had told
me that there were people who didn't drink, it would
be like saying that there were people who didn't use
soap um. It just was so common and every event,
and you know, every funeral involved repairing afterward to drink.

(08:58):
It was just ubiquitous. And of course it was a
time in American culture, particularly in that society, that men
would come home from work and have a bunch of
drinks and wine with dinner, and so it was just
a fact of life. Eventually, as a college student, Jenny
makes a decision not to drink, an unusual decision for

(09:20):
a college student who isn't in trouble with alcohol. She
had had a bad experience around freshman year when she
got very drunk. Can you imagine if every college freshman
who drank too much one time quit drinking, half the
bars in the world would probably have to shut down
for lack of business. I don't know why I stopped.
It wasn't precipitated by any kind of crisis. So I

(09:43):
like to think that somewhere in me, I would like
to believe that, somewhere in me, I sensed that in
my family, where drinking was very common. In my father's case,
I now know he was well long as an alcoholic
at that point, but it went back generations too. I'd
like to think that I somehow sensed that this was
a bad idea and had the good sense to just

(10:05):
make it all very clear for myself by ruling it out.
But I don't know that for sure that seems right,
because why else would a college girl that's without out
in a huge inciting incident beyond oh, I drank too
much one night, and I didn't like the way I felt.
I think the other factor was that I had become

(10:26):
aware that it was difficult to have conversations with my
father after you know, six o'clock, and it was maddening
to me. While he wasn't a nasty drunk, he would
sometimes say things that were, um inappropriate under the circumstances,
things that you might have confided to him, he might,

(10:48):
you know, say in the presence of somebody else. So
we became, i would say, much more conscious of this
and attempted to talk to him about it, um completely unsuccessfully.
A number of time is around the kitchen table after
dinner when we were all there, and invariably he would
talk circles around us. He seemed to make the case

(11:08):
that while he understood that he drank a lot and
he liked to drink, it was not out of control.
And thank you very much, and now I'm going off
to bed. Was your mother in those meetings, Yes, she was,
And I think she was in a difficult position because, uh,
my mother's posture with my father for a long time,
I think had been somewhat to sort of intermediate between

(11:32):
us and him. She wasn't an apologist for his drinking.
She clearly understood there was a problem. She was dealing
with it in her own way, which probably varied over time.
When I would come home from college and after that,
UM my father, for whatever reasons, that dynamics between us.
We would end up having bad arguments about often about

(11:52):
politics or something like that. And my mother told me
later that she had come to dread my coming home
during that period. So I think it began to play
out in our adult relationships with him in a way
that it had been submerged when we were children. As
a child, I thought my parents had a a good
marriage and that we were a happy family. As an

(12:14):
adolescent and as a young adult, it became more clear
to me that there was um tension in the household,
passive aggressive stuff. Never that I was conscious of knockdown,
drag out fights, but um just uh an uncomfortable quality
to some of the time that we spent together. I

(12:37):
now know that what they had in common was background
and that he came to feel I now know, although
I didn't know this then, that that that was an
insufficient basis for a happy marriage. It was no secret
from an early on my father. I guess you would
have said in that world liked women. We knew the

(12:59):
way children know that he was flirtatious, and whatever that
implied was not entirely clear. But the notion that he
was somehow um faithful to his marriage vows, that was
not a kind of given um. It was just something
we sensed in the way he interacted with people, and

(13:20):
and particularly with someone who we knew very well, who
was a friend of the family. The two families were close.
It became a kind of private joke between the children
of the two families that maybe the two families would merge.
But later, you know, when we were out of the house. Um,

(13:42):
I now know, and I guess I sensed it at
the time that there were other women too that he
was involved with. In fact, a moment when I was
just about to graduate from college and I went to
with a friend, my then boyfriend, to the island of
Nantucket where my parents had a house. Um, this is
during must have been in the late spring, and I

(14:04):
called my parents to say I'd like to go, and
my mother said, oh, you'll encounter your father there. He's
there with a friend, you know, go ahead. When we
got there, I called the house and he answered the
phone and he said, well, where are you? And I said, oh,
we just got off the ferry, and he said, I'm
not alone, and of course, you know, endlessly obedient said, oh,

(14:28):
don't worry, we'll we'll stay in a motel and and
he said no, no, um, come on, come on back.
And so we were going to go get some breakfast.
We go to get some breakfast, and all of a
sudden he emerges in the restaurant, red faced and very
bluntly says, her name is Linda. And we proceeded to
spend the weekend with my father and Linda. Did that

(14:50):
put you in a position of them keeping a secret
from your mother? I believe it did. Um. My father
never asked me to keep the secret from my mother,
but I don't know how I would have told her. Yes,
I became a colluder, an unwitting or unintentional colluder, uh

(15:12):
in my father's um complex extramarital life. But it isn't
only her father's affairs that require collusion. It's also his drinking.
I think one of the precipitating things that led us
to take the problem more seriously and get organized to
try and get him into treatment was that my brother
and I went on a trip with him, a biking

(15:35):
trip with him. I was in my very early thirties.
We went to New Zealand with him with a group
biking trip, and for two and a half weeks or
so we biked very hard, um long distances. It was
a fantastic trip. My father was great fun and he
took us and um we we loved the daytime part

(15:55):
enormously and New Zealand was of course spectacular. And then
at night he would drink heavily and get so drunk
that on like night number two or three, a complete
stranger on the trip came to us and said, why
haven't you helped him? It was a sort of shocking moment.
Um what could we say, Well, we've tried ineptly, um,

(16:17):
but I think we were kind of shamed into or
jolted into acting. So then we returned back to Pennsylvania
and we we both wrote him letters about what we'd
witnessed and how we felt about it, and how we
loved him and wanted him to take it seriously. And
in the letters responding to us, he particularly to my

(16:39):
brother who did drink uh, and he assumed my brother
would understand better than I would. I think he never
thought I could understand what he was talking about. He
explained how much he enjoyed drinking, how much of a
part of his life it was, And I also know
from other things that he said to other people that
he felt he was a total bore when he did drink,

(17:00):
and that it was somehow this sort of magic elixir
that made life tolerable. And now I never thought my
father's life would have been intolerable. But I also know
that at a very young age he had had a
dream um in which he dreamt of some red potion.

(17:21):
This was that, like I think he said, he was
like five years old, and it was a recurrent dream
of this sort of magic potion that made him feel
differently and behave differently. So whatever it was that made
him love it so much, it was very deep seated,
but we didn't understand at the time what that was.
So Jenny's father manages to white knuckle it for a while.

(17:43):
He goes for stretches of time without alcohol, including weddings
and large gatherings where he certainly would have been drinking,
but it doesn't last. Finally, at the two year mark um,
when it was clear that he was fully back to
drinking and we were not around. My mother had a
confrontation and with him and said, you know, I want

(18:05):
you to go back into treatment, and he walked out
of the house and never returned. After a brief stay
in a hotel, he decides to move back to our
dressing into a different house, what was called the Big House,
the one his grandparents had first built. The fifty room
house is at this point largely uninhabited. Jenny's cousin lives

(18:27):
on the second floor and is raising prize winning bull
terriers in a kennel on the lawn. Jenny's father decides
to move into what had been the nursery where his
mother had been raised, and turned the nursery into an
apartment for himself. He moved into the top floor of
that house and embarked upon rather remarkable restoration of the

(18:48):
top floor that then spread to the ground floor, and
over the next decade he restored every one of the
public rooms on the ground floor to men condition for
and including replacing the roof of the house for millions
of dollars. This was a house that he didn't own,
but the house also had for him all sorts of

(19:11):
emotional resonance, Having you know, known his grandparents and grown
up there and knowing what it meant to his mother,
and so the whole exercise was very, i would say,
emotionally complex. My father would have these fantastic Thanksgiving dinners
the day after Thanksgiving, not to interfere with anybody else's,

(19:31):
in which he would invite every family member and all
sorts of other people, and the cast would rise to
close to a hundred by the time that he finally died.
What do you think that was about those last years
in regard to both the restoration and your father wanting
to have these huge gatherings have everybody come to this

(19:56):
restored home. His parents had just died after very long lives,
his marriage just ended, and he had resigned or retired
from his his job, possibly under some pressure. Um so
everything had changed. He had grown up in this world

(20:17):
of big houses, some of which had fallen by the wayside.
One was a ruin where his father had grown up
in Landsdown, Pennsylvania. One had been a so called cottage
in bar Harbor in the period when bar Harbor was
sort of like Newport that ultimately had been torn down,
a place he'd gone every year as a child and ultimately,
the family couldn't unload it after the war, after the

(20:40):
depression and the war, and had to basically dismantle it.
So he'd seen this sort of grand life and he'd
seen its decay. I think he thought that if he
could make the house what had once been, because it
was really pretty much the only one of those huge
Bourbon Philadelphia Manson's that was still occupied by the original

(21:03):
family and had all the original stuff in it, if
he could make that into something a house, museum, or
something that could become somewhat self supporting, maybe some of
the land would be preserved too. So I think it
was an act of duty and loyalty and love and
also hope for preservation. And finally it fed something in
the way he had come to see himself, perhaps what

(21:26):
he had been bred even to do. And he was
constantly being written about in the restoration of the house
as sort of the lord of the manor, which he
was ironic about that, but he was willing to play
that role. It's ironic too, or or poetic maybe that
as he's creating this or attempting to preserve this, this

(21:49):
monument to history, he's also decaying himself. He is self destructing,
and doctors are saying to him, if you keep this up,
you're going to die. Yeah, and and he can't stop.
That's right, yeah about you know, just a few years
into this process, he clearly did not look well, and

(22:14):
we persuaded him to see a new doctor because his
longtime doctor had been telling him he was the picture
of health. One summer, the thing that sort of precipitated
this was seeing him on the beach and Nantucket with
his his belly distended. He was not a fat man,
but something had gone awry and it was like a
basketball And so he finally agreed to go to a

(22:38):
different doctor who had understood alcoholism and also understood the
world that my father was from, because he was somewhat
from it himself. And he diagnosed him very quickly as
having cirrhosis of the liver, and while he wasn't willing
to say how long he would last, he referred him
to a specialist who said, you've got two to four years,

(22:59):
so you can either stop where you can be dead
in two to four years. And he didn't stop. No,
he didn't, despite argumentation from me and others. He um
felt that at that point he no longer had a
job that he had to hold down, and he was
not married. He was living with a woman who apparently

(23:22):
tolerated it, and he said sort of felt like, you know,
I'm I'm in my um early seventies and I'll I'm
gonna do what i want. Now, people who know a
lot about alcoholism would say, well, that's not a choice.
It's you know, it's an illness, and that's he may
have phrased it that way, but it wasn't a choice.

(23:48):
We'll be right back. Janny's father dies at the age
of seventies six, and in the aftermath of his death,
Jenny looks around for his diaries. They aren't in his apartment,
and at this point, as a working journalist and mother

(24:09):
of young children, she's not in a position to really
go digging for them. It's been decades since his promise
on the bike trip that he would preserve safe and
leave them to her and only her, and of course
she's never forgotten, but now they're nowhere to be found.
She asks his girlfriend, who says she'll take a look.
A couple of weeks later, his girlfriend calls Janny and

(24:31):
says she found a few, but when Janny sees them.
They're not what she'd been looking for, just four slim volumes,
more like the kind of journal he kept on trips,
not revealing, not clues as to the mystery of her
father and his demons, not the real deal. Jenny wonders
if perhaps the lifetime of journals had been destroyed. But

(24:54):
then she happens to be in her mother's basement, the
house her father had left two decades earlier. At this point,
she isn't looking for anything. After all, her father wouldn't
have left his personal papers in the home of the
woman he had left twenty years earlier, would he have.
My mother said, you might want to just see if
there's anything. So my daughter, who was there, and I

(25:14):
started digging through the letters, and at the very bottom
we came upon this one single black volume, dating from
the nineteen fifties, when my father was in his mid twenties.
And I took it back to New York and read it,
and it was extraordinary and the most revelatory thing I'd
pretty much ever seen about my father, and certainly coming

(25:36):
from his own hand. And I realized I had to
go back and search my mother's entire house. So I
went back and did that, and in the pretty much
the last place I looked in this quite large house,
and in a walk in closet, a large walk in
closet in the back area of the third floor, I
noticed a wooden chest with a padlock on it that

(25:56):
I didn't recall ever having seen before, And it was
kind of boxed in with some cardboard boxes. And when
I approached it, I could see that the padlock had
been left at one digit off from the last four
digits of my parents phone number, the number they always
used for combination locks. So it's kind of apparent what
to do. I turned it the one notch and the

(26:18):
locks sprung open, and I hauled the chest out, and um.
There were forty years of diaries in identical black three
ring binders, all organized chronologically, seemingly waiting to be discovered.
The journals that Jenny's father meant to leave in her
care and then, perhaps ravaged by his alcoholism, forgot about,

(26:40):
are extraordinarily beautifully written, not just the command of language
and structure, but the deep, deep insight into himself, the thinking,
the feeling, just how well he knew himself and his circumstances.
He wrote, I am now twenty six years old. I
live in a beautiful formal house with grounds which I

(27:02):
cannot afford to keep on a decaying quasi baronial domain
of great beauty in an encroaching suburb. I am married
to a charming wife with whom I have little in
common but background. We live our background. This is no
way to live. Have truer words ever been spoken? We

(27:23):
live our background. We do this, that is, unless we
break free, or in the words of Carl Jung, until
you make the unconscious conscious. It will direct your life,
and you will call it fate. He describes there and
in many subsequent entries Um fluctuations in his moods that

(27:46):
date back to I think he said third grade, some
periods of depression a word used, although he also sometimes
used other words like you know, euphemisms for depression, and
also periods of elation and heightened creativity. Uh. And so
he tracks these moods, particularly in that period and in

(28:08):
his thirties, UM with a real attention to what what's happening.
At the same time, he made it clear from very
early on in his twenties that he was conscious that
he had a drinking problem and that he perceived it
to be a problem, and that he used the drinking

(28:28):
two I would say, mitigate the effects of what he
would refer to as the mood fluctuations. Um that somehow
the drinking enabled him to get through all sorts of things,
including social events, the very kinds of parties, and things
where he seemed to be so much in his element.
He found those intolerable without drinking. So there was the acute,

(28:55):
acute examination of his own sort of soul and mental state. Eight.
Jenny's father's recurring dream about the red potion he'd had
since he was a child a searing, painful example of
the ways that deep down we know our own demons.
We know them even though we can't speak them, and

(29:16):
so we keep some secret out of shame or simply
because we think we can't live without them. But eventually,
even if it couldn't be resolved or fixed within his lifetime,
Jenny now knows so much more of her father's inner world,
mainly what I came away with it from. It took
me months to read them. Um was this painful sense

(29:39):
of his awareness of his mental state, his struggle with it,
his consciousness about his drinking, and the way it led
him to basically lie to us about something that he
was wrestling with privately himself. So in in reading these journals,
and I mean to know your father in this different

(30:01):
way after his life, that self knowledge, you know, that
self deprecation, that awareness of his own struggle. Is that
something that you're glad that you know. I'm very glad
that I know this. I'm you know, trained as a journalist. Um,

(30:23):
So I pathologically curious. And he was a puzzle for
me from a very young age. And I don't begin
to think that I fully fathomed him or that I
understand him completely, but I definitely understand things from reading
that that I would never have have gotten before. And

(30:43):
the puzzle to me is why did he do it
in that way? Why did he tell me in my
twenties he wanted me to have the journals when he
was dead. Why did it have to be when he
was dead? Was he unwilling to have any kind of
conversation which would have been unavoidable while he was alive
on these topics? Um? Did he change his mind? When

(31:05):
did he put them up there under with the padlock?
Was it? Did he leave it obvious so that one
of us would open it? Or was it just that
that's the way he used to take the pages up
and he kind of left it in midstream. It's all
a kind of interesting, you know, posthumous puzzle for me
to try to understand what it means. Let's end with

(31:28):
Jenny reading just a bit from the Beneficiary, a moment
when the whole family is together visiting her father during
a stint at McClean Hospital on the outskirts of Boston.
The air that afternoon at McClean was loud with the
din of cicadas. The five of us embarked awkwardly on

(31:49):
a stroll along a path that wound through a wood
on the hospital grounds. We fell into the old order
of march, my father in the lead, my mother's scurrying
to keep pace, three of us dawdling at the rear.
At one point I caught up with my father to
break the silence. I asked what he'd been reading. I'd
sent him a package of magazines and books the morning

(32:11):
after we'd dropped him off a guilt offering. He had
been reading material put out by a A He said,
had he learned things about alcoholism that he hadn't known?
I asked, Oh, yes, he said, like what. He was quiet.
I glanced at him sideways, thinking he might be weighing
the choice between degrees of self revelation the duplicitousness and

(32:34):
deception involved. He answered, looking straight ahead. He left it
at that. I'd like to thank my guest Janny Scott,
for telling us her story here today. You can learn

(32:54):
more about Jenny's memoir That Beneficiary, Fortune, Misfortune, and the
Story of My Father by visiting Janny Scott dot com.
Family Secrets is an I Heart Media production. Dylan Fagan
is the supervising producer, and Julie Douglas and Bethan Macaluso
are executive producers. If you have a family secret you'd

(33:16):
like to share, you can get in touch with us
at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com. You
can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder, Facebook
at Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at fami Secrets Pod.
For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com.

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