What If a Yellow Dress, in the Pages of Vogue, Told the Story of Your Life? Part 1

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Ja mä oon kohdalla, että jotenkin on varmasti tämän ja kohdalla, että jotenkin on varmasti tämän ja kohdalla. T chairmangin, kock ystäviä koskaan pypitä? Jos te Weise pu Parelita sykyníomestata, ex-joinnonshotkoi vuoroopedin hajoalla. T聊in parempi, että itse oli tosta desconunytiin eli jatkaan. Toistaa彼ta flashingstopi destruction, saa Flujen transitionalis Furthermore. Etty en mm. Tämä oli tullut erittäin käsitön. Tämä on toistaan. Tämä on myös tullut, että he ovat käsitön. Tämä on sitten yksi käsitön. Tämä on yksi käsitön. Tämä on tullut, että jatkaan pystytäisiin. Tämä on käsitön, koska jatkaan 3 käsitön. Tämä on minuut, mutta tämä on seuraava. Tämä on tosi. Tämä on tosi, että jatkaan pystytäisiin, joka on seuraava. Tämä on tullut, että jatkaan pystytäisiin, että jatkaan pystytäisiin. Tämä on yksi käsitön, mutta toivon käsitön. Tämä on yksi käsitön, koska jatkaan pystytäisiin. 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Iho infl sactava ja luomaan minkä puhun keskujaa. Voi jo teitä jo handon ajattava tänään voi toiminnita overhe Technologiesa peroll 오� tricki taushaa asioоме himeliteksiä. Sen robortti ei ole virtoa voi näkeäЭтоties. Tämä on todennita asiakka pigestaan, mutta olen jollä halu台hmista hypinen halvaa seuraavaa, jota seuraavaa, jota seuraavaa. Tämä on yksi kertaa, että seuraavaa on jo kertaa, joita seuraavaa ja seuraavaa. Mutta seuraavaa on kertaa, että seuraavaa on heittää. Se on tärkeää, että seuraavaa on todella jatkoa, mutta seuraavaa on jo noin tärkeää. this affair and they also do not appear surprised to be there. But the hat luncheon is also filled with creatives and entrepreneurs and writers and artists filled with gals like me, the granddaughter of a divorced fierce, striving Sicilian immigrant who sold hand-knit silk ribbon dresses in Rochester, New York to survive and not just to survive but to punch the world in the face with her fist. A woman, Francesca Palato, whose whole life is the narrative of a person who did not do what she was told to do and did not color inside the lines and refused to conform and then went on to make so much money to spite them all and say, "How do you like me now?" That was my grandmother. You would not expect her granddaughter to be at this party right with that history. And the truth is, I never thought I would attend the hat luncheon either. My grandmother's legacy had a ripple effect of making her children, including my mother, and then my whole family kind of like permanent outsiders. We were not people who went where the proper people went. That was kind of in my DNA when I arrived in New York to live and it was like 2002 or so we were kind of moving back and forth but that's when we kind of landed here. At that time in my life, I had never heard of the hat luncheon but then one day, one fateful day, I saw it. It was a beautiful May day, it's always in May, and I somehow must have been on 5th Avenue just as it was starting and I saw all these gorgeous women in huge hats flocking into the park. It was like a magical sight. It was like a mirage. They were laughing and chatting and they looked so self-confident and alive. This was the inist of the in crowds and I remember thinking wherever they are going, I want to go too. I was so overtaken by their aura that I literally ran up to a policeman who was on a horse watching the procession and I asked him, "What is happening here? Who are these women?" He looked down at me and he laughed and he said, "This is the hat luncheon lady you got to pay to get in." I was like, "Okay, because it didn't seem true. It seemed like their invitations came from a higher power, like the higher power of the gods of New York City." Well, time passed. That was like 2002 and his life would have it. I did become part of the in crowd. I grew up as a human being for one thing. I kind of grew up and I thought, "I don't want this outsider status for myself. It's not who I am. I don't like it." At that period, I was developing a really great career and I didn't need to be defiant. Then there was the fact that I was married to the king of insiders. I was. I got married to Jack. Well, she was the CEO of General Electric and at that time, this was the largest company in the world and he was the CEO of it and there was not a party he wasn't invited to. There wasn't a club he wasn't a member of. When I was with him, we always belonged. Every restaurant we walked into. Every little bit of outsider you don't belong here. DNA, it was just washed out of my blood system hanging out with him. I want to say, I wasn't why I married him. I married him because he was the kindest, smartest, funniest, best human being I'd ever met in my life. I married him because I loved him desperately. But I'm sure his insider status certainly didn't repel me. I loved it about him. I liked it about him. He wasn't angry at the world. He liked being a part of the world. He wasn't an outsider. He wasn't in love with the world. And that felt more like me. So I think that it was a few years later probably. I'm guessing 2006 that I was invited to the hat luncheon by the very great Elaine Langeon. I have to just stop and tell you something about her. Elaine Langeon, her husband, Ken Langeon was my husband's best friend. He's found a promedipo. And she's actually one of New York's greatest philanthropists. There is a cancer treatment center at the Animal Medical Center. It's like the most world-class cancer treatment center for dogs because of Elaine. And I remember when we were at its dedication, she turned to me and she said, "This can maybe get a dog another six years of life. And if you've ever loved a dog, six months really matters." And she paid for the whole thing. But that's a drop in the bucket for what she has done with her generosity. She's one of the most generous, charitable people and also funny and smart and great close friend. Anyway, I met her in 2001. And a few years later, she said to me, "Let's go to the hat luncheon." And she went and afterward she said to me, "Okay, Susie, I have a table and I invite people each year. It's time for you to buy a table yourself." I got it entirely. I was enough of a enough self-confidence at that point that I thought I'm going to get a table every single year and I've never not gotten one. Except for the hat luncheon occurred on the very day that was the book launch of "Becoming You," my book. And I had to go on the Today Show. And that was a hard call, but it was the right one. Anyway, I will never miss the hat luncheon again. Although, listen up, I will never, ever, ever wear to the hat luncheon as good a dress as I did this year. I think I love this dress. Guess what my grandmother made it. It is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I would remember it as a dress. It's absolutely amazing. Thank you. You look gorgeous. Fabulous. Everything had to tell. It's so ribbon. It's so ribbon. Can you believe it? Like, it's needed. It's needed. Can you believe it? Yes. I think that pink stuff is very good. Come on, step drunk, Hollis. Of course, one thing that happens at the hat luncheon is the women talk a lot about their outfits. And that is me discussing my fabulous dress with the fabulous Hollis Heimbeck, who is the publisher of Harper Business. And technically, she's my publisher, like, kind of my boss, except for that she's mainly my friend. And she has been since 1995. She was, in fact, the first friend that I had fallen in love with Jack. And she's been my friend through thick and thin for, good lord, 40 years. Anyway, as you could hear, she loved my dress. That dress. So let's get to it. At last. On his podcast, Chasing Life, I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta. CNN's chief medical correspondent brings you the secrets of the happiest and healthiest people on the planet so that you can live your best life. Are some people just more happier than others? And what might they be doing that the rest of us aren't? So Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Apple Spotify, I heard podcasts, Amazon music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, the story of the dress actually begins in Calvin DeSetta Sicily in 1903. That's where and when my grandmother Francesca was born. Calvin DeSetta Sicily. Well, let me just say this about that. Banish your thoughts of gorgeous sexy landscapes of Sicily that you saw on White Lotus where, you know, fabulous Italian eight hotels hover over these like crystal blue waters and waiters and tuxedos go to and in throwing with champagne on silver trays. This is not Calvin DeSetta Sicily. Calvin DeSetta is a gritty industrial fortress town in the dead center of the island of Sicily. No waterfront. And for hundreds of years, it was kind of the financial engine of the country. Why? Because it sat on top of self-reminds and sulfur was like for century, it was needed necessary for two things. Fertilizer and gunpowder. I mean, if you wanted to grow anything in the world, you needed the output of Calvin DeSetta. You needed to wage war, which people did all the time. In other words, everyone all around the world needed what was coming out of that village in the middle of Sicily. I think an analogy for it is like Pittsburgh in the 1950s when it was in 60s, when it was making all the steel for everyone all around the world. That was Calvin DeSetta from about 1800 to 1920 except, and this is a very big accept, okay, in a country that was run by elite industrialists and their mafia overlord enforcers. So these two populations, the elite and the mafia enforcers, you know, they lived very, very well. I've been to Sicily. I've seen their homes. They lived on the villas on the coast. But in the city of Calvin DeSetta, where that's where the workers lived. And to extract the sulfur there under the mountains, the owners of the mines sent thousands of workers into the center of the earth every day, seven days a week. It was bone breaking, lung destroying labor, insanely dangerous labor, where people died constantly in fires and mine collapses and from lung disease and tuberculosis and cancer. And it got to the point in the 1830s that to keep the mines running full time, the overlords started sending boys as young as seven into the tunnels. They called them the "corusee," which is derived from the word "little deers." These little boys, seven years old, and to get a load of this, these kids would carry sacks of sulfur weighing 40 to 60 pounds on their back through these narrow, steep tunnels, working alongside the adult workers who were called the "peacuneidi," I don't speak Italian, I'm trying. And if this is not horrible enough and uncomfortable enough, one historical, unfun fact is that the workers in the mines frequently actually worked naked or semi-naked due to the fact that And it was so hot in there where the temperature was were up to 116 degrees, and they would sometimes do this for 16 hours a day. How could this happen? Well, it happened because families to survive often sold their children into this labor via a debt-based system called Socorromotto, "Dead Aid," where the parents "ah!" received a cash advance that bound the child to the mind until the debt was paid. This was a system of just forced labor, where the laborers were children as young, little boys as young as seven, and their fathers. This is my dear listeners. This is the history of my family on my mother's side. And here's the thing. I had no idea that it was. My sister's an idea, and we had no idea. We had no idea that this is what happened in Calton to set us sickly before they came to the United States because, well, my family is nuts. I mean, well, okay, my mom's family, and I don't know. Maybe your family is nutty in some way, too. Every family is crazy in some way. Welcome to the family. Crazy family club. There are a lot of members of it. And of course, every family is crazy in its own way, but my family was crazy in the form of secrecy. You know, families do strange things to cope. And my family's way of coping, I guess, was to never talk about Calton to setta. And in fact, when I went back and saw the village, or the city with my own eyes in 2018, I had actually no idea that it sat on a sulfur mine where my family lived and died generation after generation. No, the story I heard when I heard anything at all is that my family, like when we were growing up, that the family was vaguely aristocratic, very fancy. They were special people. And my great grandfather said was an exporter of olive oil. But for some reason, the history of my family, Calton to setta was very, very hush hush. And there was another hush hush story, which was that someone, and again, maybe it was my grandfather, had tried to organize some workers, maybe the sulfur mine workers, putting it together, but he was shot at and almost killed. And again, as this story was told, it was never mentioned that he was a minor. In fact, it was never mentioned that mining happened in Calton, as setta. I'm going to actually recall this with my sister, Della, she went through this with me. I'm going to give her a call. She lives in the Boston area. My memory is that-- Trouted in secrecy. Trouted in secrecy. Trouted in secrecy. The whole kind of story of everything is just absolutely like, why did they not speak plainly about what happened in Calton to setta? It was like all very cloaked in mystery. Yes, everything was cloaked in mystery, Susie. I mean, it was all-- Yeah, it was all a big secret. I know. But, you know, I don't know if they even knew the truth themselves, right? Yeah. Because they-- I think they lied to each other. They lied to themselves and they lied to each other. It's crazy. We didn't really have words for it, I think, in many ways. I don't think we had words for it until we went back to Sicily, you and me and Ellen. And Sophia, it was 2018, I think, when we went back, right? And we went-- That was a great trip. Well, we had hired a historian. I know you're laughing. Like, my audience doesn't know why you're laughing. Just hold on there. I had hired a historian to help us find our family history back there. And we went to go look at the house that our family had lived in. And we were confronted for the first time in our lives with the truth, which was they were not royal, regal, aristocratic people. And that what the hush, hush was all about was that they were really poor. They were really poor. They said, I remember Nana, Nana, or Sicily and great mother saying, we had a chapel in the house. And during the big earthquake, everybody ran to the church, but we went to our own chapel and then the church collapsed. Yes. And then we saw that house they lived in, we had a whole new-- They probably had dirt floors. No, we did have dirt floors. We went into it and dirt floors. And they were holding the ground for them to do their business, okay? And then we had the epic experience of going to the graveyard. And we walked by all the really big crypts and tombs where the fancy rich people, the owners of the mines were buried. And the historian kept on walking us saying it's a little bit further and the graves got smaller and smaller. And we finally found our family's burial area with the-- basically with the poppers. And it was like-- Yeah. Yeah. They were barefoot and illiterate. Yeah. Yeah. It was-- I remember-- I think that's a fascinating story. It is. It is. It's much better than coming from aristocrats. I totally do. And I remember standing over the little grave stones, which might have been little children in the mines were in our family's area thinking, oh my god, I'm so joyful that about what we did with our lives, they would be so proud. Yeah. You look-- You were standing there was like-- it was so emotionally overwhelming the distance that they had traveled. And yet, Della, we were nearly 60 when we found out the truth about our family, right? It was never spoken of. No, but it wasn't a huge surprise, wasn't it? No, I was not. It was-- was surprised to see somebody who was there who should have been nameless at this moment. Yeah, another relative was surprised. But we-- I knew from around seven or eight years old that the hush, hush secrecy and the fact that the family was kind of special was BS because if everybody was so special, like, why was our great uncle a barber? And you know, why was-- there was just-- there was no evidence that they were anything but Italian immigrants, Sicilian immigrants. Yeah, and which is something to be proud of. I know. There was a lot of lying, I think, that we're on. It was more than just being secretive. I mean, I think there were outlite, outright mistroops. Yeah. And told to us. Right. It was such a burden to be living in this. But I actually have this other thought, Della, which is that part of this secrecy and hush, hush denial, lying, part of it was a kind of defiant outsider status. Like we were not like other people. We were different. We were not part of the crowd. And I think this was a crazy kind of environment in which to grow up with this sort of like we are outsiders. And then there was no kind of truth going on. And our own mother was not about fitting in. It was never about fitting in. Never about fitting in. But we're going there with the podcast. All right. Thank you for talking. I know. Okay. Bye. All right. You know, I was thinking after that call with my sister, there was all this deception, all these lies, all this cover up. The only true thing that my grandmother ever told me about coming to America. I asked her all the time. Was it hard to come to the America? Was it hard to leave Italy? Was it hard to leave? It probed. I tried desperately to find out the truth. And the only thing that she ever said to me that felt vaguely real was that when she left Sicily, Calvin the Set of Sicily, when she was nine years old, is that she left her dog Bella behind with her best friend. And she told me that she cried about leaving her dog every night for 10 years. And I remember thinking, well, there's one true story. Anyway, just to ground us here a little bit, my grandmother left Sicily for America in 1912 right after World War I. They were not, of course, the only ones. There was a huge migration of Sicilian immigrants to the US in this period because Italy was devastated by the war. And America was the land of promise. The thought was that maybe my family would go to Argentina. I heard that from some couple of relatives, but that would have ended quite differently for me, I guess. But they didn't. And they decided to go from Calvin to set a two general pleas Rochester, New York. Now Rochester, it was a better life. It was safe. It had jobs. So the people of Calvin set, are they left to buy their lives back? My family left to do that. I'm in awe of their courage. I am. How could you not be? This fight for freedom and for self-determination by the way is a value. I mean, it's a value of agency. This desire to own your life. When I teach the value of agency in my class, when I teach my students at NYU, you stern all about the values. And I talk about the value of agency. I throw up the video of Leslie Gore singing, "You don't own me." And I won't sing more of that because then you'll hit the stop button. But I mean, that idea, no one will own me. That's agency. So they came to the United States so that no one would literally own their children. Ah, yeah, yeah. But why did they go to Rochester? I mean, of all places, I get not going to Argentina, but I mean, America was the great hope. And anywhere where the weather was better, right, they could go to North Carolina or Atlanta, even Baltimore had better weather. No Rochester's average seasonal snowfall is about 100 inches a year. And it has been as high as 160 inches in a single winter. You know, that's 13 feet of snow, okay? Tosi hyván operáttorin, Tosi hyváttes quesatarioxet. Hangi quesatarioxista uzi puhelin, tapleti tai kulokkeet, sunta telja kauppan, tai osoitteese, telya pi stefri, fana, fana. Hey, me la hennet oi kesti, ma on luma la. So here's my theory, and it's based on immigration theory, so it's not original here. It just had to be that the first family from Calton to Seda came to Rochester because they had relatives there. And then family after family continued to go there to find their community and to speak the same language and have some of the same memories. So they went to Rochester because it had factories and work, but they went to Rochester for this. It's for a sense of belonging. And that's a value, by the way, also. It's the value of community. You know, this value of community, I have to have a little aside here. It's the top value of a friend of mine, let's just call her Julie. She's a psychometrician. When you create scientifically validated assessments like the values bridge for a living as I do, you end up having friends who are psychometricians. Okay, anyway, Julie's top value is this belonging, the value of community. It's unusual, only 11% of the population has it. And she was telling me the other day that the moment that she walks into the bar where she and her fiance go every night and everyone literally shouts out her name, she says that is the best moment of her day. And I'm not sure, but I think that she actually, one time, literally said to me, I would buy a gun to defend that bar. And this is a psychometrician speaking menu. Anyway, I think my relatives, from everything I heard, would have taken up arms to defend Rochester. My God, they love that city so much. I was raised hearing stories about Rochester that would make you feel like its streets were paved with gold. There was East Avenue had its mansions and there was this street, Oxford Street, there was Corn Hill. And you would have thought it was the Garden of Eden. But I think the reason what they loved about Rochester was that it gave my Sicilian immigrant family, which was large. Decent, middle class jobs, and small, lovely homes and a sense of safety and community, they owned their lives at last, how free they must have felt. So when the Pilates landed in Rochester, my great-grandfather got a job at a canning factory and my grandmother and her three brothers were enrolled in school where they all learned English. And apparently, the kids all acclimated very quickly. It was a big deal in my family that my grandmother learned English so well, she never had an accent. And my great-uncle Mike was apparently very, very good at violin and he joined the school orchestra, that kind of thing. And then they all eventually graduated from high school and got good middle class jobs and factories, except of course for my grandmother because girls didn't do that in 1920. And also because her father, my great-grandfather, had gotten very ill, no one knows, no one could remember what made him ill, but it felt to her to care for him at home for many years with her mother, which she did, apparently very dutifully. Until one day, one of her brothers showed up to the house with an older friend. It was a guy named Justin Tubiolo and the story goes, he was very tall and very dark and handsome. And he was also a widower who had three young boys. His wife had died of cancer at age 22 after having her kids and the children were being raised by her parents. So Justin Tubiolo was essentially a very dapper bachelor. He owned a car, this was a big story. And before you know it, my grandmother and Justin started passing each other secret notes. Why? Because her father, even though he was sick upstairs, was incredibly protective of her. In fact, the story is that she could sit on the front porch, but only if her rocking chair faced backwards. So no one could see her. But she had a friend named Angela and using Angela as the go between my grandmother. She actually wrote like a very bold note to Justin saying, basically, I wanna meet you. And he brought back saying, I wanna meet you too. And they started sneaking off for ice cream and little walks with each other. And that's the story. It's very hard for me to believe that that was all that was happening with them. But whatever, I don't know. I mean, less teenage lust is a real thing, although he was not a teenager, she was. And the story is with these little secret meetings arranged by their her friend Angela and sort of covered by this friend Angela, the two of them, with their 11 year age difference, that they fell madly, madly in love. There's, they didn't say a lot about anything in my family as I think I've made the point. But there was never any holding back when they talked about the love between my grandmother and Justin to be alone. Now, there is this kind of code of silence that falls upon their wedding story. It gets kind of very murky, but here's what I got. In 1924, right after Francesca, my grandmother turned 20. She and Justin snuck to the courthouse in Rochester, New York, and they alloked. I mean, they got married by a guy in the courthouse. These are two Catholics, a civilian people, by the way. Why did they alope? I, no surprise, I have no freaking idea. I asked my mother, why did they alope? And she said, oh, Susie, there were terrible, terrible class differences. And I mean, what? Terrible class differences. They were both immigrants, but apparently, his father was a farmer. And this was like some gigantic difference between like being a factory foreman. I mean, it makes no sense whatsoever. I wonder, was it the 11 year age difference? I mean, he was gainfully employed as a guy in a factory, and he was also a car salesman. And he was a working person with friends, with her brothers. This is one of the one million things in my life that does not make sense that they had to courth in total secrecy. And then they went alope to getting married. I mean, you look at the facts. They were both sort of striving Italian immigrants, and they had mutual friends. But I guess it happened. And apparently, they met each other's families afterwards. And pretty soon, everyone apparently got over it. Justin and Francesca bought a little house, a few blocks from her parents, her father was still ill. And over the next few years, my grandmother did what women did in those days. She had four children. She had my aunt Lucille, that she had my uncle Joey. And she had my mother. She named after her own mother. She named her Filomena, but it was quickly Americanized to Phyllis, and then my aunt Justine. And from all counting, life went on. Justin had a couple of jobs. He was again, in a factory. He also became a police officer along the way. And the money was apparently OK. I've seen a picture of the house, and the families all got along. There was this little period where they tried to add Justin's sons from his first marriage back into the mix, but they missed their grandparents, and they went back to the grandparents' house. From everything I've heard, and again, with the secrecy that was going around, it was just an American story unfolding, as it was supposed to. It was a dream. It was the American dream. That is, until my grandmother, Francesca, blew the whole thing up. I mean, she, like TNT, she blew it up age 26. What a scandal she created, a scandal, which shook her world, of course. And it shook the world of Rochester. And it shook my mom's world and her siblings' world, and my world, my whole life long. And actually, it shook things up in a way that ended up with that dress, that yellow one, appearing in Vogue magazine. It could not have happened any other way. And so we will continue with that story, and what it taught me. And hopefully what it might help you understand about yourself in next week's episode. I'm Susie Welch. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. [MUSIC PLAYING]