It’s a beautiful sunny afternoon in Sag Harbor, New York, but for a moment Ivana Lowell’s gone someplace dark. She’s sitting at a table on the front porch of the American Hotel, staring at the white tablecloth, lost in thought as she contemplates the price she’ll pay when some of the more intimate revelations about her life are published next month in her memoir, Why Not Say What Happened?
“If you’re really going to write a memoir,” she finally says, “you have to really tell the truth. I thought this is the truth. This is my truth.”
To wit: The alcoholism of her polyamorous mother, the author and Guinness heiress Lady Caroline Blackwood, who was Lowell’s drinking buddy for most of her adult life; Lowell’s sexual abuse at age 9 by the husband of her nanny, whose attentions she grew to enjoy; her sister Natalya’s heroin overdose at age 17; her affair with Bob Weinstein of Miramax (“He was the handsome brother,” she says slyly); and in what is perhaps one of the most unusual revelations in the contemporary memoir sweepstakes—she has no pubic hair, the results of a childhood scalding accident that burned away her hair follicles.
Then there is the Big Question that frames the memoir—which one of her mothers three husbands and many lovers was actually Lowell’s father?
“I got the idea to write the book,” Lowell says in a smoky voice, “when I went to see a new shrink and she was taking my history. I told her about being burned, and that I was abused, and that my father died, except not that father, my other father, and she said ‘My God, you’re so battered.’ So on my way home in the taxi I was thinking, ‘It’s amazing I’m still standing! I’m remarkable!’ I started to feel self-righteous, and I began to write it down that afternoon.”
Lowell orders oysters for lunch, and with some resignation, a coke instead of a glass of wine. She’s been sober a year, but it’s still a struggle for her, although, she says Sag Harbor, where she lives with her 11 year-old daughter, Daisy, in a 200 year old mansion her mother left her, is a supportive town for recovery. “Living here is good for me because there are lots of AA meetings, and I have a sponsor,” she says. Over the years she logged several stints in rehab, which she mercifully skips over in the book. “It’s not a recovery story,” she says, “and rehabs have been written about so much.” Just then a teenager wearing a Guinness Ale tee-shirt passes by the in the street and Lowell smiles. “It’s ironic that all the family money came from alcohol,” she says.
The day after her mother died from cancer in 1996, Lowell was having lunch with one of her mother’s friends who surprised her by asking, “Of course you know who your father is?” It turned out she didn’t. Her mother’s first marriage was to painter Lucian Freud, the second to the composer Israel Citkovitz (whom Ivana was led to believe was her biological father), and her third to the poet Robert Lowell, who was Lowell’s paterfamilias from age 5 to 13, and whose name she took. “They write that Robert was crazy and that he was a monster,” she says. “But no one ever writes about his cozy side and sweetness. My mother did a very good job hiding his breakdowns from us.”
Lowell hoped that her biological father would turn out to be one of her mother’s long-time boyfriends, Robert Silver, the founder of the New York Review of Books, but to her disappointment a DNA test proved that she was the progeny of a family friend, screenwriter Ivan Moffet (Shane), who was her mother’s intermittent lover. “Even my mother used to say to me, ‘He’s not very nice,’ and that’s one of the reasons she didn’t want me to know. She didn’t think he’d make a very good father.”
As for her childhood sexual abuse in the country house in Kent, “I was quite lonely, and I liked the attention and complicity of an adult. The man told me I was beautiful. I was craving love, and it gave me power over a grown up. It sounds kind of creepy now.”
It was also in that house when she was 11 that 70 % of her body was scalded with boiling water in a kitchen accident. She was in a hospital burn ward for 9 months, and her mother, who was much concerned with everything looking pretty, dragged her to a variety of plastic surgeons over the years to try and cover up the burns, to no avail. As an adult, desperate to please one of her boyfriends, Lowell underwent a painful hair transplant procedure. “The day of the surgery my mother got so drunk she forgot to pick her up at the doctor’s office,” she says. Save for “a few lonely sprouts,” the transplant was a failure.
She gets that worried look again. “I thought, ‘Should I put that in, or should I take that out?’ But then I thought, why not say what happened?”