Name Shame
I’ve never really liked my name. Its full form, Boylston Adams Tompkins III, is dynastic and pretentious, and I got my nickname, Toby, because there were already two Tommy Tompkinses in my family, and three would have been confusing. So they called me Toby, which is risibly alliterative.
Many years ago, when I was a young actor, a snarky agent told me, “’Toby Tompkins’ sounds like some cutesy-poo midget dancing around on my desk and squeaking, ‘Hi! I’m Toby Tompkins! I’m Toby Tompkins!’ Aren’t there other names in your family which don’t sound so silly?” Well, my middle name was the last name of the second and sixth presidents of the United States, and my mother’s maiden name was Ellen Douglas Allen. I told him that, so he dubbed me Doug Adams. I found that so forgettable that when he sent me on auditions, I sometimes looked blank when casting directors used it. I thought of calling myself Douglas Adams, but people might mistake me for the author of the British science fiction romp The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Universe. So I changed agents and went back to Toby Tompkins. The second agent had no trouble with it. “At least it’s short and catchy,” he said.
Tompkins is a fairly common name in English-speaking countries, though it’s usually spelled without the “p.” It’s also a commoner’s name, and every time I start feeling boastful about my family history, I remind myself that back in some obscure Saxon shire during the early Middle Ages, there was some lowly peasant named Tom who had many brothers, sisters, cousins, and children. Since the Ealdorman who governed the shire couldn’t be bothered to keep them all straight, he simply referred to them as “kin of Tom.’ It was the same way classically-educated southern plantation owners before the Civil War named the progeny of their slaves: “Pompey’s Caesar,” “Caesar’s Brutus,” and so on. Go back far enough in English history and you’ll find that the ancestors of most WASPs were slaves. Of course the leaders of the Confederacy conveniently forgot that, and the racist knucklewalkers who fly the Stars and Bars today don’t know jack shit about history, and are proud of their ignorance. Oops, I feel a rant coming on. Please excuse me while I visit the bathroom.
Much better. Now, where was I? Oh, yes, family history.
The first Boylston Adams Tompkins, my grandfather, was a direct descendant of Thomas Boylston Adams, the third and youngest son of John and Abigail Adams, and the black sheep of that distinguished family. A failed lawyer, Thomas became his brother John Quincy’s secretary, and in the early 1800s, traveled with him to Holland and Prussia, where he developed a taste for drink that eventually undid him. He settled in Quincy, Massachusetts, and married a girl named Ann Harrod, with whom he had seven children. Ann came with a dowry large enough to support the family and Thomas’s drinking habit, while he did perfunctory service in a few government sinecures to which he was appointed when John Quincy was elected President. He died broke.
The sons and younger brothers of successful men don’t always fail to prosper, but poor T. B. Adams was a case in point. He simply lacked gumption, and it’s certainly true that John and John Quincy were tough acts to follow. So was my grandfather, Boylston Adams Tompkins, Senior, a banker who was known in financial circles as the Wizard of Wall Street, largely because he made money during the Great Depression, and wound up Chairman of the Board of the Bankers’ Trust Company. A lover of the Sport of Kings, he became president of the New York State Racing Commission, and during his tenure, horse racing was reformed, at least partially. In addition, he was a philanthropist, heading the Children’s Village of Dobbs Ferry, NY, the Henry Street Settlement, the Hospital For Special Surgery, and the Greater New York Charitable Fund.
Grandpa Tommy loved the theater, and was an occasional “angel,” investing considerable sums in Broadway plays he thought promising. His theatrical eye was as unerring as his instinct for the potential of an I.P.O., and several of the shows he backed became smash hits. All of them were musicals, and at least one producer, whose play was in trouble after a dismal preview in New Haven, asked for his help. Grandpa Tommy attended a performance and told the producer, “Add more girls.” The show was a bit of fluff called No, No, Nanette, and the additional chorines must have helped, because it had a long run on Broadway and was later made into a movie.
In 1964, after I graduated from Yale, I told my family that I wanted to become an actor. Everyone was appalled except my grandfather. He loaned me $4000 – a considerable sum at the time – to get me started, wished me luck, and told me never to ask him for any more money. Once I began to land acting jobs, I started paying him back in installments. His secretary sent me form letters over his signature that acknowledged each payment and reminded me of the debt still outstanding. It was only after the loan was paid in full that I heard from him directly. His letter thanked me brusquely for the final payment, and went on to say that he’d seen me on the opening night of an off-Broadway play, Martin Duberman’s In White America, and thought I’d been pretty good. That was high praise from such a flinty man, and I phoned him to ask why he hadn’t come backstage after the performance. He told me that he hadn’t liked the play itself. I didn’t ask him why. He was the kind of benevolent racist who liked and even admired some of the black servants he and my grandmother employed. He made sure they were comfortably set up when they left his employ, and he provided college funds for those who had teenage children. But he never invited any of them to sit down at his table and share the meals they prepared and served.
Grandpa Tommy’s appetite for pretty women was voracious, and he cheated regularly on my grandmother, the former Eleanor Marshall, whom he had married primarily for her money and social standing. But Grandma Ellie had grown up in the Edwardian era, when appearances counted and divorce was scandalous, so she tried to ignore his dalliances, and remained devoted to him. His flings were never serious, and in fact he loved her, in his own selfish way. She did get back at him once by having a discreet affair with a handsome cowboy she met at a dude ranch in Montana. The cowboy was a transplanted English toff, and he gave her his signet ring in token of their love. Much later, she told me that in her will there was a provision stating that she be buried with the ring on her finger.
Grandpa Tommy died before she did, and I’ve often wondered if he knew about her secret love. If so, he probably didn’t care. She managed their penthouse apartment in New York and their numerous vacation houses, hired and fired staff, and generally kept him in elegant comfort. By the standards of their class and time, they were a model couple. They even had pet names for each other: for reasons that were never explained to me, he called her Timmy, and she called him George.
They had four children: my father, B.A.T. Junior, (Tommy #2), and my three aunts, Sis, Joan, and Judy. Grandpa Tommy adored his daughters; they called him “Maestro,” and adored him right back. But his attitude toward his son involved what today would be called tough love. He wanted my father to make it on his own, and although he pulled some strings to get Dad his first postwar job with the Flintkote Company, a roofing and siding materials outfit upon whose board he sat, he refused to help him enter the viciously competitive world of high finance. He didn’t think Dad had the killer instinct to succeed as a bankster, but I’m not sure he was entirely right.
My father was a brown-eyed handsome man, smart, and athletic. He was also brave: a Lieutenant Commander aboard a destroyer escort during the perilous North Atlantic Convoy to beleaguered Britain, when the Nazi u-boat wolf-packs ruled the sea, he was cited for valor in dispatches from his commanding officer. During shore leave, he shattered his left elbow in a car accident, and the damage was so severe that even after several operations, he was never able to extend his left arm fully – a problem, because Dad was left-handed. But his fierce competitive drive remained intact, and he beat his opponents on the tennis court by wearing them out, developing a game of bloops, lobs, and backspins whose sheer wickedness made up for its lack of power. His golf game was similarly unorthodox, but just as effective, despite the fact that he couldn’t hit long off the tee. He was a superb horseman, riding Thoroughbreds hell-for-leather over fences during fox hunts with North Carolina’s Moore County Hounds. He loved racing Herreshoff 12s in Buzzards Bay, vying with other members of the Quissett Yacht Club, and when I was 13, he won the end-of-the season Ames Cup, with me as crew.
But no matter how well he did at sports and in business (he was Flintkote’s best salesman, and later joined a company called Webb & Knapp, New York’s premier urban real estate firm, where he became a vice president), he could never earn his father’s praise.
The problem, as I understand it, was threefold. First, though Grandpa Tommy enjoyed a drink or two in the evening, Dad had been a binge drinker since the end of the war. Next, Grandpa Tommy was a very canny gambler on Wall Street, but he never played the ponies because he knew how corrupt the racing industry was. Dad spent a lot of time and money at the track, and usually lost because he was drinking and bet on boozy hunches. In Pysch 101 terms, he was a compulsive gambler, a condition that often goes hand-in-hand with alcoholism. He played high-stakes poker at New York’s private clubs and in Las Vegas’s casinos, and almost always lost his shirt. Finally, although he’d inherited his father’s priapic interest in good-looking women, he had a softer heart, and fell in love with the ladies he bedded. Grandpa Tommy, exasperated by Dad’s second divorce and remarriage, told him, “Tommy, for God’s sake, you don’t have to marry them!”
At first Dad’s binges didn’t last very long, and during his sober stretches, he tried to repair the damage they had done. But like Thomas Boylston Adams, he couldn’t resist the call of the bottled genie he quaintly called John Barleycorn, and old Johnny took a heavy toll on his mind and body. It took a bout of acute alcohol poisoning that damn near killed him to persuade him to quit drinking. He joined AA, but his clean and sober period didn’t last long, because he hated confessing his secrets to a bunch of strangers who weren’t in his social class. Another life-threatening blackout finally scared him straight.
He spent his last years on an expensive drying-out ranch in Arizona, where his witty collection of stories about celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Shelley Winters, whom he’d met during his high-flying days in Vegas, made him popular with the younger drunks and druggies. The place raised race horses for the California circuit, and had a few less high-strung animals, and Dad taught some of the recovering addicts to ride, though by then arthritis in his legs prevented him from mounting up himself. The overworked young owner trusted him with the ranch’s truck to go into the nearest town on shopping trips, and Dad always took some of what he called his fellow inmates with him. During these expeditions, he often backslid, taking the kids with him to a bar for a beer or two, but he never drank too much or let them get hammered, and he always returned safely.
He died in Arizona, but not of liver cirrhosis. Stomach cancer, detected too late to be operable, is what killed him. By the time I flew out to his hospital, he was on the way out. Perhaps because he was ashamed of his ravaged state – so at odds with his former dapperness – he refused to see me during my first visit.
I went back next day and found a sympathetic male nurse who let me into his room. I’d been told that he’d stopped eating, but still craved sweets, so I brought him some chocolates. Doped up on morphine, he started gobbling them before he even knew who I was, but the sugar rush roused him from his stupor, and he recognized me. He was almost skeletal, except for the cancerous bulge in his belly, but he managed to crack a smile.
“I’m afraid I’ve lost a little of my blinding speed, Tobe,” he said, with a trace of his old cockiness. I didn’t trust myself to speak, because I knew I’d start crying, so I just took his hand. I hadn’t held hands with him since my childhood, but it felt good. After a moment, he said, “You’ve been a good son.” Then the morphine put him to sleep, and his hand went slack. I tucked it under his sheet and wiped the chocolate smears off his chin. Then I kissed him on the cheek.
The nurse returned. “We’d better let him rest now,” he said. I nodded, thanked him, and left the room. I had to catch a plane back to New York in the early afternoon, and I didn’t have time to see him again before my flight’s departure. After I got home, I called the hospital, but was told that he had slipped into a coma. He lingered on life-support for a few more days before he died.
I wish I could say that the peaceful expression on his face as he slept was my last mental image of him. But my brother Mike came out to see to his cremation. Mike practices Transcendental Meditation, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s form of Hinduism, and he performed a rite of spiritual continuity over Dad’s body that helps the soul of a father meld with that of his son. It’s a lovely notion, but unfortunately Mike had a camera with him, and after the ceremony he took a picture of Dad’s dead face. He mailed me a print of it without warning me in advance, and when I saw it I almost fainted with horror.
Dad’s mouth gaped open, showing his yellow, crooked bottom teeth and his gray tongue. His skin was greenish blue, as if he was already beginning to rot. And his eyes were slightly open, but rolled up into his head so that only white slits were visible. He was a ghastly, ghoulish apparition, and as soon as the shock wore off, I tore the photo into tiny bits and flushed them down the toilet. But I couldn’t banish the terrible picture from my mind, and it has supplanted every good memory I have of him. Mike meant no harm, I know, but although many years have passed, his thoughtlessness still troubles me.
My wife Patsy and I have no children, so the Boylston Adams Tompkins line stops with me – not that I’d ever name a son B.A.T. IV, since I’m not a king (except in my own estimation). My brother’s full name is Vinton Douglas Tompkins, the Vinton from a Protestant Huguenot family that fled France in the 17th century due to Catholic persecution, settled first in Britain, and later in New England.
He’s called Mike because he was born with a full head of black hair and a pug nose. Our parents, no strangers to ethnic predjudice, thought he looked like a “black Irishman,” the derogatory term for immigrants from the Emerald Isle who didn’t have red hair and freckles. Readers of a certain age might recall Pat and Mike jokes about “Paddies” who got into trouble in America because they were credulous, quarrelsome, and loved whiskey too much. In truth, the black Irish were descendants of the sailors of the Spanish Armada who survived Sir Walter Raleigh’s destruction of King Philip II’s fleet and were cast ashore in Ireland, where they eventually intermarried with the locals.
I think “Mike Tompkins” is a fine name. There’s nothing silly about it. It’s punchy and straightforward, and it looked great on the campaign posters when my brother made his two runs for vice-president on the Natural Law Party ticket. So did his photo: he inherited our father’s dark, flashing good looks. I’m rather sorry the NLP platform was too metaphysical to attract more than a few voters, but I’m proud of him for running. I voted for him in 1992, because he’s my brother, and the three other candidates didn’t thrill me. But during his second run it became obvious to me that his campaign was more about raising funds for the TM movement than a serious bid for office.
Mike’s still in the TM movement, and nowadays he lives on an ashram in northern India. As is the rule in a Christian monastery, the ashram residents are supposed to be celibate. But like Dad and his drinking, Mike has a tendency to backslide where women are concerned. He’s had a couple of romances in the past with TMers that almost ended in marriage, but on the first occasion he consulted the Maharishi, who told him to go ahead and marry. “You can become enlightened in your next incarnation,” quoth the Giggling Guru.
The second relationship fell apart because the lady had become skeptical of the weirder powers TM claims to give its practitioners– for example, yogic flying, a form of levitation, which is said to occur during deep meditation – and also didn’t want to spend four hours every day unconscious. She also had a problem with the fact that the adepts of a movement which is supposed to unite its practitioners with the Ground of All Being and give them Profound Inner Peace charged money to assign people mantras and teach them how to meditate. So she parted ways with him.
That split pretty much put paid to the possibility that Mike would add new fruit to our branch of the family tree. Right now, I’m very happy to say that he’s involved with a wonderful woman who practices TM simply because sitting down for an hour or so each day and letting your busynesses go is good for what ails you. I think she loves him as much as he loves her, but she’s been married before, and has no intention of marrying again. She’s also beyond her child-bearing years.
So although there may be some distant cousins with the name, it looks as if the direct Tompkins line has reached its end in this country. It had a good run over the years, producing several colorful and accomplished characters, a harmless ninny, one politician who wasn’t entirely crooked (Daniel Tompkins, Governor of New York and sixth Vice President of the United States), and no outright villains, as far as I know.
Not a bad record. And writing about it, as I reach the end of my personal run, has made me think again about my name. Maybe it isn’t so silly after all.