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49 Chapter 3 “Keeping up the appearance of independence” When Fleischman was about to give birth in April 1929 and checked into a fashionable maternity hospital—later described by a police-reporter friend as “that swank Stork’s Retreat on Park Ave. where they use Chanel No. 5 to sterilize potties”—she immediately ran into trouble.1 As Walter Winchell recounted in his syndicated newspaper column, “there was great excitement” because “Mrs. Bernays absolutely refused to register under her marriage tag.” Trying in vain to persuade her to change her mind, “the hospital authorities argued that it was embarrassing to them to have to announce that a child had been born to a Miss Doris E. Fleischman.”2 The embarrassments continued after daughter Doris Fleischman Bernays’s birth certificate was filled out. Since the new parents’ last names were different, the New York Department of Health required that the certificate be stamped “illegitimate .” On seeing the document’s bright red stamp (which he described as being about five inches long and three-quarters of an inch high), the same friend remembered asking the clerk in charge of records the reasons for it. He said the clerk told him, “Mister, when a record comes here and bears a different name for the father and mother, we mark the child a bastard. A nicer word for the record is illegitimate. I don’t make the rules.”3 Bernays responded with a letter to the department’s assistant registrar firmly asserting that their child was “duly born in wedlock.” Fleischman had kept her birth name when she married “in accordance with the law and her own desires,” he wrote. The U.S. government had issued her a passport in that name, and that was the name she used on her federal income tax forms. Surely it must be clear that “under the circumstances, to file any report under any other name would be in error.”4 Not only did the department order the stamp removed but it ruled that in the future any married woman who kept her birth name would be permitted to have that name recorded on her child’s birth certificate.5 Even as he made their case to the city’s bureaucracy, Bernays was planning his daughter’s future. His letter to the Department of Health was promptly followed by a much shorter one to a prestigious Manhattan private school. In the first paragraph he asked that his daughter be admitted to the school “at the earliest age at which you take children.” The second and final paragraph read, in its entirety: “I 50 Anonymous in Their Own Names do not know what prerequisites there are for entrance. Doris Bernays is the grand niece of Professor Sigmund Freud. It is a bit difficult to give much further information about her since the child is only ten days old.”6 Fleischman was even busier than Bernays was, both before and after her daughter ’s birth. One arduous task when she was eight months pregnant was supervising their move to the enormous house at 8 Washington Square North. They immediately started entertaining in their new home, although on April 8 they had to hurriedly cancel their usual Sunday-evening dinner party when she unexpectedly went into labor. Ten guests whom they had been unable to reach with cancellation phone calls arrived anyway and enjoyed a formal dinner hosted by their butler.7 Home from the hospital, Fleischman began charting her daughter’s daily progress in a notebook, recording not only her height and weight but details such as the times she slept and awoke, when she cried, how much formula she consumed, when she smiled. The new mother clearly was consulting her many childcare books, for she paid close attention to the infant’s developmental progress. Noted, for example, was when she first followed her mother with her eyes but without sound clues (June 16), her puzzled discovery of her own hands (July 4), and (after she grabbed a rattle hanging on the side of her bassinet) her “first definite coordination of eye, hand and ear” (August 1).8 A June 21 note—“Smiles when nurse smiles”—highlights one reason Fleischman sometimes could step back and examine her daughter analytically: a “nurse” (today we would call her a nanny) lived with them.9 They hired a second nurse in October 1930 when their daughter Anne was born.10 Her birth received newspaper attention of another kind because an inaccurate story circulated...

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