Title sounds familiar: Now, it’s mom’s turn

Pat Montandon was living a Cinderella life. The child of impoverished itinerant Nazarene ministers, she had blown out of a bad San Joaquin Valley marriage into San Francisco, where she became a party girl, got a TV show, spent a summer dating Frank Sinatra while managing an outpost of Joseph Magnin in Lake Tahoe and became a darling of the gossip columns.

By her early 40s, she had a rich, handsome husband in butter baron Al Wilsey, an adorable young son named Sean, a glass-walled San Francisco aerie with wraparound views, a country estate in the Napa Valley, a reputation for giving the best parties and round-table luncheons and her own column in the San Francisco Examiner. Then one evening her husband quietly announced he was dumping her. “You don’t know how to be married to a rich man,” he said, then got hitched to Montandon’s much younger best friend, Dede Traina, who presumably did.

The ugly 1980 divorce played out publicly; once-friendly gossips dipped their pens in acid and had a field day with the regal Montandon’s demand for $57,000 a month in alimony (she got $20,000 a month for eight years). San Francisco Chronicle wit Herb Caen, to whom Al Wilsey sent cases of Champagne, dubbed her the Blond Dumbshell and Pushy Galore. (Caen had been writing about her for years; when she married attorney Melvin Belli in a Shinto ceremony in Japan, he called the short-lived union “thirty seconds over Tokyo.”) Armistead Maupin caricatured her as the grasping society columnist Prue Giroux in “Tales of the City.”

On top of the divorce, Montandon was rejected by her son, who yearned for the love and approval of his father and stepmother, not his angry, freaked-out mother. Montandon fantasized about suicide and -- who wouldn’t?-- homicide too.

With the help of a Berkeley psychotherapist, she managed to pull herself out of her spiral after having a vision of a world blown apart by nuclear holocaust. She created an improbable children’s peace crusade, and took groups of kids to Russia, China, India, the Vatican, to meet with premiers, prime ministers and the pope to plead for world peace. Denigrated at home as hopelessly naive and self-aggrandizing, Montandon persevered.

“I never took the criticism to heart,” she said. “ ‘Cause I knew what I was doing. And I did a lot.”

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because one of the little peace ambassadors Montandon squired around the world -- her son, Sean Wilsey -- published his own take on events in 2005. His bestselling memoir “Oh the Glory of It All” eviscerated his stepmother Dede Traina Wilsey, one of San Francisco’s highest- profile arts philanthropists, and chronicled his ambivalent relationships with his increasingly distant father and his gorgeous, self-involved mother.

Well, now it’s mom’s turn.

Mementos of peace trips

Montandon’s memoir, “Oh the Hell of It All,” is to arrive in bookstores on Tuesday. In her spacious Beverly Hills cottage, built onto a steep slope off Coldwater Canyon, Montandon settled into an armchair to chat. A fluffy cat named Beslana, acquired during her most recent goodwill trip to Russia, purred under a footstool. Caged birds chirped in the kitchen as she gamely answered questions, not all of which were entirely pleasant for her.

The house is full of mementos from her dozens of peace trips abroad -- busts, plaques, a framed letter from Mother Teresa, a “declaration of dependence” signed (in person) by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Premier Zhao Ziyang of China. Above her fireplace hangs an oil portrait of Sean as a young adolescent. It was painted at the Napa house without Montandon’s knowledge after her divorce. One day, Sean brought it to her, telling her he’d found it in his dad’s basement, facing the wall.

Montandon moved to Southern California three years ago to “repot” herself, as she put it, after a lifetime in San Francisco. She is 78 and not the least bit self-conscious about that (although she is no stranger to plastic surgery). She wore a pair of 30-year-old navy satin lounge pants from Giorgio Beverly Hills with a loose white blouse over a white tank top, said she still gets a monthly alimony check from a convoluted trust established by the terms of her divorce, still doesn’t care much for Dede Wilsey, who inherited all of Al Wilsey’s estimated $300-million fortune after he died in 2002, is still promoting peace, and has experienced a hard-won rapprochement with her son that she cherishes and is loath to disrupt.

Sean Wilsey, an editor at large for McSweeney’s Quarterly, lives in New York with his wife, Daphne Beal, whose first novel is to be published this summer, their 2 1/2 -year-old son, Owen, and newborn daughter, Mira. Later this month, Montandon will meet up with him in San Francisco for a couple of literary events. Thanks to a well-managed $60,000 trust established when he was born, Wilsey has owned a loft in the Nolita neighborhood of Manhattan for years. It was Montandon’s publisher, the now-sacked Judith Regan, who came up with the attention-grabbing gimmick of borrowing the title (and cover design) of Wilsey’s book for “Oh the Hell of It All.” Montandon’s memoir, which she had spent a decade writing, was originally called “Whispers From God,” which, as Wilsey put it in an interview, “is so my mother.” Montandon didn’t even know that HarperCollins (parent company of the Regan imprint) had changed her title until Wilsey called her with the news.

“At first, Sean didn’t like it,” said Montandon. “He said, ‘Mom, they’ve ripped off my title!’ And I said, ‘Yes, they have Sean, and there’s nothing I can do about it.’ Then he became very accepting and said, ‘Well, it’s a good marketing ploy.’ ”

“Oh the Hell of It All” is not a response to Wilsey’s account, since Montandon had already written her memoir before her son wrote his. She allowed him to use her manuscript in the course of his research, and he quotes passages from her book in his. She did, however, make revisions after his book came out.

One of the most chilling and remarked-upon scenes in Wilsey’s book is his account of his mother’s invitation to suicide on a rainy night in their glass penthouse, shortly before his 12th birthday. In his version, his mother says, “Sean, I’m going to kill myself tonight and I want you to kill yourself with me.” He imagines the two of them plunging off their 32nd-story deck together, and writes that he was haunted for years by the idea she might kill herself.

In her soft Southern-inflected voice, Montandon disputed the idea that she ever seriously suggested suicide to her son, and took pains to explain that while she did make an inappropriate suggestion in the depths of her depression, his boyish imagination magnified it into something more dramatic than it was. Still, she said, it was wrong and she has apologized repeatedly for putting him through it.

That subject, and the fact that they disagree, is painful for both of them. Rehashing the details is treacherous emotional turf. “It’s hard for my mom to grasp, but I write about how I was convinced that we were going to have to jump off the deck,” Wilsey said. “It was very difficult to write and so painful to parse out. I actually think if you look at her version and look at mine, the differences are not that great.”

Aid to the afflicted

Montandon devotes a good deal of her story to her various peace trips, which began in 1982, with a hastily arranged trip with six children, including Sean, to Washington, D.C., the Soviet Union, Italy and Egypt. They brought sacks of letters from children to be delivered to the various heads of state, imploring the leaders for peace. They got into the White House, the Kremlin and the Vatican, where they met and talked to Pope John Paul II.

Whether Montandon’s missions were successful is hard to say. But she brought comfort and material aid to afflicted people -- most recently to the survivors of the 2004 schoolhouse slaughter in Beslan, Russia --and has some rollicking good stories to tell.

Dr. Nguyenvu (Winston) Nguyen, a 35-year-old pediatric cardiologist in Philadelphia, was a 12-year-old Vietnam refugee who had resettled in Atlanta when he won an essay contest and was taken by Montandon on two of her peace trips.

“She’s an incredible mentor to me,” said Nguyen, who arrived in the states penniless with his family at age 10, then went on graduate from Harvard and Emory University medical school. “The kind of work she does is tremendously healing. What she has taught me is the power of one.”

Just about every important moment of Montandon’s peace trips was documented. She has shelves of videotape, audiotape, bulging files with clippings and documents.

Sean Wilsey said that the trips represented “the best part of my childhood.... As for whether she made a difference, if you watch the videos, you’ll see that not only did she make a difference, she oftentimes blew their minds.”

When skepticism was expressed about one of the stories in her book, an account of the Russian mafia trying to steal 70 tons of supplies she’d collected for needy children in 1992, she marched downstairs to the hallway next to her study, opened a large cabinet, and pulled out a file labeled “Mafia,” filed with bills of lading, letters of introduction and news accounts of the shakedown operation. “I can document it all,” she said.

In the same drawer was a file called “Dede.”

“What’s in that?” she was asked.

“Not much,” she replied. “Kind of like her.” (In fact, it contained Xeroxes of several old Christmas cards sent by Al and Dede Wilsey, who were pictured with Dede’s sons, Trevor Traina, now a Bay Area entrepreneur, and Todd Traina, now a producer. Sean, who recounted yearning to be part of their family unit in his memoir and had even asked if he could call Dede “Mom,” was conspicuously absent.)

When reached by phone at her home in San Francisco, Wilsey declined to comment.

“I am aware of it,” she said of Montandon’s book, “and appreciate that you called me, but I have no comment whatsoever. I wish her well and hope that she might be able to get on with her life one day.”

Sean Wilsey, whose memoir is being made into a Miramax movie, said he thought his mother’s life is an apt topic too.

“My total dream for my mom is that a really good documentary filmmaker will want to do her story and use all her material, some of which is mind-blowing, especially her meetings with world leaders,” said Wilsey.

He even has a suggestion for a director. “Have you ever seen ‘Grizzly Man’? Werner Herzog would totally kick ass.”

robin.abcarian@latimes.com