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Bachelor Lynde Cochrane, 45, was descended from the fifth Earl of Douglas and from Scotland's hero, Robert Bruce. He married Vivian in a sneak ceremony on Aug. 12, 1917, and "immediately took off," said the Boston Globe, "in a high-powered automobile with clear weather and plenty of gasoline to take them to Newport on their way to a Maine hunting lodge." The second of their five children was Ceezee— christened Lucy Douglas Cochrane. Cochrane died in 1928, and in 1930 Vivian married another rich, blue-blooded Boston bachelor. Attorney Dudley L. Pickman Jr. He moved the whole family into a big granite Stanford White mansion on Commonwealth Avenue, with 40 rooms (five servants), where Ceezee grew up and the Pickmans still live.
Paris on Commonwealth Avenue. Ceezee took to school like a cat to water; she could get through it, but would much rather not. Her report cards indicate that as a ten-year-old she was inclined to be noisy and inattentive. She "needs to be very busy or she will gain superficial social superiority," was the comment on one of them, adding that "at heart she is kindly." Ceezee ended her academic career at Fermata, a very social, now defunct girls' school at Aiken, S.C., where she did best at French and Latin, worst at cooking and sewing, and admits: "I spent most of my time riding."
By the standards of staid old Boston, Ceezee was a bumptious debutante. She and her one-year-older sister Nancy, another high-spirited and conspicuously pretty blonde, were always making news, and Mrs. Pickman was kept busy berating the newspapers for printing pictures of them. Both were avid rooters for the Bruins hockey team; they knew all the players' names, and it was even rumored that on occasion Ceezee varied her diet of Harvard boys to go out with some of the squad. "She was always very democratic," recalls a contemporary.
Ceezee's coming-out party was just about the biggest event of the 1937-38 season. The first floor of the Common wealth Avenue house was decked with awnings and posters to create an atmosphere of Parisian streets; the guests danced till dawn to two orchestras in the drawing room banked with white flowers.
Without Clothes. Ceezee came by her high-spirited independence from her mother. Refusing to be intimidated by the Old Guard's instinctive distrust of a some time actress, Mrs. Pickman shook up Boston society by giving parties that stirred together Brahmins with Broadway, jazz musicians with longhairs such as Conductor Serge Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony and Composer Igor Stravinsky. It would have been surprising if a pretty and independent girl like Ceezee had not set her sights beyond Back Bay.