The Right People
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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF STEPHEN BIRMINGHAM
The Auerbach Will
A New York Times Bestseller
“Has the magic word ‘bestseller’ written all over it … Birmingham’s narrative drive never falters and his characters are utterly convincing.” —John Barkham Reviews
“Delicious secrets—scandals, blackmail, affairs, adultery … the gossipy Uptown/Downtown milieu Birmingham knows so well.” —Kirkus Reviews
“An engrossing family saga.” —USA Today
“Colorful, riveting, bubbling like champagne.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Poignant and engrossing … Has all the ingredients for a bestseller.” —Publishers Weekly
The Rest of Us
A New York Times Bestseller
“Breezy and entertaining, full of gossip and spice!” —The Washington Post
“Rich anecdotal and dramatic material … Prime social-vaudeville entertainment.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Wonderful stories … All are interesting and many are truly inspirational.” —The Dallas Morning News
“Entertaining from first page to last … Those who read it will be better for the experience.” —Chattanooga Times Free Press
“Birmingham writes with a deft pen and insightful researcher’s eye.” —The Cincinnati Enquirer
“Mixing facts, gossip, and insight … The narrative is engaging.” —Library Journal
“Immensely readable … Told with a narrative flair certain to win many readers.” —Publishers Weekly
The Right People
A New York Times Bestseller
“Platinum mounted … The mind boggles.” —San Francisco Examiner
“To those who say society is dead, Stephen Birmingham offers evidence that it is alive and well.” —Newsweek
“The games some people play … manners among the moneyed WASPs of America … The best book of its kind.” —Look
“The beautiful people of le beau monde … Mrs. Adolf Spreckels with her twenty-five bathrooms … Dorothy Spreckels Munn’s chinchilla bedspread … the ‘St. Grottlesex Set’ of the New England prep schools, sockless in blazers … the clubs … the social sports … love and marriage—which seem to be the only aspect which might get grubbier. It’s all entertaining.” —Kirkus Reviews
“It glitters and sparkles.… You’ll love The Right People.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A ‘fun’ book about America’s snobocracy … Rich in curiosa … More entertaining than Our Crowd … Stephen Birmingham has done a masterly job.” —Saturday Review
“Take a look at some of his topics: the right prep schools, the coming out party, the social rankings of the various colleges, the Junior League, the ultra-exclusive clubs, the places to live, the places to play, why the rich marry the rich, how they raise their children.… This is an ‘inside’ book.” —The Washington Star
“All the creamy people … The taboo delight of a hidden American aristocracy with all its camouflages stripped away.” —Tom Wolfe, Chicago Sun-Times
The Wrong Kind of Money
“Fast and wonderful. Something for everyone.” —The Cincinnati Enquirer
“Dark doings in Manhattan castles, done with juicy excess. A titillating novel that reads like a dream. Stunning.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Birmingham … certainly keeps the pages turning. Fans will feel at home.” —The Baltimore Sun
The Right People
The Social Establishment in America
Stephen Birmingham
For Harry Sions
Preface
A little more than ten years ago, I first met the man to whom this book is dedicated in the office of the late and justly celebrated literary agent, Carl Brandt. I was a young writer who had published a few short stories, a bit of verse (a secret vice), and was at the time working on my first novel, or First Novel. I had been led, by the best of Eastern-college creative-writing courses, and by the newest of the New Critics, to believe that fiction was somehow holier than nonfiction (though most modern fiction wasn’t very good), and that factual reportage was a somewhat spurious endeavor. There was a world of difference, I had been taught, between an author (of novels) and a mere “journalist.” The purpose of the meeting in Carl Brandt’s office was to discuss whether I might also “turn my hand”—my phrase—to nonfiction.
The first article I wrote for Harry Sions was returned to me rather promptly for repairs. Let us say they were extensive. Indeed, they were total. Grimly, I attacked the piece again, and once more it was returned for repairs only slightly less extensive than before. I don’t remember how many times this sequence of events repeated itself after this, but I do know that by the time the article was finally accepted I hated Harry Sions. It was several days before my equanimity returned and I realized that I was grateful.
For a number of years Harry Sions edited, scolded, stimulated, badgered, inspired, charmed, and browbeat Holiday writers. He is not a hand-holding sort of editor. Great is his glee when he can find a reason for requiring this or that Great Name in American literature to revise, repair, rewrite, or when he can reject altogether a piece of writing that does not meet his stiff and spiky standards. Harry Sions taught me two things. He taught me how to write nonfiction. And he taught me that the American upper-class surroundings and training (including The Right School) and institutions (including the “junior dances”) which I had grown up with, and had merely endured, were both interesting and exceptionally worth writing about.
Over the years, I wrote a number of pieces for Harry Sions which dealt with Society and the institutions it supports (and which, in turn, support it and help keep High Society aloft), and these pieces, along with quite a bit of new material, the result of further researches and reflections, are at the heart—if that is not too strong a word—of this book.
S. B.
Contents
PART ONE
THE SOCIAL ESTABLISHMENT:
Growing Up “Upper”
1. Who Are Who?
2. Was It Ever What It Used to Be?
3. “How Shall We Tell the Children?”
4. The New “St. Grottlesex Set”
5. “We’re Coming Out Tonight”
6. Playing the Game
7. The Dirty Part
8. Lovely, Lovely Ladies
9. The Club Convention
PART TWO
HOW MONEY LIVES:
A Nosegay of the Best Addresses
10. The Riches of Westchester
11. By the Shores of Lake St. Clair
12. The Main Line Eternal
13. The Company Town: West Hartford, Conn. 06107
14. The Power Elite: Society in the Capital
PART THREE
HOW MONEY PLAYS:
A Selection of Pleasures and Playgrounds
15. “Society’s Most Enduring Invention”
16. “July Was Always for the Shore”
17. “August Was Always for the Mountains”
18. The Palmy Beaches (And the “Other” Miami)
19. The Palmy Springs (All That Money Can Buy)
PART FOUR
BUT IS IT REALLY DEAD?
20. “Obedience to the Unenforceable”
INDEX
About the Author
Part One
THE SOCIAL ESTABLISHMENT:
Growing Up “Upper”
1
Who Are Who?
In America, there is Society. Then there is Real Society. Real Society is a part of Society—the upper part. Everybody who is in Society knows
who the people in Real Society are. But the people in Real Society do not necessarily know who the other Society people are. The two groups seldom mix. Real Society is composed of older people. It is composed of older families. Older families are better people. Better people are nicer people. Newer people may be richer people than older people. That doesn’t matter. Ordinary Society people may get to be Real Society people one day only if they work at it. It sounds confusing, but it is really very simple. Cream rises to the top.
Once, in my extreme youth, I had the difference between Society and Real Society demonstrated to me rather vividly. I was perhaps fifteen, and I was at a dinner party in New York in a very grand—or so it seemed to me—town house in the East Sixties. (The house seemed grand because it had one room, called “the music room,” which contained no furniture whatever except a huge golden cello in a glass case.) The party was a children’s party before one of the “junior dances,” I forget which, and we were offered our choice (it seemed a grand choice, too) of sauterne or tomato juice. It was the first party to which I had worn a black tie. My clothes were new, my shave was new and I, too, was very new. I was so new that I made the mistake of offering to carry the plate of the young lady I was escorting, along with my own plate, back to the buffet table for seconds of creamed chicken in timbales and petits pois. And, in the process of carrying the two laden plates back to our seats, my cummerbund, newly acquired and only dimly understood, became undone. I was in the center of the room when I felt it begin to slip, and I clapped my elbows tight against my sides to stop it. But it continued to slide down about my hips. Lowering myself to a half-crouch, and jabbing my right elbow into my upper thigh, I became aware that the plate I held in my left hand had emptied itself of peas and chicken, and I felt this warm, moist mass flowing along my arm, inside the sleeve of my dinner jacket.
This was not a Real Society dinner party. I know because, a few days later, when I told this story in all its detail to a lady who was a member of Real Society, she said, “Do you mean they served Sauterne and not Dubonnet? How dreadful!” She might have added, too, that no young gentleman of Real Society would have found himself in such a predicament. He would not have carried a young lady’s plate to the serving table. He would have let her take care of herself.
Real Society people, I once thought, do not listen to what other people are saying. But I was wrong. They listen, but their ears are attuned to different sounds; they respond to different cues. It is not that they miss ordinary conversations, but they pick up different drifts. It is as though most people were on AM and they were on FM. Once, at a Saltonstall wedding in the 1940’s, one guest was overheard whispering to another, “Did you know that she was for Wallace?” There was a pause, and then the other guest said thoughtfully, “Really? Wallace Who?”
In Philadelphia recently, a matron was exclaiming to a visitor over the great supply of books and plays that have been written about the Philadelphia social scene—Kitty Foyle, The Philadelphia Story, and more recently, Richard Powell’s The Philadelphian. The visitor commented that he, personally—as an outsider—had found parts of Mr. Powell’s novel hard to credit. “Oh, really?” said the lady eagerly. “So did I. Tell me what it was that bothered you.” The visitor cited the opening section of the book, which centers about a Philadelphia Society wedding. As readers of the novel will remember, when the fictional bride and groom have settled in their wedding-night rooms at the Bellevue-Stratford, the bride makes the belated discovery that her husband is impotent. In her distress, she runs out of the hotel into Broad Street where, walking in the opposite direction, she encounters a burly construction worker whom she has eyed admiringly in the past. He is drunk, and walking arm in arm with a prostitute. In the convenient darkness, the young bride pays off the prostitute and takes the arm of the construction worker, who does not notice the artful substitution. The bride and her new beau now proceed to a handy shed where their union is consummated. (And, in the best tradition of modern fiction, where one encounter guarantees a pregnancy, the young woman nine months later gives birth to the child who becomes the novel’s hero.) Meanwhile, back at the Bellevue-Stratford, the young bridegroom is so distraught at his wife’s discovery that he, too, races off into the night in a fast sports car and is killed in a hideous accident, thereby easing things considerably for his wife’s future. All this, said the visitor, “I simply found impossible to believe.” “I completely agree,” said the Philadelphia lady quickly. “It’s absurd. Nobody would ever spend their wedding night at the Bellevue-Stratford.”
An Englishman, who has made a hobby of studying American Society, feels that Real Society people are indeed different from you and me. “You can spot them immediately,” he says. “They have a special way of talking, a special way of thinking, and a special look. They even smell a special way. I love the way they smell.”
Though I am still unable to identify Real Society people by their odor, his other points of difference seem perfectly valid. And these differences provide the most formidable obstacles to the social climber. Such is the nature of Society that a person can live his whole life, quite happily and quite successfully, without being aware of Society, or feeling its effect in any way. Only when he attempts to move into it does he discover that it was there all along, like a wall, stern and unscalable, a wall with a small grilled door in it—locked.
Perhaps a better image than a wall with a door in it would be a series of walls, arranged in a crazy-quilt pattern like a bit of New Hampshire farm country seen from the air. Social climbing is like a game. You play it by climbing the walls and crossing the little squares between, one after another. Progress is slow and arduous, and often you must rely on guesswork. Through it all, your goal is Real Society, and as you approach its fringes, the going becomes harder. You must learn to recognize, even though you may have not yet seen one, a Real Society person. And one way to do this is to remember a few things a Real Society person is not.
People who go regularly to charity balls, who have been photographed dancing with the Duke of Windsor, who have played poker on the yacht of a Greek shipping magnate, are not necessarily all members of Real Society. Some may be, but most are the other kind. There are Real Society people who have never set foot on a yacht of any sort and who, if the Duke of Windsor walked into the room, would fail to identify him. Sheer splash has nothing to do with Real Society. There were few Real Society people in attendance, for instance, at the wedding of Luci Johnson. (“An August wedding in Washington?” people murmured.) Nor were there Real Society people at the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco. (“I hear that they met,” said a Philadelphia Society woman at the time, “at the home of a mutual friend in Ocean City, New Jersey. But how can that be? No one has gone to Ocean City for years.”) To this day, the best Philadelphia people make a point of explaining that they did not attend these nuptials; there are a number of princesses in Real Society, but Grace is not one of them. When a splash does occur at a Real Society function, it occurs by coincidence or by accident more often than by design. The wedding of Janet Jennings Auchincloss, a Real Society occasion, generated a good deal of inadvertent splash—and upset the bride so much that she burst into tears.
The Social Register is no longer—if it ever was—a reliable guide to who is Real Society and who is not. The little black and red “stud book” has always been published for profit, and has depended on its listees’ willingness to be listed, as well as on their subscriptions. The Social Register grows thicker in times of economic boom, and shrinks when the economic pendulum falls the other way. The number of Social Register families may wax and wane, but the size of Real Society remains constant. Many Real Society families ridicule the Register now, and make the familiar comment, “It’s just a telephone book.” In New York, for instance, it is still smaller and more wieldy than the Manhattan directory. As often as not, however, when an entrant is “dropped” from the Register, he has simply neglected to—or chosen not to—fill out the necessary a
nnual forms. Still, many Society people feel as the writer Louis Auchincloss does. “The Social Register has gotten so enormous,” he says, “that it looks rather peculiar if you’re not in it.”
One can frequently recognize a woman of Real Society by the way she dresses. Real Society women’s clothes have a way of staying in style longer than other people’s because Real Society fashions do not change markedly from year to year. Neither the junior-cut mink coat nor the beaver jacket has gone through many transitions since the introduction of the designs, nor has the cut of the classic camel’s hair topper. The short-sleeved, round-collared McMullen blouse is ageless, and the hemline of the Bermuda short has hardly been known to fluctuate. What is more classic than a double strand of good pearls? The poplin raincoat is as suited to suburban shopping today as it was to the Smith campus in 1953. It has been said that were it not for the tastes of the young Society woman, the great firm of Peck & Peck would soon go out of business, and all the knitwear on the second floor of Abercrombie & Fitch would quickly fall prey to the moth.
The look is easy, tweedy. Hair is a blond mixture, streaked from the sun, of middle length, and is often caught at the back of the neck in a little net bag. This style is as much at home on the back of a horse as it is with a full-length dinner dress; it has also been with us since the 1920’s. Real Society women are often tanned the year round—from riding and playing golf and tennis wherever the sun shines—and perpetual tan may lead to a leathery look, with crinkled squint lines about the eyes. It is a look exemplified in both the Mrs. Nelson Rockefellers, who had identically impeccable Real Society origins. It is a look that is instantly recognizable but, because of its particular composition, quite difficult for the outsider to simulate.
Then there is the Society voice. Trying to duplicate the American Society accent has provided the greatest stumbling block for the parvenu. Some say you must be born with it to speak it properly and convincingly, but it is safe to say that graduates of such private schools as St. Paul’s, Foxcroft, and Madeira, who may not have had the accent to begin with, can emerge with a reasonably close facsimile of it. It is a social accent that is virtually the same in all American cities, and it is actually a blend of several accents. There is much more to it than the well-known broad A. Its components are a certain New England flatness, a trace of a Southern drawl, and a surprising touch of the New York City accent that many people consider Brooklynese. Therefore, in the social voice, the word “shirt” comes out halfway between “shirt” and “shoit.” Another key word is “pretty,” which, in the social voice, emerges sounding something like “prutty.” There is also the word “circle,” the first syllable of which is almost whistled through pursed lips, whereas the greeting, “Hi,” is nearly always heavily diphthonged as “Haoy.” This speech has been nicknamed “the Massachusetts malocclusion,” since much of it is accomplished with the lower jaw thrust forward and rigid, and in a number of upper-class private schools, children are taught to speak correctly by practicing with pencils clenched between their teeth.