The Right People Read online

  Caring for the wealth and caring for the bloodline, and seeing that each reaches a not only ripe but indestructible old age, go hand in hand, but—in assembling the perfect marriage—concessions can be made in one direction or the other. An ample helping of Old Family and less money, on one side, can usually be brilliantly matched with a smaller amount of family, and more money, on the other. And a great family name—of the magnitude of Adams, Talbott, or Howard—can make up for almost anything, even total poverty. An Englishman, who had been visiting in Philadelphia, said recently, “I think that if a rich, social Philadelphia girl married an aging alcoholic homosexual in a wheelchair without a penny to his name—if the name were Cadwalader or Ingersoll or Biddle or Drexel or Roberts or Wister or Chew—everyone would say, ‘What a marvelous marriage!’”

  For though a divorce may be awkward it is as nothing compared with the disaster—and the cost—that can result from a mésalliance. When the late William Woodward, Jr., married Ann Eden Crowell, a former actress and model, and the daughter of a Middle Western streetcar conductor, his parents were models of stiff-upper-lip behavior. And, when young Mrs. Woodward later accidentally shot and killed her husband, Mrs. Woodward, Sr.’s lip was the stiffest anyone had ever seen. “Bill Woodward would be alive today, if he hadn’t married that actress,” says one of the elder Mrs. Woodward’s friends, and certainly no one can refute that statement. The Woodward shooting illustrated a couple of tangential points—that the young Woodwards were doing the customary upper-class thing in maintaining separate bedrooms, and that shooting one’s husband does not get a woman, no matter how lowly born, removed from the Social Register; the younger Mrs. Woodward retains her place in its pages, along with her membership in the exclusive Piping Rock Club.

  More recently, when the son of a wealthy Chicago manufacturer insisted upon marrying a pretty California girl of simple origins, the wedding was described by a guest as “all minks and Mr. John hats on the groom’s side of the church, and all little cloth coats and bonnets on the bride’s.” It was hard to decide, this guest confessed, which side of the church looked more uncomfortable. The young husband, in an attempt to tone up his new in-laws in the only way he knew how, gave them a sizable gift of money. His in-laws then did something that, it seemed, they had always dreamed of doing should a windfall ever appear. They bought a pick-up truck and an enormous house trailer. When they drove this caravan to Chicago and parked it, complete with butane tanks and chemical toilets, on the sweeping drive of their son-in-law’s parents’ estate on the North Shore, the fiber that held the young marriage together began to weaken. Another cash gift was tried—it went for plastic awnings and window boxes for the trailer—before the young man headed for the divorce court, another unhappy reminder of the importance of “sticking to our kind.”

  “I’ve told my daughter,” says one mother, “that if she wants to have a fling with a stranger she should for goodness’ sake have it. But not for a minute is she to entertain the thought of marrying him.” But runaway daughters are a recurring Society phenomenon, and look what finally happens to them. Popular candidates for these girls’ partners seem to be chauffeurs, cowboys, ski instructors—with fewer chauffeurs than cowboys and ski instructors because so few people keep chauffeurs any more while, as Mrs. Tew says sadly, “Everybody skis, everybody goes West …” A Chicago debutante of a few seasons back ran off and married her cowboy. When last heard from she was in Wyoming, trying to raise money through her family and their business connections, to get her husband a ranch of his own. A San Francisco debutante, selecting a ski instructor, was last heard from in the mountains trying to raise money to buy her husband a ski lodge. Moving up fast to fill the spot being vacated by chauffeurs are service station attendants. Why? So many girls these days are being given little sports cars as graduation presents. Sooner or later, each little car needs gas. Will such marriages last? Hardly ever, in the opinion of Society. Furthermore, when the novelty of such a mixed marriage has worn off, when it is time for the knot to be untied, it cannot be untied without cost.

  Several years ago, Patricia Procter, heiress to a Procter & Gamble soap fortune (and a distant relative, through a complicated series of marriages, to the runaway Gamble Benedict) decided to marry Thomas Greenwood, the good-looking son of a London greengrocer. There was the customary consternation in the New York social world in which Miss Procter moved. In fact, her peppery grandmother (a curious parallel, ten years earlier, to Gamble Benedict’s grandmother, for Mrs. Procter was also her granddaughter’s legal guardian and controlled her inheritance) expressed more than consternation. “Granny,” as Mrs. Sanford Procter was called, was so put out with the whole situation that, when arguments and blandishments and entreaties failed, she refused to attend the wedding, a relatively flossy affair with a reception following it at the Colony Club in New York. Guests at the reception bravely tried to ignore Mrs. Procter’s conspicuous absence, but as one guest put it, “Granny was everywhere in that room!” (Leaving the reception line, after politely chatting with the young bridegroom, another guest moaned, “Oh, God! He even has a Cockney accent!”)

  Things seemed to go well enough for the young couple after their marriage, but friends soon became concerned when the Greenwoods moved into an apartment at The Mayfair House on Park Avenue, a couple of floors away from Granny’s apartment, and when the groom began to seem more interested in the prompt delights of room service than in going to his job as a car salesman in New Jersey, an employment he suddenly appeared to find decidedly dull. Trouble, of a predictable variety, was not far off. There were quarrels, a separation, a reconciliation, more quarrels, and all the while Granny was right where a good granny should be, just a short elevator hop away. Soon the affair erupted unpleasantly in the newspapers. Greenwood was suing Granny for alientation of affections. Mrs. Procter, Greenwood testified, “through her great wealth,” had systematically gone about breaking up the marriage. But what Greenwood wanted, it seemed, was not his wife’s love back. He wanted money. There was a public scene in which Granny, a small and erect figure in aristocratic black, made a dramatic appearance in court. Love letters, and the opposite of love letters, were hauled out of dresser drawers where they should have stayed, and were read, and terrible accusations—many too spicy even for the tabloids—flew shrilly about. In the end, Greenwood lost his case, and disappeared. The couple were divorced. Patricia Greenwood, a sadly disillusioned young grass widow, withdrew from New York social life. Mrs. Sanford Procter continues to winter in Manhattan and summer at her farm in Massachusetts, which is called “Fish House,” * where virtually every stick of furniture and item of decoration is in the shape of, or bears the stamp of, a finny creature—as though a reminder that a fish cannot survive outside its water.

  Of young Mrs. Greenwood, her friends say, “She should have known. After all, the difference in their backgrounds.…”

  * Not to be confused with the ancient Philadelphia men’s club of the same name, and of which more will be said later.

  8

  Lovely, Lovely Ladies

  One Sunday morning a couple of years ago, devotees of the New York Times crossword-puzzle page found themselves confronted with the following problem and partial solution:

  While, manfully, doers of the big weekly puzzle tried to find a nine-letter word to fit the definition, members of the Junior League themselves, girlfully, tried to make the solution be “volunteer.” But try as they might, “volunteer” would not mesh with the vertical words around it. Less parochial puzzle-workers came to the correct solution more quickly—which, alas, was “debutante.” So distressed were members of the Junior League that many letters were written to the Times about it, and an entire article on the subject appeared in the Junior League magazine.

  That Sunday crossword, and the trouble the Leaguers had with it, illustrates the curious dichotomy that exists within the Junior League today. League members are, indeed, volunteers. A specific amount of weekly toil and endeavor in beha
lf of some approved good cause is a requisite to continuing membership. But League members are also, to a large extent, debutantes and former debutantes. In smaller cities that do not have organized debutante balls, joining the Junior League is the accompaniment, if not almost the equivalent, of coming out. Still, Leaguers do not like to be known as “just debutantes,” because, as one Leaguer puts it, “That makes us sound as though we’re dilettantes who are afraid to get our hands dirty.” Nor do they like to be considered “just volunteers.” That, as the same lady says, sounds “pretty dreary,” as though Leaguers’ hands were wrist-deep in mud most of the time. In other words, Junior Leaguers are unwilling to give up completely either half of their disparate organization, though the two halves do not seem to blend very comfortably, if at all.

  This problem is currently reflected, in other forms, all across the pastel-hued landscape of American Society: should “society” be written with a capital or lower-case s, for example? Most people who are “in Society” today would seem to want to have it a little of both, but such a compromise would call for a new kind of typography. “In 1904 and 1905, when I came out in New York, Society was still written with a capital S,” says Mrs. Corinne Robinson Alsop Cole, a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, very definitely a member of the New York Old Guard and (by her first marriage to the late Joseph Wright Alsop) the mother of columnist Joseph Alsop and Saturday Evening Post editor Stewart Alsop. (Mrs. Cole, from the bastion of her farm in Avon, Connecticut, is also, along with such formidable figures as Mrs. Winthrop Aidrich and Mrs. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, one of the towering grandes dames of the entire East.) “It was a period of an elite Four Hundred,” she says, “the last year of Mrs. Astor’s great balls. The list of debutantes was small. Forebears, not fortunes, gave the ‘open sesame’ to parties at the great private houses.”

  In those days, Mrs. Cole recalls, a young woman who made her debut was simultaneously made aware of the great and pressing obligation that family and social position imposed upon her. Society was a serious business and upon entering it a girl lifted her share of the city’s poor, beleaguered, and untidy masses upon her fragile and well-bred shoulders. The community’s unfortunate—its sick, its blind, its orphans, and its unwed mothers—became a burden that would be hers for life. As a result, says Mrs. Cole, coming out was not so much “a debutante party” as “a terrifying ordeal.” In those days, a girl was “polished” rather than educated, and part of the polishing instructed her as to her responsibilities to those less well-off than she. “The word ‘charity’ was not in disrepute then, as it is now,” says Mrs. Cole. “We all had our charities. We had local families whom we considered deserving, whom we cared for. And if a project seemed worthy we supported it with time and money. But we did it on a personal basis.” Society was, for the young Corinne Robinson, “the small group of people we knew,” and, in her debutante year, Miss Robinson joined a smallish organization established by a group of her friends and contemporaries called The Junior League for the Promotion of Settlement Houses “for the benefit of the poor and the betterment of the city.”

  Just three years earlier, in 1901, two well-connected young ladies—Miss Mary Harriman (the daughter of railroad king E. H. Harriman, and the sister of New York’s ex-Governor Averell Harriman) and Miss Nathalie Henderson (later Mrs. Joseph R. Swan)—were driving down Riverside Drive in a snappy four-wheeled sulky behind Gulnair, Mary Harriman’s trotting horse. On that excursion, Nathalie Henderson Swan later recalled, Mary Harriman said (in the somewhat stilted phrases Mrs. Swan has attributed to her), “There is an exceptionally large number of debutantes coming out our year. What can we do to make it a particularly good year, and to show that we recognize an obligation to the community besides having a good time?” Miss Harriman promptly answered her own question. She had heard about the College Settlement House on Rivington Street, and said, “We will work for the benefit of the College Settlement.” The Junior League was born.

  That year, a little entertainment was presented at the house of another debutante, and about $1000 was raised—not a large sum, perhaps, considering the wealth of the young ladies involved (E. H. Harriman alone was presumed to be worth a good $200,000,000), but, when one considers that this was in an era when young women were not supposed to handle money, and that the $1000 must have represented the girls’ carefully hoarded piggy-bank cash, it is impressive. The idea (after all, there had never been anything quite like a debutantes’ organization in the perfumed world of the Four Hundred) spread like wildfire. Debutantes clamored to get into the League, and other cities, hearing what New York was up to, raced to start leagues of their own. Boston came next and then, in quick succession: Brooklyn; Portland, Oregon; Baltimore; Philadelphia; and Chicago. “We had made it amusing,” said Nathalie Henderson Swan modestly, “and also chic to belong.”

  This helps explain some of the problems that today surround the Junior League—why, particularly in the largest American cities, it is felt to have lost some of its status. It became too amusing, and too chic. Everybody and her sister wanted to belong. Today, there are more than sixteen hundred members of the New York Junior League. The Boston League has over fourteen hundred, and the San Francisco League has eleven hundred-plus. All together—busily manipulating puppets, restoring historic houses, manning mobile museums, pushing book carts through hospital corridors, singing Christmas carols to shut-ins, planning children’s concerts and zoo trips, putting on operettas, plays, and films, organizing educational television stations, teaching arts, crafts, science and language courses, leading nature hikes, telling fairy stories to orphans, brightening the twilight days of the elderly by hanging pictures in their hospital rooms, stuffing envelopes and licking stamps, dancing their feet off in Junior League Follies, cheering the wounded and uplifting the imprisoned—there are more than eighty-five thousand Junior Leaguers in over two hundred cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Over them all the mother-hen Association of Junior Leagues of America—with headquarters located chic-ly in a suite in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria—keeps track of all the scattered League chickens, and attempts to impose a centralized system and discipline. To those who knew the Junior League in the drawing-room era, these figures and growth are “fantastic,” “incredible,” and “really rather frightening.” “I simply cannot believe,” says one woman, “that all those thousands of young women are really in Society today.” Though Mrs. Cole is loyal to her old organization, she does not quite seem to believe it either. But, rather than admit that the Junior League has changed, she prefers to say that Society has changed.

  Nowhere are the difficulties of big-city Junior Leagues more apparent than in the Pine Room of the New York Junior League clubhouse in East Eightieth Street where, at lunchtime, the ladies gather for a pre-luncheon cocktail served by a white-coated bartender, and where trays of Bloody Marys circulate. (The Bloody Mary, says one member, “is sort of the traditional New York Junior League drink—and they make yummy ones here.”) The clubhouse, formerly the town house of Vincent Astor, is handsomely paneled, furnished with French Provincial furniture, and features a splendid curved staircase (“perfect for wedding receptions”) and a cuisine so exceptional that even the husbands of League ladies enjoy coming there for dinner. But the League ladies themselves are fond of speaking of their mansion as though it only offered shelter of a sort most Spartan and austere. “But this place is nothing,” they remind wide-eyed visitors, “compared with the old clubhouse in East Seventy-first Street. That had a marvelous big ballroom, an indoor swimming pool, squash courts, and its own hairdressing salon. But during the war it just seemed wrong for us to have a big place like that, and we moved over to this little place in 1949.” At the same time, lest anyone accuse the League of living too plushly even in the old clubhouse, Junior Leaguers hurry to point out that, contrary to “that persistent rumor,” the Seventy-first Street place did not include a nurse and baby-sitting service for members to free them for good works. “It’s ridicu
lous to think we’d need the League to provide us with sitters,” an older League member says. “Why, in those dear, gold days we all had servants and nannies of our own.”

  It is in the Pine Room that the arguments most often arise over just what today’s Junior League is, as well as what it isn’t, and what it means to the world outside, and what it doesn’t. “We’re often thought of as a purely social organization,” said one Bloody-Mary-sipping member at a gathering the other day. “People who aren’t in the League don’t realize the tremendous amount of work we do. We’re considered snobs.” Others agreed that it was other people—“outsiders”—who brand the League snobbish. Those in the League don’t consider it snobbish at all.

  “But isn’t everything snobbish, really?” said another lady. “I mean, we’re like a sorority. We want people in the League who are nice, and share the same interests, and get along with the other members.”

  Several others agreed that everything was, in a way, snobbish. “For instance,” said one woman, “I live in the heart of Yorkville and there’s a Hungarian social club right around the corner. Now, if my husband decided to drop into that Hungarian club for a drink some Saturday night, do you think they’d admit him? They would not! They’d throw him right out on his ear—as he should be thrown out.”

  “Yes,” agreed another. “The Junior League isn’t snobbish—just selective.”

  “If,” said one, “you asked someone like a taxi driver what the Junior League meant to him, he’d say, ‘Yeah, the Junior League—a rich girls’ hangout.’ But we know differently.”