The Golden Dream Read online

  In the 1960s, the neighborhood was dealt its most severe blow. The Brazos ramp of the Southwest Freeway appeared on the drawing boards of those in charge of the Interstate Highway System, slashing through the old east gates of Courtlandt Place, where the crescent-shaped parklike entrance to the street had been. At the time, Courtlandt Place became sharply and bitterly divided between those who felt the neighborhood was doomed and wanted to sell, and those who preferred to stay on and fight regardless. Though the fight against the ramp was intense, the freeway, as all freeways do, inexorably came. And yet the little street, though aesthetically marred by the ramp at one end, almost miraculously remained unchanged otherwise.

  Today Courtlandt Place is a proud and handsome strip of green lawns and old cottonwood trees in the middle of a bustling city. The Courtlandt Place residents are united again and, through their Courtlandt Association—to which every home owner belongs—determined that Courtlandt Place will remain as it is forever, a pocket of large, expensive private homes. “We are an example to other cities of what can be done to preserve fine old neighborhoods,” says one association member. Plans are afoot to have Courtlandt Place declared a historic preservation district, like Audubon Place in New Orleans and King William Street in San Antonio. And, as a gesture of neighborhood solidarity, Courtlandt Place tosses an annual Christmas party for all present and former residents.

  Of course, out in the perfumed reaches of River Oaks, no one would think of living “down there.” Some River Oaks people have never heard of Courtlandt Place, and many are not sure exactly how to get there. River Oaks isn’t much concerned with the preservation of old places, being more concerned with preserving its private police force and its private garbage-collection service and its meals catered by Jamail’s, with seeing to it that no apartment buildings invade the “right” side of San Felipe Boulevard, and with its favorite preoccupations—money and blood. There was all sorts of talk in River Oaks, for example, when a prominent society woman was knocked down by the bouncers at the Old Plantation, and then beaten up in the parking lot, allegedly for trying to bring her small dog into the bar. As they say in River Oaks, “Don’t we have the most wonderful scandals here?”

  2

  The Casual Life

  Every new house in the gilded suburb of Scottsdale, Arizona, is built with a “family room.” Family rooms are almost as popular in Scottsdale as high school basketball—and flagpoles. Scottsdale, which bills itself as “The West’s Most Western Town” (the slogan is emblazoned on the town’s official stationery), may have more flagpoles per home than any suburb in the country. Scottsdale is proud of its flagpoles, and of the flag, because Scottsdale considers itself a particularly patriotic city. Its motto might well be “America’s Most American Town.” This is, after all, Barry Goldwater country, where America comes first.

  Patriotism, here, is serious business. No wonder everyone was shocked when, at a recent American Legion meeting, veterans of World War II were asked to stand up, and a German-born member of the Scottsdale City Council rose proudly to his feet. He had fought in World War II, all right—but on the other side. No wonder there was further shock when he couldn’t seem to understand why everyone was shocked.

  One of Scottsdale’s current heroines is Miss Lori Cox, now a freshman studying pre-law at nearby Arizona State University. Miss Cox, posed in front of an American flag, has been labeled in Scottsdale “The real Miss America.” It all started when Lori Cox was a little girl growing up in this Phoenix suburb in the early sixties, and saw, on a local telecast, a group of student demonstrators set fire to an American flag. “Mommy, Mommy,” she reportedly cried out. “Please make them stop it!” Then, in 1971, the Scottsdale school board banned the recital of the pledge of allegiance in the classrooms of Scottsdale’s public schools. Lori was even more upset. She went to her principal, Robert Hendricks, and protested. “But he refused, saying it would create a disciplinary problem.”

  In 1974, Senator Barry Goldwater came to speak to the pupils of Coronado High School, where Lori was a sophomore, and the students were instructed, on this occasion, to stand and recite the pledge. The students did, but there was a lot of grumbling about it, and, says Lori, “The hypocrisy of the situation bothered me.” So she carried her crusade a step further. She went to the Scottsdale school board, confronted the Superintendent of Secondary Education, and requested that the pledge be reinstated. He replied that “The pledge of allegiance on a daily basis would prove to be a traumatic experience for some students,” a judgment no one quite understood.

  But Lori Cox was not to be deterred by officialdom. The following week she and a group of friends stationed themselves outside various Scottsdale supermarkets and collected some three thousand signatures in favor of restoring the pledge to Scottsdale schoolrooms. In November, 1974, she carried her petition to the school board, which voted four to one (with one member abstaining) in favor of bringing the pledge back. But her victory was short-lived. For the next five months there were all sorts of disruptive incidents. Flags were ripped down from front-yard flagpoles, and flagpole ropes were cut. One day at school, during the singing of the national anthem, a student marched down the hall carrying a Communist flag. Although only a minority of the students were actually involved in the protests, a majority voted that the pledge to the flag was “meaningless.” “Many of the kids said they were too tired to stand in the morning,” Lori says. “It seemed as though nobody really wanted the pledge back.” She received unpleasant phone calls and threatening letters. “My name was on all the bathroom walls,” she says. “I missed all the parties and lost friends. But the thing that hurt me most was their disrespect for the flag.”

  As a result of all the dissension, five months after it had voted to reinstate the pledge the school board reversed itself and voted to ban the pledge again and to substitute, instead, a “once-a-week patriotic observance.”

  Lori was crushed but not defeated. “This is the only country in the world where a fifteen-year-old girl could approach the legislature,” she says, which is precisely what she did. After another futile round with the Board of Education, she took her case to the Senate Education Committee of the Arizona State Legislature in Phoenix, asking the committee to pass a bill that would give students the daily opportunity to recite the pledge of allegiance to the flag in all Arizona public schools. There was, she says, much opposition, but in the end the bill was passed and signed into law by Governor Raul Castro on June 13, 1975. “The bill doesn’t force anyone to make the pledge,” Lori says, “but it does permit someone to make it if he wants to.”

  Still, Lori says, it has not been easy. She has been subjected to jeers and sneers and catcalls at high school, and was even the object of derision—from faculty as well as students—during her freshman year at Arizona State. She bore it all bravely, and now, at last, things are beginning to quiet down. Lori boasts proudly of the congratulatory letters that have poured in from patriotic people like herself all over the United States, Canada, and even the U.S. Virgin Islands. “I would do it again,” she says, pointing out that she was taught “the advantages of American education and freedom of speech” by her parents. “I feel very close to God and think He is guiding me. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had the strength to go on.”

  Recently, Lori Cox embarked upon another patriotic project, which she calls Operation Mailbag. In February, 1977, with the backing of the Disabled American Veterans, their auxiliaries, and various other flag-proud organizations, some four million letters were sent out to United States congressmen and to President Carter, urging that an annual National Patriotism Week be established. The letters were all mailed on February 21, the eve of George Washington’s birthday. If the drive accomplishes its purpose, as Lori prays it will, we will have a National Patriotism Week by 1978.

  Lori Cox may have been ridiculed by some of her young contemporaries in Scottsdale and by the “self-styled intellectuals” in Tempe (where the Arizona State University campus is located
), but young people and intellectuals are not what Scottsdale is all about. It is about wealthy, frontier-spirited, Republican families who boast that they never read anything more mentally taxing than Vogue and Playboy. It is about sprawling houses with family rooms, cactus gardens, and—the new rage—private tennis courts, and that famous casual life style in which, as they say, “everybody has a pool.” As for Phoenix itself—well, all real living is suburban. No one goes to the city unless he happens to work in one of the banks, mortgage companies, or state office buildings. There is only one first-class downtown restaurant, the Eagle’s Nest, on the top of the Valley National Bank building, and that is primarily a men’s lunching place. Everything else is in the suburbs, including the big department stores—Saks Fifth Avenue, Bullocks, and I. Magnin. The supermarkets in the suburbs sell everything—liquor, baked goods, even clothing. You can find a barbershop or beauty salon, even visit your dentist, without leaving the supermarket.

  Scottsdale is almost aggressively casual. Cut-off jeans and tank tops are standard wear for cocktail parties, and men who wear neckties are regarded either as sissies or dumb Easterners who don’t know better. “If you wear a tie, someone will ask you who died,” says one man. Instead, men wear Western “bolo” string ties with turquoise beads, or gold chains. (Scottsdale women wear very little jewelry, but men wear lots of it—massive silver-and-turquoise rings, wide, mean-looking leather belts with huge silver buckles, silver-embossed cowboy boots.) The necktie is held in such contempt in Scottsdale that if a man enters the popular Pinnacle Peak restaurant wearing a tie, he will promptly have it cut off by a headwaiter with a pair of scissors. This is considered a great joke, and the victim of the vandalized necktie is supposed to laugh it off. To have one’s necktie severed at the knot at Pinnacle Peak has even become a local status symbol. The management takes the cut-off ties and nails them to the ceiling, and the hundreds of dangling bits of haberdashery have become part of the restaurant’s décor. To each tie, furthermore, is stapled the calling card of the gentleman who wore it.

  For the last decade, Americans have been moving to Arizona towns like Scottsdale lured by the climate and the casual life. It has been advertised that casual means inexpensive, and it is claimed that an individual can live in Arizona on 25 percent less gross pay than he can in chillier regions of the country. Developers have been having a heyday here, and there is a booming business in the selling and reselling of building mortgages and in commercial paper, all of which has become so lucrative that the Mafia is said to be taking an interest in Scottsdale and nearby Paradise Valley. Families buy Scottsdale houses and lots sight unseen, and often a new development will be completely sold before there are any houses, streets, sewers, or utility lines on it. Everyone in Arizona, it sometimes seems, is involved in land speculation in one form or another, and the favorite topics of conversation at Scottsdale dinner parties are the costs of lots and houses and how values have appreciated in how many years’ time. So bullish is the building industry here that banks are offering mortgages to home owners for no money down. Enticed by this situation, families in the Northeast and Middle West are pulling up stakes, emptying their savings accounts, and heading for a new life. But it turns out that jobs are not all that easy to find in Arizona. Furthermore, many are hoodwinked by unethical developers and end up having to sell their new houses, at distress-sale prices.

  Scottsdale, however, prides itself on the fact that “there are no poor people here.” Scottsdale streets are immaculate and well tended, outdoor advertising is restricted to small, tasteful signs, no neon is permitted, and yards and gardens are fenced for security and privacy. Even the Scottsdale Telephone Company building is cleverly disguised to look like a private house and not a commercial structure. Yet some newcomers from the East have found life in Scottsdale vaguely disappointing. “The accent here is all on sports and outdoor life,” says one transplanted New Yorker. “There’s no intellectual life, and not much cultural life.” It is true that a young man imported to be resident director of a small theater company arrived in Scottsdale and saw his season fold after its first production of The Glass Menagerie. On opening night, only about thirty people were in the audience. Of the Arizona Ballet, the local company, one woman says, “It’s really pretty bad; they drop people, and people fall down.” The Phoenix Symphony is really the Phoenix Pops. Arizona State University is not particularly good. There is no one on the faculty who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Even its football team is rated one of the ten worst in the country. When Leonard Goodstein was recruited to be head of the Psychology Department at the university, he was offered a lower salary than he had been making in the East. When he protested this, the recruiter “launched into an elegy about the raptures of the climate and the clear night skies and the magnificent views.” Finally Professor Goodstein said, “Are you offering me the head of Psychology or Physical Education?” Still, Goodstein confesses, “The casual life can be terribly seductive. Here, you drink your Coors beer straight out of the can—that sort of thing. But sometimes I miss the elegance of the East. Here, there is almost a demeaning of elegance.”

  The casual life means that high school basketball and football and college baseball scores are front-page items in the politically conservative Arizona Republic, which also gives space to letters to the editor that want to know: “Why are we picking on the Postal Service? Let’s pick on the Commies!” From Paradise Valley—where Barry Goldwater lives—front-page attention was recently given to the efforts of a citizens’ group to recall the mayor, the vice-mayor, and two members of the town council who had the temerity to vote for the widening of Lincoln Drive from two lanes to four between Tatum Boulevard and Scottsdale Road. Neither in Scottsdale nor in Paradise Valley do people want wider roads. Wider roads encourage heavier traffic. In fact, the most fashionable Scottsdale streets are not paved at all, in order to discourage incursions from sightseers, rubber-neckers, and other unwanted visitors, who might be Communists or similarly dangerous types.

  The casual life in Scottsdale means that Scottsdale goes to bed rather early. Scottsdale parties usually are called for six or six-thirty, and by ten o’clock, everyone is shaking hands and saying good night. A lot of this has to do with the desert climate. Scottsdale’s days can be very hot, and its nights are chilly. Often, the national high and low record temperatures are set in Scottsdale within a single twenty-four-hour period. This means that if one is going to get one’s tennis game in, one must rise early and play before the heat of the day begins. Also, Scottsdale’s bankers and stockbrokers and corporation executives have to time their business day according to Eastern time, and this, too, means rising early. Arizona and Hawaii are the only two states that completely refuse to go on Daylight Time (the feeling is that there is something a little un-American about Daylight Time), and so in the summer months businessmen are often at their desks at six-thirty in the morning, and come home at half-past two. Construction work, to take advantage of the cool mornings, starts as early as five-thirty, so in booming, building, expanding Scottsdale it is often impossible to sleep much after that hour.

  In the opinion of some, Scottsdale and its casual life have attracted just too many people. After all, the population of the place is climbing toward 100,000, and in winter there are hordes of vacationing tourists and conventioneers. Scottsdale, as they say, just isn’t what it used to be, and so, several years ago, a clever developer had the idea of building an even more exclusive suburb of exclusive Scottsdale. In the rugged mountains twenty-two miles north of Scottsdale, Carefree and The Boulders were created. Carefree’s altitude is about 1400 feet above Scottsdale’s, which means that Carefree’s days are somewhat cooler; further, some of the world’s most expensive houses have been built in Carefree for the very, very rich who no longer have to worry about when the business day begins. In The Boulders, houses have been placed upon, within, and around the great rounded granite rocks that scatter across the mountainside like huge marbles tossed from
the sky. The scenery is as spectacular as the houses, which feature indoor-outdoor pools fed by artificial waterfalls. Nearby, the Carefree Inn offers its golf course and tennis courts, and the Carefree Shopping Center sells nothing that is not expensive.

  Carefree was designed as a refuge for wealthy retirees, and they have come to Carefree from all over the United States. Some have built houses that, in architectural style, are rather like the houses that were left behind in, say, Minneapolis, but most have adopted the prevailing adobe or Arizona Territorial style. Hugh Downs has a house in Carefree, and so does Dick Van Dyke. Though Carefree does not like to think of itself as a retirement community exactly, most of its residents, as television writer Kathleen Hite puts it, are “not in their first bloom of youth.” Lazy pastimes are favored in Carefree—golf rather than tennis, a bit of hiking, rock collecting, and a great deal of contract bridge. Again, Carefree goes to bed not long after one of its predictably exuberant desert sunsets.

  Carefree was the extravagant brainchild of two promotion-minded developers named Thomas Darlington and K. T. Palmer, who, at the time, described it as “the most expensive development in the world,” and “like a limited edition of a fine piece of art,” and “only for a few very special people.” A private airport was provided for the special people’s private planes. All utility lines were run underground, and all lots zoned to a minimum of two acres (a few condominiums have since crept in). Messrs. Darlington and Palmer (their enterprise has been taken over by the Sundial Realty Company, which carefully screens prospective buyers of property) were responsible for the enclave’s quaint street names, which some people find a trifle cloying. The developers were determined that Carefree streets should sound very Western—more Western, perhaps, than “The West’s Most Western Town”—and so the winding lanes between the big gray rocks and the big houses were designated Six Gun Road, Long Rifle Road, Staghorn Lane, Stage Coach Pass, Mule Train Road, and Eagle Claw Drive, among other such flights of fancy. More than anything, however, the developers wanted Carefree street names to sound—well—carefree. There is a Serene Street, a Nevermind Trail, a Whileaway Road, a Rocking Chair Road, a Sleepy Hollow Road, and a thoroughfare called Languid Lane. For bridge players, tennis players, and golfers, there is Foursome Way. There is a Ho Road, and a Hum Road, and yes, there is an Easy Street. (Ho, Hum, and Easy Street intersect.)