The Right Places Page 2

  Kansas City was supposed to expand to the northeast. Instead, it has done just the opposite, and the costliest and most fashionable districts are now on the southwest side of the city—many of them, including the high-priced Mission Hills area, across the state line in Johnson County, Kansas. This situation, with many of the choicest taxpayers living in another state, has created a knotty problem for the Missouri-based city government, and was the doing of another high-powered and individualistic man, Mr. J. C. Nichols. Nichols came to Kansas City in the early nineteen-hundreds and bought the first few of what were to become thousands of Nichols-owned areas, most of them on the southwest side of town. It was he who developed the Mission Hills and Country Club districts where, today, all the richest people live in big sprawling houses, along twisting roads and lanes laid out by Nichols interests. In his developments, Nichols was fond of using fountains, statues, huge stone planters and ornamental sculpture. And the profusion of these Mediterranean touches in Kansas City is another of this Middle Western city’s great surprises.

  But Nichols’s masterwork was the creation of Country Club Plaza, and it did indeed represent a totally new concept in American architecture and commerce. It was nothing other than the first suburban shopping center in the world and, begun in 1920, it was foresightedly designed for the automobile age. Extensive parking space was planned for rooftops and within and beneath buildings. Today, the Country Club Plaza sprawls across forty southwestern acres and contains branches of all the best shops and restaurants, as well as professional offices. Because Mr. Nichols admired the Moorish style of southern Spain, he designed his shopping center with bell towers, minarets, courtyards, more fountains, more statuary, a scale replica of Seville’s Giralda Tower, and one fountain that is an exact copy of the Seville Light. In the years since, as a result of all this, Seville has been adopted as Kansas City’s “sister city,” a designation that technically doesn’t mean much other than to give city-proud Kansas Citians still another reason to crow, “Who needs Paris? Who needs Europe?” At Christmastime, the Country Club Plaza is decorated with thousands upon thousands of sparkling lights, and incoming planes on clear nights traditionally dip from side to side above the Plaza to let their passengers view the spectacle.

  Not everyone in Kansas City admires the Country Club Plaza’s style of architecture, and many people point out, with some justification, that the Spanish style is not really appropriate to a river city in the American Middle West. Missouri is not, after all, California, and though the state did have a brief Spanish regime this left no lasting impression on the place or people. Particularly disparaging of the Plaza are those connected with the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design, and those with the various museums. Craig Craven, a young member of the Nelson Gallery staff, describes the Country Club Plaza as “the capitol of kitsch.” When an outdoor art show was presented there, Craven denounced it as “open-air kitsch.” On the other hand, there is no question that the Country Club Plaza has become a successful real estate venture, and that it is continuing to become more so. Miller Nichols, J. C. Nichols’s son who now heads the giant company, has announced that the Plaza will before long contain a three-hundred-and-fifty-room hotel. Without question, it will be built in a style that would look right at home in Andalusia.

  During the nineteen-twenties and -thirties, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Mr. Nichols’s building projects, and of the lavish use of concrete in highways (to say nothing of in fountains, statues, and ornamental urns) was Kansas City’s notorious political boss, Thomas J. (“Big Tom”) Pendergast, and his Pendergast Cement Company. Until the Pendergast machine’s inglorious end in 1938—when more than two hundred and fifty people were indicted on charges of voting frauds, and the corruption of the Pendergast regime lay dismally exposed with the Big Boss himself sentenced to prison for tax evasion—developers like Nichols received Pendergast’s full co-operation, which was of important help. But, of course, “Nobody” in Kansas City talks about that now.

  Also of significant help to the builders and developers of Kansas City have been various members of the Kemper banking family. The Pendergasts were hardly among Kansas City’s “right people,” but the Kempers very definitely are, and they have been for some time. When you think banking in Kansas City, you think Kemper. The first Kemper, William T., arrived here in 1893, with his wife, the former Charlotte Crosby, a lady of inherited means who was also a shrewd businesswoman. Charlotte Kemper made cautious loans of money from a tin strongbox which she kept under her bed. It was she and her husband who loaned J. C. Nichols the money to buy his first ten acres of land. The Kempers may have been a bit rough about the edges in the old days, but they have since acquired all the patina needed for entrance into the loftiest social circles, and they are said to consider themselves the grandest people in Kansas City.

  To say that the Kempers have Kansas City banking pretty well sewn up would be putting it mildly. The Kempers own both the first and third largest banks in town: the City National Bank & Trust Company and the Commerce Trust Company. The second largest bank is thereby totally eclipsed by Kempers. Kempers also own or control some twenty-one smaller banks in Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma. They also own a great many blocks of downtown Kansas City real estate and, through their other investments, the Kemper name decorates the lists of boards of directors of very nearly every important industry in town, plus such national firms as Owens-Corning Fiberglas and the Missouri Pacific Railroad. The Kempers of Kansas City are all very rich, but the family should not be regarded as a monolithic money structure. The Commerce Trust and the City National Bank are in fierce competition with each other, and the two brothers who for many years headed them—the late James M. Kemper of the former bank, and R. Crosby Kemper of the latter—were on such poor terms with each other that they rarely spoke. There have been other intrafamily ruckuses among the Kempers. When the young Crosby Kemper, Jrs., embarked on the building of a large and costly modern home, of a design so extreme in its use of glass and brick pylons that conservative Kansas Citians were horrified, many of the couple’s relatives were critical and told them so. The storm grew to such proportions that the Kempers were angrily divorced before the house was finished. When the house was done, however, the pair patched things up and remarried each other.

  “Boss” Pendergast was in favor of concrete streets and fountains, but of not much else that could be considered interesting or important, or even lasting. During the long two decades of his reign much of Kansas City life—particularly its cultural life—slid into a slough of apathy and inactivity. World War II came soon after Pendergast’s collapse, and so it has only been in the past twenty-odd years that Kansas City has been trying to pull itself back up to a level where it will have as much to offer culturally as other cities of half a million population or over. This has not been an easy task, because Kansas City businessmen, in whom strong traces of the free-for-all spirit of the Old Frontier still seem to linger, have always been frankly more interested in making money than in giving it away—particularly to something called “culture” which some men equate with downright sissy. The culture drive has received the endorsement of the faculty of the Art Institute and those connected with the museums—the so-called “artistic community”—but since some of these people have longish hair it is easy for a more conventional part of the community to dismiss them all as hippies or limp-wrists.

  Several of the younger generation of Kansas City’s older families have, however, been earnestly backing the cause of Art. As a result, the arts here have been becoming increasingly respectable and have even made their way into the society columns. Young Mrs. Irvine O. Hockaday, Jr., works as a volunteer at the Nelson Gallery, young Mrs. Patrick Graham toils on behalf of the opera, and young Mrs. Albert Lea is into anything that will benefit the Kansas City Philharmonic and so on. There are a number of wealthy young collectors who have set about with determination to prove that, as far as art is concerned, everything is very mu
ch up to date in Kansas City. One couple has a collection including works by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein. Mrs. Thomas McGreevy and her broker husband have focused their attention on op, or psychedelic art, and all the pieces in their otherwise traditional Kansas City house either glow, blink, flash, or emit unearthly sounds. Mrs. McGreevy, a former actress, has gone so far as to appear in an underground Kansas City film—and in the nude. Actually, she insists, it was a flesh-colored body stocking, but when her banker father-in-law saw the movie he was so shocked by what went on in it that he had the footage suppressed.

  Another group of younger people has established the Performing Arts Foundation, dedicated to bringing better theater to Kansas City. The group includes the ubiquitous Mrs. McGreevy, Mrs. Crosby Kemper, Jr., and David Stickelber, a witty bachelor who lives in an elegant apartment with upholstered walls and Oriental rugs everywhere, even in the kitchen because “it keeps the help happy.” The Stickelber family fortune comes from the manufacturing of a bread-slicing machine—“It’s the only kind there is, you can’t slice bread without it,” as the scion of the company says. Eyebrows went up in Kansas City when Maria Callas came to stay with David Stickelber “to forget” during the period when she was being replaced in the affections of Aristotle Onassis by Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy. “Maria insisted on my creating the illusion that time was passing rapidly,” Mr. Stickelber explains. “So each day I would go into her bedroom and say, ‘This is December. Tomorrow it will be January. Thursday will be Valentine’s Day’—and so on.”

  The bright young crowd in Kansas City speak often—and often bitterly—of their parents’ generation which they feel, with some justification, is not doing what it might to support the arts in Kansas City. It is the older generation, of course, that still manages to hold most of the purse strings. The young group is particularly resentful of such people as the senior R. Crosby Kempers, who, it is felt, with their great wealth could have done much more for the city than they have and who, with the generally conservative banking policies they represent, have actually exerted a negative influence on the city’s cultural life.

  Still, for a number of years Mrs. Kemper senior headed the Jewel Ball, a debutante affair that benefits both the Nelson Art Gallery and the Kansas City Philharmonic. In fact, Mrs. Kemper founded the Jewel Ball—or so she says. The senior Mrs. Hockaday also says that she founded the Jewel Ball, and neither woman will give the other credit. What appears to have happened is that Mrs. Hockaday had the idea of having a ball, and Mrs. Kemper added the debutantes. In any case, it is still Kansas City’s most important debutante affair—indeed, the only one that counts.

  “The Kempers are worth millions and millions of dollars,” says Molly McGreevy, “and so is Miller Nichols. Wouldn’t you think people like that could spare just a few hundred thousand for the Performing Arts Foundation?” So far, the answer appears to be no.

  Then there are rich Kansas Citians like Mr. Joyce C. Hall, the man who created Hallmark and guided it to where it is, one of the wealthiest corporations in the world. No one knows how rich Mr. Hall is because he is a reticent type and Hallmark is still a family-owned company, with its earnings a closely guarded family secret, but his holdings are said to be vast indeed. The Halls, who aren’t particularly social, have contributed only minimal amounts to the city’s cultural institutions, and the Kansas City Museum of History and Science was happy to receive, last year, a check for twenty-five hundred dollars from Mr. Hall. Meanwhile, the Nelson Gallery does somewhat better, and recently reported Mr. Hall’s gift of fifty thousand dollars. Though the greeting card business might seem to align itself with art, the Halls at the moment are much more interested in a development called Crown Center (the Crown being from Hallmark’s trademark), an eighty-five-acre urban renewal effort in downtown Kansas City encompassing nearly all the land between the old Union Station and the Hallmark headquarters, an area of real estate roughly two-thirds the size of Chicago’s Loop. Crown Center has been designed to contain shops, apartments and office buildings, a new hotel, underground garages, and acres of parks and greenbelts. When completed, an estimated two hundred million dollars of Hallmark money will have been spent.

  The older generation of Kansas City’s rich continues, with a few exceptions, to do what it has always done. There are the hospitals to support. There is the Westport Garden Club to enjoy—probably the city’s hardest-to-join club since no more than fifty women may belong at any one time. There is the River Club, a downtown eating club high on the bluff overlooking the river—also considered exclusive—which the men enjoy for lunch and couples enjoy for dinner. There is the Kansas City Country Club. There are, in other words, the traditional pleasures and pastimes of moneyed Middle Americans who have “settled in” to middle-sized cities. These families regard such eccentricities as the young McGreevys’ blinking and beeping collection of art as harmless phases which the young will one day certainly outgrow.

  And, in the meantime, Kansas City—as those in the young crowd are so painfully aware—lags a long way behind its rival city to the east when it comes to culture. Compared to what St. Louis can offer, Kansas City’s History and Science Museum is, at best, a third-rate institution, though its energetic young director, Robert I. Johnson, is determined to do something about this situation. The Nelson Gallery has one of the three—the others are in Boston and Washington—finest collections of Oriental art in the country. But in other categories its collection is definitely a skimpy one. The most famous alumnus of the Kansas City Art Institute was the late Walt Disney. “Culturally, Kansas City has got to be given a shot in the arm,” David Stickelber says. And the money to do it with is so maddeningly, frustratingly there. Mrs. Crosby Kemper, Jr., who ought to know, says, “This is a tough town in which to get people—the people who really have it—to put two nickels back to back.”

  Some Kansas Citians explain their situation by pointing out that Kansas City has never had a major rich-family benefactor—the way, for instance, Pittsburgh had Mellons, Wilmington had du Ponts, Detroit had Fords, and New York had Rockefellers. On the other hand, many people see it as a city with any number of potential big benefactors, each one too shy—if not too stingy—to make the first big step.

  There is still another explanation. Years ago, St. Louis recognized the cultural wellsprings that could be tapped—and the purse strings that could be loosened—by turning to its large and well-heeled Jewish population. For many years, St. Louis has been inviting prominent Jews onto the boards of its museums and opera and philharmonic orchestra, and has made healthy use of the traditional Jewish interest in the arts and learning. Kansas City, perhaps for reasons of snobbery or ignorance going back to the rawboned frontier days, failed to tap this rich source. As a result, Kansas City’s Jews withdrew into their own tight circle, with their own clubs and philanthropies and institutions. Recently, however, Kansas City became aware of what it was missing and losing, and a definite effort is now being made to draw Jews into the general community. The names of wealthy Jewish families—the Morton Soslands, the Paul Uhlmanns, the Aaron Levitts—now decorate the important boards and committees. Now Jewish girls are being taken into the Junior League and are presented at the Jewel Ball. A few of the old barriers remain, of course. There are no Jewish members of the Kansas City Country Club. Jews have their own, the Oakwood Country Club.

  There is another breed of rich man in Kansas City who may be having a lot to do with shaping the city’s future—the new-made millionaire. An example of this sort is Ewing M. Kauffman, whose Marion Laboratories, Inc., grew from where, some twenty years ago, Mr. Kauffman was mixing pills and cures and lixiviums in his own basement by the light of a sixty-watt bulb. Today it is a company worth about two hundred million dollars, and Mr. Kauffman himself says he is worth another hundred million. The Kauffman magic formula, according to the man who invented it, is profit-sharing. He operates a generous plan by which his employees are made to feel a part of the company they work for, and
a part of its success. Kauffman boasts that at least twenty of his top men now have profit-sharing accounts in the millions. “My receptionist downstairs is worth half a million,” he says. “I just retired a maintenance man who had a quarter of a million. Look at these people—happy, happy, happy!” And, as Mr. Kauffman gesticulates in their direction, his employees smile, and smile, and smile. Part two of the Kauffman formula is that you must work as hard for Kauffman as Kauffman works for Kauffman (often fifteen or sixteen hours a day), or out you go—with your profit-sharing account no more than a memory.