The Right People Read online

  Accent and appearance help Real Society people to recognize one another quickly, but other factors also weld them into a recognizable unit. The school, college, and clubs are just as important considerations as how much money one has to spend, or where one lives. Addresses have become of minor importance to members of Real Society. They may own estates on Long Island which they call places, palaces in Newport which they call cottages, duplexes on Fifth Avenue which they call houses. A number simply own houses which they call houses. Though, for the most part, Real Society lives on the better streets of America’s larger cities, and in the more affluent of these cities’ suburbs, Real Society can still be encountered on beachheads along the Carolina coast, in tiny hamlets in Vermont, or in the Mojave Desert.

  Society has always had a matriarchal cast—particularly in the United States. But in Real Society the male reigns over his own preserve. Real Society wives have no need to be pushy. The male has his club, even though a number of the most exclusive clubs have been forced to admit ladies at the dinner hour. And, if the men’s club has become less important than it used to be, this is not blamed upon women but on urban economics and, of course, newcomers. New money has been inexorably pushing the old money out of the leather club chair, and the result is that men of Real Society have retreated to their homes again. Here, their position is secure. Their wives would never think of accepting an invitation or planning a party without consulting them. And the man may even, provided he is able to afford it, be permitted to keep a mistress.

  In Real Society it is less a matter of which club, which school, which street, and what clothes, than it is a matter of who. Who will always count more than how, or how much. One does not ask, “Where are you from?” or “Where did you go to school?” or “What do you do?” Such questions are considered as tactless as “How much did it cost?” If you have to ask such questions, you have no right to the answers. On the other hand, you may ask without fear of rebuke, “Who …?” “Who is she?” as a question may mean, “What was her maiden name?” It may also mean what was her mother’s maiden name, and what was her grandmother’s maiden name, and so on. The members of the family are the family’s most precious family jewels. Grandfather may have been Ambassador to The Hague or an alcoholic suicide; it doesn’t matter, if he belongs. Family talk is a favorite cocktail-hour diversion wherever Real Society gathers. Each genealogical fact is brought out lovingly and tenderly, examined meticulously, then carefully put away. To talk family properly, you never need a reference book or printed family tree, or any other aid; the facts are at your fingertips with dates, with snippets of incidental history, with little anecdotes. Done well, family talk is a beautiful and bewildering thing to listen to—a concerto of whos. Done poorly—by the poseur or dissembler—it can be disastrous. A social climber can sometimes fake an ancestor, but he had better examine his company carefully before he tries it. “All we Van Rensselaers,” says a Van Rensselaer significantly, “know our Van Rensselaers.” And the parvenu had better be prepared to let family values dominate all other values. Not long ago in Philadelphia the talk turned to art and, parochially enough, to Philadelphia’s two most prominent woman painters, Mary Cassatt, and Cecilia Beaux—both of whom were members of distinguished families. In the middle of a debate on their relative artistic merits, with Miss Cassatt seemingly favored, someone commented sharply, “But the Cassatts weren’t anybody!”

  People named Vanderbilt are not necessarily in Real Society, but people named Vanderlip are. In Real Society, the name Morris means somewhat more than Belmont. Rockefellers now are safely in Real Society, though they didn’t use to be, and Astors, who used to be, are pretty much out. Roosevelts always were and always will be of Real Society, despite the political affiliations of one of the family’s branches. Other impeccable Society names are, in New York: Aldrich, Auchincloss, Blagden, Burden, French, Stillman, Wickes, and Woodward; in Boston you are safe with Sedgwicks and Gardners and Fiskes, as well as with Adamses, Cabots, Lowells, and Saltonstalls. In Philadelphia, there are Drinkers and Ingersolls and Chews and Robertses. There are Biddies, but there are also other Biddies. There are Cadwaladers. It is said that a true Philadelphian can distinguish between single-l Cadwaladers, who are Real Society, and double-l Cadwalladers, who are not, simply by the way the name is pronounced.

  There are, furthermore, in every American city, families who might be called local Real Society. Thus the Fords, who are Real Society in Detroit, lose a bit of their Reality in Philadelphia or Boston. The Uihlein family and their beer may have made Milwaukee famous, but their name does not carry imposing social weight in New York. The phenomenon also works in reverse. The Kennedys, who are from Boston, are closer to Real Society elsewhere than they were—or ever will be—on their native soil.

  Certain social critics have claimed that Society has been “killed” by publicity. This is rather like saying that Dacron has killed the fashion industry. There has always been a small but colorful segment of Real Society that has labored to see that its name and picture got in the papers, just as there has always been an element more fond of going to clubs and bars and bistros than of staying home. Café Society, whether by that label or any other, is no new phenomenon, and the spiritual descendants of C. K. G. Billings’s famous dinner-on-horseback at Sherry’s dance today at the Electric Circus. Publicity filled out the “image” of American Society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, just as it does today, providing it with gaudy accents. The only difference is that the outlets for publicity, thanks to modern mass communications, have escalated. It should never be assumed that publicity and Society are alien concepts, and that one can flourish only at the expense of the other. On the contrary, Society enjoys—and is grateful for—its publicity-seeking members. They, the few, in many ways protect and support the many. Far from killing Society, these busy few provide a facade and a showcase—a deceptively glossy showcase, to be sure—for what has become an enduring structure in America, the Social Establishment. Behind the facade and the showcase, the others of the Establishment like to feel they are being given a little peace. It is not they who will be asked to give the interviews.

  Publicity, by making Society appear glamorous and celebrated, also provides the greatest lure for social climbers. And Society could not exist without its climbers.

  When a person says, with a little sigh, that Real Society is dead and gone, it is reasonably safe to assume that that person is not a member. People in Real Society know that their world is very much alive. But they don’t think it is quite polite to say so.

  2

  Was It Ever What It Used to Be?

  Of course there are very few women in Society today who lead the sort of life that was led, just a couple of dozen years ago, by Mrs. Edward T. Stotesbury. She received, as wedding presents from her husband, the senior Morgan partner in Philadelphia, a simple $100,000 diamond-and-sapphire necklace and $4,000,000 in cash to make up for it. She enjoyed such luxuries as a flotilla of maids who were in charge of nothing but her clothes. Every afternoon Mrs. Stotesbury would summon her wardrobe staff—who arrived carrying massive costume books and catalogues of jewelry—to help her decide what to wear for dinner. Even such a seemingly small task as deciding which diamond bracelet to wear, can, when one has sixty-five, take time.

  Mrs. Stotesbury’s way of life, people in Society often point out, is one that has gone the way of all 1040 forms. But it was fairly uncommon even in her own day. Her parties were criticized as being a touch garish. A generation or so earlier, the famous Bradley-Martin ball—where the hostess appeared in a twenty-foot-long train, a crown, and $100,000 worth of diamonds on her stomacher alone and Mrs. Astor managed to support $200,000 worth on her head—drew so much criticism in the international press that the Bradley-Martins exiled themselves to England forever. Mrs. Stotesbury’s guests did not overlook the fact that her husband had been nothing but a six-dollar-a-week clerk before becoming one of the country’s richest men. And, even at the peak of he
r career as America’s most spectacular hostess, Mrs. Stotesbury was not considered a bona fide member of Society. Even so she has become, today, a more or less permanent constellation in the social firmament. Some people insist that it takes at least three generations for a family, starting with nothing but money, to elevate itself to the highest Society. (Given another three generations’ time, it is also said, the same family will fritter its way back to the ash heap.) Mrs. Stotesbury proves that an individual can be elected to Society posthumously.

  Mrs. Stotesbury’s children—one is the former wife of the late General Douglas MacArthur, and the other a former husband of Doris Duke—lead lives of comparative quiet and obscurity, as do other members of other families whose wealth once glittered in the public eye. The descendants of Belmohts and Goulds and Goelets, of Biddies and Bakers and John Wanamakers have, as real estate taxes have gone up, moved from brownstone and marble palaces on Fifth Avenue and Rittenhouse Square, into apartments; here they achieve a certain anonymity. The offspring of Astors, Gardners, Vanderbilts, Fishes, Harrimans and Iselins can be found in made-over gardeners’ cottages on country estates. A number of Society people are, very quietly, doing something that formerly would have been thought very odd indeed: they live in places like Newport and Tuxedo Park, year round. (“The season here,” says one Tuxedo butler discreetly, “is now from January first to December thirty-first.”)

  But are our great Society families languishing for lack of funds? Let us not weep too bitterly for them. Taxes may have scaled down some families’ living habits. Quite a number of Society families are, comparatively speaking, poor. But a number of others are just as rich as their grandfathers were, or even richer. The late Vincent Astor, for instance, who inherited $87,200,000 in 1912, increased his fortune—right through the Great Depression—to the point where it amounted to $200,000,000 by the time he died in early 1959.

  Money may be spent in less conspicuous ways than in making a woman topheavy with precious stones, but it is still spent. Mrs. J. Denniston Lyon of New York, for instance, who only recently was gathered to her ancestors, spent it on her tiny Pekingese, Peaches. Peaches had been trained to relieve himself in Mrs. Lyon’s garden in her country place on the North Shore of Long Island. In winter, lest Peaches be confused or disturbed by the move back to Fifth Avenue, Mrs. Lyon directed her butler to make weekly trips out to Long Island. There he spaded up a square of Long Island lawn and returned with it to New York for Peaches. Peaches indeed was so particular that though he loved to eat caramel candies, he would only eat the imported Italian ones sold at the expensive food shop Maison Glass. Mrs. Lyon, among other expenses, maintained a yacht anchored off Palm Beach. A year-round staff of five was required for its maintenance. When its owner died she had not sailed the boat, or set foot upon it, for fully fifteen years. Her house in Aiken, South Carolina, stood similarly unvisited, though the house was ritually opened at the beginning, and closed at the end, of each Aiken “season.” “And it was not,” says one member of the family, “an easy house to open and close. The silver and the paintings had to be taken out of the vault and then put back again—that sort of thing.”

  Nearby, a neighbor of Mrs. Lyon’s, Mrs. Dorothy Killiam, had an extraordinary swimming pool constructed. Of average width, it was of surprising length—appearing like a long, blue canal through the garden. This was because, though its owner liked to swim, she disliked having to turn around. Taking her architect to Palm Beach one winter, she waded into the sea and began to swim along the shore. When she tired, she emerged, and said, “Measure it off. That’s how long I want my swimming pool to be.” For parties, a hundred and fifty guests for a sit-down dinner was not uncommon, and in summer—since North Shore weather could not be relied upon—she had tables set for a hundred and fifty in the house as well as out of doors. At the last minute, then, she could decide where to sit her party. To place the centerpiece over the largest table, her houseboy used to swing from a large, thick rope, slung from an overhanging eave above her terrace. Cleaning Mrs. Killiam’s massive plunge was a chore tantamount to mowing John Nicholas Brown’s lawn at Newport. Because the lawn slopes at a forty-five-degree angle into the water, gardeners and their mowers must be lashed with heavy ropes from the crest of the rise lest men and machines be plunged into Narragansett Bay.

  The servant problem is, of course, a problem. It is certainly no longer possible to acquire a “good, honest, healthy and well-trained chambermaid” for twenty dollars a month, as a 1914 advertisement in the New York Times put it. It sometimes seems as though there are no well-trained chambermaids at any price. “It isn’t the upper class that’s dying out, it’s the servant class,” says a New York lady, anxiously eyeing her courtly, but creaky, majordomo. Mrs. George Roberts of Philadelphia has said, with a good deal of accuracy, “The only good servant is a person who thinks it’s nice to be a servant. Nowadays people simply don’t think that being a servant is a nice way to earn a living.” As a result of this, there are Society people who still live in houses with rooms for twenty servants and yet have to pick up and deliver their maids each day. Many live in houses with private switchboards, and answer their own telephones. Some who maintain boxes at the Opera must hire sitters in order to attend.

  On the rolling acres of Penllyn, Pennsylvania, there are a number of imposing houses which, as a matter of family pride, the present generation of Philadelphia’s distinguished Ingersoll family is determined to keep up. The late Charles E. Ingersoll managed to run his house with three men for outside work, a chauffeur, a cook, two maids, a butler, and a pageboy called, in the English manner, the buttons. (Once, in the 1920’s, after a slight misadventure in the stock market, Mr. Ingersoll advised his family that some stringent belt-tightening was in order, and in a drastic economy measure he dismissed the buttons. But it so distressed him to see his family thus deprived that he sent them all off to White Sulphur Springs for an extended rest and holiday while he hired another buttons.) In the old days, the Ingersoll staff at Penllyn was such that the meandering gravel drives of the estate could be freshly raked after each vehicle passed. But on the Ingersoll place the other day, Mr. Ingersoll’s son John and his wife sat down for cocktails feeling tuckered. The two (she is a Cadwalader) had spent the afternoon replacing a hundred feet of iron fencing. Far from entering a decline, Real Society is often working very hard.

  And yet here again we are faced with a contradiction. For all the talk of the servant problem, there are a number of Society families who seem not to have been affected by it at all. On the North Shore of Long Island, throughout the Great Servant Shortage of the Second World War, one hostess managed to muddle through with fourteen maids who did nothing but arrange flowers. (How do fourteen young women busy themselves with nothing but flowers? Among other things, they implanted large Styro-Foam balls with broom straws and, at the end of each straw, secured a rose; the huge floral globes were used as table centerpieces. In the conservatory, an organ-pipe cactus grew nearly two stories high. Each day, the girls decorated it by placing a camellia bloom on each needle. Striking color effects were sometimes worked out with, say, red blossoms on the base of the cactus, fading to pink, and to white at the top. “That sort of thing,” commented an awed guest when he saw one of the floral fountains, “ought to be government-subsidized.”)

  At “Viking’s Cove,” her summer place at Oyster Bay, as well as at her houses in New York and Palm Beach, Mrs. George F. Baker appears to have successfully overcome the servant problem. A year or so ago her English butler of many years’ service expressed a desire to return to England for a visit. Mrs. Baker agreed to let him go and, moreover, made him a gift of his passage on a boat. But he had no sooner sailed out of New York Harbor than Mrs. Baker remembered a party she was having for Senator Barry Goldwater two weeks later. She cabled the butler on shipboard, and when he reached Southampton, he took one brief look at his native land—his first in nearly twenty years—and boarded a boat to take him home again. “I could never have give
n the party without him,” said Mrs. Baker.

  Even in Spartan, unshowy old Boston, the servant problem seems to be more a matter of how you look at it. Here, when a young debutante asked a friend if she would enjoy helping her pick out a gown for a coming party, the friend said that she would be delighted. The friend was startled, however, when the debutante sat her down on a sofa and spread open a Sears, Roebuck catalogue between them. When the friend murmured something about the uncertainty of getting a proper fit, the young lady said, “Oh, I can always have Anna take it in.” Anna, needless to say, was her governess.

  Anthropologists will journey to remote corners of the earth to find those rare spots where a species, or form of life, is still in the process of evolution. Any aboriginal society is a rewarding study, best observed before the missionaries have arrived and instructed all the natives to wear Mother Hubbards, and so it is with the American concept of a social elite. There are only a few places left where the Real Society notion can still be glimpsed evolving, where one can see how it started, and why. In such Eastern cities as Philadelphia, Charleston, and Boston, the evolutionary process was completed in the early 1900’s, when Society began to congeal into a more or less consistent pattern, and to begin its continuous and stately celebration of genealogy. San Francisco, on the other hand, a newer city, was just beginning to emerge from the primordial ooze when it suffered its historic fire and had to start all over again. Since then, it has had to work extra hard and fast to establish for itself an Old Guard. If Society ever was what it used to be, San Francisco should be a good place to observe it.