The Golden Dream Page 6

  Meanwhile, though the rest of Cincinnati may chuckle at what goes on in Glendale and at P&G, it takes very seriously what goes on in Indian Hill. While practically all the residents of this hilltop community of great estates are wealthy, a number of the homes of the first settlers here reveal the more plebeian origins of the area and are still extensive, and working, farms, with barns and sheds and outbuildings. At Indian Hill cocktail parties, the talk is as likely to center around the current tomato crop as around the Dow Jones averages. Nearly everyone in Indian Hill, it seems, owns a tractor, and for years, tractor parties—with guests arriving behind the wheels of their machines—have been a summer tradition. “It isn’t really gentleman farming, you see, it’s more like playing at farming,” explains one woman. Mrs. Edgar Mack (Mr. Mack’s money is from malt which goes into Cincinnati beer) even has a slipcover for her tractor—a pretty flowered chintz that matches her china pattern. For her summer picnics, which have become something of a local legend, she slips the slipcovers on the tractor and on the wagon that is drawn behind it, and spreads the wagon with delicacies and drinkables. Her husband—in a blazer with a pocket emblem that says “Blome Road Tractor & Tennis Society”—then gets behind the wheel and drives the movable feast among the assembled guests while his wife, in a farmerette outfit, sits on his lap being hostessy.

  Though Indian Hill tries to look countrified and old, it is really not that venerable a community. Originally, wealthy Cincinnatians lived on the west side of town or to the north, in the gaslit section called Clifton, where many old mansions still stand. (Today, Clifton has largely been taken over by physicians from the nearby hospitals and by faculty of the University of Cincinnati, whose campus is also nearby; it has become Cincinnati’s “intellectual” suburb, and is appropriately dowdy.) Then Madison Road, leading eastward along the river, began to develop. One senior resident, Mrs. Russell Wilson, remembers when Madison was still a dirt road. And when Keys Crescent, one of the city’s grander addresses, was first built just off Madison Road, Mrs. Wilson and one of her girlhood friends wrote “Stink Street” in the fresh concrete just outside the Crescent’s entrance. Madison Road led into Hyde Park, where more big, imposing houses were built, particularly along Grandin Road, where they could command splendid river views. At the end of Madison Road lay Indian Hill—so named because an Indian burial ground had been discovered there—and in the 1920s, a group of wealthy Cincinnati businessmen formed a corporation, bought up some twenty square miles of farmland, and turned Indian Hill into the enclave of wealth that it is today. They added such standard accouterments as an exclusive country club—the Camargo—polo, fox hunting, golf, and a private police force.

  Back in Hyde Park, however, along Grandin Road and its side streets—with the river on one side and the grounds of the Cincinnati Country Club on the other—there is little agreement that Indian Hill is the better address. “Is that Grandin Road group still going strong?” asked Alice Roosevelt Longworth, whose husband was a Cincinnatian, not long ago. It is, and people who live on or near Grandin Road consider themselves a breed both privileged and singularly blessed. They point out that Indian Hill, because of its greater distance from the city, is a bit out of touch with things and, with its tractor parties, even out of touch with reality. They add that most of the city’s movers and shakers—those not connected with P&G, at least—live in Hyde Park, on or off Grandin Road.

  This is true. On Grandin Road are the Ralph Corbetts, for example. Corbett is the self-made multimillionaire who turned an idea for musical doorbell chimes into the giant Nu Tone corporation and whose Corbett Foundation has poured millions of dollars into the city to support its cultural institutions, particularly those in the field of music. (And in the process, some say, the Corbetts have managed to irk certain of the Old Guard families who might have been, but have not been, equally generous.) The Corbett name decorates dozens of prestigious boards and committees, but a part of Cincinnati will never quite forget that Ralph Corbett was born in Flushing, New York.

  Hard by the Corbetts live various members of the large and wealthy Lazarus clan, whose Federated Department Stores include Bloomingdale’s, I. Magnin, Rich’s in Atlanta, and, in Cincinnati, Shillito’s, the city’s largest store. As far as Old Cincinnati is concerned, of course, the Lazaruses exist in a kind of limbo similar to the Corbetts’. Everybody agrees that the Lazaruses are important. Everyone likes the Lazaruses. Mr. Ralph Lazarus is frequently consulted on economic matters by United States Presidents. Mrs. Fred Lazarus III is unquestionably one of the city’s two or three most important women. She heads the Ohio Arts Council, has her own television program, is into all sorts of civic and philanthropic doings, and is renowned as a hostess—particularly for visiting artists and performers with the opera, symphony, ballet, or theater. But Irma Lazarus was born in Brooklyn, and her husband’s family was originally from Columbus. (Oddly enough, her identical twin sister, Mrs. Carl Strauss, may be on firmer ground; her husband’s family, the Strausses, are Old Cincinnati.)

  Clearly, Cincinnati is a place which attaches great importance to the length of time a family has spent in the city, and the oldest families have been there, almost literally, forever. Birthplace is stressed more than wealth, social position, or education, and a sharp distinction is drawn between people who “are Cincinnati” and those who “aren’t Cincinnati” or are “from away.” Mr. John Emery, for example, who headed Emery Industries, Inc., was one of the city’s wealthiest manufacturers, benefactors, and an unquestioned business, civic, and social leader. It was his mother who gave the land and developed the “ideal” community of Mariemont. For years, the 2,200-seat Emery Auditorium housed the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Yet when it was suggested that John Emery be given the purely honorary title “Mr. Cincinnati,” there were frowns of disapproval and reminders that “John Emery is not Cincinnati.” By a fluke of timing on his parents’ part, he was born in New York.

  Mr. and Mrs. James Mixter are Cincinnati, however. They live today in the turreted Gothic mansion that Mrs. Mixter’s great-great-great-grandfather John Baker built in Hyde Park in 1852. The Mixters’ children represent the seventh generation of a family that has lived continuously in one house, which still contains the original high carved-plaster ceilings, chandeliers, floors, paneling, staircase, and even the original Oriental rugs that were woven long ago in Persia to fit the rooms. “How many New Yorkers or even Bostonians or Philadelphians know who their great-great-great-grandfathers were?” Mrs. Mixter wonders. “Well, there he is,” she says, pointing proudly to the marble bust that stands in one of the twin front parlors.

  The great Cincinnati families include the Hollisters (Mrs. Mixter was a Hollister), the Johnstones (married to Procter & Gamble Procters), Hamiltons, Sawyers (also married to Procters), Rowes, Warringtons, Kilgours, Gaffs, Chatfields, Hinckleys, Haucks, Swigerts, Keyses, Rawsons, Perrins, Deuprees (Procter & Gamble again), Andersons, Bailys, Kittredges, Wulsins, and Bergers. All are, without exception, conservative to say the least. Not long ago at a party, one distinguished guest exclaimed, apropos of nothing at all, “Dammit! We haven’t had any freedom in this country since slavery!” They are also dizzyingly interrelated. “My husband’s first cousin is married to her husband’s niece,” is the kind of explanation one hears here as to how families are connected.

  Also in Cincinnati one must not overlook the Tafts, who have produced not only a United States President but a senator, Robert Taft, Jr., and a number of prominent Cincinnati lawyers and businessmen. Taft Broadcasting is a powerful force in the city, and the luster of the Taft name is enshrined in such institutions as the Taft Art Museum and the William Howard Taft School. Taft, Stettinius & Hollister is the city’s most prestigious law firm. Even though Martha Bowers Taft, the senator’s mother, is “from away,” she is considered one of the city’s grandes dames. And even though William Howard Taft could legitimately trace his ancestry back to the Mayflower as well as to King David of Scotland, it is typical of Cincinnat
i’s lack of ostentation that the late President’s son, Charles P. Taft, drives around town in an ancient compact with a canoe strapped to the roof.

  Nor should one forget the rich Geiers, who run Cincinnati Milacron, Inc., manufacturers of machine tools. Mrs. Inga Geier is often cited as a prime example of how natives of Cincinnati keep their serenity even in moments of extreme crisis. At the outbreak of World War II in Italy, when Americans abroad were trying frantically to find ways to get home, a fellow Cincinnatian remembers spotting Mrs. Geier being driven through a crowded street in Rome by her chauffeur. Rushing over to her car, the friend cried out, “Inga, the war has started! We’ve got to get out of here!” Mrs. Geier replied, “Why don’t you come over to my apartment later on for tea, and we’ll talk about it.

  There is also a strongly entrenched group of German-Jewish families in Cincinnati, most of whom live in or near Hyde Park. These include the Kuhns (related to Kuhn, Loeb & Co.), the Westheimers (some of whom have changed the name to Weston), the Friedlanders, Freibergs, and Seasongoods. The Ransohoffs are a problem. The name sounds Russian, and people like the Friedlanders say that the Ransohoffs are Russian. The Ransohoffs insist that the family is originally from Germany. There are also a number of old German-Protestant families, with names like Moerlein, Schmidlapp, and Kupferschmidt. All these families mingle freely on the social level although, as in most cities, country clubs have tended to form along religious lines. The Cincinnati Country Club in Hyde Park and the Camargo in Indian Hill are WASP-membership clubs. The Losantiville is the prestigious German-Jewish country club. The Crest Hills is the club for more recent arrivals from Eastern Europe who live in the almost entirely Jewish suburb of Amberley Village. In terms of the clubs, the members of the Fleischmann family (yeast) present something of an enigma. The Fleischmanns were originally Jewish, but a generation or so ago decided not to be. Today, they live in Indian Hill and belong to the restricted Camargo Club.

  Archetypical of an old-line Cincinnati suburban family would be Mr. and Mrs. Charles Learner Harrison III. There have been Harrisons in Cincinnati for at least five generations, and the Harrisons can find two United States Presidents in their family tree—Benjamin Harrison and William Henry Harrison—along with a signer of the Declaration of Independence, another Benjamin Harrison. The first Harrison, Edmond, came to Cincinnati in 1814. His son, Learner Blackman Harrison, went into the grocery business where he made a tidy fortune, and became president of the First National Bank of Cincinnati. His numerous descendants are still prominent in the city today.

  Charles Learner Harrison III is a pleasant-faced fellow in his forties, a partner in the stockbrokerage firm of Harrison & Company. His pretty wife, Molly, is also Cincinnati born—“though not from as illustrious a family as my husband’s.” Molly Harrison was a Maish, an old German family that dropped a c from its name (Maisch) at the time of World War I. As proof of the comfortable sense of continuity that old-line Cincinnati families develop, Molly Harrison points out that her children’s friends are the sons and daughters of the people who were her own girlhood friends, just as those girlhood friends were the children of her mother’s friends. “The daughter of the woman who cooked for us is a friend of my present cleaning woman,” Molly Harrison says. “Even the servants here tend to stay with a family from one generation to the next.”

  Like a proper Cincinnati girl, Molly Harrison went to Miss Doherty’s College Preparatory School, where Miss Doherty, in a pearl choker and with lorgnette, selected her young ladies for their pedigrees as much as their intelligence, and stressed etiquette equally with Latin. Because Cincinnati has—with its symphony, its opera, and its May Music Festival—long been a musical city, Miss Doherty’s classes let out early on Friday afternoons so that the girls could attend the symphony. Which Molly Harrison did, accompanied by her mother and grandmother.

  “We never traveled much,” Molly Harrison recalls with a smile. “The feeling was that Cincinnati is such a pleasant place, so why should anyone go anywhere else? Women never went to New York or Chicago to shop. If they couldn’t find what they wanted at Gidding-Jenny’s, they had a little dressmaker run something up, or they made it themselves. If people left town for some reason, we always assumed that it was because of business or family—not simply for pleasure! It’s still very much that way. We’ve never had a jet set here.”

  This is true, and what Cincinnati has instead might be called a set set. And it is an indication of how settled and secure Cincinnati society feels about itself that though an edition of the Social Register is published for the city, most Cincinnatians never bother to consult it. “It’s been years since I’ve bothered filling out the little forms they send me,” Molly Harrison says. “I don’t even know whether we’re still listed.” (They are.) “I know who everybody is and what their maiden names were. The Social Register just isn’t necessary. It’s not like New York, where everybody seems to be trying to prove something and the Social Register is proof that you’ve arrived, I guess. Here you don’t need any proof, any passport to society. Here we don’t need our names in the society pages. There used to be a woman here named Dolly Cohen, who had a social secretary whose job it was to keep Dolly Cohen’s name in the papers. We always rather laughed at that.”

  Not long ago, the Harrisons did a startling thing. They left their big, sprawling house in Indian Hill with its surrounding acres of lawn and gardens, and bought a small, picturesque Victorian house on a small lot in Terrace Park, which they proceeded to restore and remodel. It was startling because most people would consider a move from Indian Hill to Terrace Park a distinct step downward on the address scale. Most people in Terrace Park dream of moving to Indian Hill, not the other way around. “But,” says a friend, “the Harrisons, being who they are, could get away with it. Leave it to Molly to make it suddenly look as though Terrace Park were chic.”

  For years, Cincinnati’s suburban social seas were ruled imperiously by a small, indomitable woman named Marion Devereux, who, though she has been dead since 1948, is still talked about in hushed tones. She was the society editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer and, though her own social credentials were slim, the power she wielded was enormous. Cincinnati will be grateful if her like never appears again. Miss Devereux wrote windily and in prose of the lushest purple. No editor, furthermore, was permitted to cut or alter a word of what she wrote. Hostesses who kowtowed to her—and this meant regularly showering her with lavish gifts—were exalted in her columns, and those who dared to ignore her were made to pay for it.

  Parties that were planned without Miss Devereux’s permission, or to which she was not invited, were treated as though they had not existed, and those who gave them were labeled “social climbers.” No debutante could be presented and no wedding could take place without prior consultation with the oracle. In return for snubs, real or imagined, Miss Devereux would write such items as: “Mrs. Hollister appeared last night at the Symphony in the same blue dress she has worn so often this season.” Or: “Mrs. Anderson’s flowered hat looked just as fashionable at luncheon yesterday as when she first wore it seventeen years ago.” One hostess who had the temerity to give a party without advising Miss Devereux got a telephone call in the middle of the night from the society editor, who said, “How dare you give a party without consulting me? Don’t you know that I am the social arbiter of Cincinnati?” Thereafter, the woman was described in the Enquirer as a “social highway robber,” and several years later, when the woman’s three daughters were married, the newspaper ignored all three weddings.

  Inevitably, considering Miss Devereux’s exuberant prose style, her copy bristled with unintended double entendres, many of which were acutely embarrassing to the Enquirer’s editors. But again, not a word could be changed, and so readers were treated to such tidbits as: “Mr. and Mrs. Tom Conroy have been the center of many merry moments since their return from their honeymoon.” Or: “Mrs. Ruth Harrison, whose toilet of black satin was relieved by a touch of ermine …” Or: “A
n hour of agreeable intercourse will follow this series of events, the membership being all cocked and primed to stay on to enjoy it.” A typographical error in Miss Devereux’s column could be disastrous, as in: “Mrs. Taft’s pubic appearance last night was breath-taking, as heads turned in admiration,” or: “At cockstroke, the lovely debutantes revealed themselves to their manly escorts.” There were also times when, try as one might, no one in Cincinnati had the slightest idea of what Miss Devereux was trying to say: “In nothing to the Philistines are the May Festivals more intriguing than in the boxes and the Audience. Last night these themes of an corridor and foyer were paramount to the carnal-minded devotee of these two yearly events.”

  When, at the height of her power, Miss Devereux suddenly retired without notice, to become a virtual recluse—leading to speculation that she may have been, for some years, certifiably insane—she was replaced by Miss Jane Finneran, who had been her assistant.

  Miss Finneran carried on in the great Devereux tradition. As her predecessor had done before her, Miss Finneran edited the Cincinnati Blue Book, which is still privately published and is considered a much more reliable guide to who is who in Cincinnati than the Social Register—since the Register is published “from away.” Like Miss Devereux, Miss Finneran decided who could be a debutante and who could not. “I’m calling about Aurelia So-and-so,” Miss Finneran would say. “I’m trying to decide whether to let her come out or not. Do you know her parents? Do you know who her friends are? I don’t want any girl to come out who wouldn’t be happy coming out.” Miss Finneran, however, has retired, and no one with her authority has stepped forward to replace her—which, so far as Cincinnati society is concerned, is just as well—and society has gone back to its agreeable laissez-faire ways.