by Janny Scott
There was a photograph, too, that had enthralled me ever since I’d first seen it. It had been taken by a newspaper photographer, I think my father once said. Someone, maybe the photographer, had sent it to him later. He’d kept it, framed, on a bookshelf in his study. The photographer had been standing on the sidewalk outside the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. The brownstone and brick facade, with its original gas lanterns, was one of the most recognizable in the city. The photographer had pointed his or her camera down the sidewalk, leaving the Academy to the right. In the foreground, a disheveled man with matted hair is hunkered on the stoop. He’s emptying a bottle, in a paper bag, down his gullet. His face turned from the camera, he’s gazing down the block in the direction of an impeccably turned-out gentleman in a Savile Row suit, walking into the distance.
The photographer, I imagine, was taken with the juxtapositions. There’s the Academy, “the grand old lady of Locust Street,” symbol of old Philadelphia. There’s the destitute man crouched on her doorstep. And there’s the honorary consul, from a vanishing country, sailing toward the horizon.
Once, I couldn’t tear my eyes from the drinking figure. He seemed to me a premonition, a sprite lurking in the corner of the artist’s canvas. Now I study the man in the suit. I see the Colonel’s torso, the way it thickened in midlife. I see my grandfather’s long, slim legs. I see my father striding into the distance, exiting the frame.
Acknowledgments
I benefited from the generosity of several historians—John K. Brown of the University of Virginia; Susie J. Pak at St. John’s University in New York City; Albert J. Churella at Kennesaw State; and Richard R. John Jr. at Columbia. Professor John also introduced me to the indefatigable Jeffrey Nichols, without whose research assistance I’d still know nothing about how the Colonel made his money. The landscape architect Patrick Chassé and the landscape historian Judith B. Tankard gave me insight into the garden at Chiltern. Caroline Rennolds Milbank, the fashion historian, enlightened me about Helen Hope’s wardrobe. I’m grateful, too, for the assistance of Douglas V. D. Brown, the archivist at the Groton School; Nicole J. Milano at the Archives of the American Field Service and AFS Intercultural Programs; Frank Donahue and Michael Panzer at the Philadelphia Inquirer; the staff of the Urban Archives at Temple University; Richard Peuser at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; Kevin Pratt at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis; and Donald R. Anderson of Marist College.
Julius E. White, the copyright holder for the estate of Augustus John, gave me permission to quote from John’s sonnet to Helen Hope.
Among the many family members who patiently endured my questioning, I’m especially indebted to my father’s brother, Ed Scott. Thanks, too, to their cousins Joanie Mackie, Bob Montgomery, Alix Estey, John L. Montgomery, Mike Kennedy, Maisie Adamson, Sandy Kennedy, Rick Wheeler, and David Greenway; my siblings, Hope and Elliot Scott; my cousin Mary Remer; and several family members by marriage—Lindsay F. Scott, Gresh O’Malley, and Mollie McNickle Wheeler. My mother, Gay Scott, might not have minded if I’d settled on a different topic, I suspect, but she’s much too wise to have ever let on. Instead, she allowed me to ransack her house for lost diaries and to rummage relentlessly through her enviable memory over many lunches at Whole Foods.
I’m grateful to Margaret Everitt for kindly answering every question I asked. Thanks, too, to Joe Rishel of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Liddy Lindsay and Witney Schneidman; Nannette Robertson; Alan McFarland; Miranda Barry; Norman Wilde; Charles A. Hanson, MD; Lee G. Brockington; George King III; Paul Krautheim; Jean Miele; and Beverlee Barnes. Also to Cathie Moran for her astute reflections on her many years at Ardrossan; Maureen Gallagher, for the story of her parents, Molly and Terry Casey; and Tommy Dowlin, for his kindness to my grandparents and my father, and for everything he told me.
Andrew Wylie, my extraordinary literary agent, gave me superb advice. Sarah McGrath at Riverhead Books is the ideal editor—exacting and sympathetic. Catherine Talese did wonderful work finding and selecting photos. Steven Rattazzi kept my computer and me from the brink of crack-up. Amy Stursberg, Geraldine Baum, Dinitia Smith, John and Nina Darnton, Suzanne Spector, Allison Silver, Gay Scott, Hope Scott, Elliot Scott, and Michele Franck read drafts and gave me valuable comments.
But there’s one person without whom this enterprise might well have foundered. Joe Lelyveld believed in the idea before I did and declined to be dissuaded. On sleepless nights when I whined about what could ever have possessed me, he gave no quarter. Unflappable, wise, funny, kind—Joe is the rarest gift of all.
Photograph Credits
Photographs are courtesy of the author’s family unless otherwise noted.
1: Ardrossan. © Jonathan Becker.
2: Helen Hope Montgomery Scott. Horst P. Horst/Vogue © Condé Nast.
3: Robert L. Montgomery.
4: Charlotte Hope B. T. Montgomery.
5: Early advertisement for Ardrossan Farms.
6: Helen Hope Montgomery with Mary Binney and Aleck.
7: Edgar T. Scott, Maisie Scott, young Edgar Scott, and Jeanne Cruchet at Chiltern.
8: The Sagamore. Courtesy of H. D. S. Greenway.
9: The two Edgars in France.
10: Helen Hope and Edgar Scott boarding the Ile de France, 1938. Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
11: A desk at my grandparents’ house. © Jonathan Becker.
12: My father as a boy.
13: The street at Mansfield. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
14: My father with beagles.
15: My family with Odille Nadeau.
16: My father outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
17: My father as a young man.
18: Partial page of journal.
19: The house my father left behind. Photographed by Christopher Biddle.
20: Robert Montgomery Scott. © Jonathan Becker.
21: Outside the Academy of Music, Philadelphia.
Family Tree Photograph Credits
Thomas A. Scott. Courtesy of the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, PHMC.
Edgar T. Scott.
Robert L. Montgomery.
Charlotte Hope Binney Tyler Montgomery.
Edgar Scott. Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Helen Hope Montgomery Scott. Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Robert Montgomery Scott.
Gay Elliot Scott.
Notes
he found them interesting and therefore to be cultivated: Brendan Gill, biographical essay in States of Grace: Eight Plays by Philip Barry (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 4.
as though he belonged to another family: Horace Binney Montgomery, Return the Golden Years (Philadelphia: Franklin, 1965).
expensively appointed old-world-style houses: Michael C. Kathrens, American Splendor: The Residential Architecture of Horace Trumbauer (New York: Acanthus Press, 2002), 135.
featured in Country Life: Kathrens, American Splendor, 183.
but of a quality unsurpassed: “Palatial Home Distinctive for Lack of Ornamentation,” New York Times, rotogravure section, January 11, 1914.
had its own dairy, too: Lower Merion Historical Society, The First 300: The Amazing and Rich History of Lower Merion (Ardmore, PA: Lower Merion Historical Society, 2000), 258.
investment banking firms were underwriting new issues of industrial securities: Thomas R. Navin and Marian V. Sears, “The Rise of a Market for Industrial Securities, 1887–1902,” Business History Review 29, no. 2 (June 1955), 105–38.
The Baldwin Locomotive Works: John K. Brown, The Baldwin Locomotive Works, 1831–1915: A S
tudy in American Industrial Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
Baldwin’s net profits: Brown, Baldwin Locomotive Works.
Helen Hope would recall vividly eighty-some years later: Doris Yocum Markley, “At Home Ardrossan,” Main Line Magazine, February 1993, 17–20.
A liveried butler met them at the door: Sarah Hayward Draper, Once Upon the Main Line (New York: Carlton Press, 1980).
In a book about the Bund, the waterfront quarter of Shanghai: Peter Hibbard, The Bund Shanghai: China Faces West (Hong Kong: Odyssey, 2007).
the Pennsylvania Napoleon: Albert J. Churella, The Pennsylvania Railroad, Volume 1: Building an Empire, 1846–1917 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 442.
the beginnings of the age of industrial and class warfare: Churella, Pennsylvania Railroad, 480.
the quintessential railroad man: Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 3.
the most profitable corporation in North America: James A. Ward, “J. Edgar Thomson and Thomas A. Scott: A Symbiotic Partnership?” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 100, no.1 (January 1976), 37–65.
bending the Pennsylvania legislature to his will: Churella, Pennsylvania Railroad, 210.
a single force so formidable: William G. Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 89.
the greatest mass movement of troops by rail: E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004), 113.
a motorized dining-room table: Cleveland Amory, The Last Resorts: A Portrait of American Society at Play (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), 287.
the first American woman to break into landscape architecture: Judith B. Tankard, Beatrix Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes (New York: Monacelli Press, 2009), 10.
drifts of summer flowers in washes of color: Tankard, Beatrix Farrand, 30.
work out a scheme of color, absolutely by instinct: Beatrix Farrand, in Farrand Collection, Environmental Design Archives (notes circa 1913, Box 4 III:3), University of California, Berkeley.
Stretched on the rack of a too easy chair: Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, Book IV, line 342.
a photograph of fourteen men: Photograph by O. King of men in the garden of 21 Rue Reynouard, 1916; American Field Service World War I Photographic Collection; Archives of the American Field Service and AFS Intercultural Programs, New York, NY.
Would Groton raise money: Letter from Endicott Peabody, April 7, 1916; American Field Service World War I Records; Archives of the American Field Service and AFS Intercultural Programs, New York, NY.
called the “upper-class gentry”: George Plimpton, foreword to Arlen J. Hansen’s Gentlemen Volunteers: The Story of the American Ambulance Drivers in the Great War, August 1914–September 1918 (New York: Arcade, 1996), v.
an antique metal chastity belt—a gift from a congenial friend: H. G. Bissinger, “Letter from Philadelphia: Main Line Madcap,” Vanity Fair, October 1995, 165.
I don’t know if that’s what I look like: Michael Holroyd, Augustus John: The New Biography (London: Vintage, 1997), 464.
John wrote in a memoir: Augustus John, Chiaroscuro: Fragments of Autobiography (New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1952), 101–2.
partial to palaces and to the people who dwelt in them: Gill, biographical essay in States of Grace.
Make her like me but make her go all soft: William J. Mann, Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).
Tracy Lord was not only designed for Hepburn: Donald R. Anderson, Shadowed Cocktails: The Plays of Philip Barry, from Paris Bound to The Philadelphia Story (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), 115.
speaking to an oral historian, a stranger: Joel Gardner, Interview with Robert Montgomery Scott. Villanova, PA, April 29, 2005.
But very decent, loving people: Mike Mallowe, “The Prince of the Main Line,” Main Line Today, March 1996, 30–34.
a couple hundred observational planes: “213 Airplanes Cost Taxpayers Billion Dollars,” New-York Tribune, October 21, 1920.
an inexcusable waste of men and money: U.S. House. Select Committee on Expenditures in the War Department. Rep. of Subcommittee No. 1, Aviation. Washington, Government Printing Office, 1920, 3.
the fire was merely the coup de grace: Amory, Last Resorts, 265.
whole party would have been a flop: David O’Reilly, “To Life, Hope Scott Added a Dash of Glamour,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 15, 1995.
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