With the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the efforts of the Hogg Foundation abruptly changed direction—toward the problems of young men suddenly drafted into the armed services, their wives and children and their widows, as well as to the difficulties of people, women in particular, who were working in heavy industry for the first time.
Miss Ima was never one to spend the foundation’s money to finance an elaborate building in which to house it. Too many foundations, in her opinion, spent funds to create a luxurious “headquarters” that could be better invested in work in their fields. Just as she considered research “busy work,” as opposed to real work, she disliked trappings and apparatus, and the offices of the Hogg Foundation were kept deliberately Spartan. Once, when a memorial building to her brother Will was proposed, she opposed it, politely but firmly, declaring in writing that “he would prefer any investment this would entail to be directed toward mental health work which would more closely affect the lives of the people of Texas.”
When a piece of property became available to the foundation through a donation, on the other hand, Miss Ima was not averse to accepting it. Such an opportunity occurred after the war, when a prominent Houston family offered its mansion to the Child Guidance Center of Houston. It was decided that a new wing was needed, and this the Hogg Foundation offered to provide. As usual, Miss Ima supervised every detail of the construction, including inspecting the grade of concrete to be used to build the basement. Eventually, it was time to decide what color to paint the new addition, and an impromptu meeting was set up on the lawn. The architect first had his say, and then the various members of the board had theirs. Finally Miss Ima—for whom a special chair had been brought out onto the lawn, where she sat regally overseeing things—had hers. For several minutes she pondered the problem while the others waited silently. Presently a car drove by. It was, not surprisingly for Houston, a Cadillac. “Look,” Miss Ima cried, as the automobile rounded the corner, “that’s the color!” The car was beige with a pinkish cast and, as the Cadillac of the desired color disappeared from view, the entire assemblage rushed into the street to follow it and note its hue. “And of course,” said one of her trustees later, “she was right, and that was the color we painted the building.”
Miss Ima liked to keep up with the times. She had discovered that the secret of perpetual youth is not only perpetual motion but also perpetual enthusiasm. In the early 1960s, when Miss Ima had passed her eightieth birthday, four tousle-haired lads from Liverpool suddenly burst forth on the American musical scene. Most of Miss Ida’s contemporaries and peers, as well as a number of people somewhat younger than she, announced themselves appalled by the Beatles and by their music, which was dismissed as so much organized noise. Miss Ima, however, became an immediate Beatles fan, and announced that she found their Liverpudlian sound both intellectually interesting and melodically beautiful. All at once it seemed as though Miss Ima was the contemporary one, and her friends the old fogies. It was a situation, of course, which she couldn’t have enjoyed more.
In the 1960s she acquired still another enthusiasm, restoring old houses. In 1962 she acquired the “Honeymoon Cottage” in Quitman, Texas, which had been her parents’ first home, restored it and refurnished it, and presented it, along with the surrounding property, to the state of Texas to create the Jim Hogg State Park. Then, in 1963, at the suggestion of her friend Barbara Dillingham, she bought the Old Stagecoach Inn and its outbuildings in Winedale, Texas. Her original plan had been to move the inn, which dated from 1834, to Bayou Bend, but she then decided to leave it where it was, for Winedale had been the halfway-point stage stop between Houston and Austin, which gave its location historical significance. As usual, she was meticulous in her attention to details of the restoration of the old buildings, which had fallen into considerable disrepair, and to make sure that everything was being done properly she took a small cottage on the property where she could keep an eye on things. Ever the perfectionist, she journeyed to Massachusetts to buy square-cut nails for the floorboards. All timber for the restoration was cut from the Winedale property, to be sure it would match the original. Using a small but well-preserved fragment of wallpaper as a sample, Miss Ima commissioned a hand-printed replica at great cost, so that the living room of one of the buildings would be entirely authentic. Through it all, Miss Ima, using a cane now to get about, climbed over and around piles of construction materials on her inspection tours. The roof of one old building had a noticeable sag, and a carpenter, thinking it should be corrected, put up supports to straighten the roof line. That week end, checking on things, Miss Ima suddenly cried, “Where’s my sag?” When told what had been done, she issued instructions that the sag be restored immediately. In 1965, when the Winedale restoration was finally complete, Miss Ima presented the entire property, along with an endowment for its maintenance, to the University of Texas as the Museum of Cultural History.
While all this was going on, Miss Ima was quietly arranging Bayou Bend so that it too could eventually be turned into a museum. Each room of the big place was assigned its period and style of American antiques, and there would be rooms to contain the silver collection and the china collection, and one to contain her honors: the framed citations she had received, honorary degrees from colleges and universities, letters from United States Presidents, Texas governors, mayors, and other public officials and civic leaders; loving cups, ribbons, medallions; keys to cities and most-valued-citizen awards; and the first dollar bill run off under the signature of her old friend ex-Governor John Connally when he became Secretary of the Treasury, autographed to her. A very large room, fitted out with a great many illuminated glass cases, would be required.
In 1966 Miss Ima was eighty-four, and that was the year when, her collection finished and its contents arranged, she turned over Bayou Bend, its furnishings, and its fifteen landscaped acres of gardens to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, as its decorative arts collection. Along with the gift, as usual, went an endowment to maintain it. At the dedication she cheerfully announced that she was ready “to watch the sunsets from a high-rise apartment … free to pursue my other projects.” Still, though the property was technically no longer hers, Miss Ima managed to exercise a good deal of control over it. She used the house for parties whenever she wished, and she was allowed to “borrow” certain paintings and pieces of furniture for her apartment from time to time, which made the décor of her new home a moveable feast. She was forever popping in at Bayou Bend just to check on things, and once telephoned the curator to say, “A hurricane’s coming—check the windows!” And it was she who decreed that all the docents at the museum must take an intensive two-week training course under the curator, to assure that no visitor’s questions would go unanswered or incorrectly answered.
Today, Bayou Bend and its gardens can be enjoyed by the public—in small groups, on a reservations-only basis, but, as Miss Ima stipulated, at no admission charge.
In 1972 Miss Ima’s ninetieth birthday was celebrated with a special concert by the Houston Symphony Orchestra, highlighted by the guest appearance of her old friend Artur Rubinstein. She had, she liked to say, survived a number of serious illnesses, including gangrene (from a fall from her horse), spinal meningitis, typhoid and scarlet fever. And yet here she was. True, her cane was never out of her reach and she occasionally accepted a wheelchair, and her eyesight was failing. But at her birthday party she downed her customary quota of man-sized bourbon old-fashioneds, and sang and played the piano. In addition to extrasensory perception, she also believed in reincarnation and, in that sense, believed she was immortal. It was her hunch.
She almost was. In 1975, her ninety-third birthday behind her, she took off on a jet for Europe. She would visit London, and then fly on to Beyreuth where a very ambitious “project” awaited her. She planned to attend the Beyreuth Music Festival and to hear, uninterrupted, the full “Ring” cycle of Wagner operas. This four-work series—Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung
, none of them noted for its brevity—would amount to some fifteen hours of opera. She had also considered touring Germany, where she had studied piano as a girl, but at the last minute decided against it. Her reasons were purely practical. “The mark,” she said, “is too inflated.” When a friend questioned the wisdom of such an extensive trip at her advanced age, Miss Ima replied, “Well, when you’re ninety-three, it doesn’t matter where you die.”
In London, outside her hotel, Miss Ima was stepping into a taxicab when the driver, thinking she was inside, pulled away. Miss Ima fell. Rushed to Westminster Hospital, she was admitted with a broken hip. Her condition complicated by pneumonia, she died a few days later, on August 19. But she had had her last words ready. To a group of concerned friends—including the remorseful cab driver—who gathered at her bedside, worried that she was so sick so far from home, she said, “Whatever happens, remember that it was the way it was meant to be. I’m doing what I want to do. I’m where I want to be. I have no regrets.” Then she smiled and closed her eyes.
Back home in Houston they said, “Well, she had a rich, full life.” “Nonsense!” says her old friend Barbara Dillingham, who worked with her on the Stagecoach Inn restoration and many other projects. “She had many years of active life ahead of her. If they’d had an intensive-care unit at that hospital, she could have been saved. But they didn’t.”
Among the many eulogies and tributes delivered at the time of Miss Ima’s death were these words from Nellie Connally, wife of the former governor: “The governor’s wife is usually called the first lady of Texas, but Miss Ima always has been and always will be the first lady of Texas.”
Miss Ima would have liked that. And would have agreed.
Afterword
A VANISHING BREED
“There just aren’t women around like Mother any more,” said Eva Stotesbury’s son, James H. R. Cromwell, in 1980. “There aren’t people who can talk about the duties and responsibilities that go with money. There aren’t people who can talk about uplifting the poor and the sick, about the need to bring culture to the masses, and still be taken seriously. Today, anyone who talked that way would be laughed at. But those women had integrity, they believed in what they were trying to do, believed it was important, believed it was almost a holy obligation that went with wealth. But they’re a vanishing breed. I suppose it was the social welfare programs that were started by President Roosevelt that began to put those women out of business. The government took over their jobs. I admit I was a big Roosevelt supporter, but I’ve since had a great many second thoughts. I worked hard for Ronald Reagan, and I’d love to live to see the day when individual charity will come back to replace all these social and welfare programs that the federal government has gotten itself locked into. But I doubt if I ever will. Even the word ‘charity’ has become a dirty word. To call someone a ‘patron of the arts’ today, which used to be considered a high and worthy calling, is to employ a term of derision.”
It is certainly true that, in the years since the beginning of the Roosevelt era, the federal government has slowly and steadily usurped the territory that once belonged to a few public-spirited philanthropists, and caring for the needy, the dispossessed, the mentally disoriented, the ill and the aged has become a public rather than a private responsibility. Whether unfortunate people in American society are any better off for it is a little hard to tell, but the revolution would appear to be complete.
Indirectly, too, through the strictures imposed by the Internal Revenue Service, the United States Government has discouraged grande dame–ship. To prevent their estates from being ravaged by taxes, the rich, like Miss Ima Hogg, have been forced to funnel their wealth into foundations, where decisions are no longer made by an individual legatee but by a board of trustees—the grand committee substituted for the grande dame. Today the country bristles with foundations, employing many people, all busily doing good works—the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, and so on—all created by lawyers and business advisers for tax purposes. (The giant Ford Foundation was not set up out of a burning desire to cure the world’s woes, but by canny Wall Street bankers who saw a way to save the heirs of Henry Ford from a staggering tax bill.) The IRS may also have dampened interest in collecting art and antiques—by making costs non-tax-deductible unless and until works are donated to museums.
But Big Government cannot assume all the blame for the fact that the torch that was once the grande dame’s has fallen into other, somewhat anonymous, hands. Big Business has also done its share and has, not always with the best intentions, assumed a certain proprietary concern for Culture. In Cincinnati, where Mary Emery gave so much time and money to support the symphony, the opera, and the art museum, these institutions receive much larger donations from Procter & Gamble, whose officers, as a matter of corporate policy, are expected to serve on their boards. (Annually, Procter & Gamble gives a Christmas turkey to each of its employees, much the way Eva Stotesbury used to deliver her Christmas parcels to the poor of Philadelphia.) In New York in 1981, the stockholders of the Kimberly-Clark Corporation voted to give $10,000 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was the kind of gift Eleanor Belmont routinely made a few years earlier. In accepting the money, William V. Macomber, the museum’s president, said, “It’s thrilling to see what corporate America does to improve the quality of life.” Thrilling, perhaps, but also a bit impersonal.
For over two hundred years Americans have boasted that the country has no aristocracy. Then how does one explain this “vanishing breed” of women, all of whom were born before the turn of the century, who stretched out their arms with great enthusiasm and grasped the burden of philanthropy and culture and gave these terms new meaning, who underwrote symphony orchestras, lent their prestige to social action, succored opera companies, and set styles in living? Painting, architecture, interior decoration, landscape design and horticulture, music, the theatre, literature, science and medicine, fashion, education, and politics all felt the impact of their presence. Sticking to the no-aristocracy rule, we fall back on French and call them grandes dames, which can be conveyed in somewhat depreciatory italics and loosely defined. Yet they combined to form our republic’s closest approach to an aristocracy—one not of family, but of taste, panache, and style.
These women had no common denominator of birth. Eva Stotesbury’s lawyer father was respectably prosperous but not rich. Edith Rosenwald’s father was almost poor, and became rich while she was growing up. Mary Parkman Peabody was a Boston Brahmin, that caste which Oliver Wendell Holmes called “the harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy.” (When she was jailed in Florida, her aplomb and poise so impressed her jailers that when a reporter tried to telephone her at the jail he was told, “I’m sorry, but Mrs. Peabody is resting and cannot be disturbed.”) Eleanor Belmont was a working actress. Arabella Huntington came from—well, who knows, really? What these women had in common was not birth but flair—a confident view of life and the vitality to express it and impress it on others whom they met. They also shared a profound toughness, an ability to scythe through the thick underbrush of lethargy and indifference without incurring a single scratch, to be invulnerable to criticism and jealousy—immune to it as some are to poison ivy.
Although some were brighter than others, these women also shared a naïve, almost childlike faith in their own infallibility, a belief that what they thought was right was right. In a sense, too, though they were often among the avant-garde in matters of taste or conscience, they were also old-fashioned women, or so they might seem to women of the 1980s. They all leaned on men for financial support and advice—with the possible exception of Miss Ima, though there was always the tall shadow of her father haunting the wings. They were none of them, in the current sense, feminists. But they were all, refreshingly, female. And, though being a grande dame was obviously nourishing to the ego—grandes dames were always very
aware that they were grandes dames—it may have been nourishing to the physical self as well, as longevity is another common trait.
A dying breed. Throughout the 1970s we read, one by one, of the deaths of these members of America’s only aristocracy, and in each obituary we were reminded that “one of the last of America’s grandes dames” had departed. Marjorie Merriweather Post, nearly ninety, was “one of the last.” Alice Roosevelt Longworth, ninety-five when she died in 1980, was another—though Mrs. Longworth was more of a Washington party goer, wit, and mimic (her imitations of her relative Eleanor Roosevelt were famously side-splitting) than a social or cultural force. Her death was followed by that of Mrs. Robert Low Bacon, eighty-eight—hostess, stalwart of the Republican Party, trustee of Adelphi University and an Eisenhower appointee to the Advisory Committee on the Arts for the National Cultural Center.
All these ladies are gone, and they seem irreplaceable. With them, it sometimes seems, has died a certain exuberant spirit and élan that flashed across the American social scene for a couple of generations. And the dream of a Great American Renaissance—in art, architecture, music, design—which showed such promise when it first came into flower around 1875—seems to have died somewhere between two world wars.
To be sure, there are still younger women of consequence who grasp the social or cultural nettle—Brooke Astor, widow of Vincent, who recently donated the traditional Chinese garden known as the Astor Court to the Metropolitan Museum in New York; Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman of Chicago, who has promised her definitive Abstract Expressionist collection to the same museum; Mary Lasker, president of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation in New York, who supervises the expenditure of millions of Lasker dollars on medical research; and others. But would it be niggling or ungallant to suggest that none of them quite possesses the exuberance—the daring, the extravagance, the scale, the supremely self-confident high-handedness—that characterized some of their counterparts of an earlier era? Against that gaudy turn-of-the-century backdrop, some of today’s grandes dames appear a little wan, a little too eager to please. (The turn-of-the-century grande dame was too fiercely convinced of her own invincibility to care whether she pleased or not.)
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