The Right People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Still,” said another woman, “we get some awfully peculiar-looking people in here at night, even though they’re supposed to be superior. Not to sound snobbish, of course.”

  A tray of whiskey sours came bobbing across the Pine Room, and someone exclaimed, “Look! Whiskey sours! Who are they for?”

  “They must be for the New Jersey Leagues,” someone said. “They’re having a meeting downstairs.”

  “New Jersey!” said still another woman. “What on earth are they doing here?”

  “Well,” said the second woman, “they asked to use our clubhouse, and, after all, they’re Junior Leaguers too. We couldn’t really refuse fellow Junior Leaguers, could we?”

  “But New Jersey,” the first woman persisted. “New Jersey …”

  Perhaps the saddest Junior League story of all involves a newlywed young woman whose husband’s job required that the couple move from New York City to Bluffton, Indiana. In New York, the bride had been a member of the stately Colony Club, and she was certain she would not find anything approximating its equivalent in Bluffton. She decided, therefore, to settle on the Junior League—if there was one. She had been in Bluffton only a few days when she received a caller representing the Welcome Wagon. While the Welcome Wagon lady was telling her all about Bluffton’s shops and services, the newcomer interrupted to ask, hesitantly, “Is there Junior League in Bluffton?”

  The Welcome Wagon woman looked briefly uncertain, then brightened and said, “Well, honey, I know they’ve got a Little League and a Midget League—but a Junior League? To tell the truth, honey, that’s one I’ve just never heard of.”

  * In 1960, for instance, the Mardi Gras Ball pulled an “Arbitron” rating of 25.2, compared with 7.8 for Jack Paar in the same hour on a competing channel.

  9

  The Club Convention

  Not long ago, to their dismay, the heirs of a prominent Philadelphian read in his obituary notice, “Mr.——was a member of the Philadelphia Club and the Racquet Club.” The deceased’s son picked up the telephone, called the editor of the paper and demanded a retraction. “He was a member of the Rabbit, not the Racquet Club!” the son explained. When the editor apologized and added, “But does it really make all that much difference?” the son exploded, “But it makes a world of difference! A world!”

  The difference between the exclusive Philadelphia Racquet Club, and the ultra-exclusive Old Philadelphia Rabbit Club is clear enough. The Rabbit has only eighty to a hundred members, compared with the somewhat more inclusive Racquet. But the Rabbit itself plays a weak second fiddle in Philadelphia to the redoubtable Fish House or, as it is officially called The State in Schuylkill. Social historians often point out that men’s city social clubs in the United States are modeled on their counterparts in London. But Philadelphia’s Fish House has been able to work it out the other way around—so that London, in fact, was copying Philadelphia. The Fish House calls itself “The oldest formally organized men’s social club in the Anglo-Saxon (which is to say civilized) world.” The important qualifier in this claim is “formally organized.” Such famous London clubs as White’s, St. James’s, and Boodle’s would, according to most standards, seem actually older, but Fish House members point out that the London clubs were not private clubs, but public coffee houses, until White’s became “formally organized” in 1736. The Fish House, therefore, which formally organized in 1732, squeaks under the longevity wire. The Fish House membership is limited to thirty, plus a tiny handful of “apprentice” members, and so, though it is often said that “Nearly all Fish House members also belong to the Rabbit,” all the members of the the Rabbit do not belong to the Fish House. The Rabbit, by the way, is a relative stripling among Philadelphia men’s clubs—founded and “formally organized” in 1861.

  Both the Fish House and the Rabbit are, of all things, cooking clubs. If the Fish House specialized in cooking fish, and the Rabbit in rabbit, it would be simple enough, but the Rabbit is called the Rabbit because its original clubhouse stood on Rabbit Lane. Philadelphians nourish their parochialisms and eccentricities, and so the fact that these two clubs have no exact parallels in the Anglo-Saxon—or other—world is exactly as Philadelphia Society prefers it to be. In the Fish House, for instance, for over nine generations distinguished Philadelphia men who normally would not enter their own kitchens from one month to the next have put on long white aprons and strange wide-brimmed straw hats which members call “boaters” (but which look more like Chinese coolie hats* than traditional boaters) and, with ladles and saucepans and other implements of cuisine, prepare such delicacies as boola-boola soup and planked shad. The Fish House meets thirteen times a summer, from May to October, and at each of its lengthy and somewhat bibulous luncheons—Fish House Punch is the club’s invention and its traditional specialty—each course is the responsibility of an individual member. Thus every member gets a try at several dishes during a season.

  The “State in Schuylkill” aspect of the club is equally quaint, and even more tradition-bound. The club began as a “Fishing Company,” one of several groups that gathered along the banks of the Schuylkill River (after a morning of fishing, members cooked their catch for lunch), but somewhere along the line the group that has descended as the Fish House got off on a novel tack. It decided that it was an independent Colony, with a separate government, its own laws, and its own officials. What justification in fact there was for this assumption is dim indeed. Nevertheless, the State in Schuylkill continues to this day to pretend that it is a separate state “in Schuylkill,” even though it moved from Schuylkill in 1822 and, in 1888, moved from the Schuylkill River altogether to the banks of the Delaware where it now reposes. In 1781, the club formally joined the United States of America—even though the United States has never acknowledged its membership—but it continues to call its members “citizens,” and among its elected officials are a Secretary of State, a Secretary of the Treasury, a Governor, Counsellors, Sheriff, and even a Coroner. Its headquarters—the clubhouse—is called “the Castle.” When national Prohibition was imposed in the 1920’s, the State in Schuylkill remembered that, though it was indeed a state, it had never ratified the United States Constitution. Prohibition, it argued, was an infringement of states’ rights, but once again the Federal government seemed not to hear. If members of the Fish House approached these matters with tongue in cheek, that would be one thing, but they do not. They take them with intense seriousness, and any guest at the Fish House, confronted with its incorruptible ritual, is ill-advised to snicker. For example, meals traditionally begin with the toast, “To the memory of General Washington,” followed by a second, “To the memory of Governor Morris.” (Samuel Morris, Jr., was Governor of the State in Schuylkill from 1765 to 1811.) After past Governors have been toasted, there is a toast “To the President of the United States.” During the Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, however, this part of the ritual was conspicuously omitted. The Rabbit, though newer, observes very similar rites, and complements the Fish House in that it holds its meetings—with meals, again, prepared by members—during the winter. The Rabbit can be said to surpass the Fish House in at least one matter. The recipe for Fish House Punch was leaked to the public around 1900, but the formula for the Rabbit’s sacred grog is still a closely guarded secret. All that is known about Rabbit Punch is that it is brewed for twenty-four hours in “leather firkins,” and is served hot.

  Obviously, all men’s social clubs are designed in part to allow men to remove themselves for a little while from the company of women, and doubtless one of the joys of a men’s cooking club is that it challenges feminine domination of the kitchen, at least symbolically. Probably a very similar anti-woman feeling spawned San Francisco’s famous Bohemian Club where, lest it be supposed that the ladies of Society controlled such cultural bailiwicks as music, theatre, and the dance, the gentlemen proposed to mix good fellowship and wine with a bit of antic art. The Bohemian Club has never claimed to be its own state of the Union, but
it has more cause to than the Fish House; in addition to a spacious clubhouse on Nob Hill, which includes a theatre seating seven hundred and fifty, the club maintains a twenty-eight-hundred acre “Grove” in the Sierra Nevada mountains where, once a year, Bohemian Club members and their carefully chosen guests (President Eisenhower was one) gather and “encamp” for two weeks. Typical encampments include lectures, poetry readings, musical productions, spectacles of son et lumière, concerts by the club’s own seventy-piece symphony orchestra and, of course, revels of a more alcoholic sort. Each Bohemian encampment opens with a campfire ceremony called “The Cremation of Care,” and proceeds from there, with all entertainment designed, directed, and performed by members themselves. For years, the location of Bohemian Grove was—or so members solemnly insisted—a secret, and no one of the female sex was allowed to set foot on the territory (though ladies were admitted to the clubhouse in the city). As a result, lurid tales circulated about Bohemian Club encampments during which, it was said, primitive and erotic rites were celebrated by men from the Social Register and ladies, in Rubenesque disarray, of slightly lower social standing. Such tales—though club members naturally did little to put an end to them—were apparently exaggerated. Nowadays, though not admitted during the encampment period, wives and families of members may visit the Bohemian Grove for picnics. Most agree that it is a pretty and unsinful-looking spot.

  The Bohemian Club is one of several descendants of New York’s Century Association, the first “artistic” men’s club designed, according to its founders in 1847, for “authors and artists,” as well as for “gentlemen of any occupation provided their breadth of interest and … imagination make them sympathetic, stimulating, and congenial companions in the society of authors and artists.” How closely this policy has been adhered to is a matter of debate, but the Century Association idea has been both durable and popular. In addition to the Bohemian, other clubs founded along the same artist-and-writer lines include the Players, the Lambs, the Lotos, and the Coffee House in New York; St. Botolph’s in Boston; the Franklin Inn Club in Philadelphia; the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C.; the Cactus Club of Denver; and the Tavern Clubs of Boston and Chicago. Each maintains its own rules and rituals—such as the rule at the Coffee House that members, who sit family-style around circular tables, must not “talk shop,” and that guests, furthermore, may not be introduced to members. As a result, a guest at the Coffee House is often in the dark as to the identity of his luncheon companions unless his host resorts to some such tactic as, “Well, if it isn’t Woody Broun!” when a member appears at the table.

  The no-ladies-allowed rule in men’s clubs was, needless to say, one of the earliest to be challenged. Long before Lucy Stone, the women of American Society wanted—out of sheer curiosity and jealousy if nothing else—to have equal access to their husbands’ hideaways. Every club, as a result, has its favorite story of this or that prominent Society woman who dressed as a man in order to gain entrance, and who, as the case may be, may or may not have succeeded. And, one by one, the barriers began collapsing. Interestingly enough, the conventional men’s clubs—that is, the non-artistic—were the first to relax their rules. Boston’s Somerset Club, from its very early days, had a ladies’ dining room where women were admitted for the evening meal—though at lunchtime it is still strictly a male affair, and wives of members who may call for their husbands are unceremoniously placed on a horsehair sofa in a dimly lit waiting room. The Philadelphia Club, in contrast, was a long holdout. The Club insists that it was not until its centenary ball in 1934 that a female foot set foot on the premises. Now, however, women may come to the club for dinner on all but certain nights. In New York, the first club to admit ladies at the dinner hour was the Harmonie, a club of the city’s German-Jewish elite. The Union Club, New York’s oldest and grandest club of the Gentile elite (though, from its earliest days, it had a few Sephardic Lazaruses and Hendrickses among its membership, plus at least one German Jew, Adolphe Ladenburg, and, of course, August Belmont who “passed”) soon followed suit. It is supposedly at the Union that a member, noticing a certain lady enter the club one evening, commented wryly to the doorman, “Is it now permitted for a member’s mistress to enter the club at dinnertime?” To which the doorman is said to have imperturbably replied, “Only if she is the wife of an another member, sir.”

  In Washington, women crept into the Metropolitan Club floor by floor starting, naturally, at the bottom. First the ground, and then the second floor of the clubhouse felt the imprint of the spiked heel, and presently a sign was posted at the foot of the third-floor staircase, reading: NO LADIES ALLOWED ON THE THIRD FLOOR FOR ANY PURPOSES WHATEVER. The ladies themselves made such fun of the way the sign was worded that soon, in embarrassment, it was removed, though ladies are still enjoined not to mount to the sacred floor and, so far at least, they have been obedient. The Harvard Club of New York, meanwhile, quaintly separates the sexes by making ladies use a separate entrance located barely an arm’s length away from the crimson-painted main entrance. Inside the clubhouse, ladies and gentlemen are permitted to join one another. The Pacific Union Club, in San Francisco, though not as old as some of its counterpart men’s clubs in the East, is said to have the cleanest record in the country when it comes to excluding women. The only concession the Pacific Union makes to the opposite sex is in one by-law which states that if a member should be stricken while in the clubhouse, and should be considered “in extremis,” he may be permitted to have “one female nurse” in attendance.

  While the women of American Society were busily and systematically invading their husbands’ clubhouses, they were also forming clubs of their own—to the equal consternation of the men. New York’s Colony Club (founded in 1903 by such as Mrs. John Jacob Astor III, Mrs. W. S. Rainsford, and a sister-in-law of the Junior League co-founder, Mrs. J. Borden Harriman) was designed to be as sexually exclusive as the Union, the Knickerbocker, and the Brook. Male clubmen were scandalized, and said flatly that the only reason a group of women would wish such an organization was to have a place to conduct clandestine love affairs, and to receive letters from their lovers—which gives a fair indication of the use some of the men of Society were putting their clubs to. The ladies airily replied that, as a matter of fact, having an extra letter box was one of their reasons for establishing the club. These were the golden years before the First World War when such controversies were as serious as any that arose. The idea of the women’s social club caught on, and many others were established across the country. In New York, one of the most interesting was the Cosmopolitan Club, which is now roughly the feminine equivalent of the Century, drawing its membership largely from ladies who, though gently born and bred, toil in literature, music, and the arts. In the Cosmopolitan Club’s first years following its founding in 1911, it had nowhere near such an intellectual cast. It was known, in fact, for its wild, night-long “revels” to which no men were admitted, and where the lady members, costumed according to the theme of the evening—a night in Rome, in Hong Kong, or in Araby—carried on with every bit as much alcoholic abandon as any camper in the Bohemian Grove. “At dawn, the halls and public rooms were strewn with wilted ladies,” wrote one diarist of the time. Naturally, when word of such carryings-on reached the men, they were as anxious to get inside the women’s clubs as the women had been to get inside the men’s, and, true to form, rumors began to circulate of men dressed as women, who had gained admission to such clubs as the Colony and Cosmopolitan. Clearly, the walls that separated the sexes were about to come tumbling down.

  While all this was going on, another force was at work—eating at the single-sex club structure from within, as it were. This was the jealousy, rivalry, and competitiveness that has always characterized American Society. No sooner were there men’s clubs in American cities than everyone was arguing over which one was the “best.” The American club scene became a social battleground as it never was in England. Just as the Junior League and the Colony Club today spar
over which is the more “important,” so, in the old days, did the Cosmopolitan make it a three-sided battle in New York with members of various clubs snubbing each other, dropping each other from their guest lists, and blackballing each other from their clubs. The idea of “exclusivity”—of keeping people out—became the backbone of club life when, as sometimes happens, a club can also be oriented toward the more positive goal of taking people in. The men’s clubs bickered and called each other names, and members were always stalking out of clubs never to come back again. Clubs splintered into other clubs. In New York, the Union League was founded by a “league” of ex-members of the Union Club who departed, angrily, at the time of the Civil War protesting that, despite its name, the Union had merely allowed a pro-Confederate member to resign, instead of expelling him bodily. The Knickerbocker Club—named after the patron saint of New York City—was another Union Club spinoff, protesting that the Union was taking in too many members from out of town. When one of J. P. Morgan’s friends was blackballed by the Union, Morgan simply built a club of his own—the Metropolitan.