The Right People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Often the clubs squabbled over which had the better food and service, but the heart of the matter was really which had the higher social standing. The Harvard Club became renowned for its popovers—and still is. (When dining there, it is part of protocol to admire the popovers.) The Union League, so said its members, could not be outdone when it came to johnnycake. At the Racquet and Tennis Club, the pièce de résistance of any meal was the rice pudding. (“Would you join a club for its rice pudding?” sniffed members of other clubs.) The Brook Club was known for the overall excellence of its cuisine, as well as for its slippered and unobtrusive service (members are never presented with checks to sign; a soft-spoken servant follows each gentleman around, seeing to his needs), and also for the general grandeur of its operation. Guests of members of the Brook, for instance, are first escorted to the downstairs “Stranger’s Room,” where they may peruse an ancient edition of Barron’s while waiting for their host.

  Still, for all the clubs’ attempts at elegance, there were perennial complaints and dissatisfactions. At the Knickerbocker a member complained that a waiter had “touched” him. He would say no more. The man’s fellow members were puzzled, not knowing whether the waiter had made an inappropriate sexual advance, or had asked to borrow money. At last, however, it turned out that the waiter had tapped the member on the shoulder to call him to the telephone.

  The battle of the sexes—in this case to be in on each other’s doings—and the battle of the clubs themselves are certainly two factors which have brought both men’s and women’s clubs to their present somewhat diminished state of social importance. The day when such a club as the Union League could successfully abide by its rule of four—“no women, no dogs, no Democrats, no reporters”—has passed. The Club Idea—as it was conceived in the nineteenth century—can only survive when everyone in Society agrees that one club, and one alone, is the one that matters. College fraternities and sororities, another nineteenth-century invention, have fared about as men’s and women’s clubs have, and are quietly disappearing from one after another of the best campuses. And yet, at Yale, there exists a club institution that continues to seem indestructible.

  There are two ranking senior societies at Yale, Skull and Bones, and Scroll and Key—known affectionately as “Bones” and “Keys”—which occupy similarly sinister and mausoleum-like structures on the New Haven campus. Membership in either club is a portentous matter, and is said to cast a mystic influence on a man’s affairs throughout his life. Of the two, Skull and Bones, founded in 1832, is the older and definitely the grander. Even Scroll and Key men admit that. A Bones man, hearing his club’s name spoken aloud by an “outsider,” is supposed to get to his feet and immediately leave the room. A Keys man, whose club was founded ten years later, can boast of no such strictures. To Skull and Bones have belonged such men as Averell Harriman, Archibald MacLeish, Robert A. Taft, and Henry R. Luce. On the other hand, Scroll and Key, by not claiming the grandeur and distinction of Skull and Bones, by not protesting its importance quite so much, often comes out a social notch or two ahead. To Scroll and Key have belonged John Hay Whitney, Dean Acheson, Newbold Morris, and any number of Rockefellers, along with many old-Society Browns, Delanos, Potters, and Auchinclosses—a membership list hardly to be sneezed at. And yet, when asked, a Scroll and Key member will always insist that his society is less important than Skull and Bones. Scroll and Key, having always, and with such perfect modesty, accepted second place, inevitably emerges occupying a place considerably in front of first. It is a fact that infuriates Skull and Bones, but there is nothing they can do. If the grown-up world of big-city Society could have learned the lesson taught by Scroll and Key on a college campus—that those who don’t seem to care about being Number One are usually those who make it—Society might have developed a true Club Elite. But it never did.

  And, in any case, while the city clubs were fussing over members and fighting with each other, America was changing. The countryside was opening up. Travel was easier. Resorts were building, people were on the move, and country houses were going up. While men’s clubs in the city were grudgingly letting down their bars and admitting women, and women’s clubs were doing the same to men, a country club Society—with plenty of room for both sexes—was developing on the rolling, wooded hills outside of town.

  * The similarity to coolie hats has been remarked upon by others, and so Fish House members make it a point to say, “These hats are of a pattern brought from China … early in the last century, and were worn by a high mandarin caste.”

  Part Two

  HOW MONEY LIVES:

  A Nosegay of the Best Addresses

  10

  The Riches of Westchester

  “I’m sure you have been told,” a faultlessly tailored Scarsdale woman said to a visitor the other day, “that Scarsdale is the wealthiest community per capita in the United States.” She smiled a smile of inner satisfaction which that identical knowledge brings to residents of Bryn Mawr, Chevy Chase, West Hartford, Lake Forest, and Beverly Hills. The “wealthiest-town-per-capita” legend has been circulated about Sewickley, Pennsylvania; Clayton, Missouri; Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts; Palm Beach, Florida; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and Burlingame, California. In each town where the legend flourishes, it has been impossible to put down. Actually, the title in the wealth race of American suburbs is said to belong to Shaker Heights, Ohio, a complex of villages that sprawls wealthily outside Cleveland. (Shaker Heights has its claim backed by the United States Census Bureau, which assumedly has ways of discovering these things.) Residents of other towns across the landscape of American Society have read about Shaker Heights’s imposing per capita wealth—and have ignored it, in favor of a certainty that their own towns are secretly richer. And, of course, the trouble with Shaker Heights is Cleveland. If Cleveland were a socially more important city, and Ohio a socially more important state, the claims of Shaker Heights might be taken more seriously. It’s too bad, in other words, that Shaker Heights is where it is. Too bad it isn’t in, for instance, Westchester County, New York.

  There are easily a dozen towns in Westchester in addition to Scarsdale—including Mount Kisco, Pound Ridge, Katonah, Larchmont, Rye, Bronxville, Irvington, Bedford, Harrison, and “our particular part of Pelham”—whose residents are convinced are not only the richest towns in the country, if not the world, but also the nicest. These beliefs account for Westchester’s particular air of solidity and style. After all, to live wealthily—among other wealthy people—was Westchester’s original reason-for-being. Wealth is one of the things about these towns which their residents want to preserve. “There are no poor people at all in Bronxville,” a Bronxville woman sweepingly states. “They come in, by the day, to work here, but they go somewhere else at night—mostly to Tuckahoe.” The poor people in Rye go home to Port Chester.

  Every city in America has at least one “nice” residential section outside it, where it is fashionable to live, and New York has several score—many of them in Westchester—but Westchester’s social genesis was rather different. It was not originally colonized by New Yorkers to be anything like the clutch of suburban commuter towns it has become. It was colonized for grandeur. Almost from the beginning, in fact even before New Amsterdam was re-christened New York, the area attracted men who wished to live on a large and noble scale. The true “first families” of Westchester include the De Lanceys, the Van Cortlandts, the Philipses, the Pells, the Van der Doncks—all names linked inseparably with the early days of the little colony at the mouth of the Hudson River. It was these families who launched, beginning about 1680, the great era of patroonship and manor building in Westchester County, an era which may be said to have lasted until the Wall Street crash of 1929.

  Shortly after the Civil War, grandeur in Westchester was given a new twist. It became a Society resort. In the days when the New Jersey Shore and the Adirondacks were fashionable, and when Society paid stricter attention to “seasons,” when the shore—and sea ai
r—were for July, and the mountains—and mountain air—were for August, Westchester County began to have two “little” seasons of its own, spring and autumn. At the outset, Westchester was a controversial resort. Critics pointed out that it had no good beaches, no lakes of any size, no mountains of particular splendor. But its defenders pointed out that it had hills and streams and ponds and, most important, views; it was an era when admiring the landscape was more popular than it is today, and in scape of land the area excelled. It had rolling, sweeping vistas. It was a park, a garden.

  Before the middle of the nineteenth century, when railroads began to open up the grain centers of the Middle West, Westchester County was literally a garden, the East’s granary, its fields yielding rich crops of wheat and oats and corn. Between the fields were stands of virgin timber, and the “Westchester rocks,” a curious topographical feature of the county, protruded everywhere in cliffs and crags jutting almost perpendicularly from the ground. In the woods, deer and rabbits leapt and over fifteen hundred varieties of wildflowers grew. Even the county’s location was park-like, swept on both sides by majestic, if not beach-lined, bodies of water—the Hudson River to the west, and Long Island Sound to the east, which together give the county some sixty-four miles of coastline. As New York Society began coming to Westchester, the hills and cliffs began to be covered with castles. The wildflower-woods were buried under golf courses and en tout cas tennis courts, and the littoral sprouted yachting marinas. Westchester’s fate was sealed.

  Soon Westchester was castle-poor. “The average size of a Westchester estate,” it was announced in the elegant eighties and the gay nineties, was sixty-five rooms. Banquet halls extended to ninety feet in length, then ninety-five. As they always do when they stake out a new preserve, the members of Society became competitive. At “Carrollcliff,” the home of the late General Howard Carroll in Tarrytown—an imposing hilltop replica of a Rhine castle from the heights of which, on clear days, can still be viewed both the Hudson and the Sound, as well as the Manhattan skyline—old Westchesterites can remember when the great baronial dining hall was thrown open regularly for as many as eighty guests, with a liveried footman stationed behind every second chair. “I don’t think all the footmen were from the regular household staff, though,” one guest has recalled. “I think they brought in a few people from the grounds staff.” Not long ago, one of the linen tablecloths from “Carrollcliff” found its way to a hospital, where it was cut up to make sheets for twenty beds. The huge American flag that flew from “Carrollcliffs’s” top mast had stars somewhat larger than most tea trays and weighed, folded, forty pounds. It was in this same post-Civil War era that John D. Rockefeller’s house was built in Pocantico Hills in North Tarrytown, staffed by servants whose wages ran to thirty thousand dollars a year.*

  Not all the attempts to rearrange nature in Westchester were successful. At “Ophir Farm,” the seven-hundred-and-fifty-acre estate in Purchase which later became the home of newspaper-publisher Whitelaw Reid, the original owner, Benjamin Holliday, wanted to create what he called “a private prairie.” To obtain the desired effect, he imported a sizable herd of elk and an even more sizable herd of buffalo. But the elk jumped over his fences, and the buffalo broke them down, and the neighbors, understandably, complained. Similar complaints plagued the first owner of “Belvedere,” now the property of Samuel Bronfman, the liquor magnate. The builder installed several thousand sprinklers to water the commodious lawn, and the sprinkler system did an excellent job of keeping the lawn green. The only trouble was that, when it was turned on, the system reduced the water pressure of Tarrytown to practically zero. But the owner of the sprinklers was considerate. Though his gardeners liked to run the sprinklers early in the morning, he made sure that the water would not be turned on during the hours when his friends on neighboring estates were shaving.

  Not far from “Belvedere,” the late Jay Gould built “Lyndhurst,” a seven-hundred-acre estate with a mansion copied from a French château. After Gould’s death, the estate passed to his daughter, Mrs. Finley J. Shepard, and, after her death, to another daughter, the Duchess of Talleyrand, who not only maintained the great place but erratically and unpredictably enlarged it, buying up land and houses in the vicinity as soon as they became for sale, and then letting her properties fall into disrepair. Since the Duchess’s death, however, “Lyndhurst” has been preserved, and is now one of the few nineteenth-century Westchester palaces both standing and open to the public.

  Equally unpredictable and just as colorful and wealthy were the Wendel Sisters, Ella and Rebecca, whose country place was also in Tarrytown, hard by “Belvedere” and “Lyndhurst.” The Wendels, maiden ladies who shared their home with an aging unwed brother, J. G. Wendel, always dressed alike—in dusty and patched black dresses whose hems trailed in the streets, and in matching black sailor hats secured to the ladies’ heads by elastic bands beneath their chins. Despite their disreputable appearance, the sisters were decidedly “Old Family”—listed in the earliest editions of the Social Register and its predecessor, the Elite Directory—and were large owners of New York real estate. The Wendels were fond of horses, and each sister drove her own team, with a groom seated at her side. Yet such was their penuriousness that once, when a friend who had not seen the sisters for a long time asked them what they’d been up to, the ladies—who often spoke in unison—replied, “Why, we’ve been busy mending the saddle blankets for the last six weeks!”

  Long after their horses had died, and after more modern means of transportation had become common, the Misses Wendel refused to replace the horses, and would permit no other system of transportation to be used on, their property. No automobiles were permitted within the gates of the Wendel estate. Horseless visitors were required to negotiate the long drive on foot, and the Wendels themselves walked wherever they went. Once, Miss Ella Wendel was seen coming down her graveled drive in a state of agitation, her small dog, Tobey, cradled in her arms. When a groundsman asked her what the trouble was, Miss Ella said that Tobey had a piece of gravel in his foot. Removing the stone from the affected paw, the man commented that if Miss Ella would have her drive paved in concrete it would provide a more comfortable canine walking surface. “Excellent idea!” cried Miss Ella and, within days, a contractor had been called and the job was done. When the contractor presented his bill to Miss Ella—it was for $20,000—she opened her purse and paid him the full amount, in cash.*

  A feature of turn-of-the-century social life in Westchester was “the afternoon drive” down Broadway in Tarrytown, a ritual frankly copied from similar promenades in Newport and Saratoga. All Westchester Society turned out in full regalia for these drives, behind coaches-and-four equipped with silver harnesses and driven by blue-coated coachmen with silver buttons, high hats with black or red cockades, white gloves, white trousers, and patent-leather boots with blue or pink tops. On these splendid drives, Vanderbilts and Fields, Schwabs and Rockefellers, and Archbolds and Whitehouses smiled and bowed at one another. Mrs. Jennie Prince Black, who wrote a chatty book about Westchester of those perfumed days, recalled seeing Alexander Hamilton II daily during the afternoon drive. He always sat alone in the rear of his barouche—“a small figure wrapped in a gray plaid shawl … He never seemed to notice anyone or to change his expression of solitary boredom.” Mrs. Black also noted the presence of “an interesting visitor” from England, Winston Churchill, “the novelist.”

  There was, to be sure, a certain amount of commuting to New York in those days, but it was commuting of a special sort. “My father had a hundred-foot steam yacht, The Gracemere, named after his house,” Mrs. H. Stuart Green of Tarrytown recalled not long ago. (She was a Browning, of a retailing fortune.) “At eight o’clock in the morning, on days when he went to New York, he and a few friends would gather at the pier. They would have a leisurely breakfast on the boat while they sailed downriver to their offices.”

  “Oh, those were days like none that will ever come again,” said Mrs. Harold
Scott, a senior resident of Irvington, not long ago. Mrs. Scott’s father was Dr. Charles Brace, who made millions in the drug business in the days before income taxes. At Irvington, overlooking the Hudson, he built an enormous house out of Westchester granite quarried on his property—“a house built to last a thousand years. It’s gone now.” Mrs. Scott remembers, “At Father’s house, dinner was at seven. And that meant not two minutes after seven, but seven. If you were early, you waited outside the door until the clockstroke. The gentlemen wore white tie, and the ladies long gowns. The ladies took their wraps to the downstairs cloakroom, and the gentlemen took theirs upstairs. In the gentlemen’s cloakroom, white envelopes were arranged on a silver tray, with a gentleman’s name on each envelope. Inside was a card with a lady’s name on it—the lady he was to take into dinner. That way, you see, a lady never knew which gentleman would escort her, which made it exciting. The ladies and gentlemen gathered again downstairs and there were cocktails, but none of this ‘What’ll-you-have-to-drink?’ business. Father liked a Jack Rose cocktail, and so that was what was served. The butler came in with the tray—one Jack Rose for each guest. He was followed by the parlormaid with a tray of canapés—one apiece. Nobody would dream of asking for a second canapé, much less a second drink.

  “In fifteen minutes, dinner was announced.” No one would think, either, of carrying an unfinished cocktail to the dinner table. “There was always sherry with the soup. At the table were printed place cards and menus, outlining the courses through the appetizer, soup, fish, meat, salad, cheese and fruit, dessert, and coffee with, perhaps, a sherbet course somewhere in the middle. Dinner lasted at least two hours. Really I don’t know how we managed to eat so much! It was a day of gracious living, and when you look at the way people do things now! Cocktail parties! Father would have died of horror if he’d ever seen a cocktail shaker in the drawing room. It was a kitchen implement.”