The Right People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  * When a young man from Hastings, on the Hudson River, recently announced his intention of marrying a girl from Mamaroneck, on the Sound—and of moving to her side of the county to live—his father exclaimed in dismay, “But that means you’ll have to commute on the New Haven!”

  * The only known Australian member of the Coveleigh Club laughs at this and says, “It doesn’t take many of us to make our presence felt.”

  11

  By the Shores of Lake St. Clair

  To those who have never been to either place, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, is often considered hand in hand with Lake Forest, Illinois. (“Isn’t Grosse Pointe just sort of a rich Lake Forest?” a New Yorker asks humorously.) No comparison could be more inexact. Lake Forest is rolling and spacious, many miles north of Chicago. Grosse Pointe is flat and compact, and one of Detroit’s closest suburbs—a sliver of privilege barely six miles long and hardly more than a mile wide. The outer edge of this strip of real estate curves along the shores of Lake St. Clair—which might be called a satellite of Lake Erie—and its southern corners brush untidily against a woebegone sector of the metropolis, a maculose region of auto courts, funeral parlors, and dim cafes. Within the strip are tucked “the Grosse Pointes,” no less than five towns named (reading from south to north) Grosse Pointe Park, Grosse Pointe City, Grosse Pointe Farms, Grosse Pointe Shores, and (tucked behind the Shores) Grosse Pointe Woods. Here, in an area roughly the size of Block Island, Rhode Island, live some fifty-five thousand people, compared with Block Island’s seven hundred and thirty-two. The Grosse Pointe complex may not be “the wealthiest community per capita in the United States,” but it may well contain the densest concentration of rich people in the world. Also, according to Mrs. John M. S. Hutchinson of “the boating group,” “We have more sailboats in Grosse Pointe than Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit combined.”

  Though its approaches, from the Detroit side, are unpromising, the minute one crosses the Detroit-Grosse Pointe line one is plunged into cool green shade. Next to its profusion of fine old trees, one notices the tight concentration of Grosse Pointe’s houses. They are fitted so closely together, on such relatively small lots, within such neatly squared-off blocks, along such arrow-straight streets, that one tends to lose a sense of scale. The houses appear small. When one gets inside them, however, one discovers that many of them are very large. A city ordinance forbids fences between Grosse Pointe houses, and one can see its point: with fences around them, Grosse Pointe houses, on this level terrain, might look like so many large brownish eggs in a crate. But as it is there is an hysterical appearance to the place; the houses seem to jostle one another, each guards its square of land so jealously. Where windows peer directly into one’s neighbors’, one is swept with a sense of caution rather than security, even of alarm.

  There are certain differences between the five Grosse Pointes. Grosse Pointe Farms is certainly the choicest address. It has one of the largest areas, the smallest population, and is zoned exclusively for single-family residences. Running a close second to the Farms is the Shores, the smallest both in land area and in population. Here, too, all residences are single-family except for one or two lonely-looking multiple dwellings. People in Grosse Pointe Park would certainly argue as to whether their town was second- or third-best; it is largest in both area and population, and it is over ninety per cent single dwellings. Grosse Pointe City would argue with Grosse Pointe Park as to whether it deserved third or fourth place, but nobody would argue much about where Grosse Pointe Woods stands—at the bottom of the social ladder. It is, among other things, the only one of the five towns that possesses no lakeshore; it is the most populous and crowded; and it is the fastest-growing. In the last ten years, the Woods population has nearly doubled; it has fallen prey to the developer’s spade and ax and, belying its name, much of the Woods is now bleak and bereft of trees. The Woods is also full of apartment houses. “Very nice apartments, though,” one woman says. “Many of our nice young people start out there when they’re first married—moving into one of those cute little garden apartments on Vernier Road. They wait, then, until they can afford to move into a nicer part of Grosse Pointe.” Still, there have been mutterings in the other four towns to the effect that Grosse Pointe Woods does not really deserve the cachet of the name “Grosse Pointe” and should change its name to something else.

  Of course Grosse Pointe “isn’t what it used to be.” Everyone agrees to that. What it really used to be, in the years after Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac established his fort on the banks of the Detroit River in 1701, was farmland. The French settlers built what are now called “ribbon farms”—each farm with a few dozen yards of lake front, to provide water, and extending inland, sometimes for several miles, into the plain. These farms ran in neatly parallel strips perpendicular to the shore and, today, Grosse Pointe streets follow the boundaries of the ribbon farms. But the loss of the French farms is not what Grosse Pointers mean when they talk about how the place was changed.

  In the late nineteenth century, when Detroit became a city and an important port for Great Lakes shipping, fortunes were made: in shipping, banking, real estate, and—importantly—in the timber and mining lands of northern Michigan. Detroit Society was born, and families with such names as McMillan, Joy, Newberry, and Alger (still considered the Big Four “old” Detroit names) labored to create the impression that they were just as grand as slightly older families in the East, and arranged themselves in gingerbread palaces along Jefferson Avenue, on the riverbank. As the city grew, Society moved farther and farther out along Jefferson, toward Grosse Pointe—the “fat point” of land the French settlers had named—and, presently, was building elaborate summer residences there. Then, because the growing city of Detroit pushed harder than Society could push back, Society found itself in Grosse Pointe altogether. The summer places became year-round homes, and there were more and more of them. Detroit is still pushing. McMillans, Joys, Newberrys, and Algers are plentiful in Grosse Pointe today, but under somewhat more crowded circumstances. The genesis of Grosse Pointe, in other words, was similar to that of Westchester, but on a smaller scale.

  “It was lovely to be a girl growing up in Detroit,” said the Countess Cyril Tolstoi not long ago. The Countess is a McMillan relative, the widow of a nephew of Count Leo and, though a grandmother, is as slim and chic as a fashion model. “Jefferson Avenue was a beautiful street. There were huge elms on either side, and their branches met in the middle overhead. I remember coming out here to Grosse Pointe for parties and dances. We came in private trolleys—it was the fashionable thing to do. It was the era of the private trolley-car party. Once, my escort took me to a party in a trolley that he’d hired just for the two of us! This place used to be my grandfather’s farm—his property ran all the way down to the lake. We’d cut across wide, wide lawns and through woods to the place next door. Now, I look up and down this street and realize I hardly know anybody. I occasionally go to parties and find there’s not a human being there I’ve ever heard of.” The Countess’s butler served her an impeccable Martini and, as though to punctuate the Countess’s remarks a Good Humor truck tinkled its merry way down the street outside her windows.

  In the early days, there was another important residential street in Detroit besides Jefferson—Woodward Avenue. Woodward Avenue was where “the other people” lived. “We didn’t know the people who lived ‘up Woodward,’ as we used to say,” said the Countess. “I’m sure they were nice people. But we just didn’t know them.” And, between that golden day and this, there was a development that spelled the end of, among other things, the trolley-car party: the invention of a vehicle that ran on gasoline. If there is one thing that irritates an Old Guard Grosse Pointer it is to have Grosse Pointe considered purely the product of the automobile industry. Lest there be any doubt about where her family’s money came from, the late Mrs. Henry B. Joy drove, until 1958, a 1914 electric car. “Grosse Pointe was fashionable long before the automobile,” said the Countess
Tolstoi. Then she added with a little smile, “The first Henry Fords lived ‘up Woodward.’ We didn’t know them.” As for Bloomfield Hills, Detroit’s other select suburb, “That’s the town that automobile money built.” Bloomfield Hills is far up, almost at the very end of Woodward, where, as far as Grosse Pointe is concerned, it belongs.

  Whether Grosse Pointe was fashionable before the internal-combustion engine or not, it is automobile money, more than anything else, that has turned the place into what it is today. A man doesn’t have to be in Grosse Pointe long before someone asks him, “What kind of car are you driving?” To drive a foreign-made car is to fly in the face of Grosse Pointe convention, good manners, good taste, and—one gathers—morality. A woman, ordering her car brought round by the doorman at the Detroit Country Club in Grosse Pointe Farms does not ask for a “yellow Oldsmobile.” She asks for a “Sahara Sand Super-88.” According to one Grosse Pointe man, a lawyer, “The automobile industry has such a terrific effect on the economy of Detroit that no businessman, whether he’s remotely connected with the automobile business or not, can afford to ignore it. Each fall, when the new models are introduced, everybody holds his breath. Depending on how well the new cars go over—that’s how well we’ll all eat during the coming year.” What’s good for General Motors is definitely good for Grosse Pointe.

  As automobile fortunes created a new clutch of millionaires, the millionaires moved their families into Grosse Pointe. “Naturally,” says one woman, “they wanted to be Society so the first thing they did was to move to where Society was.” Motor money built Loire-inspired châteaux along Lake Shore Road next to the châteaux, castles, and manor houses that were already there. As property values and taxes have risen, many of the proudest Lake Shore houses have come down, and “old money” houses and “car money” houses have suffered about equally. The Truman Newberry house, “built of the most beautiful rose-colored brick” (and lumber money) has been razed, and some of its paneling and fixtures repose in newer car-money houses. The Roy Chapin mansion (he was president of the Hudson Motor Company) still stands, but probably would not if Henry Ford II had not bought it a few years ago for his own home. Mrs. Joseph Schlotman (pre-automobile money) still owns an imposing Lake Shore estate, but is resigned to the fact that it will be torn down and subdivided after her death. Mrs. Russell Alger’s house is now the Grosse Pointe War Memorial. Mrs. Joy’s property is the Crescent Sail Yacht Club. The Seabourn Livingstone house (“Grandfather cornered the wheel market—for buggies, that is,” according to his granddaughter, Helen Livingstone Howard) recently fell to the wrecker’s ball. Mrs. Horace Dodge, Sr., still keeps “Rose Terrace,” her huge house on the lake, and her two hundred and forty foot yacht, Delphine, lies in wraps at the pier at the foot of her lawn. The Delphine contains, among other delights, a $10,000 pipe organ; she requires a twenty-seven-man crew, and she has not stirred from her berth in years. (In fact, according to boating experts, the Delphine no longer can be taken out; her hull is said to lie encased in lake-bottom mud like a frankfurter in a bun. There she may stay forever, a plump reminder of a grander, more naïve time.)

  Lake Shore Road has been labeled “Widows’ Row.” Of those who still occupy the great houses, most are widows. “The other day, having nothing else to do,” said Mrs. Joseph Schlotman, “I made a list of all my friends. I wrote down a hundred and twenty-five names—all women, all widows. We entertain each other—back and forth. We play cards, have teas, and little dinners. We watch rather a lot of television. If a man’s face ever appeared at one of our tables—why, we wouldn’t know what to do! Sometimes—I wonder. Why has this happened? Did we women work our men too hard?”

  Nowadays it is hard to tell where pre-automobile money leaves off and automobile money begins. “We all lent money to old Henry Ford,” one woman says, “and he gave us stock in his little company. Who ever dreamed he’d be so successful?” So, many non-automotive families made automotive fortunes whether they liked it or not—and there is no evidence to show that they did not like it. But if the sources of some families’ wealth are no longer clear-cut, one name must stand as an exception—Ford. Fords are so integrally a part of Grosse Pointe, and Grosse Pointe is so obsessively conscious of Fords, that scarcely a waking hour passes without some mention of them. “That’s Mrs. Robert Kanzler,” someone may whisper. “Her husband is Mrs. Edsel Ford’s sister’s son.” Just as customers in English pubs gather and talk about the Queen, so do guests at Grosse Pointe cocktail parties gather and talk—and speculate, and gossip, and exchange the latest bit of news—about the Fords. It is a persistent, though unproven, tale in Grosse Pointe that the rector of one of the local churches not long ago let his tongue slip and said, “Now let us bow our heads and praise the Ford.”

  As a new arrival to Grosse Pointe soon realizes, however, there is not one important Ford family in existence but three—none of them remotely related—and sorting out the Fords is a newcomer’s first social chore, not an easy one. The richest Fords are, needless to say, “the car Fords” as they are called, represented by Mrs. Edsel Ford, her three sons, Henry II, Benson, and William, and her daughter, “Dodie.” Then there are the John B. Fords and the Emory Fords, known as “the salt Fords” because their family enterprises include the Wyandotte Chemical Company (built on Wyandotte’s rich salt beds) as well as the Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Company (soda ash from the salt beds is an ingredient in glassmaking). Finally, there are “the old Fords,” who include Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Clifford Ford; he is a retired investment banker. These last Fords are not wealthy by the standards of other Fords, but their name has the patina of age. Mrs. Ford, an amateur genealogist, has traced the family right back through the Plantagenets to Alfred the Great in the ninth century. “Lord knows how we got mixed up with Alfred the Great,” Mrs. Ford says, “but there he is—right in the book.” In this tracing, she did not encounter a single automobile manufacturer or buggy-maker. Mrs. Ford was a Brush and Mr. Ford’s mother was a Buhl—both “first-cabin” families in Detroit. The original Buhl was given a land grant by King George III in the 1760’s and when one of the Buhls was selling some property recently an elaborate search was made into his legal title to it—a search that never was successful. “Damn it,” said Mr. Buhl finally, “there isn’t any title to that land. The Buhls just took it.”

  To confuse Ford matters further is the fact that, while the Frederick Clifford Fords are old Fords, the Frederick Sloane Fords (no kin to Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors) are salt Fords. Also, the Frederick C. “old” Fords’ son, Walter Buhl Ford, married “Dodie” Ford, daughter of Mrs. Edsel “car” Ford. She is therefore twice a Ford, and she, her husband, and their children are known as “the Ford-Fords.”

  Each of the three Ford families occupies a special niche in Grosse Pointe life, and each has carved for itself its own area of community endeavor. The car Fords have generally taken over the “glamour” charities—the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Detroit Symphony, the Opera, and the various museums. As a result, Mrs. Edsel Ford is without doubt the grandest grande dame in Grosse Pointe Society. So surrounded with servants and secretaries and other “protectors” is she that telephone calls to her have become heroic feats. Getting “put through” to Eleanor Ford can consume an afternoon and, whether she herself is aware of this state of affairs is a matter of perennial conjecture. When she appears at a private party—seldom—or at an important public function—less seldom—a great hush falls upon the room which she does not seem to notice either. A pleasant-looking white-haired woman with no particular sense of fashion, her appearance would not inspire awe in any other city. Her conversation is chatty and housewifely—she always wants to hear about her friends’ children—conducted in a down-to-earth manner in a Middle Western accent. “Now don’t you go off and go home without me, hear!” she called to her escort at a museum opening not long ago. Yet, at her entrance, crowds part like the waters of the Red Sea.

  The salt Fords have tended to concentrate their labo
rs on such social-welfare causes as the Planned Parenthood Federation, the United Fund, and the local hospitals. The old Fords enthusiastically—and appropriately—support the Grosse Pointe War Memorial Center, the historical society, and the Episcopal Church.

  Each of the three Ford families stands for a certain set of values for a certain group of Grosse Pointers. “Every class of society has its royalty image,” says the painter Clifford West (whose wife is a salt Ford), “the image of the people it would most like to be like and be accepted by.” Grosse Point has at least three such heads of state, all named Ford. To Grosse Pointe’s new millionaires (not surprisingly, since Henry Ford’s is the most spectacular success story in the annals of American business) the car Fords represent the apex of society, and Henry II, Benson, and William are the kings. Oscar L. Olsen, for example, has become enormously wealthy in what his wife calls “the steel and plastics business,” but what he enjoys calling “the toilet seat business.” (Olsenite Toilet Seats, with Mr. Olsen’s slogan, “Tops for Bottoms,” are among his products.) He says, “To me, Mrs. Edsel Ford is the great lady of Grosse Pointe. Do you want to know what a great lady she is? Well, sir, my wife sent her an invitation to a charity ball with a little note saying she hoped Mrs. Ford would come. And do you know what that great lady did? She picked up the phone and called my wife to tell her she couldn’t come! That’s what I call a great lady!”

  The car Fords also represent the sort of large-scale fun that can be had with large amounts of money. When the Henry Fords threw a coming-out party a few years ago for their daughter Anne—a party reported to have cost in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars, the affair was lampooned in several national magazines, and was criticized generally in the American press. Among the new millionaires in Grosse Pointe, however, the party and its cost were vigorously defended. “Why, when you stop to think that the Ford Foundation gives away an average of half a million dollars a day, why shouldn’t the Fords have fun with what they’ve got left? Old Henry never had any fun with his money. Why shouldn’t young Henry have a little fun with his?”