The Right People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Of Ann and Hugh Auchincloss’s thirteen children, only one—the first John—had the proper dynastic talent to produce male heirs bearing the family name. Of his twelve brothers and sisters there are no descendants whatever today. Yet John is responsible for a remarkable circumstance. From him descend all the Auchinclosses in America—dozens upon dozens of them—with the exception of those in the embalming business. An Auchincloss family tree, prepared in 1957, lists the names of some three hundred and thirty descendants of John and, of these, fiftyseven have been males named Auchincloss. Genetically, this is an uncommonly high proportion. The family tree lists ten Hugh Auchinclosses, fifteen Jameses, eight Stuarts, seven Anns, twenty Elizabeths, and quite a few Johns, Williams, and Douglases. Included are ten sets of twins. More of each have been born, of course, since the tree was compiled. As happens in large families, cousins have married cousins, but this has not seemed to affect the rate of production. The first John had nine children, seven of them boys. In the second and third generations, multiple marriages begin to take place, giving Auchinclosses complicated step- and half-relationships.

  Two marriages per Auchincloss today are commonplace, and three are no surprise. One pair of Auchincloss sisters married the same man, one Benjamin Betner, though not, naturally, at the same time. (The family tree delicately overlooks this somewhat unusual circumstance.) Hugh D. Auchincloss himself was married, first, to Maya Chrapovitsky, the daughter of a Russian naval officer, and their son, another Hugh, is called “Yusha,” a rough Russian equivalent of his name. Hughdie was married, second, to Mrs. Nina Gore Vidal, the ex-wife of an aircraft executive, by whom he had two children, Thomas Gore and Nina Gore Auchincloss (and, for the duration of the marriage, had a stepson named Gore Vidal). Third, he was married to Mrs. Janet Lee Bouvier, mother of two Bouvier girls, Caroline Lee and Jacqueline Lee. By the former Mrs. Bouvier, he had two more children, Janet Jennings and James Lee Auchincloss. Mrs. Vidal was the daughter of T. P. Gore, the famous blind Senator from Oklahoma. “Thus,” says Hughdie Auchincloss, “I was on two occasions connected with the United States Senate.”

  More striking than the Auchincloss divorce record is the family record for marrying well. Auchinclosses themselves don’t like to be reminded of this fact—which delights their in-laws—but it is true: in each Auchincloss generation, there has been at least one brilliant marriage to carry the family upward onto new plateaux of prestige and privilege. No sooner had the first Hugh married Ann Anthony Stuart than the advantages of the union began to appear. What little Ann lacked in looks, she made up for in Scotch doughtiness and spirit. When war was declared between England and the United States in 1812, it found Hugh Auchincloss, still a British subject, an enemy alien. All aliens were ordered removed “at least forty miles from tide water so that they might not be able to render aid or give comfort to the enemy,” and Hugh Auchincloss was promptly interned up the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie, far from his dry-goods store. His wife then took matters into her own hands. She boarded a stage for Washington—a three-and-a-half days’ trip—determined to take her husband’s case to the top, to the President of the United States himself, if need be. Once in Washington, she hired a hack to take her to the White House. On the way, her driver pointed to a pedestrian and said, “There goes Mr. Monroe, the Secretary of State.” “Stop the hack!” cried Mrs. Auchincloss. She bounded out, confronted Monroe on the street, and demanded to see President Madison. Somewhat startled, no doubt, the Secretary agreed that she could come to the White House the following morning.

  When she told her story to Madison he was at first unimpressed. But, according to her great-grandson John Auchincloss, “She stayed in Washington about a week, making such a nuisance of herself that the President and the Secretary of State, to get rid of her, for the country was at war, issued an executive order allowing her husband to return to New York and resume his occupation. Ever since, Auchinclosses have been unafraid of storming the halls of the mighty.

  The exception that had been made in the single case of Hugh Auchincloss did not endear him to the other Britishers interned in Poughkeepsie. They kicked up a mighty fuss and, before long, the pressure was such that the President was forced to rescind his order. But this time, at least, Hugh Auchincloss was prepared. He had fitted himself out with a mule team and wagon and, instead of making for Poughkeepsie, he headed west, as a traveling dry-goods store. By the war’s end, he had peddled his way as far as Louisville, Kentucky, and was a rich man.

  From that point on, Auchinclosses have been rubbing elbows steadily with the highly placed in Society and government. The eldest son of Hugh and Ann (the first John) made what can only be described as an imposingly advantageous marriage. Though his bride wore the unprepossessing name of Elizabeth Buck, her pedigree virtually bristled with great Colonial names—Winthrop, Dudley, Wainwright, Mainwaring, and Saltonstall. Her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was John Winthrop, called “The Great Immigrant,” Governor of Massachusetts and one of the founders of Harvard. Two other many-times great-grandfathers, Thomas Dudley and Joseph Dudley, were Massachusetts Governors; another John Winthrop was the first Governor of Connecticut, and still another was Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. One could go on and on citing the distinguished ancestors of Elizabeth Buck and, when one is talking Auchincloss family history, one does. One of her ancestors was Sir Richard Saltonstall of Huntwicke, and his wife—we are in the sixteenth century now—was said to have descended directly from William the Conqueror.

  The late Charles C. Auchincloss, who took up genealogy as a hobby late in life, worked out an elaborate chart showing how William the Conqueror fitted into the family, and even Uncle Charlie’s greatest admirers admit that he had to use both ingenuity and a certain amount of imagination to come up with that relationship. His chart shows how today’s Auchinclosses are also directly described from the royal lines of England, Scotland and, for good measure, France, through King Philip II. Not one, but three of Elizabeth Buck Auchincloss’s ancestors—Sir Richard Saltonstall, Governor Winthrop, and Governor Dudley—arrived in Salem aboard the vessel Arabella in 1630. Charles Auchincloss liked to point out that families who arrived on the Mayflower really had not accomplished much until the passengers from the Arabella, “named after the daughter of a duke,” arrived to show the others what to do. Charles Auchincloss also used to somewhat infuriate his wife—who was the former Rosamond Saltonstall—by explaining, genealogically, how he, with his heavy dosage of Saltonstall stock, was really more of a Saltonstall than she was.

  It is generally unwise, particularly with the older generation, to poke fun at the Auchinclosses’ ancient and regal family claims, but one person who has done so, albeit affectionately, has been Wilmarth Lewis, the author and Horace Walpole scholar, whose late wife was Annie Burr Auchincloss, a collateral descendant of, among others, Aaron Burr. Speaking at a family reunion in the ballroom of New York’s Colony Club (which Louis Auchincloss describes as “a tremendous feat, but more like a stockholders’ meeting than a family gathering), Mr. Lewis took the Auchincloss family tree lightly to task. Speaking to the hostess of the huge affair, the late Emma Jennings Auchincloss (mother of the present Hugh D.), he asked Aunt Emma if she recalled “dear cousin Charlemagne Auchincloss,” and “old Uncle Henry the Eighth.” Glancing at the Auchincloss charts, he noted that one of the Auchindosses had married a Smedberg—“obviously of an old New York family”—and wondered if, therefore, there wouldn’t be a good family reason to speak of “Cousin Noah,” and, perhaps, “dear Uncle Adam,” and “Aunt Eve.”

  Nonetheless, with Elizabeth Buck’s entrance into the family, the Auchincloss name assumed a place in New York Society which it has never vacated. The couple built a spacious summer home in Newport, in then fashionable Washington Street, on the water’s edge. They had nine children, seven of them boys, but it was their eldest daughter, Sarah Ann, who made the first brilliant marriage in that generation. She wed James Coats of the Scottish thread-manufac
turing family and, in rather short order, a number of the Auchincloss boys became American agents for Coats Thread, a profitable endeavor. Next, Edgar Stirling Auchincloss married Maria Sloan, daughter of the president of the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad. John Winthrop Auchincloss married a Russell, another family prominent in New York and Newport, and—from a money standpoint, the best marriage of all—Hugh Dudley Auchincloss married Emma Brewster Jennings, whose father, Oliver B. Jennings, was a founder of the Standard Oil Company. Jennings and the first William Rockefeller married sisters named Goodsell, and therefore, Auchinclosses of the Hugh Dudley branch are first and second cousins of the William-branched Rockefellers.*

  Talk about a social power structure! The Hugh Dudley, Edgar Stirling, and Sarah Auchincloss Coats branches of the family are the three rich branches, but the others have not done at all badly. A daughter of the John Winthrop branch married another Jennings, a cousin of the first—and a daughter of the Henry Buck line married a Colgate, of the toothpaste family. Today, the Auchinclosses are “the most marvelously connected family in New York,” according to a friend, occupying nearly two full pages of the New York Social Register, some forty-seven separate listings, compared with forty-two for Rockefellers, eight for Vanderbilts, and a mere two for Astors. This, of course, does not include Auchinclosses who have migrated to such far-flung cities as Honolulu. Through marriage, the Auchinclosses are now kin, in addition to Rockefellers, Sloans, Winthrops, Jenningses, Saltonstalls, and Smedbergs, to such other redoubtable families as the Frelinghuysens, the Van Rensselaers, the Cuttings, the Reids, the du Ponts, the Grosvenors, the Truslows, the Tiffanys, the Bundys, the Adamses, the Ingrahams, the Burdens, the Vanderbilts and, of course, the Kennedys.

  One might call them the definitive family of American Society. They describe its limits, and its design. The lacy branches of the Auchincloss family tree spread across its entire landscape. The Auchinclosses have never married Roosevelts. On the other hand, when young Lewis Rutherfurd married Janet Auchincloss at Hammersmith Farm in 1966, it was realized that Rutherfurd’s step-grandmother, Lucy Rutherfurd, had for many years been F.D.R.’s mistress, making the Roosevelts seem somehow part of the family, or at least close.

  It should not be inferred, because so many Auchincloss men married well-placed and wealthy ladies, that the men were fortune hunters. For the most part, Auchincloss men have been sober and industrious—whether as thread merchants, lawyers, bankers, or stockbrokers—and dutiful pillars of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. The Auchinclosses have produced a distinguished doctor, the late Hugh—a cousin of the present Hugh D.—who was Chief of Surgery at Presbyterian Hospital in New York, and Professor of Surgery at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. Even Auchincloss women have gone into business. Mrs. Maria Auchincloss Look, for example, was for several years the American packager and distributor of a product called “I-Snips,” an ice-cracking tool. Auchinclosses dislike being idle, and no one has demonstrated this better than Louis Auchincloss, who works full-time as a Wall Street lawyer and has turned out an imposing array of novels and short stories in his spare time.

  “The Auchinclosses have always been a very nice family,” says one friend. As a member of the family puts it, “There have been several stupid Auchinclosses, but no cruel ones.” There have been but few playboys or scapegraces in the family, and a gentle air of good behavior surrounds them all. This reputation for piety and rectitude has added to their legend and their stature, and is an important ingredient in the Auchincloss style. “One was always a little in awe of them,” says a New York woman. “At least I was brought up to believe that if you saw an Auchincloss doing it it was right.”

  In Bar Harbor, Maine, where the J. Howland Auchinclosses have long owned a summer place—grandly ignoring Bar Harbor’s fall from fashion—their neighbors for many years were the Archbolds, who lived just down the hill. The Archbolds, another Standard-Oil-founding family, are far richer than most Auchinclosses. Yet Archbolds tremble when Auchinclosses frown. At Bar Harbor, the Archbolds kept horses for their children, though the Auchinclosses did not. Horses involve stables, stables involve a manure pile, and a manure pile entails flies and certain odors. Lydia Archbold—now Mrs. Archbold Foote, a horsewoman of some note—recalls that one of the most agonizing duties of her childhood was writing her first social note. It was a note to Mrs. Auchincloss. Since they were Lydia’s horses, her mother explained, little Lydia should write to Mrs. Auchincloss apologizing for the way the manure pile smelled, and hoping that the scent did not make its way into the Auchincloss garden.

  Auchinclosses have become arbiters of elegance and, in their quiet and unassuming way, standard-setters. Mrs. J. Howland Auchincloss recalls the years before she married into the clan, when she was Priscilla Stanton, and her parents occupied a brownstone opposite the first Hugh D. Auchinclosses in East Forty-ninth Street. The present Hughdie Auchincloss was then a baby of approximately the same age as Miss Stanton’s little brother, William, and Priscilla’s mother often posted her at the window to keep an eye on the Auchincloss house across the way. “Mrs. Auchincloss,” said Mrs. Stanton, “has a hospital-trained nurse for little Hughdie. And when you see that nurse take little Hughdie out in his carriage, I want you to tell me exactly what she has him dressed in.” Priscilla remembers running to her mother with such news as, “She has little Hughdie in his little fur coat and fur bonnet!” There was nothing to do but hurry out and buy a fur coat and bonnet for baby William.

  So powerful is the Auchincloss name in Newport that, when it was decided to combine the coming-out party of Jacqueline Bouvier with a christening party for her half-brother—and invitations read, “Also honouring Mister James Lee Auchincloss”—baby Jamey received invitations to dinners, dances, and cocktail parties all over town.

  In the summer of 1966, the most waited for event in Eastern Society was the Auchincloss-Rutherfurd wedding in Newport—he, tall, handsome, splendidly educated (Buckley, St. Paul’s, Princeton), and impeccably pedigreed (directly descended from Peter Stuyvesant, New York’s last Dutch Governor); she, like her step- and half-sisters, dark-haired and beautiful and, of course, “an Auchincloss,” Hughdie’s youngest daughter. Socially, it was a long way from another wedding of the same season—that of Luci Johnson to Pat Nugent. In fact, the only notice taken in Newport of the Johnson-Nugent nuptials was when someone commented, “In that heat? Will anyone go?”

  While Washington sweltered, a crisp breeze blew across Narragansett Bay. The green lawns of Hammersmith Farm, where the reception was being held, swept down to the blue water’s edge. The family ponies romped in the fields, and the Black Angus herd posed decoratively against the sky, as, indeed, they are supposed to do. (The Black Angus are actually a decorative herd. Both Mr. and Mrs. Auchincloss like to look out their windows onto grazing animals and so, to indulge this fancy, Hughdie Auchincloss buys eighteen or twenty head each spring and sells them again in the fall, before returning to his winter home in Washington.) A white oval tent was set up on the lawn for the reception party. Inside, there was music and laughter and champagne and, outside, little John-John Kennedy, in the costume he had worn as a page (the bride was his mother’s half-sister)—blue linen shorts, white silk shirt, blue satin cummerbund, high white socks, black patent leather shoes with silver buckles—chased the Auchincloss ponies while a brace of Secret Service men chased him. (He had been a perfect page throughout the ceremony until the very end; as the wedding party was leaving the church, John-John could not resist throwing a quick punch into the ribs of a young contemporary.) As six hundred guests wandered in and out of the tent, through the spectacular gardens, admiring the dazzling sunshine of the day, the evident happiness of the young pair, and the auspiciousness of the match, everyone was saying that it was the most beautiful wedding anyone had ever seen. Then, suddenly, into the Bay, at the foot of the long cascade of lawn, swept the New York Yacht Club’s sailing cruise—hundreds of sails billowing, like a host of huge white butterflie
s composing a backdrop for the party. “How like the Auchinclosses to get this to happen—and for nothing,” someone murmured. And of course Janet Auchincloss, senior, had known that the cruise was scheduled, had hoped it would arrive to help decorate her daughter’s wedding. It did, and in the colors she had chosen for the wedding’s theme—blue and white.

  “Obedience to the unenforceable.” It was a phrase that governed the life of Dr. Hugh Auchincloss, who died in 1947, and which governed the lives of many Auchinclosses before and after him. It might be said to be the motto—the moral law—of the family. “We’ve always been more like a fraternity than a family,” Louis Auchincloss once commented and, if so, this phrase is the fraternal password. Each of Dr. Auchincloss’s children and grandchildren was required to memorize the phrase as soon as he or she was able to talk, and so were all Dr. Auchincloss’s nieces, nephews, grandnieces, and grandnephews. The children were asked to repeat the phrase before sitting down at Dr. Auchincloss’s Sunday dinner table.