Consider the Charles Chaplins. Chaplin was among the first to expatriate himself to the high mountains in the narcissus-scented air, and he is now considered the paterfamilias of the Alpine Set. His château above Vevey has beautiful gardens, and the house is always filled with fresh flowers. In his eighties, Chaplin is somewhat slowed down, but he still takes short walks and suns himself on his terraces, attended by his secretary and servants and pretty wife. And he always appears at the annual Christmas eve gala given by Madame de Chevreux d’Antraigne, an Englishwoman who has a big house in Montreux. Her house has a hall of mirrors, and her party is a major event to which everyone in the Set turns out—Noel Coward, the David Nivens, James Mason, the William Holdens. Charles Chaplin rarely says much any more at parties, but he nods and beams and looks contented. “He seems to have removed himself from life a bit,” says a friend. But isn’t this what Switzerland is for? To escape from reality?
Consider Noel Coward in his pink-and-white chalet above the clouds, somewhere over the rainbow. “These little raspberries were flown in from Israel,” says Mr. Coward, spooning them from a chilled silver bowl. “You must absolutely submerge them in this thick fresh cream, and then cover them with sugar.” The road to the pink-and-white chalet is lined with tubs of pink-and-white petunias. Mr. Coward’s bright purple lounging jacket matches the covering on his bright purple sofa, and his green slippers match the green baize covering of the coffee table. Like Switzerland, Mr. Coward is very floral, very coordinated, the epitome of elegant suavity. “When Gertie Lawrence and I danced, it was said that we were the definition of glamour,” he says without a trace of modesty. A favorite footstool, in needlepoint, is designed with the opening bars of some of his songs—“Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart,” and so on—the labor of a friend. “Dorothy Hammerstein did a needlepoint pillow for me,” he says, “Joan Sutherland did another. So did Mary Martin. Merle Oberon did me a pair of needlepoint slippers.” He turns to his secretary: “Are the Lunts coming for drinks?” These are the sort of people who pass in and out of the Chalet Coward. Of all the things that his house contains, Mr. Coward is proudest of his blue-tile shower bath, which he designed himself, and which has jets of water that shoot out at the bather from all directions.
“The Swiss are terribly un-tiresome,” Noel Coward says. “They aren’t the least bit celebrity-conscious. They leave one at absolute peace. I’ve lived here since 1951, and the living is blissfully easy. The air here makes one sweetly lazy, which I adore. The most energetic thing I do is walk down to the village for a drink. Then I ring for the car to come and drive me back up. Joan Sutherland lives just above me, and the Nivens are just above her. Joanie’s going to put in a swimming pool. I don’t quite approve. It seems rather un-Swiss. And I suppose she’ll make me trudge up to it. But I’m terribly lucky here. And of course there are the lovely taxes. Look—here comes the sun.”
As if by command, the clouds in which his house has been drifting disappear, and the valley below is revealed, in Technicolor. The higher vineyards are a deep blue-green. Above, fat cows graze on pasturage so steep it seems miraculous that they don’t topple over and come rolling down. Walt Disney could have done no better. To the south, the big-rock-candy-mountain silhouette of Mont Blanc rises and frames itself perfectly in Sir Noel’s south-facing window. “Isn’t it sweet?” he asks. And, “Shall we have some more of my delicious Jewish raspberries?”
Of all the beautiful escapees, those—like Noel Coward—who are British subjects find the Swiss taxes the loveliest. This group includes the Nivens, James Mason, Deborah Kerr, Peter Ustinov, the Chaplins. If these people lived at home in England, they would be taxed at murderous rates by Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue. But, ever since an unfortunate experience in one of her colonies in 1776, Great Britain has refrained from taxing foreign-based Britons. By agreeing to remain outside of England for at least nine months a year, these British pay only the trifling Swiss tax. The rich from other countries have found similar shelter in Switzerland, which helps explain why the likes of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, Sadruddin Aga Khan, Lilli Palmer, Sophia Loren, Gunther Sachs, Maximilian Schell, Ingemar Johansson, Georges Simenon, Vladimir Nabokov, and a long list of other names are Swiss-based for at least part of the year. The Swiss tax system—or non-system—used to be equally attractive to Americans. Alas, it is no longer, and this is why at least one American woman speaks of the late President John F. Kennedy as “a worse tyrant than Hitler.”
What happened was that, before World War II, Americans who lived permanently abroad were not required to pay tax on income from sources within the United States. Then, after the war, with Europe rebuilding and American businesses expanding into European cities, large numbers of Americans were going to Europe to work for short periods of time. For these people, the law was changed to apply not only to permanent nonresidents but to those who lived outside the country for as little as eighteen months’ time. Immediately the rich—and their accountants—saw what was possible. By living eighteen months in a country such as Switzerland, where taxes were a pittance, they could escape U.S. taxes altogether. Immediately a very well-dressed migration began. At the same time, film companies were discovering the fiscal advantages of working in Europe, and suddenly—for Gary Cooper, William Holden, Orson Welles, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Irwin Shaw, Audrey Hepburn, Mel Ferrer, Yul Brynner, and scores of others—Switzerland became the only place to live.
An example of what could be done was the technique employed by Elizabeth Taylor. With an income of roughly $1,000,000 a year, she established a Swiss residence and corporation into which all her money went. Of this she was required to pay a Swiss corporate tax, a minuscule two-tenths of one per cent, or about $2,000 a year. Her corporation then paid her a salary. If, by tightening her belt, she was able to get by on $10,000 a month—$120,000 a year—her Swiss income tax could not have come to much more than $15,000 annually. In other words, she was able to keep over $900,000 of her yearly million by living in Switzerland. At home in the United States, her tax bill might have run as high as $850,000. No wonder she could put enough money aside to buy an inch-and-a-half long diamond.
But in 1962 President Kennedy’s tax reforms put a stop to all this. Today, only the first $25,000 of a non-U.S. resident’s income is tax-free, and everything above that is fully taxable at U.S. rates. Obviously, to the super-rich, $25,000 tax-free is not an exciting figure. When the new laws went into effect, the allure of Switzerland rapidly evaporated for a number of Americans, including Miss Taylor, who gave up her Swiss residence, though not her Swiss bank accounts.
The 1962 law got to be known as the William Holden Law, and no one resents this more than Mr. Holden, who points out that he was a relative latecomer to Switzerland. “I didn’t come here until 1959,” he points out, “so I only got three years before they pulled up the ladder.” Furthermore, he has proved himself to be less fickle than Miss Taylor and has stayed on even though the tax advantage has gone. He owns a large villa on the lake outside Geneva which he calls “Beau Jardin,” and he has remodeled it extensively—adding rooms, combining others by tearing down partitions, installing huge glass window-walls which “the Swiss builders don’t understand—they want rooms like little caves.” And now his Swiss villa would look right at home on Stone Canyon Road in Bel Air.
“I’ve stayed on for a variety of reasons,” Holden says. “With my own lack of education, I wanted my sons to be bilingual, or perhaps trilingual.” The two boys were teenagers when the Holdens arrived, and have since spent ten years at Swiss schools. “Also, Geneva is sort of halfway between New York, where I go frequently, and Kenya, in Africa, where I have interests. I’m a wildlife nut, you know. But what I like best is the way the Swiss respect the individual. They might be curious, but they’re too civilized to invade your privacy. This is something we’re losing in the United States, probably because of our bureaucratic form of life. The press here respects your privacy always. The pre
ss here wouldn’t dream of asking a question about your private life. In the U.S., the press dwells on tragedy. If there’s an accident, they can’t wait to get to the poor victim to interview him on his experience. Americans seem to have become more watchers than doers. The Swiss believe in everybody attending to his own business. It gives life here this wonderful sense of peace and quiet.”
Peter Viertel, the sportsman-novelist and husband of Deborah Kerr, who was first attracted to Switzerland by the skiing, as his wife was by its offer of a shelter from British taxes, is somewhat less generous in his appraisal of Swiss life. Perhaps he is simply too active a man to settle happily into an atmosphere of perpetual relaxation and avoidance of care. Viertel says, “It’s an easy country to live in. It gives you a feeling of safety. But the stimulation of the conversation here is nil. You read the newspapers, you listen to the radio, and you talk to your friends, but you’re not a part of a going community where you discuss things with people who have views other than yours. You have to get out from time to time. Otherwise you get rock-happy—like living on a magic island. But there’s one good thing about living in an isolated cell like this. When you go to Paris or London or wherever, you’re like the new boy coming to town. You get a bigger thrill when you see your friends again, and they’re much happier to see you than if you’d been there all along.”
Life in a never-never land can become a tiny bit boring. But the Alpine Set is, after all, a notably mobile one. They do get out from time to time. The Viertels, for instance, also spend a certain amount of time sunning themselves at Marbella, on the coast of Spain. To the less well-heeled, it is a different story. Stuart Dalrymple, an American businessman who was stationed for ten years in Switzerland before returning to the United States, says, “Actually, we retreated. Our life in Geneva made Zelda and Scott’s existence look like a Cub Scout picnic. At the end of a decade, with two girls unable to articulate in English, a more than slightly jaded patina on our not-so-rosy cheeks, and no roots whatever, we opted to come home.” The Dalrymples now find the good life in Massachusetts.
Imagine a movie starring David Niven, James Mason, Noel Coward, with the porcelain beauties of Deborah Kerr and Audrey Hepburn (who still keeps a chalet in the pines above Rolle), all set in a landscape where the real estate goes for about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars an acre. William Holden will play the handsome American. You can see what sort of gilded and mannered story would have to ensue. In a way, it is as though the members of the Alpine Set had written their own script, and were acting out their lives in a setting of their own devising. You can see why Elizabeth Taylor wouldn’t stay. Switzerland is just not suited to her broad style. Neither was it to Van and Evie Johnson’s, who hated it. “I suppose one can’t expect people like that to come and sit by a lake and give little dinners,” says Noel Coward, whose recent little dinner was for a visiting Sir Laurence Olivier.
Members of the Alpine Set see a lot of each other—English-speaking souls cluster together—and the titled and celebrated from all over the world are always passing through Switzerland (to visit their doctors or their banks), but life is not without controversy. The Old Guard—the Chaplins, Noel Coward, et al.—tend to think of William Holden’s Hollywood-type house as a bit too much. “You approach it by boat,” says Sir Noel with famous disdain, “through water that is absolutely awash with French letters. There’s a walkie-talkie from the pier to the house, but it doesn’t always work, and so the boatman has to announce you by shouting at the top of his lungs: ‘Four people coming up for tea!’”
Then there is the somewhat mysterious presence of a young American named Bernard Cornfeld. Starting with brains, chutzpah, and very little else, Bernie Cornfeld built up a mutual-fund empire, Investors Overseas Services, Ltd., that at one point was estimated to be worth over two billion dollars. The Cornfeld empire has, of course, collapsed, dragging down all sorts of other people with it. But Cornfeld himself remains very much on the scene in Geneva where, it is assumed, he emerged from the tatters of his company with a sizable personal fortune.
He is a smallish man with a pixie face who wears his blond hair in a long and flowing style, and whose taste in clothes runs to belted silk jump suits with flaring lapels. A bachelor, he still lives in the vast stone castle he bought when he was at the height of his powers, and his house is still filled with miniskirted bunnies, tourists, and itinerant hippies whom he leads, Pied Piper fashion, on water-skiing parties by day and boisterous pub-crawling by night. His social behavior is outrageous. He shows up at formal dinner parties three hours late, often barefoot, with his colorful retinue in tow, and insists on sitting on the floor to eat. In the old days, when he was considered a financial force (it was once said he could buy all of Switzerland if he wished), this sort of behavior was tolerated, and when Bernie and his friends swung into such spots as Griffin’s, a Geneva discotheque, the room would snap to attention. Now that he has fallen from financial grace, he is regarded as really nothing more than a semi-amusing curiosity.
Bernie Cornfeld doesn’t seem to belong in such a quietly rich right place as Switzerland. He would seem a little out of place in our movie. But perhaps not. After all, Walt Disney often tossed a good-natured buffoon, a kind of village idiot, into the plot to addle the waters of his fantasy, pretty-pretty world. A little comedy relief is welcome, even in Munchkinland. And Switzerland, true to form, is allowing Bernie Cornfeld to settle slowly into the elegantly turned woodwork and perhaps, in a year or so, the slight blemish his presence creates will have disappeared, by hocus-pocus, altogether.
Photo by Slim Aarons
Fairfield County’s contented commuters
8
Fairfield County: Perilous Preserve
It is probably harder to maintain anonymity and privacy of wealth in the United States than in a country like Switzerland, which virtually has privacy written into its constitution. It is difficult to tuck an American fortune behind a protective alp, much as one might like to try.
Not long ago a young woman was walking her two dogs along a shaded road in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she and her husband had just built a new house, and an automobile drew up beside her and the driver opened his window and inquired, “Can you tell me where the Rich family lives?” After a puzzled moment, the young Greenwich matron replied, “Well, I think that adjective would really apply to every family here.” Obviously, the motorist was looking for a family named Rich. But the Greenwich lady’s reply was not inappropriate to Greenwich, nor to other parts of Connecticut’s Fairfield County. Here, according to the fond belief of many of the residents, in this roughly triangular piece of real estate in the southwestern corner of the state, is contained the greatest concentration of wealth—in many cases anonymous wealth—of any county in the United States. Here (again in Greenwich) was where a woman, when asked why she chose to live there, answered simply, “Because we’re so rich.”
Actually, by dollar-count, Fairfield is not the richest American county, but only the tenth richest. The richest, officially, is Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfield lags behind even Bergen County, New Jersey. But, loyal Fairfieldians point out, Fairfield County in addition to such luxurious towns as Greenwich, Darien, New Canaan, Westport, Weston, Fairfield, and Southport, also includes the sprawling city of Bridgeport. Bridgeport, with its air redolent of brassworks, may qualify as one of America’s least attractive cities, and is facing the problems—urban decay, racial disunion, poverty—of other industrial towns its size.
Fairfield County also includes such small industrial towns as Stamford, Danbury, and Norwalk, which have their share of similar woes. When one thinks, in Fairfield, of Fairfield County, one does one’s best not to think of these places; one edits them out of the mind, as it were. When Dorothy Rodgers, wife of the composer, first moved to Fairfield County she volunteered to do some Red Cross work in Bridgeport. She was told, gently but firmly, that it would “not be appropriate” for her to work in Bridgeport, a short drive from her h
ouse, but in Greenwich instead, which lay a fair distance down the pike. As for Danbury, most Fairfield people seem unaware that it is even in the county, and look startled when reminded that it is.
When one has subtracted these cities and their immediate environs from the rest of Fairfield County, what is left can be described as one of the most beautiful residential areas in the country. The southern rim of the county faces Long Island Sound, a jagged, rocky coastline with hundreds of tiny coves and harbors, secluded beaches, and gently rocking deep-blue water dotted with diminutive offshore islands and, on any summer weekend, clouds of sailboats. Inland (there are two kinds of people in Fairfield County, “water people” and “backcountry people”) the land rises in a series of wooded hills threaded by bright streams and narrow, winding roads. The terraced climbing of the hills means that it is possible, even from many miles inland, to catch, here and there, distant glimpses of the Sound. Across this whole terrain, behind rhododendron-shrouded gates, guardhouses, and even simple mailboxes on white posts, are spread some of the handsomest and best-cared-for houses to be found anywhere. “One wonders,” someone said not long ago, “as one drives along these roads, whether there really are any poor people any more.” On the Sound side of Fairfield County, the look of the place is more suburban. The Sound side is more built-up. The houses, though large and expensive-looking, stand closer together. This is because the prices for waterfront acreage have climbed to the stratosphere, and houses have been built on smaller lots. Back-country, the feeling is definitely rural. A number of people keep horses, and one passes jumping courses, paddocks, and handsome barns and stables. This is hunt country, much of it, and, as it does in Southern Pines, the sound of the hunting horn rings across autumn mornings. Wildlife here is in great variety—deer (a mixed blessing since they devour shrubs and flowers) and rabbits, raccoons, possums, squirrels, pheasant, partridge, and scores of other kinds of birds. Would it mar the pleasant picture of this place to remember that this is also a part of the country where one can encounter the particular problems which seem particularly to beset the affluent and ambitious—divorce, alcoholism, drug problems in the schools? Yes, but this is also part of Fairfield County, and residents shake their heads and ask, “But aren’t these problems everywhere in the country?” The Kiwanis Club of Westport operates a rehabilitation center for drug addicts. Psychiatrists do a good business here.
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