The Right Places

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  It may well be that the IRS is exerting indirect pressure in hopes of breaking down the traditional social structure in the traditional club. Built into the whole club concept, right from the beginning, was the principle of “exclusivity,” and there is no question that those who practice exclusivity are more concerned with keeping people out than with letting them in. Apologists for the concept argue that humans have an essential right to privacy, and to mingle and associate only with others of their own choice; that a group of friends may choose whatever criteria it wishes for admission to the group. This notion, of course, has come under attack in recent years as flying in the face of the broader, more urgent cause of civil rights, and the clubmen have had a hard time trying to defend the special tax status of clubs which are known to discriminate, as well as the fact that members of these clubs have been allowed to treat their dues as standard business income-tax deductions.

  But right from the beginning in 1887, racism and anti-Semitism were part of the whole private-club idea. This, the post–Civil War era, was when racial and religious hate first became apparent as facts of life in America; they existed before, of course, but no one noticed them. The earliest country clubs were structured along racial and religious lines. To counteract anti-Semitic clubs, Jews developed clubs of their own which were intended to be equally exclusive. In Westchester County, for example, the Century Country Club was intended as the specifically Jewish “answer” to the exclusive, non-Jewish Apawamis Club. The Century, furthermore, was designed as a German Jewish Club and, as one member put it, “mostly Wall Street, though we have a couple of token Gimbels.” Other Jews—Russians and Poles, for example—were consigned to the Old Oaks Country Club, where they were said to be “waiting to get into Century.” This is less true today, as even the Century has had to look elsewhere than in the German elite for its membership.

  In New York City, meanwhile, old Spanish and Portuguese Jewish families—fixtures of New York life since before the Revolution—had been taken into the city’s best clubs indiscriminately for generations. These people looked askance, however, at the upstart Germans, who had then to organize a club of their own, the Harmonie.

  Discrimination in clubs has been attacked for longer than most people realize. After his defeat by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, the late Wendell Willkie went to Hobe Sound, Florida, for a rest, where he found that Hobe’s Jupiter Island Club accepted no Jews. He immediately and vociferously objected, threatening never to come back, and the club hurriedly announced a shift in policy. More recently, Kennedy in-law Stephen Smith was criticized by New York broadcasting head R. Peter Straus for taking his family to the Lake Placid Club, a club “that is known openly to discriminate against Jews,” according to Straus. Senator Robert F. Kennedy stalked out of Washington’s Metropolitan Club soon after that, announcing that he had discovered the club was not taking in diplomats from the new African nations. New York’s University Club—though it boasts the Yale insignia, in Hebrew, on its McKim façade—has for years been notoriously anti-Semitic and under attack from Jewish groups since in most cities the University Club is open to any college graduate. Recently, the University Club announced a softening of this hard line.

  The late Ward McAllister, who invented the phrase “the Four Hundred” for Mrs. Astor’s parties, once wrote: “Men whose personality is not remarkably brilliant and who, standing by themselves, would not be apt to arouse a great deal of enthusiasm among their associates on account of their intellectual capacity, very frequently counteract these drawbacks by joining a well-known club. Thus it will be seen that a club often lends a generous hand to persons who, without this assistance, might ever remain in obscurity.” Today, the exact opposite seems to be the case, and it is the clubs, not their members, which are becoming obscure. Has, for example, the celebrity of David Ogilvy, the advertising man, been enhanced in any way at all by his membership in the “exclusive” Brook Club? Roy Chapin, Joseph Alsop, Gardner Cowles, David K. E. Bruce, Roger M. Blough, Winthrop Aldrich, C. Douglas Dillon, and Henry Ford are all members in good standing of the Links. And yet their famous faces are, nowadays, only rarely seen within the clubhouse. His memberships in the Knickerbocker, the Century, and the University Club did not help lift Nelson Rockefeller from obscurity, nor did the Tuxedo, the Union, and Washington’s Metropolitan Club offer a “generous hand” to Averell Harriman.

  The classic clubman—overstuffed, with his after-lunch cigar, dozing in his huge leather chair—is becoming a dying breed. A generation ago, nothing added more spice and relish to the dinner-table conversation than tales of this or that rich man who tried, but didn’t “make” the club—how the elder J. P. Morgan, enraged that he could not get a friend of his into the Union Club, built himself a whole new club, the Metropolitan. Today, all this sort of thing has begun to seem hopelessly old-fashioned. And when, not long ago, at a membership meeting of the Knickerbocker Club, a candidate’s name was proposed, someone said, a little tentatively, “Of course you know he’s Jewish …” the immediate reaction to the speaker was: “What do you mean? Do you mean you want to keep the man out?”

  At the same time, the traditions and the rules which the social clubs imposed upon their members have begun to seem not only antiquated but ridiculous. A sign—NO LADIES ALLOWED ON THE THIRD FLOOR FOR ANY PURPOSE WHATEVER—which for years hung in the Metropolitan Club in Washington finally became the object of so much derision that it was removed. Equally the object of fun is the notice posted on a door in Boston’s Somerset Club which reads: THIS WATER CLOSET FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY; OTHER WATER CLOSETS AVAILABLE ON THE SECOND FLOOR. At one New York club, it has long been a firm rule that no business could be discussed over the club luncheon tables; also, because everyone was supposed to know everyone else in the club, there was a rule that no introductions could be performed. In recent years, members have found these rules increasingly silly and restrictive, and several resignations from the club resulted. Today, these rules have been relaxed, and prospective new members are eagerly urged to pay the old rules no heed.

  Perhaps the trend that members of the National Club Association fear the most, however, is that today’s young people seem to be turning their backs on the whole idea of private social clubs. It is very like what is happening on campuses, where the young are rejecting fraternity and sorority memberships on the grounds (the phrase of the moment) that they are “not relevant,” preferring instead to join activist and political groups trying to end pollution and the Vietnam War. Such staid New York organizations as the Links Club—often considered the most exclusive club in America—are worried about being rejected by youth. The Links, chartered in 1916 “to promote and conserve throughout the United States the best interest and true spirit of the game of golf in its ancient and honorable traditions,” includes so many giants among its members that it has been said that “walking through the Links locker room is like walking through a nude Industrial Hall of Fame.” But the sons of the giants are heading, it would seem, in another direction altogether. Who will be in the Links thirty years from now?

  There is still another social fact at work here. Not only the young, but the oldest guard of society have been gradually placing less emphasis on club memberships. A random glance at a couple of issues of the New York Social Register tells a curious story. Take the case of Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Dow Gibson (she is the former Helen Whitney). In 1950, the Gibsons belonged to a total of fifteen clubs—the Links, the Piping Rock, the Metropolitan, the Meadow Brook, and River, the National Golf Links, the Creek, the Union League, the University, the New York Yacht, the Turf & Field, the Westminster Kennel, the Racquet & Tennis, the Colony, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. By 1967, the Gibsons had cut their club memberships by exactly two-thirds, to a mere five—River, Creek, Piping Rock, Colony, and DAR. The same sort of thing is true of the Winthrop W. Aldriches, who, in 1950, belonged to eighteen clubs. Seventeen years later, they had trimmed their list to a mere eleven. Is it possible that as clubs hav
e become the target and the province of the middle class, they have been falling out of favor with the upper?

  Meanwhile, the National Club Association is busy. It has, after all, an industry involving hundreds of thousands of people, who do everything from manicure golf greens to manicure fingernails, to support. The NCA recently announced a new and successful club called the Mill River, in Upper Brookville, Long Island. Its charter stipulates a membership equally divided between Jews and gentiles, and is intended to reverse the trend of other Long Island clubs “to go one way or the other.”

  In New York City, a new men’s social club has been announced, to be called the New Yorker Club. It will be “private, distinguished, but unexclusive in the usual sense. It will be devoted to interracial friendship.” The New Yorker Club will restrict itself to one thousand members, the only qualification being that members either work or reside in the New York metropolitan area. Behind the club are Richard V. Clarke, a Negro who heads a minority-group consulting firm; Holmes Brown, chairman of the New York Board of Trade; Herbert J. Farber, a prominent public relations man; Senator Jacob K. Javits and Senator Charles E. Goodell; Charles Luce, chairman of Consolidated Edison; Arthur Goldberg, former delegate to the United Nations; Theodore W. Kheel, labor consultant; Orin Lehman, chairman of the New School for Social Research; and advertising man David Ogilvy. Initiation fees for corporate membership will be twenty-five hundred dollars and “must include either the chairman or president of a company.”

  Perhaps the New Yorker Club is the private club of the future. One can only speculate, and agree that it is a new departure. Meanwhile, for those who long for the days when the band, in raspberry tuxedos, played sweet songs on Saturday nights for sweet-smelling and compliant girls, perhaps you had better go back to Mr. O’Hara’s novels.

  In London, meanwhile, the great social clubs—White’s, Boodle’s, St. James’s, the Saville—upon which American social clubs were originally modeled, are still flourishing. In fact, there are some who feel that socially it is more important today for a young London businessman to ally himself with the right club that it ever was before, that the helping hand and lift from obscurity are still provided by clubs on that side of the Atlantic. A recent item from The Times of London would seem to confirm this. The item reported that a certain London gentleman—not named in the story—had applied for membership in a certain club so often, and had been turned down with such gonglike regularity, that he had finally pleaded, “If you’ll just let me join this club, I promise I’ll never so much as set foot inside it.”

  There are some tales that one longs to have be true, but that one suspects cannot really be. The above story is one of these. Can this actually have happened? Or was it a slow day at The Times reporter’s desk and, for his own amusement, did he tap out this little vignette for his newspaper—just to see if it would get past the copy editor’s desk, perhaps? It seems like something very close to sacrilege to doubt the authenticity of a news item from, of all places, The Times of London. But do you really believe that story? Do you?

  Courtesy of the Erno Laszlo Institute

  An Erno Laszlo “symposium,” Dallas

  18

  Where to Get Young and Beautiful

  There is hardly any point in having money—old money or new—if you can’t use it to look your best, is there? While country clubs and city clubs may be languishing, health and beauty spas are flourishing all over the world, and with but one design in mind—to help the rich stay young and pretty.

  Staying young, to begin with, takes time, and time, to use a more than familiar phrase, is money. If you have money, you can buy time—other people’s time. A person who has servants to help around the house can find time for a little nap in the afternoon, little naps that keep you looking youthful and rested. With servants to do her household chores, a woman can spend time before her mirror with creams and masks and jellies, tweezers, brushes, teasing combs, and eyelash curlers. She can take the time to study her face, to experiment with different kinds of cosmetics, to find which shapes and shades flatter her best and make her appear younger. She has time, in other words, to think beautiful.

  Or she can take the time to turn herself over to others—to the masseuse who, for fifteen dollars and up an hour, will tug and twist and push and pound her body into shape as many times a week as a client wishes; to an exercise instructor, like those at Kounovsky’s in New York (where Mrs. Onassis goes and where Mme. Louis Arpels wears diamonds with her leotard), where the calisthenics a woman needs to keep her firm and fit are made a gay social occasion, and not the chore and bore they are when done, alone, on the bedroom floor at home; to a salon, such as Elizabeth Arden’s, where a whole “Day of Beauty” (costing a hundred dollars and up, depending on how far you want the Arden people to go) will tackle the entire woman, from hairstyle to pedicure. With time, a woman (and a man, too, of course) can take up all the sporty, outdoorsy things—golf, tennis, swimming, riding—that are so good for one. With time, a woman can take a week—or two, or three—at a place like the Greenhouse in Texas, where, for about one thousand dollars a week plus tips, a woman can go through a programmed ritual of health and beauty, involving diet, exercise, massage, skin treatments, hair treatments, makeup lessons, manicures, pedicures, fashion lectures, and, for good measure, a little culture (travelogues). With time, which is money, the list of things available to help you look younger is almost endless.

  “To me, it is a crime—a crime,” cries Jolie Gabor, “for a woman not to look her most beautiful, her most glamorous for her husband or her lover. When he comes home at night, she should be freshly bathed, in her most exquisite perfume, in her most beautiful dress, her loveliest makeup, every hair in its place!” Well, yes, but the servantless woman, whose day has been spent with housework and laundry and small children, and who is exhausted by the time she has the roast in the oven, must certainly be forgiven for collapsing on the sofa in her blue jeans rather than stepping into a perfumed tub.

  “Household help is absolutely the one essential thing,” says a New York housewife who happens to be without it at the moment. “If you have help, everything about staying young and looking good becomes much, much easier. Even dieting is easier. I mean, I know it’s easier for Jackie Onassis to keep her figure than it is for me. If she steps on the scales and sees she’s gained a pound, she simply tells her cook, ‘All I want for dinner tonight is a cup of yoghurt and some fresh strawberries’—and it’s done! She doesn’t have to fix the kids’ dinner, so she couldn’t possibly—ever—catch herself licking the spoon from the mashed potatoes. And if John-John brings home an uneaten half of a peanut-butter sandwich in his lunch box, it isn’t Jackie who finds it there and eats it.”

  The older one gets, the more it costs—in time and money—to stay young. This is a sort of natural law—that the richest are able to stay looking youngest longest. There is, for example, the matter of cosmetic surgery, which most doctors now view more favorably (or at least with less disfavor) than they did in the past, on the basis that anything that improves a patient’s appearance will improve his outlook and thus make him feel better. On the other hand, plastic surgery is costly; fifteen hundred dollars is an average cost of a face-lift, and it is not covered by Blue Cross; and since any surgery is a shock to the system, recovery takes time and involves some discomfort.

  The number of cosmetic operations performed in America has escalated enormously—some say by as much as five hundred per cent in the past ten years. At the same time, surgeons who specialize in this work have become much more skillful, sophisticated, and ingenious. The face-lift is now the most commonplace of these operations, and one woman who had checked into a Connecticut hospital for the removal of some varicose veins decided to have the doctor lift her face as well, “just for the fun of it.” Men, in the meantime, have also been getting facelifts in hugely increasing numbers, but not for fun at all. They have found that the lack of puffy eyes and jowly chins has become a definite business as
set and—for that purpose—can become tax-deductible.

  Today, there is virtually no part of the body that cannot be put into trimmer, more youthful shape by the removal or addition of snips and pieces here and there. Women who have weight problems, impatient with diets, now frequently order themselves instantly slimmed, through surgery. According to one doctor, whom his colleagues consider “particularly clever,” if a woman is “too chesty, too busty, I give her my little pinch pleats.”

  While all this has been going on, it is inevitable that some of the business of keeping wealthy people young has slipped into the hands of those who—though not certifiable quacks—possess qualifications somewhat more tenuous. After all, the business of keeping wealthy people young has become big business, and everybody wants a bit of the action. The relatively new (in the United States, that is) technique of facial peeling is still the subject of much controversy, and a number of practitioners have found themselves in serious difficulties with the courts and have even gone to jail. The process, by which the outer layer of skin—along with the accompanying wrinkles—is peeled away through the application of chemicals, must, to be legal, be performed by a licensed M.D. It is reasonably uncomfortable, and for a time after the operation, peeled people do not look very presentable and are well advised not to appear in public. But this does not mean that peeling cannot be fun. Mrs. Marjorie Merriweather Post Close Hutton Davies May, an elderly beauty, makes a game of it. Every year or so, she invites her doctor and three close friends to her Palm Beach house and all four ladies have themselves peeled. In the sequestered days that follow, they are a congenial foursome for bridge.