The Golden Dream

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “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 menus and place cards; the menus outlined the courses through the appetizer, soup, meat, salad, cheese and fruit, dessert, and coffee, with, perhaps, a sherbet course somewhere in the middle to clean the palate. Dinner lasted for 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 seen a cocktail shaker in the drawing room. It was a kitchen implement.”

  It was an era so accustomed to entertaining on the classic, grand scale that hostesses were unfazed by situations which, today, would unhinge the average society woman. There were, for example, two prominent Brown families in western Westchester—the Franklin Q. Browns and the Walston H. Browns. One evening, the Frank A. Vanderlips (he was president of the National City Bank) got their Browns mixed. Instead of arriving at the Walston Brown’s, where they were expected, they appeared at the door of the Franklin Q. Browns, who were having a quiet evening at home. Mrs. Franklin Q. Brown, however, sensing that something of the sort had happened, rose to the occasion magnificently. Murmuring to the Vanderlips that she was delighted to see them, and that dinner would be en famille, she then had a quick word with her kitchen staff. Within fifteen minutes, both couples were seated at a place-carded table for a six-course dinner with four wines. The Walston Browns, of course, spent the evening wondering what in the world had happened to the Vanderlips, while the Franklin Browns assumed that they had invited the Vanderlips and forgotten to put it on their calendar.

  A great feature of this turn-of-the-century social life was the Afternoon Drive down Broadway in Tarrytown, a ritual that had been copied from similar promenades in such resorts as Newport and Saratoga. The Afternoon Drive was taken with huge seriousness and ceremony, and to appear on the drive was a mark of social status. Virtually all Westchester society turned out in full fig for these drives in good weather, sitting stiffly and erect in coaches-and-four. The horses wore silver harnesses and were driven by blue-coated coachmen with silver buckles, buttons, and brocade, high silk hats with black or red cockades, white gloves, white trousers, and patent-leather boots with blue or pink tops, everything polished to a gleam. On these splendidly important drives, Vanderbilts and Fields and Goelets, Schwabs and Rockefellers and Archbolds and Whitehouses, smiled distantly and bowed politely at one another, as gentlemen tipped tall silk hats at the ladies. Mr. John Archbold, who, like Mr. Rockefeller, was “in petroleum,” was one of the more imposing figures, boasting not only one coachman but a second “on the seat,” whose job was merely to help the Archbolds in and out of the carriage. Mrs. Jennie Prince Black, who wrote a chatty book about Westchester in those days, recalled seeing Alexander Hamilton II daily during the Afternoon Drive. “He always sat along 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 commented on the presence of “an interesting visitor”—Winston Churchill, “the novelist.”

  Two spinsters, the wealthy Wendel sisters, Miss Ella and Miss Rebecca, kept a large summer place in Tarrytown, which they shared with their aging bachelor brother, J. G. Wendel. The Misses Wendel always dressed alike, in patched and tattered black dresses whose fallen hems trailed in the dust, and in matching black sailor hats which were secured to the ladies’ heads with wide elastic bands beneath their chins. Though the Wendel sisters were not twins, it was difficult to distinguish Ella from Rebecca, and adding to the problem was the fact that they often spoke in unison. Despite their odd appearance and behavior, the Wendels were from a fine old New York family, listed in the earliest edition of the Social Register as well as in its predecessor, the Elite Directory. As an indication of their social prominence, they were allowed—long after New York City had passed an ordinance banning the keeping of large livestock in Manhattan—to keep their cow, Bossie, in the rear garden of their town house at 442 Fifth Avenue. In Westchester, each sister drove her own team of horses, with a groom seated at her side. At the same time, they were notoriously thrifty. Once, when a friend who had not seen them for some time asked of their whereabouts, the sisters chorused, “Why, we’ve been busy mending the saddle blankets for the past six weeks!”

  When, eventually, their horses died, the sisters refused to replace them. Nor, long after other forms of transportation had become more fashionable and convenient, would they travel any other way; wherever they went, they went on foot. Nor was any other kind of traffic permitted to enter their estate. A visitor to the Wendels’ estate who arrived by automobile was obliged to leave it at the gate and negotiate the long gravel drive on shank’s mare, as the ladies did. One day a grounds keeper noticed Miss Ella Wendel walking up her drive carrying her little dog Tobey and in an attitude of some distress. When the grounds keeper asked her what was wrong, she explained that Tobey had got a piece of gravel wedged in his paw. The grounds keeper removed the bit of gravel from the troubled paw and remarked, in passing, that if the Wendels would have their drive paved with concrete, similar mishaps could be avoided in the future. “Excellent idea!” cried Miss Ella. She immediately telephoned a contractor, and within a few weeks, the drive was paved. When the contractor presented Miss Ella with the bill—for twenty thousand dollars—she opened her shabby purse and promptly paid him, in cash. Several years later, Tobey—a mongrel no more prepossessing in his appearance than his mistresses—achieved national celebrity as “the world’s most expensively maintained dog.” It seemed that the Union Club had offered the Wendel sisters five million dollars for their Manhattan dwelling in order to build a clubhouse. The Wendels turned the offer down. It was not, they said, that they minded selling the house; they could not bear to give up the backyard garden. It was needed as a run for Tobey and, of course, for the cow.

  Those few men who, for business reasons, needed to commute from Westchester to New York on a more or less regular basis did so, needless to say, in a grand manner. The late Mrs. H. Stuart Green (a Browning, whose family founded Browning Fifth Avenue stores, formerly Browning-King) used to reminisce about the days when her father commuted to the city on his hundred-foot steam yacht, the Gracemere, named after the family’s Tarrytown estate. “Father and a few of his friends would gather at the pier in the morning,” Mrs. Green would recall. “They would go aboard the Gracemere, where breakfast was served and the morning newspapers were waiting for them. Then they’d cruise down the Hudson to New York. It was slow, but it was wonderfully leisurely and relaxing—such a pleasant way to go to business.” After her father’s death, Adelaide Browning Green kept the Tarrytown estate (though not the yacht), or at least as much of it as she could. Gradually, the surrounding grounds diminished through the steady attrition of real estate development and offers too lucrative to refuse. Eventually, she and her husband moved from “the big house” to “the little house”—not really little, though it had been intended as a guest cottage.

  Sitting on her terrace overlooking Tarrytown—with the new high-rise apartment houses, the fast-food outlets, the smoke of industry that has moved there, and the hum of traffic on the new Tappan Zee Bridge, which connects Westchester with the interstate that leads to Albany “and God knows where else”—Mrs. Green liked to recall that long ago, more naïve, almost forgotten time. “It was wonderful,” she would say. “It really was an escape to come up here, a beautiful dream. This was where it all started, you know, in this Hudson River Valley. There was nothing”—with a disparaging wave of her hand toward Rye and the other eastern suburban towns along the Sound—“over there. Tarrytown was Tarrytown, and Ardsley was Ardsley. These were towns that meant something. The Ardsley Club was founded here—in 1896, just eight years after golf was first introduced in this country; one of the very first golf clubs in America. And
the founding board of governors of that club—John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Chauncey Depew. There were giants in the land in those days, believe me. What’s more, they were gentlemen, and their wives were ladies. People were kind to one another in those days. I sit here and wonder where it went, and when it began to go. I try to tell my grandchildren about it, and they can’t believe it ever was. Sometimes I wonder if it ever was. Perhaps”—a wistful look would come into her eyes—“it was simply all too beautiful to be true.”

  15

  Nil Admirari

  “They never give you anything to eat in Boston. Here, we serve marvelous dinners—terrapin fins in sherry sauce, wonderful lobsters, smoked salmon flown in from Scotland, crown roasts of pork, that sort of thing. In Boston, you’re lucky if you get a cup of clear soup and a bit of tired fish. The food—that’s the main difference between Boston and the Main Line.” This was a Philadelphia woman describing what she felt sets the Main Line apart from Boston. Philadelphia inevitably compares itself with Boston—never, perhaps self-consciously, with the city in whose shadow Philadelphia lies: New York. Possibly this is because Philadelphians, like Bostonians, consider themselves an older, better-grounded aristocracy (“New York is all pretty much come and go, isn’t it?” asks the same Philadelphia lady), with a strong continuity of traditions, breeding, and manners. Philadelphia and Boston, along with such cities as Charleston, Savannah, and Cincinnati, are known to their citizens as America’s Heirloom Cities. The fine things are not only there; they have always been there and, the assumption is, they always will be. In these cities, doing the Right Thing is natural because it has been bred in for generations. But in Philadelphia, Philadelphians feel, the Right Thing is more natural and more firmly bred in than anywhere else—particularly when it comes to food.

  The Philadelphia Main Line is often accused of having so narrow a view that it takes in only itself. Indeed, this sometimes seems to be the case. Several years ago, the late Miss Anna Ingersoll (“When a Biddle gets drunk he thinks he’s an Ingersoll,” is the local joke) was eager to discuss with a friend a new novel that had appeared that year, called The Philadelphian. “What did you think of it?” she wanted to know as she sat in her granite mansion in Penllyn. The friend hesitated, and then said that he found parts of the tale difficult to believe. “The opening, for instance,” he said, “where the Philadelphia society girl marries a proper Philadelphia boy. They go to the Bellevue-Stratford to spend their wedding night, and there the girl discovers that her husband is impotent. She becomes hysterical and rushes out of the hotel and down Broad Street into the night. Then who does she meet but an Irish construction worker who had flirted with her in the past. She goes with him into an empty construction shack that just happens to be handy, they make love, and, from this encounter, she gives birth to the hero of the book. Her husband, meanwhile, has also run out of the hotel, into his fast sports car, and gets himself killed in an auto crash. I found all this a little hard to credit.”

  “Absolutely!” cried Miss Ingersoll. “Nobody would spend their wedding night at the Bellevue-Stratford!”

  The Philadelphia Main Line has often been cited by architects and city planners as one of the most beautiful of American suburbs. Of course, the physical beauty would not be apparent to the casual motorist driving westward along Lancaster Avenue between Overbrook and Paoli, the Main Line’s technical limits. On Lancaster Avenue, the Main Line’s main artery, the developers have laid a particularly heavy hand, and the street is awash in neon, which advertises the motels, silver-domed diners, gasoline stations, and automobile showrooms that are interspersed with prison-like high-rise apartment houses and morticians’ studios. But beyond all this—and not very far beyond—lies a particularly gentle countryside of hills, twisting streams, waterfalls, and meadows, with roads winding narrowly under tall trees, past moss-covered rocks, fern-choked creek beds, sudden ponds afloat with ducks, and houses of brick and local stone gracefully designed to accommodate, and not quarrel with, the landscape. There is no doubt that much of the Philadelphia Main Line is pleasing to the eye.

  And yet, ironically, and unlike Westchester County, the Main Line was not “discovered” by the rich of Philadelphia. The rich, in fact, were virtually forced to settle there. The Main Line, among fashionable American suburbs, may be unique in that it was coerced into fashionability. Also, for all Philadelphia’s claims of continuity and age, the Main Line is a relatively new suburban area, barely a hundred years old. The area was conceived, designed, and developed in the 1870s and ’80s by the Pennsylvania Railroad as a hard-nosed real estate venture. The railroad was not interested in aesthetics. It was interested in making money. When it began pushing its tracks westward along its “main line,” it was naturally eager to develop passenger and freight business along the way. To encourage this, the railroad built a chain of large and reasonably glossy resort hotels along the route, just as Henry Morrison Flagler was to do, a few years later, with his Florida East Coast Railroad, creating such places as Daytona Beach, Palm Beach, and Miami. The Pennsylvania Railroad then, in its advertising and promotion, declared that these hotels were fashionable. They weren’t. Philadelphia is a city that is slow to change its ways. At the time, Philadelphia society, by tradition, lived in either Society Hill or Chestnut Hill, both well within the city limits. Philadelphia snubbed the Main Line, and stayed put, summering, as it always had, in Northeast Harbor, Maine. The resort hotel business seemed doomed to failure. Then the railroad decided to use a little muscle. Applying the kind of pressure that only a large corporation can, it urged its top executives to build expensive homes along the Main Line in order to give the area some cachet and chic. The railroad had become a great social force in Philadelphia, and many wealthy Philadelphia families—whose money came from other endeavors—held large blocks of railroad stock. The railroad applied pressure on its shareholders, too, until the message was clear: Build on the Main Line and help tone things up. And so, reluctantly, almost begrudgingly, the rich of Philadelphia began packing up and moving to the Main Line, which, at the time, seemed terribly far from the Philadelphia Club and the Cotillion.

  It was not long, of course, before the Main Line towns, as in other suburban areas, arranged themselves in a well-defined pattern of social stratification, with some addresses better than others. Bryn Mawr, Villanova, and Haverford became the three most fashionable places, in that order. Gladwyne, however, can, according to one Philadelphia woman, “be either-or.” There is a great—some say the greatest—amount of wealth concentrated in Gladwyne. But Gladwyne, as some people point out, “is a little bit Jewish.” On the Main Line, Radnor is considered “very nice” (“Very nice is another way of saying filthy rich,” says one Main Line resident), and so is Wynnewood, where the Walter H. Annenbergs have their large spread, which makes Wynnewood a little bit Jewish too. Bala-Cynwyd is to Philadelphia what Palo Alto is to San Francisco and what Stamford is to New York—sort of fashionable, but not really all that fashionable. Much of Bala-Cynwyd has become an extended shopping center. Poor Narberth, meanwhile, is at the bottom of the social pecking order. “Narberth just never did have any style,” says one woman. Penn Valley, on the other hand, is regarded as “a very nice young community,” but Penn Valley has a heavy cross to bear. It must use “Narberth” as a postal address. Wynnewood was dealt a similar blow by the Postal Service a while back when it was announced that mail could no longer be addressed to Wynnewood but had to be designated “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19151.” The town of Devon, many people feel, would not make a particularly good address if it were not for the famous Devon Horse Show which takes place there every year, and draws the fashionable from all over.

  Wayne is a problem. It is considered “not a good social address,” but the people in Wayne would live nowhere else. Wayne people stress the “friendliness” of Wayne, and call it “the friendliest town on the Main Line.” To be sure, a great many Wayne families tend to see a lot of one another
and tend not to mingle with non-Wayne folk. “It’s a nice, family sort of place,” says another Wayne resident. And a movie exhibitor who operates a number of theaters in the area says: “It’s very strange. A Walt Disney movie—and I mean a terrible Walt Disney movie—that laid an egg all over town will break box office records in Wayne.” Perhaps this is because the big, comfortable old houses in Wayne appeal to young couples with small children. Or perhaps it is because, as the rest of the Main Line says, “Wayne is just hopelessly square.”

  “Old Maids Never Wed And Have Babies, Period,” is the phrase one is supposed to commit to memory in order to know the sequence of the stops on the Main Line’s Paoli Local out of Thirtieth Street Station: Overbrook, Merion, Narberth, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr—with “Period” standing for Paoli, at the end of the line. Between Bryn Mawr and Paoli, the phrase is somewhat more outrageous: “Really Vicious Retrievers Snap Willingly, Snarl Dangerously. Beagles Don’t,” for which the acrostic is Rosemont, Villanova, Radnor, St. Davids, Wayne, Strafford, Devon, Berwyn, Daylesford.* There is some justification for the preponderance of Welsh, or Welsh-sounding, names on the Main Line: a small group of Welsh Quakers farmed the area before the Pennsylvania Railroad moved in. But most of the communities—Narberth, Radnor, Wynnewood, Bala-Cynwyd, Berwyn, and so on—were given their Welsh names rather spuriously by the railroad, which thought that this made the area sound quaint and Old World and therefore chic. Since then, private builders, developers, city planners, estate owners, restaurateurs, and shopkeepers have added to the Welshification process with names of their own devising—either lifted arbitrarily from the map of Wales or invented and made to sound Welsh—until today almost everything on the Main Line that does not appear to commemorate a member of the Continental Congress has a name that is Welsh-like.