The Kansas City member points out that prospective candidates are sponsored by a member who knows them well enough to secretly complete an application form detailing personal, academic, and professional characteristics. A big part of the application is being able to list family members—related by blood or marriage—who are connected to what they call “Linkdom.” “Once the application is passed around to the membership,” she explains, “we have a breakfast or a luncheon where we sort of audition the women. They think they’re attending a regular Links activity because we have many other guests there as well, but the truth of it is that we are actually looking them over, giving them a dry run, and seeing how they fit in and interact with the membership. Do they carry themselves well? Are they smart, gracious, interesting? Each of the sponsors is told not to inform the prospective member of what’s actually going on, but some of these sponsors have a hard time staying quiet. You know how women can be.”
After weeks of reviewing applications and looking over the candidates, the membership votes and either accepts or rejects the candidate. “If the rules are followed properly,” says the member, “a ‘rejected’ candidate never knows she has been rejected because she actually never knew she was being considered.”
During a trip I took with my parents to a recent Links convention in New Orleans, I joined two Links members in a restaurant for a conversation they were having with a young woman who was hoping to gain admission to the group (the names and some identifying details have been changed) back in her hometown of Chicago. They allowed me the opportunity to listen in and gather my own conclusions on the do’s and don’ts for Links candidates. Lucille, in her late fifties, was from Atlanta, while Charlotte, in her early sixties, resided in Los Angeles. It was Charlotte’s niece, Kelly, a young accountant, who was seeking the advice from the two women.
“First of all,” explained Lucille, as she gestured to the thirty-two-year-old Kelly, “if you’re really serious about this, you should be laying the groundwork long before anyone nominates you. You should be buying tickets to as many Links events as possible. Go to everything.”
Charlotte agreed. “That’s right. Get in their faces and make them get used to seeing you in their circles. When they start seeing you all the time, they’ll start to think you’re already a member.”
“And when they realize I’m not?” asked Kelly with a lilting laugh.
“Then somebody will say, ‘Well, she should be because she obviously fits in!’” Lucille concluded, as if the answer were obvious.
Charlotte jotted a couple of names on a sheet of green-and-white Links stationery. “I can think of some ladies that got in after getting their names out on the charity circuit,” she added. “Maybe you could start hosting some fund-raisers.”
Kelly rolled her eyes slightly. “I think it would take a while to build that kind of recognition.”
“Then think about what you’ve already got working in your favor,” said Lucille as she peeked over at Charlotte’s list. “What do you have that distinguishes you from other candidates? Do you have a big house? A tennis court? A pool? A vacation home where you can entertain members?”
“Well, Jim and I aren’t rich.”
Charlotte nodded. “Yes dear, but you’ve got that lake house you never use.”
“Perfect.” Lucille underscored her point with an “okay” sign.
“And you drive a BMW,” added the proud aunt.
Kelly smiled. “Actually, it’s a Mercedes.”
“Even better.” Lucille jotted down a few words on Charlotte’s paper. “Now what about your husband? Is his company the kind of place that will buy tickets at fund-raisers or take out ads in a Links journal? That counts for a lot too.”
“That’s right, Kelly,” added Charlotte. “It’s all part of the mix, girl. You’ve got to play that up. Work it.”
“But whatever you do, don’t go around telling people you hope to get in,” added Lucille with a broad gesture of her opened hand. “Nobody likes to take in somebody who seems desperate. Just be cool about it and play it off like it’s no big deal.”
“But remember that it is a big deal,” added the older relative with utter seriousness in her voice.
Kelly nodded at me to demonstrate her agreement.
Lucille picked up the pen again and jotted down some words. “And sweetheart, don’t take this the wrong way, but you might go and get yourself some more education—like a master’s degree.”
“But I’m already a CPA,” Kelly snapped back.
“I know you are, but a graduate degree will help your chances,” added Lucille, “especially if you’re going to be going after one of the older chapters. They really want to see as many degrees as possible.”
“Well, she might do better with one of the newer chapters,” said Charlotte. “One of those suburban chapters might be easier for you—especially since you’re not an Heir-o’-Link and don’t have any celebrity ties.”
Because competition for Links membership can be so stiff, even the best advice doesn’t guarantee admission. Sometimes chapters have become divided over a decision to admit or reject a proposed member. A few years ago, a relatively young chapter on the East Coast underwent a bruising battle over a proposed candidate’s eventual rejection.
“She isn’t coming into this club sideways if I can help it,” snapped Ada Evans.
“Well, she seems pretty nice to me, and we need younger, more accomplished women,” remarked one of the other club members.
Ada and several members of her chapter (the individuals’ names and identifying details have been changed) created a minor scandal that sent waves through the group when they blackballed the candidate in order to get revenge on the young woman’s family.
“I don’t care how nice she is,” explained Ada to the faction of women she had persuaded. “I have my reasons, and I’m going to keep her out.” Ada was a Links member of long standing, and she knew how valued each spot was.
Normally, she maintained a neutral position regarding candidates who had been nominated. She acknowledged that she was occasionally swayed by a candidate who had done her or her family a special favor, but today she was influenced by a long-awaited opportunity to settle a score with someone. She had finally found a tenuous connection—and that connection was through Alison Jones-Roberts, a popular young candidate for admission into Ada’s Links chapter.
Alison was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale University, as well as a graduate of Yale Law School and an MBA graduate of Yale’s School of Management. Already a managing director at a major investment bank, Alison was smart, soft-spoken, and eager to be considered by the chapter. A native of Chicago, she had been raised in quiet wealth—the daughter of an engineer and a psychologist who had been an Atlanta debutante and a member of AKA. Alison had everything to recommend her: a good family background, a seat on the board of a world-renowned museum, a strong record of volunteerism, an annual salary in excess of $300,000, and a winning personality.
“What is it that you’ve got against Alison when everybody else likes her?” one of Ada’s friends had asked in a private moment. “We’re lucky she’s not trying to join one of the other chapters,” the woman added. “We should automatically let her in.”
Ada had nothing against Alison or her family. Her reason for keeping the lovely and popular Alison out was to strike back at Alison’s husband, Steve Roberts, who had two years before reneged on getting her own daughter tickets to an inaugural ball in Washington. Although she had met Steve only once, she knew that he had helped out on a presidential campaign. She had heard that he might have access to tickets and had hoped to get her daughter tickets to one of the balls. When the tickets failed to materialize, Ada Evans never forgave Steve. Two years later, the best revenge she could seek was to blackball the woman he eventually married. Alison Jones-Roberts was going to pay the price. Ada launched a campaign to keep Alison out of the chapter. To persuade certain members to go along with her, she promised support
for their own candidates and even handed out all-expense-paid weekends to her summer home to those who assisted her in making sure that everyone who was being considered would be admitted except Alison—including women who had never attended the many Links-sponsored events that Alison had supported. Her final blow was to persuade the chapter to accept even an elderly woman who some members believed was showing signs of senility. Although there was a large division in the chapter, Ada was successful in her campaign.
Perhaps more than any other social club, the Links runs itself by a code of conduct and will even dispatch senior officials from its national office to mediate certain disputes. Unfortunately, some of these actions are never discovered by headquarters until it’s too late.
“This is a wonderful organization, but we can all run the risk of getting too caught up in a high-society, clublike mind-set,” says Anita Lyons Bond, a member of the St. Louis Links. “We need to keep more of our focus on improving the lives of less-advantaged people.”
Even though their monthly activities take up a great deal of time and resources, many of the Links women also belong to other groups like the Girl Friends, Drifters, or Northeasterners, or to sororities like Alpha Kappa Alpha or the Deltas. Quite a number are married to men (“Connecting Links”) who belong to the Boulé (Sigma Pi Phi) or the Guardsmen, and it is, of course, common for their kids (“Heirs-o’-Links”) to be members of—or graduates of—Jack and Jill.
St. Louis Link Anita Lyons Bond, who is a member of the Girl Friends and the Smart Set, is married to a surgeon who belongs to the Guardsmen and the Boulé. Their kids grew up in Jack and Jill. Sharon Mackel of Shaker Heights, Ohio, belongs to the Links and Deltas. She and her husband, a physician, have kids in the Cleveland chapter of Jack and Jill. Hildred Webb, a resident of Houston, belongs to the Links and the Girl Friends. Her husband, John, is a surgeon and an active member of the Boulé. Their daughter, Kim, an attorney, debuted at the Smart Set’s cotillion. The Links membership includes hundreds of families like this.
In addition to growing up in a home filled with the women who founded the Links, explains Philadelphia resident Gwynne Wright, “I was also one of the first children in Jack and Jill.” Her mother, Dorothy, was Jack and Jill’s first national president in 1946. “Once you are a part of one of these groups, you end up knowing many more people in all the other groups too.”
As Phyllis Stevenson sat in the living room of her Tudor home in New Rochelle, she flipped through some old photographs of the prominent families that she had grown up with in New York. She stopped to look at an Amsterdam News photo that reported on her debut at the Girl Friends cotillion in 1952. The photograph showed her in a white floor-length ball gown surrounded by several young men all dressed in tuxedos. The article detailing the event was written by Gerri Major, the best-known chronicler of black society from the 1920s through the early 1970s.
“Mother, I’m trying to remember the names of the four boys who escorted me at my coming out,” said Phyllis as she leaned underneath a light near the piano. “I can see this is Roy, Joseph, and Donald. But who’s the other? Is that Sammy?”
Stevenson’s mother, Anna Murphy, leaned back and briefly stared out the large picture window into a street lined with sixty-year-old oak trees. “Yes, Phyllis, that’s Sammy—he’s a radiologist in Boston now, but you have a short memory,” she said with a laugh. “You actually had six escorts. Two of the boys got cropped out of the picture when the newspaper published the photo.” Anna went on to name the other boys and the respective details about them. One had just graduated from Fieldston at the time of the cotillion, one was now an attorney in Philadelphia, four of them were sons of fellow Girl Friends. The yellowing article was just one of hundreds that focused on the activities and families of one of the most stylish and elite organizations established for black women.
This mother and daughter could only be talking about the biggest cotillion tradition of old black society: the Girl Friends’ Ball of Roses. For years, in many cities, these Ball of Roses cotillions reaffirmed the importance of the organization along with the families of the girls they chose to debut.
What the Links have in numbers and political clout, the Girl Friends can match in social ties and history. Considerably smaller and two decades older than the Links, the Girl Friends is a league of stylish black women who are accomplished, well-connected, and “Establishment.” A high percentage of them are married to physicians.
“We’re a lot smaller than the Links because we’re a lot more selective than they are,” says a Chicago Girl Friends member who notes that the Links organization is no longer as intimate and social as it used to be. “They are all about money, power, and ambition these days. The Links used to be more focused on family background and paid more attention to social status, but now they’ll take anybody in if the woman has got money and clout. The Girl Friends aren’t into that kind of power.”
While it is true that the Girl Friends chapters are less likely than the Links to include large numbers of “power women,” many disagree that the Girl Friends is low-key. Some say that the tight-knit group’s claim and emphasis on old-guard families are unparalleled.
“Those Girl Friends are almost too intimate,” says a Los Angeles attorney who was rejected by the group, even with an Ivy League résumé. “Everybody knows everybody’s business because all the women in the group seem to be the daughters of members, the granddaughters of members, the nieces of members. It almost feels inbred. While the Links are into power and professional clout, these women are over-the-top with their lineage, long hair, and social status. Even their directory seems clubby and claustrophobic.”
While it’s hard to discern which criticisms are legitimate, particularly when they are offered by rejected candidates, it is true that the Girl Friends membership directory offers a surprising amount of personal information on each of its thirteen hundred members—perhaps supplying more information than any other club directory. Whereas the Links directory offers the name, address, phone, and spouse’s name of each member and the Drifters add the member’s birthday, the Girl Friends directory not only presents the name, address, phone, and spouse’s name but also offers a photograph, the occupation of both the member and the spouse, the names of the members’ children, and information on whether any of the members’ daughters are Girl Friends. Many of the members also list the professions of their children.
“Why does the whole organization need to know what my husband and children do for a living?” asks the Los Angeles attorney, who admits she was surprised when she was passed over for membership into the group. “They might as well list where our parents went to college. How is any of this relevant?”
One response to that question is that the families represented by the women in the Girl Friends all place a great value on tradition and position. Others say that such details allow people to understand the historic ties between family members and friends. There is no better representation of this tradition than Phyllis Murphy Stevenson and her mother, Anna Small Murphy. Phyllis was national president of the Girl Friends from 1980 to 1982, and her mother was one of the charter members when the group was founded in Manhattan in 1927. Anna eventually served as president from 1952 to 1954.
Although they are the only mother-daughter team in the forty-chapter organization to hold the title of national president, they are quite similar to the other Girl Friends when one looks at their ties to other institutions of the black elite: summers in Sag Harbor since the early 1940s, when Phyllis was a child, membership in the Deltas, education at Fisk University, childhood ballet lessons with Ada Fisher Jones in Harlem, family membership in the Comus, and friendships with some of the most prominent black families in America.
“When we first decided to create the Girl Friends group,” explains Murphy as she relaxes in a living room filled with African art, “most of us lived in Harlem and were just graduating from college or starting graduate school. It was 1927 and I wasn’t even married yet. Sev
eral of us had grown up together, attended the same schools or summer camp in upstate New York, or taken dance or piano lessons together.”
The intent was to establish a club of young women with similar backgrounds and interests who could meet occasionally for social or intellectual purposes. Since they were all quite young, they sought out an adult chaperone to accompany them when they went to public places in New York.
“We asked Bessie Beardon to serve as our chaperone,” says Murphy as she points to a piece of artwork hanging near Phyllis’s fireplace. From a mere glance at the colorful collage, it quickly becomes obvious to me that “Bessie” is the mother of the renowned artist Romare Beardon. It also soon becomes obvious that Anna and Phyllis’s world was populated by many prominent individuals—and some far more famous than the best-known artist to come out of Harlem. I quickly discover that Anna and Phyllis are accustomed to being around people who understand their shorthand.
“One of my fellow Girl Friends was also responsible for giving that piano to Phyllis,” explains Murphy with pride. “You know Mildred Johnson. It was Rosamond’s.” Deciphering the shorthand, I realized that the late-nineteenth-century piano had been owned by composer J. Rosamond Johnson, brother of James Weldon Johnson, who used it to compose the 1901 song “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—now often referred to as the Negro Anthem and performed at black churches, colleges, and organizational gatherings.
After quiet prodding, Anna reluctantly explains to this outsider, “Rosamond Johnson was the father of my closest friend, Mildred Johnson Edwards, and Phyllis grew up as best friends with her daughter, Melanie.”
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