A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth

by Louis Auchincloss

  The kind of dissipation of large fortunes in gambling and women that forms such a staple for novelists of nineteenth-century French fiction was never a characteristic of American society, even in the South, though it certainly existed, and made a kind of surreptitious appearance in the New York of the 1880s and '90s. Certainly by the time of my father's generation (he was born in 1886), the sacredness of capital was an established creed, and even the Vanderbilts (George of Biltmore always excepted) probably lived within their incomes. The work ethic applied to all. My father had two brothers-in-law born wealthy men who lost the bulk of their fortunes by insisting on managing their money themselves rather than leaving it to professionals. "Had they been beachcombers," Father used to say, "they'd be rich men today."

  I can't think of a single example among my contemporary friends and relations who dissipated a substantial inheritance. Many vastly increased them. Some parents were ingenious in training their offspring in the care and management of money. The Rockefellers are perhaps the extreme example of a family whose members were successfully taught financial responsibility from an early age.

  The father of my friend Bill Scranton, former governor of Pennsylvania, gave Bill, when we were at Yale, a much larger allowance than other students. But with it went the responsibility for two poor relatives who would presumably be destitute if Bill blew it all. Even bribes in the family, theoretically meretricious, sometimes worked. I know of a case where an idle youth with bad marks was turned into a star by the lure of a glittering motorcycle. He went on to become a Wall Street magnate.

  A common objection to inherited wealth is that it stifles the urge to work. I have not generally observed this to be true, except in cases where the individual involved would probably not have achieved very much had he toiled in the vineyard. My richest friend and contemporary, Marshall Field IV, whom I met in law school, is sometimes cited as a victim of wealth; he succumbed at age fifty to drugs. But his nervous troubles were a matter of tragic inheritance; the story of the Fields is like that of the House of Atreus.

  I pause for a moment with Marshall. The first thirty years of his life were wonderful ones. He seemed blessed of the gods. He had looks, brains, health, charm, a lovely and loving wife, a devoted family, many interesting and lively friends, and pots of gold. At Virginia Law School, where he and I were classmates, he was Notes editor of the Law Review and president of the law school and of the university's honor court. The honor system was sacred at Virginia: the most honorable of the students, and they were fine men indeed, would not hesitate to turn in their best friends for cheating. I remember watching Marshall preside at a session of the court when the mother of the defendant rose and screamed, "Are you, Marshall Field, son of one of the richest men in this country, going to disgrace my poor boy for life by throwing him out of this university?"

  When Marshall joined me later he was mopping his brow. "There's got to be an easier way to make a living," he muttered.

  In the war he served creditably as an officer aboard an aircraft carrier and in peace untangled the snarl of his father's newspapers, until the Field darkness that had caused his grandfather's suicide and other family tragedies descended upon him.

  I draw the curtain.

  4. A Few Words About Women

  OF COURSE, like most men I judged women by my mother. As the wife of a prosperous lawyer, she had two nurses to care for four minor children, a cook for her meals, a waitress to serve them, a chambermaid to clean the house, and a chauffeur to drive her. Her days were thus free for some not very taxing charity work, lunches with friends at her club, matinees or concerts, visits to museums.

  If a woman were intellectually ambitious, which my mother was, she could take courses at Columbia or the New School. In the hot months, when we moved from town to the country and I was sometimes taken to meet my commuter father on his evening train, I contrasted the sweating cheek that he gave me to kiss with the cool one of Mother's beside the swimming pool. Why was it so great to be a man?

  At my day school in the city I had a friend whose family sent him to classes in a red Rolls-Royce limousine that I greatly envied. I did not much ingratiate myself with Mother when I asked her, "If you went downtown to work like Daddy, do you think that between you, you could make enough money so we could have a red Rolls-Royce?"

  Why should one rest while the other toiled? I didn't get it.

  It was commonly said that because so many women were possessed of great wealth in their own right, that they exercised considerable economic power. It is truer to say that they could have. But all that was left by tacit consent to the men. Women, before they took jobs in the professions, were content with the power they exercised in the home, where they ran the household and the children, selected the life style and the friends, chose the vacation spots and the charities to be supported and even the church to be attended. The problems of finance and moneymaking they didn't even want to hear about. Their attitude was summed up by this bit of dialogue between husband and wife from T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party.

  LAVINIA: It's only that I have a more practical mind.

  EDWARD: Only because you've told me so often. I'd like to see you filling up an income-tax form.

  LAVINIA: Don't be silly, Edward. When I say practical, I mean practical in the things that really matter.

  Men accepted this division eagerly, thinking that they had won, as did women, with more reason. If a woman made her own fortune, except in a conceded territory as the stage or cosmetics, men called her a witch, like Hetty Green. Women didn't care what Hetty Green was called, and they were right. It didn't matter.

  ***

  Mother's woman friends were mostly in their early fifties when an old Groton classmate of mine remarked of one of them (whom I shall call Rosette) crudely but interestingly, that she alone of the group remembered that she was still a woman. I was rather taken aback, but, thinking it over, I began to see what he meant. Rosette had a bit of French blood, and she made the most of it. Her eyes, her gestures, her tone of voice in the presence of men showed not only her awareness of their difference but her pleasure in it. I do not in the least mean that she was provocative or flirty; it was to imply that to her the fact that the sexes had a reason for being differently constructed was always in the picture.

  Did that mean that males had to be catered to? Never. French women are absolute rulers in their own domain. But what did my Groton friend think of the rest of Mother's friends? That they were unattractive, unappealing? Certainly not. He only meant that, to them, the game of sex was over. They had attained what they had wanted: in most cases, a husband, often successful and frequently faithful, and children, largely by this time adult and usually good enough citizens. To describe these ladies: they inclined to be large and strongly built, rarely stout, well dressed but not too stylish, accustomed to deference from those who served them, and with good formal manners that placed their interlocutor on an exact par with themselves, if not sometimes a trifle lower.

  They left all business matters entirely to their husbands, assuming that everything that went on "downtown" was as strictly honorable as in their own pure lives. They ran their sometimes large households with commendable efficiency and sat conscientiously on meritorious charitable boards. They had a good deal of free time in which to visit each other, to read, to go to the theatre, to hear music, to play cards, to visit museums. Most of them were more cultivated and interesting than their husbands, but they all were aware that their lot in life was easier than that of most of their fellow men and were not inclined to rock boats. They would have been angered to be called snobs.

  They wore little jewelry but what they did was very good. Mrs. Clarance Pell, whose husband was the longtime president of the Racquet Club, wore a jangling bracelet of small gold racquets, each representing one of his championships. My mother used to say it was the envy of every social climber in New York.

  The lady I have called Rosette, an excellent housekeeper, was twice widowed and u
sed to boast: "Well, at least I have made two men very comfortable." I doubt you would have heard such a remark from Mother's other friends. To them the husband was merged in the family; the children got equal attention. Mother, who had a way of carrying domestic concerns to extremes, went so far as to assert, hearing of F.D.R.'s polio: "Eleanor must have been glad it wasn't one of the children." But that was just Mother.

  None of Mother's friends had jobs, but there were some like Mrs. Alsop, who were very active in politics, or Ruth Draper, who triumphed on the stage. I liked how one of them defined the words "My rod and staff": "My rod is my church and my staff is my money." Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold a post in a President's cabinet, was known to some of them and admired by all. But she was not an intimate, though she belonged to a tightly knit ladies' discussion group of which Mother was a leading member. F.D.R. at a cabinet meeting was known to have thrown this smiling question to his secretary of labor: "What will they think of that, Frances, in the Junior Fortnightly?"

  Suppose a lady of this order did not find a husband or did not choose to have one. Well, if she happened to be an heiress, it didn't matter. A Frenchman visiting New York was supposed to have observed that it couldn't harbor a really worldly society because it contained so many rich old maids who in Paris would have been married by force. And indeed, he had quite a list: the Misses Anne Morgan, Ruth Twombly, Julia Berwind, Anne Jennings, Helen Frick, Edith and Maud Wetmore. Less richly endowed but still independent virgins might lead social lives not dissimilar to that of their married friends, depending for affection on loving nephews and nieces, but if really poor they were doomed to act as companions to ancient and long-surviving parents. Indeed, this latter was often considered their sacred duty, even where funds existed for a paid companion.

  Suppose the lonely female, even if well to do, was—hush, hush—a lesbian? The term was little used; a preferable one was "horsey." Such matters were better locked in the closet. The particular one in our lives I shall call Aunt Daisy, though she was not related, but a dear friend of the family. She was a large, imposing woman, hefty rather than stout, with blond hair drawn straight over her scalp to knot in back. She wore mannish suits and her love life was hidden but far from un-guessable. What she believed in was almost the exact opposite of everything Mother stood for: that life could, and perhaps should, be lived for the appreciation of art, if one did not have the good luck to have been born an artist oneself.

  Mother was fond of Aunt Daisy, but she never yielded an inch in her conviction that the only really good life was to have a faithful husband enthusiastically at work in a beloved profession and a faithful wife happily raising a large and essentially obedient family. The amazing thing about my mother was that she was always able to see her own case as a thing apart, having no special relation to others, so that she brought a fresh and unbiased mind of penetrating power to the problems of her friends who sought her advice in droves. As one of them, whose happy marriage she arranged in a difficult situation, told me, "I was lucky not to be related to your mother, for her mind doesn't work as well with her own family."

  Aunt Daisy could only pity Mother for what she regarded as philistine principles. Daisy boasted of having heard more than fifty performances of Tristan at the opera house and rarely left town for fear of missing a cultural event. "If you see a tree, give it a kick for me," she used to say to those departing in rustic retreat. She lived amid the large and handsome objects of her prosperous and utterly respectable family, whose money came from one of Commodore Vanderbilt's corrupt judges. New York had its compromises.

  Aunt Daisy was warmly interested in any of her friends' children who showed the least intellectual curiosity, and her talk of art in any form was witty and amusing. Her quotations, mostly of poetry, were wonderfully relevant to the subject under discussion; she was the first person to make me aware of pleasures that were of only tertiary importance to my parents.

  But Aunt Daisy's tragedy was my bitter disillusionment. Her increasing alcoholism rendered her inanely sentimental about works of art, particularly music, about which she had formerly made good sense. In an opera box (one constantly loaned to her by a rich and devoted friend) she would ask me to bring her drinks from the bar and wax irate when I told her it wasn't allowed. The sad thing was that her deterioration struck me as a kind of justification of Mother's point of view. To this sorry state an overindulgence in the arts brought one!

  The elderly husband of Aunt Daisy's most intimate friend once described Aunt Daisy to Mother as the "dark shadow" in his life. Did that mean she and his wife had an affair? I hope so.

  A somewhat similar warning though in a different area was offered by a dazzlingly beautiful first cousin of Mother's whom I shall call Sally. Sally's looks and charm had made her a noted figure in society: she had been married twice—the second time happily though both times childlessly—to attractive men about town who shared her epicurean view of a life dedicated to pleasure and the maintenance of a fine appearance.

  Like Aunt Daisy, but in a very different way, she was Mother's opposite, but as Mother's senior by a year, she had dominated her in childhood and the bond was never loosened. Sally, whose closest next of kin was a brother married to a great heiress, had once proposed to leave her own not inconsiderable estate to Mother's children, but had been dissuaded by Mother, who had insisted on the brother's preference. It was a typical example of what I used to call Mother's "magnificent disloyalty."

  Sally's end might have pointed to the moral in a story written by Mother had she written any. Living alone in an apartment hotel as a widow, surrounded by great gaping dolls in wonderful dresses, she took to the bottle and eventually threw herself out the window. A news account described a pillow in her apartment bearing the legend: "Don't worry—it never happens."

  The problem that brought these ladies to the grave was, of course, simply alcoholism, but my young, family-influenced mind insisted on the moral lesson. But there was a third woman in my life who also died of drink and who also lived in striking disaccord with Mother's principles. About her, my mother and I did not ultimately agree. This was Elsa Stanton, wife of Mother's much younger brother, Bill, and the only human being I think Mother actually hated. I'm afraid she was most unjust.

  Bill Stanton, a charming fellow, early orphaned by the premature demise of my maternal grandparents, had emigrated in his twenties to Hong Kong where he could afford, with thirty ponies and the needed houseboys, to lead a life based in polo that he couldn't possibly have afforded in New York. There in due time he had met a merry, plump, twice-married but now free, charming lady, a brilliant figure in the crown colony's smart international society, some dozen years his senior with two grown children. He fell violently in love with her, a passion that never cooled, and they were married, very happily. But to Mother, who had been a kind of substitute parent to this adored younger brother, the fact that Elsa could give him no children, was older, and drank, made the marriage a travesty that she could never forgive.

  The rest of the family appreciated Elsa's high spirits, humor, and devotion to Bill. She also had great courage, which appeared when Hong Kong fell to the Japanese, and she and Bill were interned in Stanley Prison. Joseph Alsop, a fellow prisoner, speaks in his memoirs of the great example in sheer guts that Elsa provided to the other inmates. Her leg had been broken during the siege, but she saved her diamonds from the guards by secreting them in her cast.

  One Japanese officer, with the strange politeness that they sometimes (too rarely) showed their victims, called on Elsa in her cell to ask if they could use her house as an officers club. She wanted to know why they bothered to ask.

  "Because it's so much nicer to have permission," he explained.

  "Well, you don't have permission!" she declared.

  Needless to say, she found the house gutted when they returned after the war.

  Mother's hostility to Elsa (which incidentally was thoroughly returned) lasted unremittingly until the latter's death
from drink. It was quite unlike Mother. Even when she had to search among the family jewels for an appropriate wedding present for Elsa she manifested a sentiment that could only be called savage. Like a true puritan she selected the most valuable jewel of all, a diamond choker with a huge pin, and said she hoped Elsa would stick it right through her jugular vein!

  The columnist Joseph Alsop described Elsa in his memoirs, quite erroneously, as the richest woman in Hong Kong. At her death he said to me, "I suppose Elsa's fortune will be tied up for the children. What will your uncle live on?" A typical Joe question. I replied, "He will live on what he has always lived on: his own income. Elsa left him everything she had, and he has already settled it on her children."

  Part II

  Education and After

  5. Teachers, Beloved and Otherwise

  BOVEE WAS A PRIVATE day school for boys from six to the age of twelve when they were apt to be sent off to boarding school. It occupied a tall brown stone building on Fifth Avenue opposite the Central Park Zoo, through which we were marched two by two at recess but not allowed to visit. That we could do on weekends with parents or nurses if we were not taken to a country estate.