Christopher Taylor Buckley (b. December 24, 1952) This journalist, humorist, and novelist is the trophy son of all-time Pantheonist William F. Buckley Jr. (see William F. Buckley Jr.) and his wife, Pat, known to their boy as “Mum and Pup.” A product of Portsmouth Abbey and a Bonesman like his old man, Chris parted with the legacy in the twenty-first century when he began to misbehave in the public eye: He endorsed Barack Obama (see Barack Obama) for president in 2008, thus having to resign from the board of the National Review, the magazine his father founded in 1955. Buckley wrote one of our favorite novels, Thank You for Smoking.
Tory Robinson Burch (b. June 15, 1966) Daughter of suburban Philadelphia. A graduate of Agnes Irwin School and the University of Pennsylvania, she knows her way around classic American sportswear. Her signature ballet pump, the Reva, and blouses and dresses are sold in boutiques in East Hampton, Greenwich, Palm Beach, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and Bellevue, Washington.
George Walker Bush (b. July 6, 1946) The oldest child of George H. W. and Barbara Bush attended the family schools of Andover and Yale. Though just an average student, he was tapped, like the previous Bushes, into Skull and Bones. After college, “Dubya” dabbled in a few careers. He would have preferred to have been named baseball commissioner (no objections here). Instead, he became the forty-third President of the United States. Typical quote: “I was raised in the West. The west of Texas. It’s pretty close to California. In more ways than Washington, D.C., is close to California.”
Mary Stevenson Cassatt (May 22, 1844–June 14, 1926) From a good Pennsylvania family, young Mary became serious about painting as a teenager. Cassatt was able to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia as long as she didn’t expect to pursue this work professionally. Unlike men, women were not permitted to draw from live models, and Cassatt got her mother to agree to spend time in Europe as her chaperone while she studied and copied masterpieces. Eventually, taken under the wing of Edgar Degas, Cassatt made her life as a painter, as an expatriate, and as an unmarried woman. She is considered the greatest female Impressionist.
Stockard Channing (b. February 13, 1944) Named Susan Antonia Williams Stockard at birth, this native New Yorker lived on the Upper East Side and attended Chapin before heading off to Madeira in Virginia. She hated her name (see Sigourney Weaver), and while attending Radcliffe married a fellow named Walter Channing when she was nineteen—and became Stockard Channing. (Though they were divorced within four years, the name stuck.) With some good reviews for small projects, Channing was finally noticed in a big way when she played tough teenager Betty Rizzo in the movie musical Grease in 1978; she was thirty-four. Channing won awards for her work as Ouisa, the mummy, in both the Broadway production and film of Six Degrees of Separation. She won an Emmy for her work on The West Wing. She has been married and divorced four times, and when not working, Channing lives with her boyfriend in Maine.
Cornelius Crane “Chevy” Chase (b. October 8, 1943) A fourteenth-generation New Yorker, listed in the Social Register, Chase has ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower, played a role in the American Revolution, and were early mayors. He attended the Stockbridge School, graduated from Riverdale Country School, and went to Bard, where he dated Blythe Danner (see Gwyneth Paltrow) and played in a band with “Bardons” Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan. From the National Lampoon Radio Hour alongside John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and Bill Murray, it was an easy segue to Saturday Night Live, where Chase delivered his signature line, “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not.” Long, lean, and cute, he was a leading preppy crush of the late 70s and 80s.
Julia Carolyn McWilliams Child (August 15, 1912–August 13, 2004) Formidable, both in height (6’2") and in accomplishment, the Pasadena native graduated from Katherine Branson and then went on to Smith, earning her BA in 1934. After doing copywriting for a high-end furniture store, she worked for the OSS during World War Two, where she was posted in China and Sri Lanka (née Ceylon) and helped create a shark repellent to keep them from bumping into and detonating Allied bombs. She married Paul Child in 1946 and, on moving to France, learned how to cook. The rest of her story is available on DVD as Julie and Julia (see Meryl Streep).
Stephen Tyrone Colbert (b. May 13, 1964) The youngest of the eleven Colbert children of South Carolina, and the only one who insists on the French pronunciation of their surname, Stephen Colbert was neither class clown nor misfit. He graduated from Charleston’s Episcopal Porter-Gaud School, then went on to Hampden-Sydney College (the preppiest college in the United States), whence he transferred to Northwestern for his last two years, ultimately ending up within the Second City hemisphere. Eventually joining The Daily Show, he is the spin-off supremo, winning awards for truthiness and the American way.
Anderson Hays Cooper (b. June 3, 1967) Former child model for Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren, Cooper is best known for being a broadcast journalist for CNN. The son of socialites Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper and Wyatt Emory Cooper, Anderson graduated from the Dalton School and Yale University. Following in many distinguished and shadowy Yale footsteps, he spent a couple of summers interning at the Central Intelligence Agency but decided against a career as a spy in favor of being the original host of ABC TV’s The Mole.
Charlotte Curtis (December 19, 1928–April 16, 1987) Born in Chicago to a surgeon and the first woman diplomat who held field posts in Haiti, Panama, and Switzerland, Curtis graduated from the Columbus (Ohio) School for Girls and then Vassar. She arrived at The New York Times in 1961. By 1965 she was the editor of the Family/Style section, winning fans for her witty reporting. It was she who quoted Leonard Bernstein at his “radical chic” fund-raiser for the Black Panthers as saying, “I dig absolutely.” (See Leonard Bernstein. See Tom Wolfe.) Always ladylike in appearance, even in the very male newsroom, Curtis wore French perfume and high heels, and her hair was always impeccably done. In 1974 she was promoted to editor of the op-ed page, making her the first woman on the editorial masthead. She maintained that position for eight years. A collection of her articles, The Rich and Other Atrocities, was published in 1976.
Edward Bridge “Ted” Danson III (b. December 29, 1947) Kent School, Stanford—Carnegie Mellon, BFA. With great savoir faire, Ted Danson has become the ultimate prep multitasker: at publication he was appearing on two HBO comedies simultaneously: Curb Your Enthusiasm and Bored to Death. Natch, it was his finesse in playing ladies’ man and alcoholic barkeep Sam Malone in Cheers that puts him in the Pantheon. Why? Because it was set in the heart of Yankeedom, Boston.
Bruce MacLeish Dern (b. June 4, 1936) When you watch actor Bruce Dern in the movies or on Big Love, does it occur to you that you are watching a Choate and Penn graduate, the grandson of a former governor of Utah, a nephew of American poet Archibald MacLeish, the godson of Adlai Stevenson (see Adlai Stevenson) and Eleanor Roosevelt (who used to babysit for young Bruce)? Didn’t think so. Furthermore, Dern played Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, starring Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan, and Sam Waterston (see Sam Waterston) as Nick Carraway.
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (July 25, 1844– June 25, 1916) Born in Philadelphia before the Civil War, Thomas Eakins was the son of a “master calligrapher.” He went to Central High School, the best public school in that city, where his talent for drawing was noted. Next it was the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (see Mary Cassatt); there his interest in the human body almost made him consider a career as a surgeon. Eakins studied anatomy at Jefferson Medical College for a year, and then went to Paris to study with the Orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme at l’École des Beaux Arts. Eakins was also happy to paint from nude models, which wasn’t yet done in the United States. Upon returning to Philadelphia, Eakins became a teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he had only recently studied. Passionate about precision and locomotion, he made his first sale with a picture of a sculler whose shoulder muscles’ strain was evident. Rowing was an earl
y theme, and he encouraged his students to look at the human body—even sending them to observe medical dissections. Instead of drawing from wax molds, he preferred the use of photographs, like those of Eadweard Muybridge, who broke down movements into each and every motion. Probably Eakins’s best-known painting, The Gross Clinic, was considered, in fact, gross for its time (1875). Eakins became appreciated, sadly, after his death.
Fantastic Mr. Fox (b. 1970) Although the son of a single father, British writer Roald Dahl, Mr. Fox (“Foxy” to his missus) has certainly earned his place here. He was born in England but has lived around the world, thanks to George Allen & Unwin Ltd., Alfred A. Knopf, Rizzoli, Viking, Puffin, Collins, Dorling Kindersley, Bantam—and that’s just in the English language. We admire Fox for his reliance on wearing corduroy suits—even at leisure—his laissez-faire attitude towards his newspaper job, and making his naughty streak (stealing chickens and cider) work for him and his family. Director Wes Anderson (né Wesley Mortimer Wales Anderson, St. John’s School, Houston) certainly understood Fox’s preppiness; allowing George Clooney to voice him with his devil-may-care mammal voice was inspired.
Jane Fonda (née Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda) (b. December 21, 1937) Greenwich Academy, Emma Willard School, Vassar College. The fact that the “Barbarella”–“Hanoi Jane”–“Workout Jane” daughter of Henry Fonda and former wife of media magnate Ted Turner (see Ted Turner) is an honest prep should surprise no one. Fonda has the finest elocution of any American actress, not to mention perfect posture. Her activism makes her a black-sheep preppy, her activity keeps her young.
Jodie Foster (b. November 19, 1962) One of the few actors around who can and does dub herself whenever one of her films is distributed in a French-speaking country, Jodie Foster was born Alicia Christian Foster in Los Angeles. By the time she was three, she was appearing in commercials (she was a “Coppertone baby”), and soon she was starring in Disney productions. None of this sounds like a typical prep biography, and it is not. Yet Foster applied herself academically, becoming the valedictorian of her class at the Lycée Français in Los Angeles, and then went on to Yale. Today she is an Oscar-winning actress who wears either jeans or Armani.
Alan Stuart Franken (b. May 21, 1951) The junior senator from Minnesota, Franken attended the Blake School in Minneapolis, where he was a varsity wrestler. More important, he began a long partnership with classmate Tom Davis, with whom he wrote comedy. He graduated from Harvard cum laude with a degree in political science. As the professional writing team of Franken and Davis, the two young men moved to New York, where they were staff writers for the new Saturday Night Live (a postgraduate program of Harvard College). Initially they shared a weekly salary of $350. Franken went on to perform in the show, and earned three Emmy awards for his work. He also named his daughter Thomasin, in tribute to his professional partner. He was a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 2003. Moving on to writing books and hosting the flagship show on Air America Radio, Franken has been a staunch progressive who’s supported and visited the troops in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. You might think he was admitted to the Pantheon only for his unwavering choice of traditional tortoise-shell glasses; in fact, it was his understated restraint as he waited through the endless recounts of his 2008 election vote that wins our admiration.
Theodor Seuss Geisel (March 2, 1904– September 24, 1991) Our beloved Dr. Seuss attended public school in Massachusetts and, according to one of his biographers, “Ted grew to respect the academic discipline he discovered at Dartmouth—not enough to pursue it, but to appreciate those who did.” This explains why Seuss is a stalwart member of the Pantheon. Punished for throwing a party with coeds, Geisel was demoted from the editor-in-chief position of the college humor magazine, the Jack-O-Lantern, so he began to use his mother’s maiden name as his byline. After college, Seuss told his dad that he’d won a fellowship to Oxford. His father was so proud, he announced the news to the local paper. Alas, Ted had misled his father, and had not been admitted to Oxford. Mr. Geisel was so embarrassed, he scraped together money to send his son there anyway. Again, this is a Pantheon-worthy move. Dr. Seuss began doodling at Oxford, where he met his wife. Does it matter that he never got his degree?
Vartan Gregorian (b. April 8, 1934) Though born in Iran, Gregorian represents the prep American dream as a solid member of the prepescenti. After schooling in the Middle East, Gregorian matriculated as a freshman at Stanford when he was twenty-two years old. He earned his degree and his Ph.D. there with honors in history, and moved on as a professor. Within short order, he became a chaired professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the provost there, but then, having been overlooked as the next president of Penn, he moved on to the presidency of the New York Public Library. A social powerhouse in Manhattan, in eight years Gregorian raised a gazillion dollars (Hello, Brooke Astor!) and returned to academia as the sixteenth president of Brown. During his tenure the university climbed up the social ladder of the Ivy League, with titled Europeans and the very rich suddenly choosing to go there. A Presidential Medal of Freedom holder, Gregorian is now the president of the Carnegie Corporation. He has more than sixty honorary degrees. So far.
A. R. (Pete) Gurney (b. November 1, 1930) Albert Ramsdell Gurney Jr. is our leading playwright. Even the untalented among us who wish to act can find a partner with whom to spend an evening performing Love Letters in front of an audience (the script allows the players to read from it). Having lived the life (St. Paul’s School, Williams College, Yale School of Drama), Gurney has exposed the uncomfortably unemotional private natures of Yankee preps and dramatized our unrequited love, our feelings of being discovered as frauds, and our sexual and professional ambiguities.
W. Averell Harriman (November 15, 1891–July 26, 1986) The son of Union Pacific Railroad chief E. H. Harriman, Averell was raised in New York City. After Groton and Yale (Skull and Bones), he established a banking business with his brother, Roland—Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. is still in operation today. In 1936, Harriman, a passionate skier, established the Sun Valley resort in Idaho as a way to increase revenues for the Union Pacific Railroad. During World War Two, Harriman served as FDR’s envoy to Europe before becoming Ambassador to the Soviet Union. He became President Truman’s Commerce Secretary, then was the head of the Marshall Plan. Harriman was Governor of New York from 1954 to 1958, when Nelson Rockefeller (see Nelson Rockefeller) defeated him. He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for President, losing to Adlai Stevenson (see Adlai Stevenson). As the prototypical elder statesman, he was appointed to major positions by presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He was nicknamed “the Crocodile” by Bobby Kennedy for his snap. Married three times, he is buried in Arden, New York.
Buck Henry (b. December 9, 1930) Born Buck Henry Zuckerman in New York City. A graduate of Choate and Dartmouth, with a glorious career as writer, director, producer, and actor, he wrote the screenplay for Catch-22 and co-wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay of The Graduate, enough reason to be included here.
Thomas Pearsall Field Hoving (January 15, 1931–December 10, 2009) was the son of the longtime head of Tiffany & Company, Walter Hoving, and his wife. A top-drawer upbringing sent Thomas to Hotchkiss and Princeton, where he earned his BA, MFA, and Ph.D. Hoving went straight to the Metropolitan Museum, first as an assistant curator of The Cloisters, the museum’s off-site medieval collection. After a year as Mayor Lindsay’s Parks Commissioner (see John Vliet Lindsay), Hoving became the Executive Director of the Met in 1967, a position he kept for ten years. Under Hoving’s showmanship, the grand museum’s “circulation” increased, as he expanded the physical plant and made the museum swing with the times. Afterwards, he wrote, appeared on TV, and consulted.
John F. Kennedy Jr. (November 25,1960–July 16,1999) Forever known as John-John, he was the true scion of President Kennedy’s Camelot. Born at Georgetown Hospital, John-John attended Collegiate and graduated from Andover, Brown, and the NYU School of Law. Like many of us, he had
to take the New York bar exam multiple times before he passed it. Famously nice and insanely handsome (perpetual holder of People magazine’s “Sexiest Man” title), John-John died at age thirty-eight while piloting his own plane to Martha’s Vineyard. Our collective hearts are still broken.
Alfred Abraham Knopf (September 12, 1892– August 11, 1984) A native New Yorker, Knopf went to Columbia University, where he tasted elitism as a member of the Peithologian Society, a literary club. After graduation in 1912, young Knopf visited the British author John Galsworthy, and decided to try a job in publishing. He started Alfred A. Knopf in 1915, at first focusing on European writers, including E. M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence, and then such American writers as John Updike (see John Updike), Theodore Dreiser, Conrad Aiken, and Willa Cather. In 1960 Knopf sold his company to Random House. In 2010, Alfred A. Knopf published True Prep (though he didn’t know it).
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