Nancy Jane Kulp (August 28, 1921–February 3, 1991) While not a graduate of a tony boarding school, nor of a private college, Nancy Kulp earns her way into the Pantheon the hard way: through work. That plus a dazzling lockjaw as Miss Jane Hathaway on The Beverly Hillbillies, where her character was an uptight, class- conscious spinster who worked in banking (see). Kulp was married to a man for ten years but later in life announced that “birds of a feather flock together.” One can even hear her say it in her inimitable way.
Iris Cordelia Love (b. August 1, 1933) Her most important discovery was the Temple of Aphrodite in Knidos, Turkey, in the summer of 1969. Described as a kind of madcap heiress-archaeologist (you know the type), she grew up in Manhattan, attended The Brearley School, went on to Madeira, and graduated from Smith College. After her great find, this descendant of the Guggenheim fortune turned more of her attention to her beloved dachshunds. She has raised champions who’ve won the Westminster Dog Show, and keeps dozens of dachshunds on her property in Vermont. A lifelong party girl, Love was for years the companion of gossipeuse Liz Smith. According to one article, Love’s criteria for choosing friends are twofold: that her dogs must like you, and that you like to drink. Welcome, Iris Love.
Yo-Yo Ma (b. October 7, 1955) The beloved cellist moved with his family from Paris to New York as a child. While in the 2nd grade, he performed at the White House, for President Kennedy. After high school and Juilliard, Ma, already a world-renowned musician, attended Columbia University before transferring to Harvard. He graduated from Harvard in 1976 and won an honorary doctorate from the same in 1991. It’s not because of his schools, his experience playing for heads of state or on Sesame Street, The West Wing, etc. that puts Ma in the Pantheon. It’s because he once left his rare cello, a 1733 Domenico Montagnana, insured for $2.5 million, in the back of a New York City taxicab.
Rachel Lowe Lambert Lloyd Mellon (b. August 9, 1910) Known forever as “Bunny,” Mrs. Mellon was the daughter of the president of the Gillette Safety Razor Company, Gerard Lambert, who went on to cofound Warner-Lambert (of Listerine fame), which is now part of the Pfizer Pharmaceutical empire (Viagra). (The only mention of Viagra in True Prep.) After her first marriage to Stacy Lloyd, she was married to Paul Mellon, son and heir of Andrew Mellon and grandson of the founder of Mellon Bank. That Mellon. As a close friend of Mrs. John F. Kennedy, Bunny, known for her elegant taste (a member of the International Best Dressed List), was asked to help out with the decoration and art for the White House and, as a noted gardener, was asked to redesign the Rose Garden, which she did. Between 2005 and 2008, Mrs. Mellon donated generously to the presidential campaign of adulterer John Edwards.
James Ingram Merrill (March 3, 1926–February 6, 1995) The American poet grew up in New York City as the only child of Helen Ingram and Charles Merrill of Merrill Lynch. That Merrill. He learned German and French from his governess, before his by-then- divorced parents sent him away to Lawrenceville. He went to Amherst (his father’s alma mater) afterwards, though he had to interrupt his college education when he was drafted by the army in 1944. He returned, and graduated in 1947, and by then he’d had an affair with his (male) professor, who privately published Merrill’s first book of poems, The Black Swan. That volume is considered one of the rarest souvenirs of modern publishing. In 1951, Alfred A. Knopf (see Alfred A. Knopf) published First Poems in a numbered edition that is also considered a rarity. With a significant inheritance, Merrill established a foundation, often subsidizing other writers anonymously. He and his longtime partner, David Jackson, lived part of the year in Greece and part in Connecticut, and eventually added Key West, Florida, to their annual itinerary. As a poet, Merrill had the pleasure of being recognized in his lifetime, winning the Pulitzer, Bollingen, National Book Critics Circle, and Bobbitt National prizes, and the National Book Award twice.
Robert Morris Morgenthau (b. July 31, 1919) If family is destiny, Bob Morgenthau was destined to serve. His father, Henry Morgenthau Jr., was secretary of the Treasury for Franklin Roosevelt. He raised the money for the New Deal. His grandfather Henry Morgenthau Sr. was U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (!) during World War One. Young Morgenthau was raised in Manhattan and graduated from the New Lincoln School, Deerfield Academy, and Amherst College. During World War Two he enlisted in the navy, fighting for four and a half years in both the Pacific and the Mediterranean, mostly on destroyers. After the war, Morgenthau went to Yale Law School and then to the corporate firm of Patterson, Belknap, and Webb, and was made partner. President Kennedy asked him to be the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, a prestigious and high-visibility appointment. Although Morgenthau ran unsuccessfully as the 1962 Democratic nominee for governor of New York (see Nelson A. Rockefeller), he served as U.S. Attorney throughout the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies. Yet as a political creature, Morgenthau was pushed to leave his post by various men in the Nixon administration. In 1974, Morgenthau was elected the District Attorney of New York. He served eight consecutive terms, an unprecedented record. Among the jewels in his prosecutorial crown: Mark David Chapman (John Lennon’s killer); the Tyco crooks; Bernie Goetz, the subway vigilante; and Robert Chambers, the “Preppy Killer” (see); Morgenthau retired from the DA’s office at the end of December 2009. As of January 2010, at age ninety, he had joined the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
Frederic Ogden Nash (August 19, 1902–May 19, 1971) Despite all the right skills and entrée, Ogden Nash never graduated from college. He did graduate from St. George’s, the boys’ boarding school in Rhode Island, and he did matriculate at Harvard, but he only lasted through his freshman year. Among other jobs, he taught at St. George’s for a bit and wrote advertising copy for streetcars before he ended up working at Doubleday. A natural-born rhymer, Nash was famous for his comic verse:
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I’ll never see a tree at all.
He published many casual light poems and became a longtime contributor to The New Yorker. He cowrote the book for One Touch of Venus, the Kurt Weill musical, with S. J. Perelman. The Rye, New York, native was transplanted to Baltimore, a city he loved devoutly. Though he lacked a college degree, Nash spent much time on American college campuses, giving talks and classes.
Barack Hussein Obama (b. August 4, 1961) The 44th President of the United States and Nobel Laureate was born in Hawaii. After a few years in Indonesia, Obama attended Punahou School, America’s largest private school (enrollment over 3,750) from K through 12th grades, went to Occidental College for two years, then transferred to Columbia University, from which he graduated. Obama is a possessor of many “firsts,” including first black president of the Harvard Law Review, meaning he was the top-ranked student in his class there. Creator of the “Beer Summit” in the White House garden in 2009, he has not yet managed to quit smoking.
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (b. January 17, 1964) Model wife, Mom-in-Chief, First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama is admired for her style, her cool, and her intelligence. At 5’11’’, she has arms that look sculpted out of onyx and, for covering up, often chooses cardigans from J.Crew. A graduate of Princeton University (cum laude) and Harvard Law School, Michelle Robinson was an associate at the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin, where she was asked to mentor a summer associate named Obama. The Obamas still cherish their “date nights.”
Conan Christopher O’Brien (b. April 18, 1963) Class valedictorian at Brookline High School, Harvard University student, and president of the Harvard Lampoon for two years, O’Brien picked up the preppy-sounding nickname “Coco” when he became a cause célèbre in the January 2010 NBC late-night coup. His hairdo is lamentably unprep, but (and this is a compliment) his sense of humor is downright sophomoric.
Frederick Law Olmsted (April 26, 1822– August 28, 1903) Where would prepdom be without America’s premier landscape architect? Combining two prep professions in
to his genius, Frederick Law Olmsted designed all or part of so many campuses and parks where we have whiled away the hours and years … Multiple thank-you notes would never suffice. He gave us Central Park, Phillips Academy (Andover, his alma mater), Berwick Academy, Groton School, Lawrenceville School, Noble and Greenough School, Pomfret School, and St. Albans School, as well as many of our college and university campuses: Berkeley, Bryn Mawr, Colgate, Cornell, Denison, Miami University (Ohio), Mount Holyoke, Smith, Stanford, Trinity (Hartford), Rochester, Washington University, Wellesley, and Yale are among his 355 commissions. Hospitals, parks, parkways, historic neighborhoods—indeed, even the landscaping around the U.S. Capitol was created by Olmsted, clearly an overachiever.
Gwyneth Kate Paltrow (b. September 27, 1972) This Spence School graduate, known as “Gwynnie,” was first famous for dating Brad Pitt, then Ben Affleck, and is now married to preppy English rock god Chris Martin of Coldplay. Daughter of prep actress Blythe Danner (George School, Bard College; see Chevy Chase) and TV producer Bruce Paltrow (St. Elsewhere, Homicide), she was raised between the best zip codes in New York City and Los Angeles. As the title character of the feature film Emma, Paltrow needed no extra coaching for archery, horseback riding, piano playing, singing, or her peerless English accent. This Academy award–winning preppy (Shakespeare in Love) is now a blogger.
Sister Parish (July 15, 1910–September 8, 1994). Dorothy May Kinnicutt got her nickname for being the only girl in a gaggle of five children. Her father, Gustav Hermann Kinnicutt, had gone to Harvard and was in finance. She was born in Far Hills, New Jersey, but her parents had an apartment on the Quai d’Orsay in Paris and a house in Dark Harbor, Maine. She attended Chapin and Foxcroft, made her debut at nineteen, married an investment banker by the name of Parish, and opened up her decorating business in 1933. Eventually, her eye brought her loads of important clients, including such names as Astor, Vanderbilt, Whitney, Paley, Mellon, Getty, Engelhard, Annenberg, Rockefeller, and Mrs. John F. Kennedy, when she moved to the White House. Albert Hadley became her partner in 1962. Today, two nice ladies in Bedford, New York—one Sister’s granddaughter—run her company and have a cute Web site.
David Hyde Pierce (b. April 3, 1959) is well-spoken enough to be the believably persnickety sitcom psychiatrist Dr. Niles Crane, a preppy and a Yalie (see). A native of Saratoga Springs, New York, Hyde Pierce arrived in New Haven thinking he would be a classical pianist. There, he discovered he loved the theater, and he performed in everything from Gilbert & Sullivan to Beckett. He is married to TV writer and director Brian Hargrove, and has won four Emmys for his work on Frasier, and a Tony for best leading actor in a musical for Curtains.
Fairfield Porter (June 10, 1907–September 18, 1975) This representational painter who was influenced by Vuillard, Bonnard, and de Kooning grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, majored in art at Harvard, and stayed on the East Coast to live the life of an artist. He studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. Celebrated for his beautiful landscapes, depictions of nice people in the suburbs, and self-portraits, he was also a respected art critic at The Nation and at ARTnews, when it was the art world journal of record. He wrote a series of books about artists, including one on Thomas Eakins (see Thomas Eakins), not because he was a fan but because it was assigned. In 1949 he and his family moved to the prep resort of Southampton, New York, but they spent summers at the house built by Porter’s father on Great Spruce Head Island, off the coast of Maine. He and his wife were married for forty-three years and had five children together, though Porter had a brief affair with poet James Schuyler, who then lived with the family for almost a decade. Porter was also a friend of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Jane Freilicher, and Larry Rivers. From photographs we can tell Porter often painted on easels set outside, in cotton Bermuda shorts or khaki pants.
John Silas Reed (October 17, 1887–October 19, 1920) From an affluent background in Portland, Oregon, Reed, known as Jack, and his brother were tended carefully by their parents; even their little playmates were selected from among Portland’s social elite families. After several years at private Portland Academy, Jack was sent to Morristown Academy in New Jersey to prepare for his college entrance exams. After a couple of tries, he got into Harvard, where he was a member of the swimming and cheerleading teams, a member of the drama club and the Harvard Lampoon, the president of the Harvard Glee Club, and wrote a play that was produced by the Hasty Pudding Club. After his graduation in 1920, Jack moved to New York to live “la vie bohème” as a journalist and a muckraker. Soon he was politicized, and Reed became a respected war correspondent, following Pancho Villa in Mexico, meeting Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, and being arrested several times for sedition in the United States. He is buried in the Kremlin. Best of all, he was portrayed by Warren Beatty in his epic film Reds.
Christopher D’Olier Reeve (September 25, 1952–October 10, 2004) Descended on both sides from early-American patriots, including Mayflower passenger William Bradford and Governors Dudley, Winthrop, and others, Christopher Reeve earned his world renown as the gorgeous young Juilliard-trained unknown who was cast in 1978 to portray Superman/Clark Kent in Superman: The Movie. A graduate of Cornell University, Reeve was a natural athlete who sailed, skied, rode, and flew. As an actor, he felt he came into his own only in the 1990s after the public forgot him as Superman. His career was cut short by an equestrian accident in Culpepper, Virginia, over Memorial Day weekend 1995, which left him paralyzed below the neck. Reeve’s commanding wisdom, drive, and verve enabled him to become one of the world’s leading activists for stem cell research. He led the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation until he died on October 10, 2004. He is truly missed, as is his radiant and dynamic wife, Dana.
Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (July 8, 1908– January 26, 1979) The first ever “Rockefeller Republican,” since the term was coined for him, Nelson Rockefeller, grandson of Standard Oil empire founder John D. Rockefeller, was a moderate Republican from New York. Born in Bar Harbor, Maine, he attended the progressive Lincoln School in Manhattan, then went to Dartmouth, where he was in Casque and Gauntlet, Big Green’s club for campus leaders. After graduation Rockefeller followed in his father’s footsteps at Chase bank, at Rockefeller Center, and as a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art. As New York’s forty-ninth governor (see W. Averell Harriman), Rockefeller won four four-year terms, though he retired in his fifteenth year of service. In that time Rockefeller expanded the state university system from twenty-nine to seventy-two campuses, helped create 22,000 miles of highway, founded the Urban Development Corporation to build more lower-income housing, coalesced all public transportation and bridge authorities into the N.Y. Metropolitan Transit Authority, and made a statewide commitment to the arts. In 1974, Gerald Ford appointed Rockefeller the forty-first Vice President of the United States, following the resignation of President Richard Nixon. “Rocky,” as he was known, was always considered a socially liberal member of the GOP. Because he died suddenly while working with a young female assistant, Rockefeller achieved a kind of immortality that most men could not dream about until the invention of the Internet.
Paul Mayer Rudnick (b. December 29, 1957) Gay preppy writer with food issues. First produced play Poor Little Lambs, a drama about the Whiffenpoofs at Yale, his alma mater. Addams Family Values, In and Out, Sister Act (under the pseudonym Joseph Howard), and I Hate Hamlet are some of his other works. He eats candy. Only.
Aline Bernstein Louchheim Saarinen (March 25, 1914–July 13, 1972) If Aline Saarinen had been born in the latter part of the twentieth century, she would have become one of the most famous women journalists in the United States. Though the media world was more quiet, more tasteful, more prep during her lifetime, she left a remarkable legacy just the same. Born to well-to-do Jewish parents in Manhattan, she graduated from the Fieldston School and then was Phi Beta Kappa at Vassar. She returned to New York and married, entered graduate school at the Institute of Fine Arts of NYU, and had two sons by the time she had her master’
s degree in architectural history. She joined the staff of ARTnews, becoming its managing editor for four years. Divorced with two young boys, Louchheim won awards for her critical writing, and was sent to Michigan to interview prominent architect Eero Saarinen (designer, eventually, of the Saint Louis Gateway Arch, the Black Rock building in New York, Dulles Airport, the kinetic TWA headquarters at Kennedy Airport, as well as many familiar pieces of furniture) for The New York Times. They instantly fell in love, and within a year Saarinen divorced his wife and married Aline Louchheim, who became her husband’s staunchest advocate. She continued to work, winning a Guggenheim fellowship, and published a bestselling book. When Eero died, suddenly, Aline Saarinen reinvented herself as a television journalist, entering this field at the age of fifty in 1964. Beginning with documentaries about the arts, she moved into harder news, becoming the third female correspondent at NBC News. At her death at fifty-eight, she was the Paris Bureau Chief of NBC News, the first woman to have been entrusted with an overseas bureau.
Erich Wolf Segal (June 16, 1937–January 17, 2010) That Segal was the son of a Brooklyn rabbi is beside the point. After Midwood High School (Woody Allen’s alma mater), he went to Harvard, where he was the Latin salutatorian and the Class Poet. Segal earned his master’s and Ph.D. from Harvard as well, in comparative literature. Rabbi Segal’s son is not anointed here because of all that learning, nor for writing the kicky screenplay for the Beatles’ animated feature Yellow Submarine. Segal earns his spot the old-fashioned way, for using the term “preppy” as a declarative in his novel, then movie blockbuster, Love Story.
True Prep Page 5