Brooke Christa Camille Shields (b. May 31, 1965) is not admitted to the Pantheon for her remarkable physical beauty, nor for her academic pedigree of Dwight-Englewood School and Princeton ’87. No, she is included because her handsome grandfather Frank Shields was once a tennis star. We regret to mention it here, but Ms. Shields risked being expunged from the Pantheon for her long-term public friendship with Michael Jackson, her marital annulment from Andre Agassi, and her public brouhahas with Tom Cruise, but her solid marriage to comedy writer-producer Chris Henchy, providing two daughters with preppy names (Rowan and Grier), keeps her within the fold.
Stephen Joshua Sondheim (b. March 22, 1930) An only child, Sondheim grew up on Manhattan’s Central Park West and attended the Ethical Culture School. After his parents’ divorce, he went to the George School in Bucks County, where he became friendly with Jimmy Hammerstein, the son of musical theater great Oscar Hammerstein Jr. Hammerstein père recognized talent and drive in young Sondheim and became a sort of surrogate father to him, as well as a teacher and a boss. After high school Sondheim went to Williams College, and won a prize enabling him to study with composer Milton Babbitt at Princeton. A meeting with Arthur Laurents led to introductions to both Leonard Bernstein (see Leonard Bernstein) and Jerome Robbins. In 1957, Sondheim wrote the lyrics to his first Broadway production: West Side Story. Two years later he wrote the lyrics to another Laurents show, Gypsy. For A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Sondheim composed as well as wrote the lyrics; it played for more than three years on Broadway and won a Tony Award for Best Musical. His show Company, which he produced, wrote, and composed, won Tonys for Best Musical, Best Lyrics, and Best Score. Always a favorite of the critics, Sondheim’s name suggests complicated compositions, devilishly clever lyrics, and an often discernible aura of darkness hovering above the stage. Other works include Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George (for which Sondheim received a Pulitzer Prize), Into the Woods, and Assassins. Sondheim’s songs are usually too intense for medleys, though “Send in the Clowns” has been sung in Las Vegas showrooms. Not that any of us have been to any of them.
Kate Spade (b. December 24, 1962) was born Katherine Noel Brosnahan in Kansas City, Missouri. After her all-girls’ Catholic school and the University of Kansas and Arizona State, Katy, as she was known, moved to New York to work in the world of fashion magazines. As Katy Brosnahan she was an editor at Mademoiselle magazine. With her boyfriend, Andy Spade, Brosnahan began Kate Spade, a handbag company with a lot of optimism and fabric swatches. They married in 1994, and the Kate Spade company, a successful purveyor of clothing, accessories, and paper goods, is now owned by Liz Claiborne. That optimism and an appreciation for her retro aesthetic earn her a spot in the Pantheon.
Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874–July 27, 1946) Coiner of eternal phrases (“There is no there there”; “America is my country, but Paris is my hometown”; “You are all a lost generation”). Born in Vienna, Stein moved to Oakland, California, with her family. After her parents died she was sent to live with relatives in Baltimore. Stein attended Radcliffe College, class of 1897, and then studied at Johns Hopkins Medical School but left after two years. Well known for her salons as well as her alternative lifestyle, Stein lived an enviable life, surrounded by art, the avant-garde, and her mustachioed companion, Alice B. Toklas. She died in France.
Frank Philip Stella (b. May 12, 1936) After an education at Phillips Andover and Princeton University, Frank Stella, influenced by such diverse artists as Caravaggio and Jasper Johns, became a highly regarded abstract painter. Best known for his flat striped and shaped canvases, at thirty-three he was the youngest artist ever to have a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Stella’s work is collected around the world, in museums, galleries, and private collections. As a prolific printmaker, he has made thousands of prints for those with humbler budgets. (And students can decorate their dorm rooms with his posters.)
Martha Helen Kostyra Stewart (b. August 3, 1941) The second of the six Kostyra kids of Nutley, New Jersey, Martha went to Barnard College. This alone would not be Pantheon-worthy. She met Andy Stewart while attending Barnard, modeling part-time, and even working as a live-in housekeeper, and they soon married. Stewart was a student at Yale Law School at the time, so his bride moved up to New Haven for a year. She returned to Manhattan to finish her degree and graduated from Barnard in 1963. Still not Pantheon material. Within two years, the Stewarts had their (only) child, daughter Alexis. With modeling no longer an option, Martha decided to give stockbrokerage a whirl. She did well at that, quickly demonstrating her talent for making money. She started her catering business, Uncatered Affair, with a friend from Westport, Connecticut. That was prep. The partnership unraveled over issues of control, and now Martha was the manager of a gourmet food business in her town. Her meticulousness won her fans, and one of them signed her up to write a cookbook. Entertaining was a smash. More books, and soon products, followed. Out went Andy, though his last name persisted. A brand was born! Stewart has been on a gajillion TV shows, demonstrating her skills in the kitchen, the smokehouse, the abattoir, the garden, and the gift-wrap room. She has become ubiquitous, and when she took her big public fall, she reemerged undaunted and unashamed. She makes workaholics look like slackers. Come to think of it, that’s not preppy at all.
John Whitney Stillman (b. January 25, 1952) Whit Stillman is the only writer-director to date who has sensed the drama within a single deb season and known what it was: cinematic gold. Revel in the preppiness of his 1990 film Metropolitan: “You don’t have to read a book to have an opinion”; “I’ve always planned to be a failure anyway, that’s why I plan to marry an extremely wealthy woman.” Stillman has lived in Europe the last dozen or so years. He may no longer even be an auteur, for all we know.
William Oliver Stone (b. September 15, 1946) Possibly the best-known preppy who is a conspiracy theorist, screenwriter, and director, Oliver Stone grew up in New York City. After attending Trinity School (when it was all male, natch), he went on to the Hill School and then to Yale. Alas for Mummy and Daddy Stone (by now divorced), Oliver dropped out of Yale … twice. He was inspired by his own drug use when he wrote the screenplays for Scarface and Midnight Express. No stranger to controversy, Stone’s film JFK promoted the theories of the obsessed Jim Garrison, the New Orleans DA who believed there was a cover-up. A Vietnam vet, Stone made three movies (as writer-director) set during that war, including his masterpiece, Platoon. He wrote and directed Wall Street and its sequel, Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps.
Mary Louise “Meryl” Streep (b. June 22, 1949) is not only our greatest actress; she is our greatest actress as well. Raised in Bernardsville, New Jersey, in the heart of horse country, Streep went to Vassar, though she spent a semester at Dartmouth when it was still a men’s college. Afterwards, while studying at the Yale School of Drama, she was a standout. Streep, married since 1978 to the same husband (a modern show-business anomaly), has been nominated for more Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Tonys, etc., than anyone else in the industry. She is famous for her meticulous rendering of accents, dialects, and knife skills (see Julia Child). However, we welcome her here for appearing to resist the ineffable lure of the plastic surgeon’s knife.
Newton Booth Tarkington (July 29, 1869– May 19, 1946) Named for his uncle, California governor Newton Booth, Tarkington was a prolific author of many important American works, some of which have been transformed into classic American movies, such as The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams (see Katharine Hepburn), and others that were not, such as the series about Penrod, a mischievous teenager. After graduating from Exeter, the Hoosier went to Purdue University and after sophomore year transferred to Princeton, where he was voted the most popular student in the class of 1893. Somehow, though, despite this award and his presidency of the drama club (now the Triangle Club), as well as his membership in the Ivy Club, the prestigious eating club, Tarkington never graduated from Prin
ceton. He did receive two honorary degrees from Princeton, a record he still holds. Having donated the money to build a men’s dorm at Purdue, Tarkington Hall, NBT also got an honorary degree from Purdue. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for literature, and ran and served one term in the Indiana House of Representatives. He was a Republican.
James Vernon Taylor (b. March 12, 1948) made his worldwide debut at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, as his father was a doctor on staff. In 1953, after the Taylor family had relocated to North Carolina for Dr. Taylor’s practice, they began spending their summers on Martha’s Vineyard, where “Jamie” Taylor began writing and performing. After a few years at Milton Academy, Taylor returned home to public high school and then signed himself in to McLean Hospital, the noted psychiatric institution affiliated with Mass General and Harvard Medical School. Years lost to depression and serious drug addiction never diminished Taylor’s beautiful singing, writing, and performing. Marriage to Carly Simon (Riverdale Country School, Sarah Lawrence) produced a new generation of singer-songwriters, Ben and Sally Taylor. Finally, like many daddies who’ve been married several times, Taylor became the father of twin boys, Henry and Rufus, at age fifty-three.
Uma Karuna Thurman (b. April 29, 1970) is one of the principal movers within the cadre of bohemian preppies. To know of Uma is to be aware that her father, Robert Thurman, is the Columbia University professor and Buddhist monk who married a former model once married to Timothy Leary. Uma attended the boarding school Northfield Mount Hermon as well as the Professional Children’s School in NYC. Instead of graduating from either of them, she was cast in the movie Dangerous Liaisons, naked. Uma, what a wild girl you are.
Andrew Previn Tobias (b. April 20, 1947) Youthful-looking author and financial columnist Andy Tobias attended the Horace Mann School when it was still all-male and therefore way more prep. Afterwards he went to Harvard, where he was a president of the Harvard Student Agencies, which among other entrepreneurial ventures publishes the Let’s Go! travel series that is beloved by the Eurail pass set. By the time he was attending Harvard Business School, he was also contributing articles to New York magazine, among others. Tobias has written thirteen books, including Fire and Ice and The Best Little Boy in the World, which was a fictionalized account of his life growing up gay. It was first released under the pen name of John Reid (don’t see John Reed) in 1973. It was reissued under his own name and expanded in 1998. Tobias has been the treasurer of the Democratic National Committee since 1999.
Robert Edward “Ted” Turner, III (b. November 19, 1938) The son of privilege, Ted was born in Cincinnati, but his family decamped for Savannah when he was nine. A graduate of McCallie School, he went on to Brown where he studied Classics. His dad, a billboard entrepreneur, reacted to this news by writing his son that he “almost puked.” No problem. Ted was expelled when a girl was found in his dorm room. Besides giving the world CNN and all the various Turner cable networks, Turner is outspoken in the extreme. His 590,823-acre ranch in New Mexico is the largest parcel of land in private hands in the United States, and his estancia in Patagonia is 93,900 acres (he owns eleven other ranches). A talented sailor (America’s Cup winner) and a philanthropist, he is referred to by his third wife, Jane Fonda (see Jane Fonda) as “my favorite ex-husband.”
John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932– January 27, 2009) Born and raised in Shillington, Pennsylvania, the area and topography he would use as the settings for his major Rabbit novels, John Updike was co-valedictorian of Shillington High School. He won a full scholarship to Harvard, where he was president of the Harvard Lampoon and graduated cum laude with a degree in English, and a Radcliffe wife. At this point Updike dreamt of becoming an artist, and he won a fellowship to study at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford. He also sold his first short story to The New Yorker. In 1955 he was offered a column there, and soon he was able to move to Massachusetts while supporting his family as a writer. This began his long, distinguished, prolific, and rich life as a writer of fiction, poetry, essays, and art criticism, as well as his long association with The New Yorker. For all his industry, his reputation and sheer artistry, he remained humble, seeing himself as a chronicler of the “Protestant middle class.” He wrote about sex frequently, lustily, as if still a young man. Updike married twice and had four children. He also won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. In later years, Updike would interrupt his writing day for another passion: twice weekly golf games at Myopia Hunt Club.
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr. (b. October 3, 1925) As the only child of colorful parents, Gore Vidal had a lot to live up to. His father, West Point’s first aeronautics instructor, was said to have been Amelia Earhart’s great love. The elder Vidal was an all-American quarterback who helped found what became Eastern Airlines, Northeast Airlines, and TWA. Gore’s mother was an actress and socialite who had had a long on-and-off affair with Clark Gable, and who became, through remarriage, distantly related to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Vidal attended Sidwell Friends School and St. Albans in Washington, D.C., before going off to Exeter. He served with the army during World War Two, and had his first book published at nineteen. Although he is said to have had affairs with women—including Anaïs Nin, and he was once engaged to Joanne Woodward—Vidal has been a public homosexual, and had a fifty-three-year relationship with the late Howard Austen. Vidal has always enjoyed feuds with other intellectuals, including Norman Mailer, but most especially with William F. Buckley Jr. (see William F. Buckley Jr.), with whom, as co–political commentators for ABC News in 1968, he came to blows.
Vera Ellen Wang (b. June 27, 1949) A stylish Professional Children’s School and Sarah Lawrence graduate, Wang grew up in a large apartment on Park Avenue. She began a promising journey as a competitive figure skater but chose to pursue her education instead. After a career in the fashion department of Vogue, Wang started her wedding-dress business when she could not find a gown she liked for her own wedding. Now that it’s a diversified multimillion-dollar business, brides from Weston, Massachusetts, to Ross, California, depend on her designs, as do smart women dressing up.
Samuel Atkinson Waterston (b. November 15, 1940) On his mother’s side, a Mayflower descendant, and on his father’s, a first-generation American, as his father was born in Scotland. Sam attended the Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts, where his father taught, then graduated from Groton. A scholarship student at Yale, he spent his junior year at the Sorbonne. Waterston began his acting career onstage, then moved to film, where, among other roles, he was Nick Carraway in the 1974 production of The Great Gatsby (see Bruce Dern). Waterston has acted in every iteration of Law & Order; consequently, he will be in reruns for eternity. He is the eighth cousin four times removed from forty-third president George W. Bush (see George W. Bush).
Sigourney Weaver (b. October 8, 1949) was named Susan Alexandra Weaver, but took the name Sigourney after a character in The Great Gatsby (see F. Scott Fitzgerald) when she felt she was just one of too many Susans (see Stockard Channing) in her classes at the Chapin School and the Ethel Walker School. A graduate of Stanford University and the Yale School of Drama, Weaver comes from parents who also used different names from those they were given. Her mother, Elizabeth, an English actress who was in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, was named Desirée Mary Lucy, and her father, Sylvester, who was chairman of NBC until 1956 and campaigned unsuccessfully for pay TV, was known as Pat. Tall and statuesque, Weaver often portrays patrician women on the big screen.
Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862–August 11, 1937) Born Edith Newbold Jones, the niece of the “keeping up with the Joneses” Jones. To the manor born, young Edith, her two brothers, and her parents lived between New York City; Newport, Rhode Island; and Europe. Like most young girls from her set, she was “educated at home.” Although the fact that she published scandalously honest fiction about her world in the closed societies of New York, Newport, and Europe—showing ambition, wit, and intellectual curiosity—would deem her to be unprep, her fea
rlessness and devotion to detail enable us to forever understand how the upper classes lived, from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Wharton won a Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence in 1921, the first woman to ever win that award. Wharton died at her home in France in 1937. Serious fans can visit her house in the Berkshires, The Mount.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler (July 11, 1834–July 17, 1903) Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Whistler attended West Point before going to Europe to become an artist. He studied in France but spent most of his adult life in London. A very social bohemian, he earned hugely negative reaction from critic John Ruskin, who said he “never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler sued Ruskin for libel. He won a Pyrrhic victory, netting only one farthing. Whistler was bankrupted by his suit. The artist had a long-standing feud with Oscar Wilde as well. He published a book in 1890 called The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. His best-known painting is Arrangement in Black and Grey: the Artist’s Mother.
Richard Treat Williams (b. December 1, 1951) Named for ancestor Richard Treat, an early settler in Connecticut, Williams grew up in Rowayton, in Fairfield County, and went to the Kent School, all the way in Litchfield County. He studied acting at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. Williams was discovered by director Milo? Forman, who cast young Treat as Berger in his great movie musical Hair. Like many preppy actors, Williams has performed in Love Letters (see A. R. Gurney).
True Prep Page 6