True Prep

by Lisa Birnbach

  The photos on the following six pages are of a second wedding. The preppy Second Marriage is a fascinating phenomenon because it reveals something quite astonishing: that the preppy, male and female, can change, can even “grow.” Indeed, the preppy’s second spouse, whether male or female, is almost invariably a psychotherapist. All right, that is a slight exaggeration. But most notably, the second spouse will have the capacity for thought and feeling and love that the first spouse almost entirely lacked.

  Yes, even a preppy can learn the value of thought and feeling and love. After fifteen or twenty years of marriage to someone who cries only when he thinks about having joined the wrong club at Harvard, or who finds all the psychic nourishment she needs in the ladies’ intermediate tennis clinic, even a preppy may feel unfulfilled. As a youth, the preppy usually assumes that, having been accepted both at the bank training program and as a junior member of the club, he or she can expect no more trouble in life, and this illusion usually persists through the first few years of Marriage One. It is a shock to discover thereafter that life brings its horrors—death, madness, illness, infidelity, debt, the bastardization of Abercrombie & Fitch—to a preppy family as much as any other. What often happens is that a crisis or two causes one member of the preppy couple to mature, to understand a bit better the tragic nature of our existence, while the other remains the same goofball. Then comes the failed couples’ therapy, and the decision of one member of the couple to continue seeing Dr. Pasternak individually.

  Wisdom—to say nothing of a tragic worldview—ill suits the preppy, and, as always in a case of lost innocence, one almost feels sorry for the preppy who has gained it. The wise preppy, his or her expression tinged with sorrow, seems out of place in gay green plumage at the yacht-club dance. Yet there are compensations: After the divorce and the period of being alone, the preppy meets and falls in love with someone who understands—sometimes a psychotherapist (in which case the preppy may be overcompensating for what the first marriage lacked), sometimes another divorced preppy who possesses a surprisingly sensitive soul and who has been through it all. Both preppies, if that is the case, experience a kind of love that they never knew existed, and they marry.

  How much happier an event—albeit in a subdued way—is the second wedding as compared to the first, no matter how much fun the first may have seemed. The bride’s mother is totally out of the picture. There have been no agonizing hassles with the food-and- beverage manager. The guests are all true friends, none of the irritating, pointless people who had to be invited the first time around are there. Only two or three people, real friends, remain from the cast of two dozen that formed the original wedding party.

  Most important, the bride and groom are really in love, and they really love each other. They are happy. They have made their choice of the heart relatively—relatively—free from the psychic and social forces that have controlled them most of their lives. Their souls are joined together like two ropes tied with a full carrick bend rather than, as in the first marriage, with a granny knot. Yes, you can have true love and your whale belt, too.

  —James Collins

  Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard, Columbia Business School

  “Serena is both a true romantic and a true eccentric,” her longtime friend Houghton Wood Livermore observed on the evening before her Loomis Chaffee School roommate’s second—or was it third?—wedding. “Years ago in our dorm, all the girls were discussing God. I can’t imagine why. And one by one, each declared whether they believed or didn’t, and there was Derby announcing, ‘I believe in love.’ I will never forget it.” True, her attempts at finding love have taken her hither and yon. After Georgetown there was a time in northern California and then in Washington State, where she bought a llama farm. (Daughter Olympia—not pictured—is from those days.) Falling in love with the polo star Felipe Santo Réal was the next stage, and Derby, now going by her first name, Serena, followed him to Argentina with Olympia, and they married. Eventually they had another daughter, Anabella, now eleven.

  Meanwhile, Frederick Blake was following a more conventional, prescribed course. After Groton and Yale, he worked for General Foods in the pudding division, married his girlfriend from Mt. Holyoke, moved to Darien, Connecticut, and had a daughter, Esmé (photographed here with her husband, Fairfield, and their sons, Stamford and Wilton).

  He left puddings and transferred his talents to the early word processors at IBM. While he moved up the ladder at Big Blue, life was predictably on track, like an excerpt from John Cheever or Richard Yates. His wife, Gillian, fell under the spell of Guru Rajneesh and was on her way to Mysore, India, by way of the Orient Express. There she met Countess Maria Ornagy-Szezhni von Klepthammer. Gillian Blake has lived with the Countess in the Dolomites since 1984.

  While Serena was enjoying life in Argentina, Frederick’s nose was to the grindstone. “I’d meet girls, you know, through my friends and their wives but no one who stuck,” he said from his office at Barton, Blake and Forrester Wealth Management. “But I was never lonely. I was busy working, fulfilled with Esmé, and sailing. My life felt whole.”

  How did the free bird meet the buttoned-down banker? “I saw him across the room at a wedding,” the bride, then known as Derby Whitmarsh, said. “It was just this past October. It’s been like a cork flying off a bottle of vintage champagne!” Houghton Livermore was nonplussed, having seen her old friend through many love affairs. “I would never have thought that at his age Frederick would want to be surrounded by so many kids, but what the hell? One more won’t hurt.” Is there a baby under her fabulous ecru Vera Wang suit? No one will say for sure, but the ring Frederick designed for Derby has four oversized brown diamonds gathered in a cluster by the jeweler Maja duBrul. Four? “It’s my lucky number,” coos the bride, who may or may not be pregnant with her fourth child, and may or may not be on her fourth marriage.

  Much depends on what channel the TV was last on when we were watching. Also depends on how far from our supine bodies the remote is at any given time. Preppy men love sports as much as anyone, and might leave games on all the time without a discernible preference for a single team or sport or player, for that matter. Yet they know a surprising amount of pertinent trivia. “Oh, Petrie—he’s only got one testicle.” Or “See McLean over there? He’s the tallest player in the whole NBA.” Sometimes it is dazzling.

  What do women watch (to paraphrase Sigmund Freud)? It could be the news, it could be infotainment, a movie, a canceled series like Law & Order (who doesn’t like Sam Waterston (see)?) or gritty forensic shows. Those of us with strong stomachs will watch the ghoulish: real plastic surgeries or Nip/Tuck. Some like the girlish—Sex and the City or The L Word reruns. Truth is, other than the red carpet and the Oscars, we are mostly television dilettantes.

  But we all love to do things. We love to get away! We need it, in fact. A change of scenery—if we live in Washington, D.C., even a trip to the resort where all the Atlanta preppies go will feel so familiar, and yet unfamiliar. A weekend at a spa with some friends, skiing for a weekend, the Caribbean for a long weekend, Europe whenever we can. We’ll usually bump into someone we know somewhere. Remember seeing the Waterstones in Sardinia? That was almost as hilarious as seeing the Connors on our plane! Such a riot! If we are good travelers, we are superb houseguests. Invite us to your ranch or château and we will be no trouble at all—practically invisible until cocktails. If we want to downplay a trip, we use the word “just.” “Oh. We’re just going skiing,” meaning “a simple trip, nothing out of the ordinary. Don’t envy us.” “We’re just going to Bermuda” also works, meaning it’s a short trip. But those short trips add up, and pretty soon you notice the Baers have almost permanent suntans.

  Yet some of us are distance snobs. We’ll go to Asia the way you go to Beaver Creek: frequently. Do we go because we love it, or because we want to tell people we just came back from India? Long-distance travel is not unlike Harvard in this way, and as with that ancient institution of higher
learning, we have to leave it to say we enjoy it to people who will be duly impressed.

  Don’t complain to us about hunting. We’ve heard the arguments about it being barbaric, blah, blah, and that they’ve even outlawed it in England (which doesn’t mean it has stopped in England, btw), and we know you think foxes are sweet furry things like Rupert your pet ferret, but when you look to a field on a wintry morning and hear the horn, the thrill is like no other. Galloping, jumping the lovely low stone walls, a little frost on the ground, a little sherry in our bellies … It’s heaven. Aside from the Unionville Hunt with Mr. Stewart’s Cheshire foxhounds, there’s nowhere we’d rather be than Fauquier County, Virginia.

  There the season lasts from early fall through late winter, and hunts take place three days a week, the most formidable being Saturday mornings, which have the largest “field.” The Middleburg and the Piedmont Hunts—officially Piedmont Fox Hounds—(“Originally established as a private pack in 1840. Recognized 1899. Hunt attire: scarlet, old gold collar; Evening: scarlet, old gold collar and waistcoat”) are almost the very best in this country, but nothing tops the Orange County Hunt, which was “established in 1900, recognized in 1902. Hunt attire: scarlet for staff only; no scarlet in the field, no hunt collars, buttons only. Evening: scarlet, white facings.”

  Parvenus who attempt membership are studied carefully: The ultimate sin is being overmounted (too much horse for the rider) or too carefully dressed.

  Afterwards, we go to The Rail Stop, our favorite watering hole in The Plains, a village five miles away from Middleburg.

  Scary but true. Sixties TV character Thurston Howell III, (1) a somewhat two-dimensional preppy with a patrician accent, a supporting player on Gilligan’s Island, was ranked—for real—on Forbes.com every year since 2006 (see). There he is, between Tony Stark (Iron Man) and Bruce Wayne (Batman). He is the CEO of Howell Industries, a Harvard man, and a billionaire set in the amber permanence of reruns.

  Howell, portrayed by Ohio-born actor Jim Backus (“Mr. Magoo”), was important in the suspend-all-reality world of ’60s sitcoms because he and his wife, Eunice (known to all as “Lovey”), took a tourist cruise around Hawaii with a mismatched group of kooks. (Funny they didn’t just buy a boat or the state, for example.) And, better for the plotlines, Thurston Howell brought thousands and thousands of dollars and many changes of ascots to wear for the three hours he expected to be gone. Good preppy thinking. The money, though not useful tender on a deserted island, still bought power and influence among the shipwrecked, and the Howells enjoyed that power. While the professor and the skipper and the first mate did real work, the Howells showed us how to be elegant and well dressed even during a natural catastrophe. One had to admire Lovey’s willingness to trim the grass with her delicate manicure scissors. She was just trying to help.

  We love lists. So let’s look at other preppies who somehow made it through the homogenizing filter of television. We hereby present the rest of True Prep’s Fictional Top Five (in chronological order):

  Miss Jane Hathaway (2) Possessor of a plummy lockjaw, a boyish haircut, and a Vassar degree, Jane Hathaway somehow became the secretary to the head of a Beverly Hills bank. Played by actress Nancy Kulp (see), Miss Jane had to facilitate matters at the Clampetts’ every day, if not more often. As an eastern snob, Miss Jane was another fish out of water in a show about fish out of water. Rich but uncouth Southerners who refer to their swimming pool as a “see-ment pond” are droll enough in 90210, but regarding Miss Hathaway, with no curves on her bony physique, and severe except for a nutty crush on hunky but stupid Jethro Bodine (she was slumming)— you get the feeling she was written into the show after a spectacular audition.

  Murphy Brown (3) What can you say about a character whose backstory is that she is just returning from rehab at the Betty Ford clinic (see)? Played by real-life prep Candice Bergen (Westlake School, University of Pennsylvania [x]), Brown was a have-it-all career girl in the ’90s: with beauty, a great job, lots of friends, wealth, and as much club soda as she could drink. In later seasons, she became pregnant, and without a relationship had the child on her own (VP Dan Quayle did not approve). Colleen Dewhurst played her mother, Avery Brown. Marian Seldes portrayed her aunt, Brooke Brown.

  The Crane Brothers: Dr. Frasier and Dr. Niles (4, 5) Two psychiatrists who live in Seattle would not seem like preppies off the bat (you know we rarely go to medical school), but if you saw and heard the Cranes you would change your point of view. Two effete and well-spoken fellows—their late mother was also a psychiatrist; their father, who lives with the divorced Frasier, was a police detective. Both boys were said to be named after their mother’s lab rats. At Bryce Academy, his fictional prep school, Frasier Winslow Crane (Kelsey Grammer) was known as “The Bryce Academy Crier.” From there it was to Harvard where he earned his BA, Harvard Medical School (M.D., Ph.D.), and a postdoctoral stint at Corpus Christi College at Oxford. Niles, on the other hand, attended Yale (BA) (as did his real-life self, David Hyde Pierce—see), Yale Medical School (M.D., Ph.D.), and did his postdoctoral work at Cambridge University. Even more astonishing, there are Web sites that are filled with this arcana.

  Oh, Gossip Girl, what can we do with you? We watch you filming; among the hordes of teen girls, we stare, arms crossed, thinking only, “Really?” Your show, meant to depict our lives as seniors in the elite private schools in Manhattan, is a travesty. We decided that instead of just bashing your faux preppiness, we would offer our help to your production staff, to bring a little pink and green authenticity to TV. We can get credit for it.

  To Whom It May Concern:

  After much viewing of your television show, we would like to offer some constructive criticism to make Gossip Girl, well, more genuine. It seems that no true preps work on your show. You just need a little guidance, and that’s where we come in.

  BLAIR WALDORF: Our preppy wannabe. Blair, wearing a strand of pearls and a headband does not make you a preppy. You also tote your maid Dorota around like a purse. Let Dorota live her life … in the kitchen, where she’s supposed to be.

  SERENA VAN DER WOODSEN: God gave you a three-part last name for a reason! And we will not let you throw away a great name for nothing. So take off your faux-bohemian thigh-high boots and sequined dresses and put on a tweed skirt and simple cable-knit sweater. And I am concerned about the martini glass that seems to be glued to your hand; you are partying every night of the week. You have SATs to study for, and you must talk to your grandfather about helping you score a place at Yale. Now go clean up.

  NATE ARCHIBALD: We like you–ish. You have few plot lines, but you have a good family name on your shoulders. Your dad got indicted, and you slept with an older woman. You go to Columbia. How about studying?

  Let us conclude with the worst case of preppy fraud, CHUCK BASS. Chuckie, the only people who take stretch limousines to school are pedophiles offering young children candy and a puppy to get inside. A regular Lincoln Town Car would be quite acceptable. And the ascot you have been seen sporting has got to wait for another 40–50 years, if at all. (Do you want to be George Hamilton when you grow up?) Your commitment issues with Blair are boring. Didn’t you know that your parents pick out the girl you are going to marry when you are an infant? Then, Chuckles, you snubbed Skull and Bones on your visit to Yale. Is it not one of the most important unspoken rules of Prepdom that if a secret society at Yale asks you to join, it is impolite to say no? This is an actionable offense. Gang, one last piece of advice: cut out the PDA. The sex on your show is gross. We would never actually allow a camera crew to cross that line. So please, all of you, keep the corduroys on, the cameras out of the bedroom, and think of England.

  Love,

  a real seventeen-year-old-uniform-wearing Manhattan private-school student

  Where to begin? Once upon a time we weren’t allowed to chew gum in public, wear shoes that were not laced, read comic books, or discuss politics at a social event. If all the mummies and daddies who laid down the law the
n could have imagined reality television, with all its vulgarity, materialism, sniping, backstabbing, catfights, first dates in hot tubs, sex, and foul language, they would certainly not be pleased. What has the world come to, they might ask, as do nice people who are still amongst the living.

  To suggest that reality TV is unprep doesn’t go deeply enough into its deviltry.

  We value our privacy. So people who agree to live surrounded by cameramen and soundmen and lights and need the attention to feel validated are constitutionally not prep. Even if you attended private school and college, and have many traceable nice ancestors, and play the right sports, your commission within reality TV disqualifies you immediately. No true preppy—whether she had a storied last name or not—would allow herself to be so exposed and to live at the mercy of TV producers and editors. That means all you “housewives.” By the way, if you were an actual socialite, you would never refer to yourself that way.