A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth (3 page)

For the women, society offered a certain power and prestige, but it also tended to reinforce conventions that limited those with ambition. I had known Janet Auchincloss's daughter, Jackie Bouvier, since her mother's marriage to Father's first cousin Hugh D. Auchincloss. But they lived in Washington and Jackie was a good bit younger than I, so I saw her rarely. We all, of course, were drawn by her charm and beauty, but such qualities are not unusual, and none of us predicted her remarkable destiny. I did, however, have a curious premonition of it.

I was spending a weekend with my brother John in Washington, and he and his wife had asked the Hugh D. Auchinclosses and Jackie for a family dinner. During the meal we learned that Jackie was engaged to a New Yorker called Husted. After the meal she and I sat in the corner, and I quizzed her about him. I had just published a novel titled
Sybil
about a rather dull girl, which Jackie, perhaps surprisingly, had read.

"Oh, you've written my life," she told me. "Sybil Bouvier, Sybil Husted. Respectable, middle-class, moderately well off. Accepted everywhere. Decent and dull."

And then a curious but strong feeling gripped me, quite unlike anything that usually accompanied parlor chatter.
Why was this pretty girl talking such nonsense? Didn't she know that a very different fate awaited her?
A week later we learned the engagement was off. So sometimes women did break the rules and found that it worked out quite successfully.

The real and formidable influence of society was, fittingly, social. Those inside society's ranks controlled the private schools, the clubs, the country clubs, the subscription dances for the young, the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches, as well as the larger banks and law firms. It is commonly said that they have been relegated to the past. That is not so. They have simply lost their monopoly; they have had to move over and share their once closely guarded powers with the new rich, who are quite willing to spare the older generation so long as they are allowed to copy, and perhaps enhance, their style. See any Ralph Lauren ad.

My eight great-grandparents were all natives of Manhattan and all uncritical members of the society I have attempted to describe. As they had multiple siblings and numberless descendants, the city seemed awash with cousins, and I was apt to be surprised if I didn't find one or more in any circle I attended. To me, New York society (we never used the term) was not a class that dominated my world; it simply was that world. It was said of a school that I later attended, Groton, that there was no snobbishness because the boys all came from the same background, and there was actually some truth to this.

The four principal families of my origin seem to merge together in retrospect into a single unit: an uninspiring but decent and respectable bourgeois tribe. Yet how different they seemed to a growing and observant boy! Father's mother's family, the Russells of New York and simpler pre-Vanderbilt Newport, had been rich from imports and clipper ships prior to the Civil War and prominent in the society described in the diary of Mayor Philip Hone, a cousin. But all was now in the past. Despite their Italian villas and marble busts taken on Roman honeymoons, the Russells, by the time of my childhood, were faintly shabby.

Much smarter and up to date were Mother's maternal family, the Dixons, a cheerful, close-knit, handsome, and worldly group who set a high but not unreasonable value on appearance in clothes, sport, and general behavior. They were devoted to each other, and their neighboring brownstones on Forty-ninth Street were known as Dixon Alley. But at parties they were less inclined to cluster; they mingled and didn't interfere with family unless a girl was stuck on the dance floor or a boy was spending too much time at the bar.

The Auchinclosses were the Johnny-come-latelies, not bringing their woolen business from Scotland until 1803. The first Hugh Auchincloss was interned as an enemy alien in the War of 1812 and unsprung by an indignant visit by his wife to President Madison. (Anyone could go to the White House then.) The family produced a high percentage of vigorous males who made their rapid, unopposed entry into society through business and legal aptitude as well as advantageous marriages. The dour Scotch ways were soon abandoned, though I can remember a maiden great aunt who, during a visit to Bar Harbor, refused to go with us to the swimming club because men and women shared the pool. And that was when women's bathing suits covered them from neck to toe with long, black stockings added!

The Stantons, Mother's father's clan, were too few in number for notice, except for the elegant Uncle Ed, who sent his shirts to Europe to be properly laundered and was so esteemed by his rich friends that they eased him into a job for which he had little qualification: nothing less than general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. His unexpected passion for German opera when the boxholders all preferred the Italian led to his dismissal, and he died abroad of alcoholism.

New York, unlike Boston, had, even in my young days, scant respect for genealogy. Although some of the Auchincloss wives had distinguished colonial forebears (my great-grandmother Auchincloss could boast that both her grandmothers were Sal-tonstalls), I doubt that had much to do with the family's rise. But an early origin—when combined with a large fortune-will attract a certain awe in the city. To be an Astor or a Rockefeller was to be important even to the oldest New Yorker.

I remember as a boy Mr. and Mrs. John D. Jr., who summered in Seal Harbor, Maine, visiting the neighboring Bar Harbor Swimming Club. Received like royalty, they passed, nodding graciously, through the umbrella tables on the club lawn where members were having a noontime drink. Mr. Rockefeller was not a noticeable figure, but his wife, who had put the family on the social map and also orchestrated the splendid landscape architecture of their great estate in Tarrytown had a wonderful, almost Edwardian, elegance.

It was she, notoriously, who had made a philanthropist of her spouse. Yet he had refused to support her in her major interest: the Museum of Modern Art, which he regarded as red and radical. This was a problem in the museum's early years, for although Mrs. Rockefeller had money of her own, it was not nearly on the same scale as her husband's. If she gave only, say, $50,000 where a million was expected, too many of the wealthy would also reduce their pledges. Peggy, the wife of David Rockefeller, downplayed any tensions. "My father-in-law," she claimed, "so adored his wife that he couldn't bear to have her not share all his interests." Eager to hear more, I couldn't help pointing out that this wasn't so much love as possession. After this comment, little more was divulged. (Of course the Rockefeller children ultimately followed their mother and became the principal supporters of the museum.)

While on the subject of such prominent families we must, of course, raise the name of the Vanderbilts, who dominated newspaper accounts of society. But this was not enough to ensure widespread admiration: The dynasty's rather too-palatial residences tainted them with vulgarity to a discriminating minority. Edith Wharton spoke of the family as engaged in a constant Battle of Thermopylae against bad taste, which they never won.

Revered by all in my boyhood for rectitude and the highest financial responsibility were the partners of the House of Morgan. To my young and naive ears they might have been the twelve apostles. I should note here that my father's law firm represented J. P. Morgan & Co. and that my mother's father had been head of a small trust company that was part of the Morgan empire. As a little girl she had been staying in a summer hotel in Bar Harbor, Maine, when the great Morgan yacht, the
Corsair,
had steamed in, and an invitation to dine onboard sent to the Stantons, who promptly accepted, though they had another engagement. A fictitious cold was used as an excuse to their previous host when the date was cancelled. When Mother, overhearing all this on the telephone, protested, she was simply told: "When you're older, dear, you'll understand these things."

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.

O
F 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.