Edie (15 page)

Hundred House, Groton School, Massachusetts

Groton graduation photographs of Bobby (1951), Minty (1956), and Jonathan (1958)

MINTUBN SEDGWICK
 Francis and Alice almost never visited Groton while Minty was there, but Francis wrote a series of letters critical of Groton. The trouble was, of course, that Minty was under tremendous psychological pressure from his father. There was nothing wrong with the academic standing of the school.

Groton never paid the slightest attention to Francis’ letters. No answers of any sort ever. That was the policy and I think they were wise. But Francis was always very, very loyal to Groton until the episode of the blacks came along. . .

You don’t know about that? All hell broke loose. The Secretary of the Federation of Protestant Churches wrote to all the prep schools asking them what their policy was on admissions so far as race and religion were concerned. John Crocker, the headmaster, is a Christian from way back and has a wife who is not only a Christian but a very strong anti-segregationist. He wrote back saying that we pay no attention to race at all, despite the fact that we are nearly all Wasps, as they say. . . but we do have Roman Catholics.

Having set the policy, Groton went to look for a black. It was important that particularly the first one be just right. Now, they wanted an outstanding boy, but not
too
outstanding. They didn’t want him to be the star of the football team or the best scholar in the class. Howard University selected six black students. Groton got a boy, and he was just right. Of course, the first day everybody was frightfully nervous about the whole thing except this boy, who was completely relaxed. Well, Francis took off about this. He was furious that he hadn’t been consulted, so he wrote a letter, unsigned, which appeared on Groton School stationery to the alumni:

GROTON LETTER DATED FEBRUARY
 12, 1957

. . . In consistence with Christian doctrine and the teachings of the Bible and in consistence with the human beliefs of two of Groton’s most eminent graduates, the New York Governor Averell Harriman and the late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Groton announces its irrevocable intention to increase the number of Negroes from a few students to not less than one fourth and not more than one third of its total enrollment.

To this just and proper end Groton boys, parents, friends, and the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People are invited to help qualified Negro boys to apply. Inability to pay is no obstacle. A Christian character and ability to meet Groton intellectual standards are the sole requirements. Groton pledges, if necessary, the full use of its entire endowment fund towards scholarships for this purpose.

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 My father’s view of blacks was “The negro is first cousin to the monkey, and that is a
fact.”
But I don’t think it was rage at the headmaster, John Crocker, or at Groton for taking blacks, so much as it was his rage at all institutions or people that wouldn’t remain static and conform to his image of them. Look how he behaved when Babbo married Gabriella! Everything had to stay the same or he would go berserk.

MINTURN SEDGWICK
 When Francis’ letter was sent, the administration and many of the alumni were furious. Of course, there was the big question of who had sent it. There’s nothing illegal about sending unsigned letters through the mail, but the Post Office doesn’t like it and asked if the school would be interested in finding out who wrote this thing. Naturally, the school allowed that it would be.

Within two weeks the Post Office told the school that their handwriting expert, who had never been faulted, was prepared to swear that the man who addressed those letters also signed himself Francis M. Sedgwick. Well, what to do? Naturally, the few people in the know informed me right off. I just couldn’t believe Francis had done such a stupid thing. I heard people say that if they could find out who the hoaxer was they’d ride him out of every club—that sort of thing. The attitude of the school was not to publicize the fact that this reasonably eminent alumnus was the author of the letter. So Francis was clear in that regard. I was advised to try to get Francis to seek psychiatric help.

I faked some business out on the West Coast and went to see him. He met me at the airport, which is about thirty miles from Rancho Laguna. We had not driven more than five or ten miles when he asked, “Have they any idea who wrote that letter?”

I said, “Yes, they know. It’s you.”

That stopped Francis in his tracks.

Well, he didn’t attempt to deny it. He told me that the reason he had written the letter was to draw attention to the problem and that he was following it up with a long letter detailing his objection to blacks at Groton. When I got back to the East, this second letter had already
been mailed to all the alumni. The gist of his argument was that, while he highly approved of educating blacks and was delighted they were in Harvard, Groton was sort of a family and you didn’t take blacks into your family.

It was a shame. Francis had become very active in Harvard affairs. It was in him to become the president of the Associated Harvard Clubs. He might have gone on to become an Overseer. This killed the whole thing.

Francis was a terribly competitive fellow. He was very ambitious physically, as I was, and he just didn’t have the physique; but he worked on himself so that he became awfully strong, stronger than me. I’ve seen him take a Manhattan telephone book and tear it in two. This is partly a trick, but it requires tremendous strength. First he wanted to be a tycoon. Then he told me once that he must build a statue, paint a picture, and write a play or a book. Three things that would really last.

Uncle Ellery once asked Babbo if he wasn’t scared of his son—that colossal, hungry ambition of his—which Uncle Ellery found unnatural and terrifying. Babbo just shrugged it off. Babbo died less than a month before the “hoax” letter. Francis had only seen Babbo once after he married Gabriella. Francis turned up in Stockbridge to have lunch with Mrs. Austen Riggs and Gabriella fled the Old House. She was frightened of a confrontation. I was there when my brother arrived. The conversation was polite, but there was a lot of emotion. Babbo had always wanted to heal the breach, but Francis wouldn’t allow it. His letters had been so ferocious: “You can come home again if you divorce that woman.” How Francis could shift his moods 11 heard from Mrs. Biggs that just after leaving Babbo in the Old House, he kept her luncheon party in gales of laughter.

JONATHAN SEDGWICK
 I came back to the ranch from Groton and I didn’t know that Babbo had died. My father came out to meet me. He was walking with a cane. He said it was high blood pressure, but it was sadness I He was not letting his feelings out, but there were tears in his eyes. He loved that man. He really loved that man. It was so sad he couldn’t tell him. Babbo wanted to hear it. They hurt each other so much.

My father was most threatened by the loving people in his family . . . by the men. He was trying to be masculine all the time. He was very sensual and effeminate actually, but he didn’t understand that effeminacy is part of manhood. He felt small. My father told me
that he himself had been a weakling—a little pigeon-chested, sickly boy who had been bullied—and now
he
was a man. He talked about the feeling of the pigeon-chested, these feelings of people pushing him around. Well,
he
wasn’t going to be pushed around, so he had made his body and his ego strong. He wanted his sons to do the same. Minty always threatened his sense of what manhood was just by being Minty. Minty was sensitive and loving and it was just awful.

Once my father knocked Minty to the floor in my grandmother’s apartment in New York City and banged his head against the floor: “Get up and fight me.” Minty just cried. It was over Minty not being a man.

DR. JOHN MILLET
 Apparently Minty began drinking and demanded that his father pay for his psychiatric treatment. Francis told me, “I jumped him and put him down.” He told me about this in New York in 1960 when he came to see me about Minty, who was going to be twenty-two in a couple of days. He told me how much he and Alice loved Minty, whom he described as innately timid—getting off a horse at sixteen and asking his mother to ride it home for him. He described Minty as quite artistic, very good-looking, with a nice sense of humor, though verging on the effeminate. Minty had begun to cause them anxiety when he refused to play football at Groton and then when he was turned down by Harvard because he had indicated that facing challenges was a problem for him. At that point Minty went out and enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, and at the end of two months he had upset his father considerably by spending his entire yearly allowance of twenty-five hundred dollars. He would sleep until one-fifteen in the afternoon, just too late to get to his last class. He left college almost at once and had a very interesting experience in the Army, where he served for three years. After two months of basic training, despite his fear of firearms, he came out with the sharpshooter’s medal and best-soldier rating. Then he was assigned to learn Chinese, and though he was four years younger than anyone else and a private, he graduated as one of four people out of a class of forty—with men ranked up to colonel—who had an all “A” rating. Francis got the nicest letter from his commanding officer, who was a Chinese Mandarin. Minty wanted to go to korea, But was sent to Fort Meade, where he did secret decoding work until his discharge.

He finally entered Harvard in the fall of 1959, and stopped writing to his family a month later. Francis said that in the beginning of January Minty called him from New York City from his maternal
grandmother’s apartment, saying that he was on medical leave from Harvard with the consent of the University; the school would accept him back after a year’s work. He told Francis that he had been advised to go to New York City to live on his own, and he had enough money from a trust his grandmother had set up for each of the children to pay for his upkeep and his therapy.

Francis told me that he made no move to interfere, but he soon became concerned about Minty. He had heard that Minty was giving tremendous dinners at the Stork Club and that his doctor in New York was giving him pills so strong that his driving license was inoperative, so he hired Cadillacs with chauffeurs. So Francis finally called his mother-in-law to tell her that Minty must get out of her apartment. In return, Minty had telephoned Francis two or three times, telling his father to butt out of his affairs—calling him stupid, and being abusive when he was drunk. Minty was particularly aggressive at Francis’ suggestion that he come see me.

One of Francis’ weapons was refusing to pay for Minty’s psychiatric treatment unless he was under my care. I was asked to keep a check on his progress. Shortly after, Minty called and asked for an appointment with me. I wrote Francis: “Well, I finally saw your Minty. He is indeed a most attractive youth, as you described him to be, and I suspect in other ways also the spitting image of his male progenitor, which I suspect is the reason for most of the troubles that you’ve experienced in your mutual relationship. I believe the boy has great promise, but is of unstable temperament and is not die kind of mule that you can get into action by whacking his behind.” I urged Francis to continue to help. “You are pained that he begs for financial help. However, this, at the moment, symbolizes
for him
asking for love. You’re indulging him for what is apparently a serious purpose, and for that purpose only, namely, the continuation of therapy at the hands of his own doctor might serve to break the logjam of feelings and substitute this
ex fronti
from
visa tergo”
—direct power from the front rather than by kicking a person in the rear.

SAUCIE SEPGWICK
 Minty stayed at my grandmother’s briefly. Then Roland Redmond, the lawyer in charge of my grandmother’s affairs, got him out of there on my father’s orders and he spent some time apartment-sitting for Mrs. Albert Spaulding. Gabriella, Babbo’s widow, arranged it. Mrs. Spaulding was a very respectable lady with a ravishing apartment in which Minty roared around, very disturbed. I saw him getting crazier and crazier. One day I came in at nine in the
morning and found him conducting the stereo with a baton, blood on his pajamas, and I got scared to death. I took him to Payne Whitney, the psychiatric division of New York Hospital, and got him to commit himself voluntarily. That was the first of a number of hospitalizations—Silver Hill, in Connecticut, finally. . . you remember, that’s the hospital Dr. Millet founded.