The Golden Dream (15 page)

“She may have been difficult,” says Bill Rockefeller, “but she left a will that we're very proud of.” It is a will that may help change the image of the Greenwich Rockefellers, and establish them as philanthropists in their own right.

As for Tarrytown, across Westchester County on the banks of the Hudson, William Rockefeller waves a jaunty hand from his home on the Sound, and says, “Anyone with any sense knows that summers are cooler on the Sound than they are on the river.”

11

Troubled Darien

Each of the Connecticut suburbs has attempted to cultivate a personality and an aura of its own. Greenwich, despite the fact that many of the old estates have been razed and subdivided, still likes to think of itself as providing the grandest Connecticut address. Farther up the line, wealthy and conservative Southport regards itself as “what Greenwich used to be.” Westport is “swinging”—artistic and liberal, popular with advertising and other media folk. Woodsy Weston is quieter, more family-oriented. When choosing a Connecticut suburb, one is supposed to take these differences into consideration.

Then there are the two pretty, well-manicured towns of New Canaan and Darien. New Canaan—to people in Darien, at least—is regarded as elegant but stodgy. It is a town preferred by dowagers and wealthy retirees. It is comfortably isolated. It is far from the Connecticut Turnpike and, by train, must be reached by a special spur of the New Haven tracks (which dead-end at New Canaan). Darien is considered a livelier, more fun-loving, party-going town for younger, upwardly mobile families. But Darien also lies hard by Exit 13 (a number which the superstitious find ominous) of the Connecticut Turnpike, and thereby hang many of the town's recent problems.

It used to be that the Darien Police Department had little to do besides quiet an occasional noisy party or domestic argument, and ticket cars without parking stickers at the railroad station. “Our
main excitement was helping get pet cats out of trees,” says a member of the Darien police force. But in the twenty years since the turnpike opened, the population of Darien has doubled, from 11,000 to 22,000. Most of the big old houses remain, but they have become crowded in by smaller, less expensive houses, many of them built for corporation executives stationed in the New York area for two- or three-year periods. There is much more turnover in real estate than there was a generation ago. Though it used to be that everyone in Darien “knew everybody else,” this is now no longer the case, and long-time Darien residents now encounter strange faces in the shops and supermarkets. In the last ten years, twenty-one new commercial buildings have been built in the town, and the number of employees who commute into and away from Darien each day has doubled to three thousand. Two new motels have opened, bringing in transients for the first time.

There are still the small expensive shops along Darien's main street, but there are also new shops, restaurants, and bars where both the atmosphere and the customers are somewhat less refined. In 1975, Darien had its first murder in more years than anyone can remember—a triple homicide in a barroom brawl. A year earlier, the town had its first bank robbery and, shortly afterward, its first street holdup. The incidence of shoplifting and bad-check passing has climbed alarmingly, along with break-ins and residential burglaries. Home owners who never used to lock their doors when they went out are now installing elaborate burglar alarm systems, and shops and banks now scan customers with mirrors, sheets of one-way glass, and closed-circuit television cameras. Because of the town's easy access to the turnpike, trucks now turn in to the quiet, tree-shaded streets at night and park in front of empty houses, and within hours, burglars will have removed everything of value. Darien has now learned of the “specialty burglar,” who may choose to go only after silver, or jewelry, or paintings, or furs, or hi-fi components, or Oriental rugs.

The local newspaper used to print routinely, as social items, details of residents' vacation plans. Editors have been told to discontinue this, and to print nothing until a vacationer returns. The news that Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so are departing for their winter home in the West Indies would almost certainly guarantee the arrival of a burglar's truck the following night. Though the town is proud of its fast and efficient police force, many residents are even hesitant to notify the police when they plan to be away. The fear is that the
police, in their “dealings with criminals,” may let a fact slip out that would lead to a burglary. The owners of expensive and expensively decorated houses used to be delighted when magazines like
House Beautiful
and
House & Garden
wanted to photograph their gardens or interiors, along with floor plans. “Now,” says one woman, “I'd have to think twice about letting anyone into the house to take pictures. When something like that is published, it's like a blueprint for a burglary.” (Friends and relatives of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney were shocked when she published a book of pictures of her daughter's dollhouse—a detailed and miniaturized room-by-room version of the Whitneys' Kentucky mansion: for twenty-five dollars, a burglar could have an itemized catalogue of the house's costly contents. In Darien, the opening of houses to tours on behalf of a charity was once a popular fund-raising technique. Today, the best houses in Darien refuse to participate in such tours. “It's a shame,” says one woman. “The only people you can get to show their houses are the ones where there is nothing pretty to see.”

Another indication of what has happened in Darien is that the number of requests for “bank escorts” has climbed steadily in the last twenty years, reaching 1,085 last year. “It used to be that a local merchant just strolled over to the night depository of his bank at the end of each business day and made his deposit,” a member of the local police force declares. “Nowadays, he asks for an armed escort from us.”

To cope with the climbing crime rate, Darien has increased its police force to thirty-five, and a policeman's starting salary, which formerly was $3,800 a year, is now $13,000. Darien police used to be trained in a desultory fashion, and were not even instructed in the use of firearms. But now each officer must qualify weekly at the department's new indoor firing range with a standard .38 caliber revolver. Some officers have been taught bomb-disposal techniques and how to use tear gas and high-powered rifles, as well as to conduct ransom negotiations with kidnappers. Merchants, meanwhile, have been attending police seminars on credit card fraud, dealing with shoplifters, and how to spot a phony check.

While Darien feels that most of its crime comes from “outside,” there is a new kind of criminal in the town that is even more disturbing: the young offender who is a member of Darien's old, proud establishment. The owner of one of Darien's snappier ready-to-wear shops describes the following incident: “A sixteen-year-old
girl was in the store the other day, and I saw her pick up a fifty-dollar cocktail ring, look at it, and drop it in her purse. I know the girl, and I know her parents. So I telephoned her mother and told her what had happened. The mother immediately began screaming at me and telling me that her daughter would never do such a thing. She told me that she intended to close her charge account with me. Later, the girl's father called me and said that not only would his family never do business at my store again, but that if I tried to press charges against his daughter he'd sue me. So what can you do when something like that happens—lose a fifty-dollar ring or lose a customer who spends a couple of thousand dollars a year in your store? I wrote the parents and apologized for everything. I even sent the girl's mother a bottle of perfume.”

Of course, it would be wrong to assume that a town like Darien is experiencing anything like a crime wave, nor is what is happening there much different from what is happening in suburbs all over the country, where, last year, as statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation show, serious crime increased 10 percent. Darien residents insist that their shaded, manicured streets are still for the most part safe, and that their rolling green hills along the Connecticut shore provide an unusually pleasant and comfortable place to live. They point to the fact that neon signs and outdoor advertising have been kept to a minimum, and that the old Boston Post Road which runs through the center of town still has an agreeable, New England look. They would live, they say, nowhere else. But the presence of crime has made Darien edgy, and added an uneasy note to the town's formerly leisured, sneakered, casual mood. Complacency has given way to a certain nervousness and wives cast worried looks at husbands when, in the night, the family dog sits up and growls at the door. The possibility of crime—or at least the interruption of peace of mind—hangs in the air as persistently as the distant drone of traffic from the turnpike. It is something unwanted and unexpected that the turnpike has brought to little Darien.

Becky Thompson graduated from Darien High School in 1965. A year earlier, a young man named Michael Valentine, leaving a teen-age party where he had had much to drink, was driving his date, Nancy Hitchings, home when his car struck a tree. Nancy Hitchings was instantly killed, and suddenly Darien was the center of unpleasant publicity. The parents of the youths giving the party were arrested for serving liquor to minors, and Becky Thompson's
senior year at high school was spent with New York reporters roaming the school grounds looking for more stories about the rich, decadent, “swinging” youth of Darien. “It was also the year the police started making pot busts,” Miss Thompson recalls. “Everybody was convinced that the youth scene in Darien was full of drugs, sex, and depravity. Actually, drugs had never been the real problem. The real problem was alcohol. Kids would swipe it from their parents' liquor closets, bring it to school parties, drink it in cars or even on the school bus.”

Growing up in Darien was, for someone like Becky Thompson, a somewhat confusing experience. On the one hand, she was imbued at an early age with Darien's mystique of being one of the nicest places in the world to live—nicest, and most socially acceptable. “I was always convinced that the farther you got from New York on the New Haven Railroad, the better your address became,” she says. “I was sure that we had it all over those New York suburbs down the line.” She was also impressed with “the prettiness of the town,” and the public school system. “I know the schools were superior to what you could find in other places,” she says. “At Darien High, I was a slightly above average student. But when I spent my sophomore year with an aunt in Columbus, New Mexico—the only place in the United States to be invaded by a foreign power: Pancho Villa—I was at the top of my class.”

Socially, however, it was another story. “There were cliques that started in grammar school, and that went right on through high school. They were cliques based on how much money your parents had, what kind of cars they drove, how big a house they lived in, whether they belonged to the Wee Burn Country Club and the Noroton Yacht Club, or Woodway, the poor man's club. The cliques were based on how well kids dressed, how much spending money they had, and what parties they were invited to. There was one section of maybe fifty Cape Cod development houses on Allen O'Neill Drive, cheap houses put up in the 1950s. Nobody associated with the Allen O'Neill bunch. There was also a tremendous amount of bigotry in the school—against Jews, but mostly against blacks. There was a handful of black kids, mostly the children of domestics, and nobody paid any attention to them; they were like invisible. There were a couple of Jews, but I was told that Jews had a hard time buying property in Darien. They had to go to Stamford or South Norwalk. Then there was the Tokeneke group, from the rich families on Tokeneke Road. They were a world unto themselves
. By high school, most of the Tokeneke group went off to private boarding schools. The rest of us simply never saw them again. They disappeared.”

Becky Thompson's parents were neither of the Tokeneke group nor of the Allen O'Neill bunch, but were somewhere in between. Miss Thompson grew up in a medium-sized house on a one-third-acre lot on Phillips Lane, modest by Darien's standards. Her father, now retired, was a design engineer, who commuted daily to New York. Her parents were Democrats, which marked them as oddities in the predominantly Republican Darien community. “My father always felt a little out of place in Darien, I guess,” she says. “Actually, he had an excellent job and earned a fine salary, but it didn't seem fine enough for Darien.”

To be betwixt and between, neither rich nor poor, in a town like Darien is not easy. “I used to walk along Tokeneke Road and look at all the beautiful houses,” Becky Thompson says. “The Lindberghs' big place, for example. It made our house on Phillips Lane seem awfully small and pitiful. When I got a summer job as a cashier at Stoler's store, it was because I wanted to earn some money, but at the same time I knew that it was the lower-class kids who did this sort of thing. I grew up feeling that I—and my parents—just didn't fit into Darien, that I couldn't compete with the best kids because they wore more expensive clothes. I felt inferior, and I'm sure I grew up thinking that we were a lot poorer than we really were. I suppose that's why, after college, I left. My impression is that the rich kids come back to Darien, get married and settle there, and join the Wee Burn Club. It's the kids like me who leave.”

When Becky Thompson comes back to Darien these days to visit her parents she tries, in a sense, to forgive it and to see it in its prettiest light—the tree-lined streets, the scarcity of neon. On a recent visit, she found the town still talking heatedly about the new nursing home, which was the center of a bitter zoning battle (it was opposed by many, first, because it was a nursing home and, second, because of its height: a full three stories), and which was built despite the editorial opposition of the
Darien Review
, a conservative publication generally against all forms of change. She was pleased to discover a new Darien paper, the
News:
“livelier,
somewhat
less Republican, and filled with more than just bridal announcements and social notes.” Her parents and their friends were also talking excitedly about a neighbor's house on Phillips Lane that recently sold for $101,000. Though the house has only three bedrooms and one
and a half baths, such a price makes it begin to sound like a rich person's dwelling and has the Thompsons thinking that their own house may be a rather valuable piece of property. “When I go back now, Darien doesn't seem
quite
as pretentious a place as it used to seem,” Becky Thompson says. “But it is a pretentious place.”