The Golden Dream (25 page)

One woman who still lives in the Smith-designed mansion she built in 1925 after the earthquake is Mrs. Angelica Schuyler Bryce, the widow of Peter Cooper Bryce, who, along with Harold Chase, Pearl Chase's brother, developed Hope Ranch. (Things tend to get somewhat inbred in Old Guard Santa Barbara, and it is important to remember who was a Hollister, who was a Meeker, who was a Poett, and so on.) The eighty-six-year-old Mrs. Bryce, who has always been known by her childhood nickname, “Girlie,” is, along with Miss Chase and Mrs. Horace Grey, one of the grandes dames who for years have ruled the social seas of Santa Barbara. She actually worked with George Washington Smith on her house, helping him collect the antique hammered-iron hardware which was copied in Europe and brought to her estate, Florestal. On her fifty-five landscaped acres Girlie Bryce maintains what amounts to a private zoo, including forty-five peacocks and a sixty-year-old tortoise named Gappy, who is fed a diet of watermelon and fresh fruits imported from Hawaii. Gappy reciprocates by letting Mrs. Bryce's thirty-eight grandchildren take turns riding on his back when they come for visits. For all the splendor of her surroundings, Girlie Bryce complains: “Santa Barbara has gotten so big. If it gets any bigger it's going to be a horrible place.”

Santa Barbara has gotten big, and now has a population of over 200,000. After World War II came Vandenberg Air Force Base, bringing in a sizable military contingent. Then came the University of California's Santa Barbara campus, and Robert Hutchins with his Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, both of which not only added people but contributed what Santa Barbara considers an intellectual, think-tank atmosphere to the place. Dr. Hutchins's pronouncements from his lush hillside villa (“Mankind's intellectual power must be developed”) are given much weight. Then came General Motors, bringing with it some hundred new families. The
General Motors people tended to stick to themselves, which was fine with Santa Barbarans, who said, “If you don't want us, we don't want you.”

But, for the time being at least, Santa Barbara isn't going to get any bigger. For the last few years, Southern California has been undergoing an acute water shortage and now each Santa Barbara household has a water ration allocated on a complicated formula based upon past consumption, number of persons in the household, etc. If a Santa Barbara home owner exceeds his water quota, he is charged a penalty, even though there seems to be plenty of water to sprinkle golfing greens and to fill thousands of backyard pools. It was the water shortage that was given as the reason Santa Barbara declared a moratorium on new building some time back. But the real reason for the building moratorium, Santa Barbarans admit, was to keep out more new people. It has also had the pleasant effect of keeping Santa Barbara real estate values going up and up.

“Santa Barbara is an
international
suburb,” says Mrs. Michael Wheelwright, the wife of a prominent landscape architect, and many Santa Barbarans would agree with her. It is true that many Santa Barbarans maintain homes elsewhere, and are always jetting from one part of the world to another. When Santa Barbara attempted to publish its own edition of the
Social Register
a few years ago, the enterprise collapsed after four editions—largely because most of social Santa Barbara is already registered in
Social Registers
of other cities. Foreign visitors also abound, including Baron Philippe de Rothschild, who customarily winters at the Santa Barbara Biltmore and swims daily in the Olympic-size pool at the adjacent Coral Casino (a members-only club for Santa Barbara residents, free for guests). And certainly, for all its suburban appearance, Santa Barbara is technically not a suburb of any particular city. It is too far from Los Angeles to be considered a commuting town—though some people, like Manuel Rojas, make the trip back and forth to business in private planes. It is no secret that San Francisco thinks little of Los Angeles, and that Los Angeles echoes these sentiments about San Francisco. But Santa Barbara thinks little of both Los Angeles and San Francisco. “I go to Los Angeles as little as possible,” says one woman. “I sometimes go there for shoes from Saks.” Santa Barbara thinks even less of the Los Angeles suburbs. Beverly Hills is dismissed as “mostly Jewish.” And of mostly non-Jewish Pasadena, a Santa Barbaran snorts: “They have more smog in Pasadena than they do in Los Angeles!” San Francisco is also given
short shrift. When a visiting San Franciscan mentioned, in the way San Franciscans have, that he lived in “the city,” his hostess retorted, “I live in a city too—Santa Barbara!”

Santa Barbarans also point out that Santa Barbara actually has suburbs of its own. The old money lives in a coastal community called Montecito. New money has collected itself in the hills beyond, at Hope Ranch.

In fact, the word “suburban” is anathema in Santa Barbara, as it is becoming elsewhere in America. The word no longer has the pleasant, easy ring that it once had. Euphemisms have been tried. “We live in the
country
,” is a popular one. A Santa Barbaran, of course, would say, “We live in
Santa Barbara
.”

Santa Barbara is one of the few remaining towns in the United States—Port Huron, Michigan; San Antonio, Texas; and possibly Greenwich, Connecticut, are some of the others—that, for whatever else it is or isn't, is still a
place
, its own place. It's a place where, as one woman describes it, “genteel people live—people who don't need to be justified by anything.”

As for the rest of California, Merv Griffin, an unwilling transplant from the East, asserts: “It's nothing but polyester leisure suits, frozen yogurt, mood rings, Big Macs and fries, Cuisinarts, heated water beds, sharks' teeth on chains, and jogging”—little of which will be encountered in Santa Barbara.

CITY VS. SUBURB

18

The Price of Status

City planners bemoan the fact that the so-called flight to the suburbs has already begun to cause the death of the cities which spawned the suburbs. “We're moving out of the city for the children's sake,” is the commonest excuse that is given, and it is true that the suburban migration has been led by the responsible, well-to-do, well-educated parent group in search of the grail of better schools—that is, by the people most able to bolster the tax bases of the cities. With these people gone, the cities become abandoned to the poor, the ill-educated, and the irresponsible. Tax levies for schools are voted down, and city school facilities deteriorate, while good teachers flee to the suburbs as well. Some cities have managed to solve the problem in part by annexation. The Ohio villages of Hyde Park and Clifton, which used to be separate townships, are now annexed to Cincinnati (though Indian Hill and Glendale have no intention of becoming annexed, and have resisted). This has helped the city's tax coffers somewhat. But a Cincinnati school-tax levy failed in 1966, and the schools had to give up their kindergartens. Currently, Cincinnati's police and fire departments—a community's first lines of citizen protection—are both in the throes of manpower cutbacks. Without protection and without good schools, what the city planners call the “responsible parent group” simply will not stay.

Dr. Margaret Mead has said: “People find it very difficult to face the problems which are confronting all cities today. Every city in
America is presently faced with going to pieces—letting suburban shopping centers develop until the downtown shopping area is destroyed, going in for the kind of urban renewal that means destruction [Cincinnati's Wesley Chapel?], breaking up neighborhoods to the point where there are no neighborhoods left, turning a city into what Newark is today.” Dr. Mead can remember when Newark was a not unattractive city, and when Bamberger's was a pleasant place to shop. “But today,” she says, “people who work at high levels in Newark come in through tunnels, then take elevators to their offices. They never go out in the street. That's the sort of place that's taken over by machine guns in the end.”

To avoid such a direful end to American cities, Dr. Mead says flatly: “First of all, you need to give your citizens protection and good schools. They've got to know they can come and go in safety—that's basic. And you must have excellence in the educational system. If you don't, people are going to move out. After all, their children have only one life to live, and you don't sit around in a city and have your child's schooling wrecked.” When reminded of the economic plight afflicting American cities today, which has forced cities to make drastic cuts in budgets for schools and for fire and police protection, Dr. Mead snorts: “Nonsense! It's ridiculous to wail about the financial state of the United States. This is the richest country in the world. We're just spending our money in the wrong places.” To reverse the trend toward urban disintegration, Dr. Mead prescribes “a massive reordering of priorities” on both the local and the national levels: measures as diverse, and drastic, as redistribution of welfare services to keep the poor from “piling up” in the cities, an all-out effort to develop efficient mass-transportation systems, and diverting federal funds from arms expenditures to financial assistance for the cities.

Meanwhile, of course, the flight to the suburbs continues, and Dr. Mead foresees the day when the suburbs will fall prey to all the ills that now beset the cities. “It's already happening,” she says, and it is true that towns—such as New Rochelle, New York; Stamford, Connecticut; Beverly Hills, California; and Shaker Heights, Ohio—that once considered themselves “suburban” are now, in fact, small cities with high-rises, traffic lights, noise, and parking meters. There are rush-hour traffic jams in Rye and Darien, and light industry has come to Greenwich. Suburban lakes, rivers, and beaches are polluted, and there is smog in both Hyde Park and
Indian Hill. Suburbs battle over big-city issues such as school bonds, zoning, and tax hikes.

There are, however, other reasons for the suburban exodus besides a search for better schools and more efficient police. Many families feel anonymous, socially, in big cities, where they find it difficult to meet people, make friends, and be “taken in.” They hope vaguely that in a nice suburb, they will not only find a better way of life but will also make “a fresh start” in the social sense: meet and mingle with “a nicer class of people,” and achieve, thereby, a boost in social status. But unfortunately, as once-small suburban towns have burgeoned, it is no longer quite that simple. Many suburban towns feel that they have grown quite enough, thank you, and they examine newcomers with unfriendly, even hostile, eyes. The first friendly face the new suburbanite may meet may belong to the Welcome Wagon lady, but after that, America's choicest suburbs can be extremely hard social nuts to crack. The fashionable country clubs, in the economically uncertain 1970s, have been experiencing financial difficulties. Memberships have declined, and there has also been a decline in clubs' use for large parties and weddings, due to the economic crunch. Golf has been losing favor over the last decade, particularly among younger people, though clubs must still maintain—and pay taxes on—vast golf course acreages. There has also been a decline of interest among young people in the whole idea of country clubs. Rye's Apawamis Club not long ago closed its beach and tennis facility, and sold off property, to make fiscal ends meet. The American Yacht Club, in order to appeal to a more diverse membership, has added such non-sailing enticements as a swimming pool and new tennis courts. The Manursing Island Club, which used to close for the winter, now keeps its doors open all year long.

Still, though the best clubs in the choicest suburbs may need money and often have yawning membership vacancies, they remain difficult to join. “We can't just take in every Tom, Dick, and Harry,” says the manager of Darien's Wee Burn. If the club did, it would lose its precious reputation for “exclusivity”—its whole reason for being—and exclusivity means nothing more or less than keeping people out. To join clubs like the Wee Burn and the Apawamis, therefore, it is still necessary to have a sponsor, a second, and a third, plus letters of recommendation from as many as ten club members. New applicants are then subjected to interviews
and screening by membership committees. To newcomers, who know no one in the town, these conditions may present almost insurmountable obstacles. And in towns like Rye and Darien, where virtually the entire social life of the community—from dancing classes to teen-age parties and summer sports—revolves around one club or another, the newcomer may find himself feeling singularly left out of things. As the Planning and Zoning Commission chairman of Greenwich put it bluntly not long ago: “Intruders from any direction must be held at bay.”

Still, though it is not easy, entry into suburban society is possible for the unknown newcomer. But to achieve social status in the suburbs requires special rules, and though many of the “rules” may seem like purest common sense, it is surprising how often they are ignored—with the result that the newcomer remains isolated, bored, unhappy, and frustrated. So for those determined to ignore Dr. Mead's warnings (after all, she has been known to be wrong in the past) and to abandon the city for a “nice” suburb where “nice” people live, there are a few tips and pointers to be borne in mind.

To begin with, it can be taken almost as a rule of thumb that the choicest suburb of any city will be the most inconvenient to get to—the farthest from the city, with no train or bus service, often inaccessible by any form of public transportation (like Cornwall, Connecticut), and reachable only by private automobile. There are a few exceptions to this, such as Grosse Pointe, Michigan, which is almost within walking distance of Detroit and which is still considered a very tough place, socially, to penetrate. (Bloomfield Hills, farther out, would argue this and point out that Grosse Pointe, which for years excluded Jews, now has not only Jews but also a few black families.) In general, the family wishing to move to an exclusive suburban enclave must forget about convenience. Inconvenience provides privacy, seclusion, and hence prestige.