The Right Places (15 page)

Just why restrictive policies against Jews have remained in Fairfield County's best clubs is a question difficult to understand or answer, and the reasons for their existence are hard to pinpoint. No particular member
, or group of members, of any club can be accused of overt anti-Semitism. It is almost as though these policies had a life of their own, were self-generative, and have remained not out of specific prejudice so much as out of the vague excuse that “this is the way it has always been.” Dorothy Rodgers recalls that when she and her husband first moved to Fairfield a friend suggested that the Rodgerses join the local beach club. “It was a perfectly simple little beach club, without any social pretensions at all,” she says. “It was not one of the fancy clubs. We simply thought joining it would be fun for the children.” A few days after suggesting it, the friend telephoned Mrs. Rodgers to say, “I'm just so embarrassed I don't know what to say! I simply had no idea that they felt this way, but it seems they don't accept Jewish members no matter
who
they are.” Mrs. Rodgers, a humorous and successful woman in her own right, as an author and designer, says, “Of course we're entertained in Christian homes out here, but I always wonder if it isn't mostly because of who Dick is. Would we be invited if he weren't Richard Rodgers? And meanwhile, with the shortage of servants, a great deal of the entertaining out here takes place at the clubs. We have a very pleasant life in Fairfield, with friends here whom we treasure and others who come out for weekends from New York. We don't golf, and we don't play tennis. We do play mean croquet on our lawn all summer. So we don't miss the club life at all.” Mrs. Rodgers also believes that restrictions in clubs are less the result of formal anti-Semitism than the expression of a kind of naïveté. “I sometimes think these clubs exclude Jews largely because they don't
know
any Jews. They'd like to make Jewish friends, perhaps, but they simply don't know how!”

Meanwhile, there is rather little social intercourse between towns like Greenwich and Southport and the other communities in the county. Bette Davis, who lives in Westport, explodes and says, “My God, I'd never be invited to a party in
Southport
—unless they wanted me there as some sort of curiosity, or freak. After all, I'm unmarried, a woman who works for a living, who makes her money in the entertainment industry, and who has the scarlet letter ‘A' for Actress branded on her bosom! If I lived in Southport, I'd never be accepted. Here, of course, it's quite different.”

Westport has always been a little different. Early in the nineteen-twenties
, the town of Westport was discovered by a group of New York writers and artists who began coming to Westport for the summer. Soon they were buying and restoring old farmhouses and barns.
New Yorker
writers and cartoonists, a notably clubby lot, led the way, and people like Peter De Vries, Hamilton Basso, Jerome Weidman (who has since moved away) and Whitney Darrow, Jr., were among the early arrivals. They were joined by others from the theater and films such as June Havoc, Eileen Heckart, Ralph Alswang, and David Wayne. To this rich and bright brew were added infusions from the worlds of radio and, eventually, television, book publishing, and, to top it off, a large contribution to the population from the world of advertising.

Madison Avenue has, furthermore, contributed for the most part people who are from the so-called “creative” end of the business—copywriters and art directors. This has given the town of Westport the feeling of a bright, brash, assertive—somewhat raffish, middle-class-based, but still very well-heeled—artists' colony. Downtown Westport abounds with what are called “fun” shops. There are fun dress shops, men's shops, gourmet shops, gift shops, ice cream shops, cheese shops, delicatessens, bookshops, and grog shops. Collectively, the fun shops of Westport exude an aura of franticity, of desperation. The fun totters on the brink of hysteria, as though the shops were not at all sure how they were going to pay their bills for the fun merchandise on their shelves. One suspects the shops are as overextended as, indeed, many of their best customers doubtless are. All over Fairfield County, shopkeepers complain about slow bill-payers; some of the wealthiest, biggest-spending families pay bills only once a year. But one suspects that there are more shops in Westport than can be supported by even this high-living community. Compared with Westport's, the shopping district of the more sedate and quiet town of Fairfield is a dreary affair. It consists largely of Mercurio's Market, whose claim to fame is that it was here that the late Margaret Rudkin—who went on to make a fortune in Pepperidge Farm bakery products—brought her first few loaves of bread to sell.

Weston, in the backcountry, is sort of an extension, on a much more woodsy scale, of Westport. That is, the population of Weston also includes writers, artists, actresses, and actors. But Weston is much smaller, with only a handful of small stores at its center—stores which,
on the tax rolls, are classified as residences because the town, officially, is zoned against businesses altogether. Westport has grown too large for it, but Weston is still small enough to operate on the old New England town-meeting system. To Weston residents, the town meetings are an important part of the town's charm. Understandably, the most heated arguments at town meetings are over issues which threaten to increase taxes.

Sonny Fox, the television personality, who lives in Weston and is typically active in local affairs, is particularly interested in matters dealing with the local schools. “Whenever there's a school bond issue that you think everybody's behind,” he says, “you find at the town meetings, a lot of little old ladies in gray hair and sneakers who have crawled out of the hills somewhere to fight it. These little old ladies are always big taxpayers, and of course they don't have children in the schools—at least not any more. I remember one woman who got up in town meeting and made a long speech saying, ‘Why are we spending all this money on schools? Why don't we use it to spray the trees? The hell with the children! Let's save our elms!' Somebody in the back row said, ‘Great idea! Let's just spray the children.' Our town meetings really get pretty wild.”

Compared with towns like Weston, Westport, Southport, Fairfield, and Greenwich, other Fairfield County towns such as Darien and New Canaan seem more predictable—very pretty, very cozy, but essentially bedroom towns of successful businessmen-commuters who work five days a week in Manhattan.

One reason for the distinctive character of so many Fairfield communities involves zoning. If you don't count school bonds and other tax issues, zoning is easily the number one topic of conversation in Fairfield County. If you want to get a heated conversation going at a Fairfield County dinner table, simply mention that inflammatory six-letter word. In a particularly excited state about zoning is Greenwich. One of the factors that has permitted Greenwich to retain its precious “rural character” has been the extensive amount—close to ten thousand acres—of privately held vacant land which has been left, as in the Joseph Verner Reed estate, to Nature's green thumb. Slightly more than half this land, or about five thousand acres, lies in the backcountry, and for more than forty years, this land has been zoned to a
minimum of four acres per family. An additional twenty-five hundred acres is zoned so as to require that each family occupy no less than two acres. These high-acre zoning laws apply to just about a quarter of Greenwich's thirty thousand total acreage. Meanwhile, Greenwich has been caught in a press between an exploding population, an increased migration from city to suburb, and pressure from developers who have sought to persuade large landholders that there are fortunes to be made if their property can be down-zoned, broken up, and sold. Few property-owners are immune to the temptations of large sums of money, and few rich people seriously resist the chance to become richer. But so far the attempts to invade the historic four-acre zone have been met with public outcry and defeat.

The sociological argument for breaking up the larger landholdings has been the claim that the rich on the big plots of land must now, in the 1970s, make way for the billowing upper middle class, that enclaves of power and property no longer make sense in a society where any man who prospers deserves to live in as pleasant surroundings as he can find. In Greenwich, this argument has pitted Mr. Lewis S. Rosenstiel, the eighty-one-year-old chairman of Schenley Industries, against the conservatives and traditionalists of the town. For several years, Mr. Rosenstiel—a Greenwich summer resident for thirty-six years—has been making a determined effort to have eighty-three acres of land which his Rosenstiel Foundation owns—in the four-acre zone—reduced to half-acre lots which would then be sold at less than a thousand dollars a lot. Mr. Rosenstiel's arguments are sociological, he insists, not economic. He has called Greenwich's four-acre zoning laws “
de facto
economic discrimination,” and those who support his view point out that it is also
de facto
racial discrimination. Mr. Rosenstiel and his foundation would like to open part of Greenwich to middle-income families, some of whom would most certainly be black families. Not long ago, a hearing on this matter took up a total of thirty hours stretched over seven nights, and produced more than a thousand pages of testimony. Tempers ran high, and insults were shouted by, and at, some of America's most prominent and—as a rule—quietest families. The matter, still unresolved, has divided Greenwich into two angry camps, while others, who agree with Mr. Rosenstiel's point of view but who still like Greenwich the way it is—and don't want to see it
changed—find themselves ambivalent on the subject. Underneath it all, unspoken but still there, is the knowledge that Lewis Rosenstiel, the champion of integration (economic and racial), the foe of discrimination, is also an outsider—a Jew.

Similar zoning arguments go on in other Fairfield County communities, and committees are forever being formed to look into other uses to which vacant, high-zoned land can be put. As property taxes rise, and the larger landholders feel the squeeze, there is increased pressure on them to break up their estates, and there has been much talk of putting residential land to discreet commercial use. If, say, a company bought twenty-five wooded acres and built a well-designed research center in the middle of the tract, no one would know it was there. A number of two-to-four-acre-zoned lots would go off the market, and the town would gain a rich taxpayer. Weston has talked of attracting this sort of business, but one man who lives there says wryly, “What they want is a company that will build a factory in the middle of the woods where no one will see it. When you do see it, it should look like a beautiful house. The factory should produce something that doesn't create any smoke or smells or noise, and deliveries should be made at night—preferably by Cadillac limousines. It would be better if this factory could be run by computers, because computers don't have kids that have to go to school and add to the tax load. But if it has to have employees, they should all live far away, in another county. And the factory should not require any town services—police, fire department, or garbage pickup. Not surprisingly, this sort of ideal company and factory has been a little bit hard to find.”

On the question of commercializing vacant property, Greenwich possesses a certain psychological advantage. It has been able to keep its city taxes comparatively low. Greenwich has done this by limiting city services, which, in turn, has helped the town preserve its treasured rural look. Though it has excellent police and fire departments, many miles of roads have neither streetlights or sidewalks. A large part of the town is without sewer service. (In these sections, septic tanks, sump pumps, and the rising water table—rising higher with the construction of so many swimming pools because pools impede natural drainage of ground water—are topics of conversation almost as popular as zoning.) Parts of the town must use private garbage collectors. Many
roads are unpaved, which means that they are inexpensive to maintain, and that they also discourage sightseers and others who don't belong. The public schools are excellent, but the rich of Greenwich send their children to private schools—to Greenwich Academy or Greenwich Country Day—so the schools have not been under undue pressures. Greenwich has a population ceiling of 86,820 people, which it expects to reach by 1985—unless, of course, the zoning laws are changed.

The second great force that has shaped the character of Fairfield's towns, perhaps even equal in importance to zoning, lies in the towns' means of access. Three major arteries of transport thread their way east and west, running roughly parallel to each other, across the breadth of Fairfield County, from the New York line to Fairfield's outer limits: the Merritt Parkway, the Connecticut Turnpike and the New Haven Railroad. The Parkway, with a beautifully landscaped center mall, winds gracefully through the backyards of largely invisible estates; it is the traditional dividing line between shore-country and backcountry real estate, with everything to the north of the Parkway being back-country. In the spring, the Parkway's length is aglow with flowering dogwood. For all its beauty, there were eyebrows raised in the 1930s when it was built. Why, for example, did the Merritt thread its way so artfully around the Rockefeller estate (the Greenwich Rockefellers, that is, first cousins of the Tarrytown ones) when a more logical route would have been straight through it? Perhaps, if you are a Rockefeller, you can detour a parkway. The newer Connecticut Turnpike, which runs along the shore, is largely a truck route (trucks are not permitted on the higher-class Merritt). The oldest route, and the most important in terms of the social makeup of Fairfield towns, is the New Haven branch of the Penn Central Railroad.

Greenwich is the first of the fashionable Fairfield stops as the railroad makes its uncertain way from Grand Central Station in Manhattan. The oneway trip takes about an hour, and for years, Greenwich has attracted a certain kind of commuter—the man who, for all his success and affluence, nonetheless needs to maintain a regular schedule at a place of business in New York City. Thus you find living in Greenwich men like G. Keith Funston, former president of the New York Stock Exchange; James A. Linen, of Time, Inc.; and IBM's Thomas J. Watson, Jr. The towns of Southport and Fairfield, on the
opposite side of the county and farthest from New York, have attracted quite a different sort of resident. They are beyond the commuting range, except to the most indefatigable commuter, and they are also suburbs of Bridgeport. Many wealthy Bridgeport manufacturers have built houses here. These towns have also drawn well-heeled retirees and others whose needs to go to New York are infrequent. In Southport, you find people like the industrialist Charles Sherwood Munson; Standard Oil heiress Ruth Bedford, and retired advertising tycoon Chester J. La Roche. The area is also popular with people who use it primarily for weekend visits and summer vacations, such as Mr. and Mrs. Rodgers and the Leonard Bernsteins. Westport, which is just about the longest practical commuter distance from New York, has attracted those whose commuting hours are irregular—the actors and painters and writers—as well as those businessmen who are so secure in their positions that they need not arrive at their desks before ten-thirty or so, the Madison Avenue men.