The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  With war orders surging, the Colonel engineered the merger in 1915 of two major manufacturers of guns, shells, caissons, and other ordnance—advance word of which sent the price of the stock of one of the firms to its highest levels ever. His firm took the lead, with a New York firm, on the reorganization and recapitalization of the world’s largest manufacturer of trucks. In 1916, a syndicate led by the Montgomery firm and one other acquired nearly all the stock in one of the oldest and best-known independent oil-refining and petroleum products companies in the East and reorganized it under new ownership. In 1917, it led the restructuring and recapitalization of one of the world’s largest consumers of copper, which the company used to produce cable for telephone and telegraph, and electrical, companies. And during the war years, when American machinery firms became targets for Wall Street stockjobbing operations—the buying and selling of securities in pursuit of quick profits—the Montgomery firm was a principal in the purchase, reorganization, and recapitalization of one of the only two United States producers of armored steel, used to make battleships.

  On the evening of March 1, 1917, ten years after the partnership had been announced in the Wall Street Journal, the firm celebrated itself with a banquet in the ballroom of the thousand-room, French Renaissance–style Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in downtown Philadelphia. Three years earlier, the partners had opened a New York office with Theodore Roosevelt Jr. in charge; a year after that, they’d opened branch offices in Pittsburgh and Hartford. One hundred twenty-five firm members and guests turned out for the tenth-anniversary blowout at the Bellevue-Stratford, described at its opening a decade earlier as the most luxurious hotel in the country. In the two-tiered ballroom, with light fixtures by Thomas Edison and chandeliers by Lalique, the Colonel, in white tie and tails, sat on the stage beneath the proscenium arch, at the midpoint of a feasting table draped in white linen and decorated with floral centerpieces, silver place settings, and candelabras. His cofounders sat on either side. Their fathers, the city’s banking and department-store bigwigs, flanked them. Below the high table, men in tuxedos and women in evening dresses sat at round tables filling the room. The menu for the occasion listed nineteen dishes, including fillet of sole, breast of guinea, sweet potatoes, and a dessert called bombe pompadour. A photographer captured the event—the sea of pale faces turned upward toward the camera, frozen momentarily above crystal glasses, linen napkins, oysters on the half shell, dinner rolls yet to be touched. Some seven hundred fifty oysters were consumed that evening in celebration of the Colonel and his firm’s dazzling success. I wonder if anyone there that evening imagined even for a moment that the partnership would begin to crumble within six months.

  Helen Hope Montgomery, with two of her siblings

  Helen Hope, the Colonel’s eldest child and my father’s mother, used to say she was raised to go to parties. That’s how she put it. “I’m just a party girl,” she’d say, chasing the confession with a percussive laugh. Her parents wanted her to know a lot of people, she’d say; they wanted her career to be marriage. On one level, the declaration was matter-of-fact—a data point along the lines of “Dad flew autogiros.” The laugh that followed was an invitation to see the humor in the situation: If you found it funny, good. So did she. By the time I knew her, she was fully aware that changing times had stolen some of the luster from her assigned vocation. But she can hardly have regretted how it had worked out. She’d aced the party-girl exams, no question. As for her career in marriage, she was CEO of a blue-chip domestic union. She’d made herself into a dairy farmer of some renown, disregarding her father’s stated position that cows weren’t for women. She’d appeared on best-dressed lists alongside Babe Paley. She’d judged horses at Madison Square Garden. She’d honored her parents by doing more than anyone else to keep Ardrossan going, the farm operating, and four generations of family members on much better than speaking terms.

  Helen Hope Montgomery had been named for her mother but she took after her father. She had his big, dark eyes, pronounced eyebrows, dark wavy hair. Headstrong and competitive, she had a pony at four, rode in horse shows at eight, competed in jumping classes at thirteen. “I was terribly ambitious,” she said. “I wanted to be the top of everything.” She had a fine affinity with animals. In a scrapbook, I find a photograph of her at about eight months, in a white linen dress with puffy sleeves, propped against a long-haired dog named Cauliflower, twice her size. She sits in the curve of the dog’s long torso, eyes wide, one tiny fist lost somewhere in the dog’s flowing beard. Child and dog meet the gaze of the camera, appearing mildly affronted, as though the photographer has interrupted a moment of intimate consultation between cousins. In a published account of the activities of a local foxhunting club—an enthusiast’s diary of miles covered, fences cleared, noses bloodied, port consumed—I find the trail of the Colonel and his then adolescent eldest, Helen Hope. They would set off together before dawn on fall mornings, riding for miles across frosted fields to join the hunt that her great-uncle had founded.

  On a cold day in the winter of 1910, the girl who would grow up to sing a naughty song to the Duke of Windsor and win a Charleston contest judged by Josephine Baker gazed for the first time at the rolling expanse that was to become her family’s place. Helen Hope was six years old that day. Her family had been living in Haverford, a half dozen station stops out from Philadelphia on the Main Line. Governesses, cooks, maids, chauffeurs—nine in all—attended to the needs of two parents, one auntie, and two daughters. (Two more children were yet to be born.) On that day, which Helen Hope would recall vividly eighty-some years later, the family set off in a French touring car, with an open top and a French chauffeur, to survey Dad’s latest acquisition. (“Americans were not supposed to be capable of driving a car in those days,” my grandmother would note.) To its six-year-old passenger, the car seemed to tower above the ground. Sunlight flashed on its brass fittings. The party sallied forth in the gravy boat with its uniformed driver. He headed northwest, intending to approach the property from the south, and maneuvered the vehicle onto Godfrey Road. Soon the road, unpaved then, turned into a ribbon of mud. The wheels began to spin, sending clods of dirt shooting into the air, burrowing deeper into the muck. The young gentleman financier with his fancy car, enviable wife, beautifully turned-out little girls, and grand dreams ended up having to summon four horses he’d just bought. Pressed into service as draft horses that day, the hunters hauled automobile, chauffeur, children, wife, and paterfamilias from the ooze.

  School in any formal sense was not a priority. Some Main Line parents sent their offspring to boarding school at six or seven, aping the child-rearing customs of the British upper classes; the husband of one of my father’s cousins was sent away at five. The Montgomery children were spared that fate. “My mother, a strong believer in both practicality and charm, regarded education for women as a rather unnecessary waste of time,” my grandmother once explained. Instead, a French governess taught her to read and write in French. Tutors taught her and her siblings other subjects at home or in the houses of other families nearby. A dance instructor was imported to hold classes in the then unfurnished ballroom in the big house. Boys in knicker suits and dancing pumps and girls in dresses and ballet slippers arrived from neighboring estates. A liveried butler met them at the door, escorted them past several large dogs, and delivered them to the ballroom to shake hands, in front of the fireplace, with Muz. Helen Hope’s brother, Aleck, eventually went to boarding school and from there to Harvard. But the first test their sister Mary Binney would later remember having taken was a Red Cross test, during World War II. She was in her midthirties.

  Unconstrained by the obstinacy of school calendars, the Montgomery family was free to travel. In December 1921—by which time there were four children, ages seventeen, fourteen, ten, and nine—the family set sail for Europe on the last of the four-funneled ocean liners, the Aquitania. On his passport application, the Colonel wrote that the family wo
uld return “within eight months.” Their itinerary, as Aleck reported it later on sheets of yellow legal-pad paper, was listed as follows: “British Isles, Egypt, India, Gibraltar, Madeira, Portugal, France, Italy, Greece, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Algiers, Czechoslovakia and other countries en route.” A year and a half after returning, the family set off again, minus Helen Hope, on a circumnavigation that took them to England, France, Egypt, Aden, Ceylon, Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macao, the Philippines, China, and Japan. During a month-long emergency layover in Hong Kong, the matriarch recovered from what was said by several American newspapers, which saw these facts as newsworthy, to be “an attack of India fever.”

  In a book about the Bund, the waterfront quarter of Shanghai, I came upon a mysterious reference in a chapter on the Astor House Hotel, which was said to have been the first Western hotel in China, advertised as “the Waldorf-Astoria of the Orient.” The author recounted the hotel’s history as a magnet for foreigners and expatriates. “Notable Guests”—from Albert Einstein to the Maharaja of Kapurthala and the last Hawaiian king—were enumerated. Buried in that list was the following item: In 1924, a British woman and her daughter stayed at the hotel “pretending to be Charlotte Hope Binney Tyler Montgomery and her wealthy socialite daughter Helen Hope Montgomery.” The pair “made a fortune duping Shanghai’s foreign community. The daughter, who was supposedly coming into a huge fortune, courted marital proposals and was swift to lose or run off with engagement rings, whilst her mother borrowed many expensive fur coats on the pretense of having them copied, but which were never seen by their owners again. The couple made a safe escape to Hong Kong before the hotel was besieged by their debtors.”

  When I knew her, my grandmother had a storytelling style that inclined sharply toward antic capers and skillfully calibrated overstatement. But she professed to have been painfully shy as a child. Her mother had cured her, she said, with two pieces of advice—the first, about the importance of always giving people the best possible time; the second, about the futility of excessive self-awareness. “It is stupid to always be thinking of yourself,” my grandmother would remember her mother telling her. “Point yourself at something and then get going.” Whether she’d really suffered from shyness, I can’t be sure. If she did, it seems conceivable that she cured herself by force of will. She had the discipline to override whatever mild anxieties might have caused what she called shyness. If that worked for her, she probably assumed that the rest of us could benefit from similar advice. The language of emotional nuance was not her mother tongue. Once, she turned to a granddaughter, not quite emerging from adolescence, and offered a bit of blunt, less-than-tender grandparental advice. “You know, it’s not enough to look good,” she said. “You have to say something.”

  By her own account, Helen Hope put her mother’s advice to work: “So the first thing I did was to get some girlfriends with plenty of boyfriends. On Sundays our courtyard was full of the most disreputable cars imaginable.” Her parents were horrified, at least in her telling: “I had become very interested in boys and I think my parents were worried that I was going to be old news by the time I was a debutante at eighteen.” So they found a boarding school that took not only girls but their steeds. They promised her a horse if she’d go. She took the bribe. Before leaving for school, she asked her mother what she should do about Latin, the existence of which was news. No problem, Muz assured her: “You’re fluent in French!” The horse arrived at the school first; rider followed. She lasted less than two years. Her parents, she said, “snatched me out to polish me off in Europe. I was delighted about that since I missed the final exams, having cleverly avoided tests in the past by getting chicken pox and pinkeye.”

  Of Muz’s four children, Helen Hope most closely resembled her father. She adored him and, it seems, he adored her. If he had one criticism of his admired eldest, it was that she might benefit from grappling more seriously with life. When she looked in the mirror each morning, the Colonel would say, Helen Hope would ask herself, “How much fun can I have today?” My grandmother liked to tell that story. But, from the way she told it, you might have concluded that she took her father’s critique as a point of pride.

  Mary Binney, three years younger, was the artist. A pianist and a dancer, she traveled, as a teenager, into Philadelphia every Friday afternoon and Saturday evening to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra perform under Leopold Stokowski, then at the height of his nearly thirty-year run as the orchestra’s music director. Aleck, four years younger than Mary Binney, suffered from an unhappy relationship with his father. Aleck’s son described Aleck’s Navy enlistment as running away from home: “My grandfather’s somewhat brutish personality was not particularly helpful to my father.” The youngest of the children, Charlotte Ives, eighteen months younger than Aleck, was the most daring and the most tragic. Widely loved, she rode horses that no one else would attempt, became a recreational pilot, made a spectacularly bad and brief marriage, ended up in a wheelchair for reasons no one ever seemed quite able or willing to pinpoint, and was outlived by all three of her siblings.

  To mark my grandmother’s 1922 “launch” into society—that’s the society writers’ vernacular, conjuring visions of a luxury liner gliding decorously down a ramp, champagne bottles shattering across the prow—her parents organized a day of point-to-point races in her honor. An import from Ireland and England, point-to-point racing was new. Amateurs raced hunting horses on a course that took them across open fields and over fences and ditches. In his scarlet coat, top hat, and breeches, the Colonel greeted his guests at the front door of the big house. They sailed across the carpeted hallway, through the living room, out the French doors onto the terrace. One woman, it was reported later, wore a red-and-white-check gown; a black velvet box coat at hip length; a small hat with a black velvet crown and silver metal brim; a fox fur scarf; and high, laced, tan shoes, their fronts embroidered in red. Men and women gathered on the greensward, which stretched into the distance before ending abruptly at a recessed retaining wall designed to keep cows off the lawn without interrupting the view. In a black-and-white photograph apparently taken that day by a photographer hired for the occasion, riders gallop their horses flat-out across a pasture, coattails flying. The house looms behind them on the hilltop, half-hidden by not yet fully grown trees. In a second photograph, a horse and rider clear a high post-and-rail fence, as two more horses approach from behind. In the distance, spectators watch from a ridge. “Never in the annals of society in this city has a debutante been honored in such an unusual way or been the recipient of so much social attention,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported breathlessly the following day.

  The infatuation of society reporters with Helen Hope, and her attentiveness to their needs, commenced in earnest that fall. Newspaper readers learned that the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery would “never grow wildly enthusiastic over a new recipe, or skip with glee over a brand new way to put up tomatoes.” She preferred dancing and golf, though she said she was no good at the latter. She was the one debutante who defended bobbed hair; she favored longer dresses over shorter ones because they made her look dignified and tall. Her “crowning shame, of which she is not ashamed,” the newspaper said, was a tendency to fall unexpectedly and deeply asleep. “When it comes to the question of husbands, Miss Montgomery tells her preference with the same engaging smile,” the newspaper reported. “The ideal HE must be tall, good-looking, good-natured. He must have a million, and, last but not least, he must . . .”

  The final qualification for the job had been torn off of the clipping.

  At just over six feet, Edgar Scott was tall enough. He was stylishly tailored and slim, leaving the impression of an extra inch or two. My father once described him as resembling “a latter-day Roman emperor—benign, intelligent.” He was good-looking, if not in the chiseled, caveman way. He had blue eyes, a fair complexion, a curved nose, and light brown hair combed back from his forehead. His long face, at r
est, settled into a slight smile. To me as a child, he had the look of a creature in a children’s book—a debonair fox. He was good-natured: What most people saw most of the time was a gentle charm, though he, too, had a temper. If he didn’t “have a million” in the year of Helen Hope Montgomery’s debut, there was reason to expect that one day he would. His grandfather Thomas Alexander Scott, the railroad president, had left behind a fortune estimated in 1881 at between five and ten million dollars. At a dinner party in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, in November 1922, my father’s parents laid eyes on each other for the first time. She was eighteen; he was twenty-three. Refining her account of that evening over the decades that followed, she polished it into the smoothest of romantic chestnuts. “I looked at him across the table,” she would say. “I thought he was divine.”