America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Mr. Brady is an unabashed San Francisco aristocrat: “If I’m not one, who is? It comes in one’s mother’s milk.” His father, George T. Brady, Sr., was a noted San Francisco physician. He himself is a semiretired San Francisco attorney whose specialty was international law, and his wife is a Denby of Rhode Island whose ancestor Thomas Harris was among the first band of colonists to come down from Massachusetts by canoe with Roger Williams. His mother, meanwhile, was the late Doña Francesca de Ortega de Brady, who in her youth, was one of San Francisco’s great beauties, and, in her old age, was one of the city’s revered grandes dames. This makes George T. Brady, Jr., the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Don José Francisco de Ortega, who married Maria Antonia Carrillo and who is credited with being the first white man to set eyes on San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate—and who died a bit disappointed that he had not discovered a grander bay for his king.

  “Of course in California now there are Ortegas, and there are other Ortegas. In Spain and Mexico, the name Ortega is about as common as Smith or Jones,” Mr. Brady says. “But we are the genuine article, and we all know who each other are. There are quite a lot of us around. Alas, Don José’s lands were all lost after the Great Drought of the sixties. But most of us have done well for ourselves, nonetheless. Success is in our blood. Some of my Vallejo cousins married Ganters, who make swimsuits. Others married McGettigans. Don José’s rancho was about eighteen square miles, and was called Rancho Nuestra Señora del Refugio. It was the twelfth Spanish land grant in the state, and one of the first five in Santa Barbara County. The land may be gone, but in Santa Barbara there are an Ortega school, a library, and a street. There may have been an Ortega who came over even earlier, with Cortés, and he may have been an ancestor, but we can’t prove it. Which is the grandest of the old Spanish families? There’s only one rule—never be the first to leave a party of old Californianos. The others will all start saying how much more of the sangre azul they have in their veins than the fellow who just left!”

  Needless to say, George Brady, as a direct descendant of one of the first settlers, is a member in good standing of the Society of California Pioneers, along with a profusion of his cousins. He is also a past president of the organization and remains on its board of directors. Civic-minded, as an Ortega should be, he is also on the boards of Mount St. Joseph’s and Mount St. Elizabeth’s Home for Wayward Girls, the Proctor Library Foundation, and the Glaucoma Foundation. “We’ve always tried to do our duty,” he says. “That’s in the blood, too.”

  The Ortegas may have lost their land, but the family has held onto other heirlooms: the heavy silver table service, antique lace mantillas, combs, military uniforms, and Mr. Brady’s four-times great-grandfather’s sword, emblazoned with the family’s motto, which, translated from the Spanish, is “Never draw me without reason, never sheathe me without honor.”

  George Brady had the fact that he was an Ortega, and an aristocrat, drummed into him “from the time I was old enough to talk.” One of his earliest memories is of being taken, by his nurse, to visit a young cousin—“fourteen times removed, I think”—and of being presented to his cousin’s grandmother, “a little old Spanish lady, dressed in black widow’s weeds.” Young George was introduced to her, and she responded with a little sniff. Obviously, the name Brady meant nothing to her. A little later, Brady’s mother dropped by to pick him up, and she was introduced to the little Spanish lady as Doña Francesca de Ortega de Brady. Slowly, the little lady rose to her feet, extended a jeweled hand, and said, “I rise to greet an Ortega.”

  Then she performed a deep curtsy.

  *A hereditary society, of course, differs from a social club in that ancestry is the sole criterion for membership. Over the years, a number of these have evolved and have received national recognition. The most prestigious is probably the Society of the Cincinnati, which requires that one prove descent from an officer in the Revolutionary Army (fighting on the American side, naturally, and honorably discharged). To be a member of the Society of the Cincinnati is considered the American equivalent of being made a Knight of the Garter in England and is taken very seriously. Other hereditary societies have somewhat more quaint, even whimsical, genealogical criteria. There is, for instance, the Flagon and Trencher Society, whose membership is restricted to descendants of colonial tavern keepers. There is also the Descendants of the Illegitimate Sons and Daughters of the Kings of Britain, where one must produce an ancestor who was a bastard offspring of any king or queen of England, Scotland, or Wales. There is even a national society called Son of a Witch, with members whose ancestors were either accused, tried, convicted, or hanged for witchcraft. (The society will provide a list of “recognized” witches, most of whom operated in the vicinity of Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1690s, to interested applicants. Why the society’s national headquarters are in Arizona is unclear.)

  PART THREE

  Heirs Apparent

  18

  Secret Society

  Only recently a New York woman, who can trace her lineage to the gracious Dutch women who founded Society in New York, gave a dinner for fifty of her friends. Practically all of them came of families antedating the arrival of the British fleet that turned Nieuw Amsterdam into New York. No mention was made of the affair in any paper in New York City, first, because the old regime did not and still does not believe that publicity is necessary to social success, and second, because the city at large has forgotten the families who built it.

  Yet these families endure, submerged, and women whose ancestors have directed the social life of New York for ten or more generations still continue to entertain and be entertained without the blare of publicity.

  These words, from Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer’s book, The Social Ladder, were penned in 1924. But they could just as easily, and accurately, have been written in 1987, and about private enclaves of New York gentlemen. Few New Yorkers today are probably aware of the existence, in their very midst, of a small, elite men’s club called The Zodiac. It is typical of America’s secret aristocracy that The Zodiac should have been created, in a very real sense, in secret, that it should have passed its hundredth anniversary several years ago without anyone but its members knowing, and that even the Social Register—which publishes the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and officers of all the elite clubs in the country—should be unaware of The Zodiac. The Zodiac has no clubhouse, and no address, and no telephone. It has no bylaws and no president, and no list of its members has ever been published. And yet it is easily the most exclusive club in the United States. As its name implies, its membership is restricted, at any given time, to only twelve male members.

  The Zodiac was founded in the 1870s by the elder J. Pierpont Morgan, and to understand the principles behind The Zodiac it is first necessary to understand Mr. Morgan. J. P. Morgan has enjoyed, for some reason, the worst posthumous reputation of any man in the history of American banking and finance. History has portrayed Morgan as vain, autocratic, stingy, curmudgeonly, and money-mad. He was in fact none of these things. What he was, was an aristocrat to the marrow. When Morgan died in 1913, much was made in the press of the fact that, out of his $69.5 million fortune, only a small portion of his estate—about $700,000—was left to charities, giving the impression that the public weal was one of the last things Morgan cared about. What was overlooked was that, during his lifetime, Morgan had contributed vast sums to a wide variety of causes. He was a notable collector of rare books, paintings, and other art objects, and many of these were given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of which he was president. Over the years, he had made large financial gifts to this museum, as well as to the American Museum of Natural History, Harvard College (especially to its medical school), the Lying-in Hospital of New York, and the New York trade schools. He was also the principal financial backer of the Groton School, in Massachusetts. It has also been forgotten that, in 1895, when the U.S. Treasury’s gold reserves had sunk dangerously low, Morgan’s bank loaned the g
overnment $62 million in gold to shore up the gold reserves to the $100 million level, thereby supporting the country’s currency and averting a financial panic. In his will, furthermore, Morgan stipulated that his son and principal heir, J. P. Morgan, Jr., should make regular annual gifts to designated charities.

  At the time of Morgan’s death, the “huge” size of his fortune was drawn to public attention. In fact, his fortune, though respectable, was far smaller than those of Henry Frick, E. H. Harriman, or Andrew Mellon and even smaller than those of Thomas Fortune Ryan and Payne Whitney. And Morgan’s money was as nothing compared with that of the DuPonts or John D. Rockefeller. It was Andrew Carnegie who, commenting with surprise on the quality of Morgan’s art collection, said, “And to think—he wasn’t even a rich man!”

  Perhaps Morgan’s most famous comment was his laconic reply to a man who asked him how much a yacht cost. “If a man has to ask,” he answered, “he can’t afford it.” At the same time, as an aristocrat who believed that sailing provided the truest test of a man’s character, he also once said, “You can do business with anyone, but you can only sail a boat with a gentleman.” Also memorable was his humorous reply to a friend who had asked him to lend him some money. “No,” replied Morgan, “but I’ll let you walk down the street with me.”

  Admittedly, Morgan had a crusty, distant personality and never made a fuss over other people. He disliked being fussed over himself and, in his London office, became so annoyed with the European practice whereby underlings bowed themselves in and out of the offices of their superiors that he ordered the practice stopped on pain of dismissal.

  Like an aristocrat, Morgan observed a strict, almost puritanical code of behavior. No scandal, romantic or otherwise, ever attached itself to his name, even in an era where every rich man was expected to have a mistress. Once, when Morgan was taking to task an associate whose love life was becoming the stuff of drawing room gossip, his associate replied that he was doing nothing more than what everyone else was doing “behind closed doors.” “That, sir,” countered Morgan, “is what doors are for.” According to Morgan’s rigid standards, the worst thing a man could do was to break his word. Once, when a man who had been a longtime friend and business associate and was even a relative by marriage, broke his word over a relatively trivial matter, Morgan never spoke to the man again.

  John Pierpont Morgan was a prototypical patrician Yankee. He was born in 1837, the son of Junius Spencer Morgan, who, with his partner George Peabody of the Salem Peabodys, formed what eventually became the international banking house of J. S. Morgan & Company in London. The banker’s son was splendidly educated at the private English High School in Boston and at the University of Göttingen, in Germany. Throughout his life, J. P. Morgan remained very England-oriented. His suits, shirts, cravats, hats, shoes, walking sticks, and even underwear were custom-made for him in London. He admired the stiff-upper-lip nil admirari quality of the upper-crust Britisher’s famous reserve, and for this he was thought to be a very cold fish indeed. On the other hand, to the few men whom he considered his true friends, he was intensely and almost sentimentally loyal. When Morgan built and established New York’s imposing Metropolitan Club at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixtieth Street in 1891, it was widely reported that he had done so to spite the older (1836) Union Club, which had slighted him. In fact, spite had nothing to do with it. Morgan had proposed a friend of his for membership in the Union, but the club had blackballed him. Acutely embarrassed that a man whom he had endorsed should have received such humiliating treatment from his fellow clubmen, Morgan decided to create a new club for his friend by way of atonement. The Metropolitan Club that resulted was a far more luxurious facility than the proud but somewhat dowdy Union Club.

  One reason J. P. Morgan was vilified by the press after his death was that, throughout his life, he had an aristocratic disdain for—even loathing of—publicity. Though his name was known all over the world, he never made a speech or attended a public meeting. He never granted interviews to reporters, and he dodged photographers. When Harvard, to whom he had been so generous, wanted to give him an honorary degree, he declined the honor, knowing that receiving it would involve an acceptance speech and dealing with the press. Publishers offered him huge sums for his autobiography, but he turned them all down and refused to authorize any book to be written about him in his lifetime. Even his son-in-law, Herbert Satterlee, was unsuccessful in trying to persuade him to be interviewed on the subjects of his life and business philosophy for posthumous publication. “He had,” said one of his former associates, “the instinctive shrinking from publicity of the man of breeding.” The closest thing to a public statement of his code occurred a year before his death, during the monetary trust investigation of 1911–1913 by a House committee, when Samuel Untermyer asked him whether commercial credit was based primarily on property or on cash. “The first thing,” roared Morgan in reply, “is character. A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.”

  By the 1870s, Morgan had begun to question the role of the private men’s clubs in the city. Their original purpose, he felt, was being subverted. Men’s clubs in New York and elsewhere had been originally founded on the model of the men’s social clubs in London, designed as places to which men of similar backgrounds and interests could repair at the end of a business day and enjoy an hour or so of companionship unrelated to business. The Union Club had been organized on this principle, and indeed, during the early days of this so-called Mother of Clubs, it was considered poor form to discuss business on the club’s premises. This had also been the basic tenet on which the oldest club in America had been established, the Fish House in Philadelphia, which was founded in 1732. To assure that the Fish House would always be assertively social, and nonbusiness, it was formed as a men’s cooking club, with members taking turns preparing meals for the membership. (The Fish House, also known as the State in Schuylkill, was indeed a separate state in colonial times and was so recognized by colonial governors. For nearly two hundred years, the club kept the recipe for its famous Fish House punch—a potent mixture of rum, brandy, peach liqueur, sugar, and lemon juice—a closely guarded secret.)

  Other New York clubs had followed the Union Club’s example and were, in a sense, all offshoots of the Union. The Union League Club was organized in 1863 by disgruntled Union Clubbers who objected that the Confederate secretary of state had been allowed to resign from the club when he should have been expelled. The Knickerbocker Club had been formed in 1871 by ex-Unionites who felt the Union was taking in too many out-of-towners and not giving proper preference to members of Old Knickerbocker families. The Brook Club was founded in 1903 by two young Turks who had been ousted from the Union Club for attempting, or so they said, to fry an egg on the bald head of one of the Union’s most venerable members.

  But it was not frivolity or politics that Morgan found objectionable about New York’s men’s clubs. It was a trend he spotted developing in the post–Civil War era of capitalist expansion, in which the clubs were abandoning their initial precepts of gentlemanly good-fellowship among peers and were becoming places where business deals were put together. In this, he was foresighted, for this is exactly what the men’s clubs have become, particularly in a financial city such as New York. The clubs have certainly wandered far from their original goals. The Links Club, for example, was first organized, as its names implies, “to promote and conserve throughout the U.S. the best interests and true spirit of the game of golf.” Today, the Links, on East Sixty-second Street in Manhattan, is far from any golf course and has become a club whose membership consists of business leaders from all over the country—Minneapolis Pillsburys, Beverly Hills Dohenys, Dorrances from Philadelphia, and Kleenex-making Kimberlys from Neenah, Wisconsin.

  The commercialization of the private clubs is now almost complete. As one New York clubman put it recently, “If I have a hundred-thousand-dollar deal to put together, I’ll take my client to lunch at the
Union or the Knickerbocker. If it’s a million-dollar deal, I’ll take him to the Brook. If it’s ten million, we’ll go to the Links. If there’s no deal to discuss, we’ll go to the University Club.”

  To offset what seemed to Morgan such an alarming and unaristocratic trend, his answer was the tiny Zodiac club: twelve gentlemen selected on no other basis than, as one member has put it, “good-fellowship and good genes.” For nearly a hundred and fifteen years, twelve Zodiac members have met on no regularly scheduled basis, but at least two or three times a year. For each gathering, a member is designated “caterer” to the other eleven and is expected to provide a dinner, either in his own home or in one of the private rooms of one of his clubs. No female guests have ever been invited to meetings, though once a year a dinner is held to include the wives of members. For years, Zodiac members met in full evening dress, white tie and tails, wearing medals and decorations where appropriate. Today, that dress code has been relaxed somewhat, and Zodiac dinners are black-tie. Conviviality and conversation are the only orders of the evening. Business is never to be discussed.