America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Not that Zodiac members are necessarily men who lead lives of idleness. Their gatherings are intended to be marked only by “congeniality and conviviality,” but there is an underlying, more serious theme: the cultural and civic betterment of the city of New York. Membership in The Zodiac is supposed to be kept very secret, as Mr. Morgan wished it, but this author has been able to ascertain the names of ten of the current dozen members. These are:

  • Robert G. Goelet, of the old New York real estate family, related to Astors as well as to Vanderbilts, a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History and former president of the New York Zoo.

  • John Jay Iselin, descendant of John Jay and former president of New York’s WNET/Channel 13 public television station.

  • S. Dillon Ripley, retired head of the Smithsonian Institution and married to a Livingston.

  • Schuyler G. Chapin, former dean of the Columbia University School of Arts and a Schuyler descendant.

  • Daniel G. Tenney, Jr., a descendant of Massachusetts Sedgwicks, married to a Philadelphia Lippincott, a partner in the old New York law firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, and a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation.

  • Robert S. Pine, president of L. F. Rothschild & Company.

  • August Heckscher, former New York City Parks commissioner and The Zodiac’s secretary and only officer.

  • Arnold Whitridge, occupation “gentleman,” and the club’s oldest member.

  • Howard Phipps, Jr., of the Pittsburgh steel family.

  • J. Carter Brown III, director of Washington’s National Gallery of Art.

  The observant will note a preponderance of Harvard and Yale alumni among The Zodiac’s membership. The even more observant will spot the fact that many of these men are graduates of the Groton School. Mr. Morgan would have approved of that, too.

  Today, only three men’s clubs in America survive that are dedicated principally to good-fellowship and good times. There is the ancient State in Schuylkill, still a men’s cooking club, which was obviously the inspiration for Morgan’s Zodiac. The State in Schuylkill calls itself “The oldest formally orgainized men’s social club in the Anglo-Saxon (which is to say civilized) world.” The governing qualifiers here are the words “formally orgainized.” Such famous London clubs as White’s, Boodle’s, and St. James’s would appear at first glance to be older, but State in Schuylkill members point out that these private clubs started out as public coffeehouses, until White’s became “formally orgainized” in 1736, thus making the State in Schuylkill four years older. As for its informal name, the Fish House, this stems from the fact that the club was originally a “Fishing Company” of Philadelphia men who fished the banks of the Schuylkill River in the eighteenth century and enjoyed cooking their catches afterward.

  The Fish House meets thirteen times from May to October for its home-cooked luncheons, and periodically during the winter months for dinners. Each course of each meal is the responsibility of an individual member, meaning that members get a chance to try their hand at various dishes—with an emphasis on hearty, outdoorsy fare such as boola-boola soup (made with mussels), planked shad, and pressed duck—throughout the year. As with The Zodiac, there is a dress code at the Fish House. Preparers of the dishes don long white aprons and odd-looking wide-brimmed straw hats called boaters, but which look more like Chinese coolie hats. Members explain that “these hats are of a pattern brought from China early in the last century, and were worn by a high Mandarin caste.”

  The State in Schuylkill clings determinedly to the notion that it is a separate state, and no part of Pennsylvania. Its members are called Citizens, and among its elected officials are a secretary of state, a secretary of the treasury, a governor, counselors, a sheriff, and even a coroner. Meals traditionally begin with a toast—“To the memory of General Washington”—followed by a second, “To the memory of Governor Morris,” who was Samuel Morris, Jr., governor of the State in Schuylkill from 1765 to 1811. After other past governors have been toasted, there is a toast “To the President of the United States,” though during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt this part of the ritual was conspicuously omitted. The club’s bylaws permit no more than thirty Citizens, or members, at any one time, though at its meetings a certain number of carefully screened Apprentices—or hopeful members-to-be—are invited. While the Citizens do the cooking, the Apprentices do the serving. As a result of the thirty-Citizens-only rule, there have been fewer than five hundred Citizens of the State of Schuylkill in the more than two hundred and fifty years of its existence. Citizenship, it may go without saying, is nearly always conferred upon members of old Philadelphia families.*

  During Prohibition, the State in Schuylkill reminded itself that it had never actually ratified the U.S. Constitution. Therefore, it saw no reason to be bound by the strictures of the Eighteenth Amendment.

  Then there is San Francisco’s remarkable Bohemian Club. Since San Francisco is a much newer city, the Bohemian Club cannot claim the great age of many eastern men’s clubs, but it is nonetheless a spiritual descendant of both the State in Schuylkill and New York’s Century Association, which in turn was another of the splinter groups to emerge from the old Union Club. Formed in 1847, the Century’s first membership consisted of gentlemen who felt that intellectual and artistic endeavors were being slighted by the Union. (At the time, one Union Club member grumbled, “There’s a club down on Forty-third Street that chooses its members mentally. Now isn’t that a hell of a way to run a club?”) From the State in Schuylkill, the Bohemian Club has borrowed its emphasis on the great outdoors. From the Century, the Bohemian has taken its emphasis on matters of the mind, or at least the imagination.

  Every Bohemian Club member is expected, no matter what his actual calling or profession, to demonstrate some sort of artistic talent—whether it be writing doggerel, playing a musical instrument, or singing a passable baritone. When “other qualifications have been met,” a candidate for Bohemian membership can even make a willingness to paint flats for the scenery of the club’s stage shows pass for a “talent.” In the city, the Bohemian Club occupies a handsome red brick Georgian clubhouse on one of the flanks of Nob Hill, and among the facilities here is a 750-seat theatre, where members prepare and present regular amateur theatricals. But the club’s most celebrated institution is its annual two-week summer “encampment” at Bohemian Grove, a twenty-eight-hundred-acre tract it maintains high in the Sierra wilderness. Each Bohemian encampment begins with a campfire ceremony called The Cremation of Care and continues with such events as lectures, poetry readings, musical productions, spectacles of son et lumière, and concerts presented by the club’s own seventy-piece symphony orchestra. All these productions are written, produced, directed, and performed by the club’s membership, and a high degree of professionalism is expected and often achieved. In between these cultural events, there is plenty of time for entertainment of a more bibulous nature.

  By eastern standards, the Bohemian Club is large, with some twelve hundred members, but it is also in one sense exclusive. Because social San Francisco has been accused of being both parochial and provincial (as well as a bit nouveau), and to offset the fact that some older-established eastern families still tend to think of San Francisco as being at the end of the Anglo-Saxon (which is to say civilized) world, the Bohemian Club likes to think of itself as a national, not just a city, club. Though plenty of Old Guard (which is to say late-nineteenth-century) San Francisco names such as Crocker, Flood, Spreckels, and de Young are represented in its membership, the Bohemian Club welcomes members from other cities. Thus, while prominent San Franciscans and other Californians often have to wait for years to be invited to join, men from Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, and Washington go sailing in with no delay at all. The club also has members from Canada and from European cities. To each encampment, a small, carefully screened list of out-of-town guests is invited. These have included Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. But otherwise the encampments
are members-only, and assertively all-male.

  For a long time, the location of the Bohemian Grove was a jealously guarded secret, which led to stories and speculation—particularly among wives of members—about wild goings-on, involving loose women, at the grove. Naturally, members did nothing to scotch these lurid tales. But eventually the secret leaked out. Today, wives and children of Bohemian Club members are permitted to visit the grove, though never during an encampment. They find it a peaceful spot for picnics, and if there were ever orgies there, no sign of them remains.

  Then, finally, there is the little Zodiac club of New York, the most secret of them all. Aside from its once-yearly nod to spouses, women are never included at its gatherings, nor have outside guests ever been invited. With only twelve members, a member must die or otherwise be placed hors de combat before a new member can be taken. As a result, only about fifty men have belonged since J. P. Morgan started it more than a hundred years ago.

  “Part of the fun of belonging to The Zodiac,” says John Jay Iselin, one of the club’s newer members,* “is that nobody else knows about us and, because nobody else much cares, they can’t call us ‘exclusive.’ We’re just a bunch of friends who like to get together and enjoy each other’s company.”

  And to enjoy the company of good genes.

  *Membership is supposed to be a closely guarded secret, but who belongs can be ascertained by consulting the Social Register.

  *An opening slot for Iselin appeared upon the death of James Bryant Conant, former president of Harvard, later U.S. high commissioner for West Germany, and still later American ambassador to West Germany.

  19

  Old Guard Versus New

  In New York, where money has become the main municipal product and preoccupation, members of the old-line families have responded to the often voracious social onslaughts of new wealth by collectively (and politely) withdrawing into a common protective shell such as The Zodiac. Tortoiselike, they have tucked their heads inside the carapace of family blood and family name. While leading active business lives, they have, in a social sense, become like cave dwellers in the city their ancestors built. They have gone underground. After all, they all know who each other are, and they no longer feel the need to prove or promote themselves in any public way. They cannot properly be called snobbish, because a snob is defined as a person who aggressively seeks out the company—and only the company—of the wealthy or well known. Faced with social climbers, the Old Guard families have tended to respond with passive, and again polite, rather than active resistance. A case in point would be the Old Guard’s reaction to the arrival of the first August Belmont in its midst.

  John Jacob Astor was not a social climber. August Belmont was. Indeed, he may have helped invent the term in New York. He was social climbing personified and a snob par excellence. He had appeared suddenly in New York in 1837, with money in his pockets, to take advantage of one of the financial community’s periodic panics. Buying up stocks at bargain-basement prices and then watching them rise again, he quickly succeeded in his mission. Belmont was Jewish, but that fact alone would not have amounted to a social demerit at the time. He announced himself as the new American representative of the European banking house of Rothschild, and the Rothschilds were by then internationally respected and in several cases bore European titles. But Belmont denied his Jewishness, and somewhere during his journey from his native Germany to America his original name of Schönberg—“beautiful mountain”—had been more or less Frenchified into Belmont.

  But there was something peculiar about all this, beyond the name change. The Rothschilds almost never sent a representative to open up new banking territory who was not a family member, yet they did seem to be on very close terms with Mr. Belmont. And the rumor circulated to the effect that, in Europe, whenever a male Rothschild traveled with a lady who was not his wife, the pair would traditionally register at hotels as M. et Mme. Schönberg. Thus the possibility presented itself—though it would never be proven—that August Belmont was an illegitimate Rothschild, an embarrassment to the family at home but trusted sufficiently to be dispatched to conduct family business on the other side of the Atlantic. This was the enigma of August Belmont: a man who looked like a German, spoke with a precise, if stilted, British accent, had a French name, and wanted to become an American aristocrat.

  Belmont had not been able, as the Astors had done, to ally himself maritally with one of the Old Guard families. But he did the next best thing. He proposed to, and was accepted by, the daughter of an American war hero. She was the beautiful—if, by some accounts, dull-witted—Caroline Slidell Perry, the daughter of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, distinguished officer in the Mexican War and the man credited with having opened Japan to the West. Her uncle was another naval commander, Oliver Hazard Perry, hero of the War of 1812 and the Battle of Lake Erie. The Belmonts were married grandly in the Episcopal Church.

  But from that point onward August Belmont began doing everything on almost too grand a scale, which left New Yorkers more aghast than impressed. He and his new wife established themselves in a new house on lower Fifth Avenue that was bigger and more elaborate than anything the Astors had ever owned. It was the first house in New York to have, among other things, its own ballroom, a room set aside solely for the annual Belmont ball. As Edith Wharton commented later, in her novel The Age of Innocence, this room “was left for three hundred and sixty-four days of the year to shuttered darkness, with its gilt chairs stacked in a corner and its chandelier in a bag.” The Belmonts were also the first couple in New York to have their own red carpet, to be rolled down the marble front steps and across the sidewalk, for parties, instead of renting one from a caterer along with the gilt chairs.

  Everything the Belmonts did seemed larger than life, and so naturally it was talked about and written about. August Belmont may have been New York’s first, and was certainly its most ardent, publicity seeker. When he imported a French chef from Paris, the news made the papers. August Belmont’s art gallery was the first in the city to be lighted from a skylight in the roof, and the collection of art it housed was remarkable, including works by Madrazo, Rosa Bonheur, Meissonier, Vibert, and—truly scandalous—an assortment of voluptuous and oversize nudes by Bouguereau. Most scandalized by the last was an Old Guard New Yorker named James Lenox, who lived directly across the street from the Belmonts. Learning of Mr. Lenox’s objections to the Bouguereaus, Belmont defiantly hung the largest and most explicit of the nudes just inside his front door so that it would be in full view of the Lenox front windows every time the Belmont front door was opened, which, in light of the amount of entertaining Belmont did, was often. Mr. Lenox would become almost apoplectic at the mention of the Belmont name, and according to Lucius Beebe, when Lenox was told that Belmont spent twenty thousand dollars a month on wines alone, Lenox collapsed of a heart attack and died.

  The press happily chronicled the extravaganza of Belmont’s high living. Two hundred people could be comfortably seated at table in the Belmont dining room, with a footman behind each chair, to dine off the Belmont gold service. Belmont had taken up the sport of kings, and the regal Belmont racing colors—scarlet and maroon—had been established. The livery of Belmont’s coachmen and footmen consisted of maroon coats with scarlet piping and silver buttons embossed with the Belmont family crest (which, it was said, Belmont had himself designed after studying various royal European coats of arms), along with black satin knee breeches, white silk stockings, and patent-leather slippers with silver buckles. All his carriages were painted maroon with a scarlet stripe on the wheels. His chief steward, it was said, was required to go through five complete changes of uniform each day.

  At the same time, there were some decidedly odd stories that also circulated about August Belmont. It was said that he washed, combed, and set his wife’s hair, and chose all her dresses from her dressmaker. It was said that, despite his stable of Thoroughbreds, he himself could not sit a horse. It was said that he eaves
dropped on his servants and blackmailed them into accepting the lowest wages in the city. Heroism had not made Commander Matthew Perry wealthy, and when Mrs. Belmont’s father came to live with the Belmonts, it was said that August Belmont treated his father-in-law like a servant, giving him menial household chores to perform and sending him out on petty errands. These activities did not sound like those of the kind of gentleman August Belmont seemed to want to be.

  In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton presented a thinly veiled portrait of August Belmont in the fictional character of Julius Beaufort, a man whom, as one of Mrs. Wharton’s characters put it understatedly, “certain nuances” escaped. As Mrs. Wharton wrote:

  The question was, who was Beaufort? He passed for an Englishman, was agreeable, handsome, ill-tempered, hospitable and witty. He had come to America with letters of recommendation from old Mrs. Manson Mingott’s English son-in-law, the banker, and had speedily made himself an important position in the world of affairs; but his habits were dissipated, his tongue was bitter, and his antecedents were mysterious.

  Like Caroline Belmont, Julius Beaufort’s wife (who “grew younger and blonder and more beautiful each year”) always appeared at the opera on the night of her annual ball “to show her superiority to all household cares.” To explain why she accepted invitations to the Beauforts’ dinner parties, one of Mrs. Wharton’s characters said airily, “We all have our pet common people.” But, Mrs. Wharton added, “The Beauforts were not exactly common; some people said they were even worse.”

  August Belmont had gone a long way toward going too far with New York society, but he had not yet made his final, fatal step. That was yet to come. For years, the most important social event in New York had been the annual Assembly, held at Delmonico’s. And, for years, invitations to the Assembly had been rigidly based on the standards of “birth and breeding.” An invitation to the Assembly was the ultimate proof of social rank. Year after year, August Belmont had dropped broad hints to various of the all-male members of the Assembly Committee that he and his wife would like to be invited. The hints had been politely ignored.