America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  The spoiling of Craig Mitchell was particularly intense because, as a child, he was considered sickly. He suffered from mastoid problems and then came down with scarlet fever. During his nearly two years of illness, he was showered with presents. He was given one new present every day and two on Sundays. Presently an entire room in the house had to be set aside for his collection of gifts and toys. Upon his recovery, his nurses and governesses were instructed that their young charge was to be given anything he asked for, and under no circumstances was he to be made aware of anything unpleasant that might possibly upset him. “I remember as a kid in the twenties people were talking about the Massey rape case in Hawaii,” he recalls. “I remember hearing the subject come up at the family dinner table. I wasn’t paying too much attention to the conversation, but I interrupted to ask some sort of question about the Massey case. There was a horrified silence, and the next morning I found myself packed off to see a psychiatrist to tell me all about the birds and the bees.”

  Craig Mitchell was raised in the family-built mansion at 934 Fifth Avenue that is now the French Consulate, and in weekend and summer estates in Tuxedo Park and Southampton. That, he recalls, was considered normal. “Typically, a family had three houses fully staffed, and those staffs were enormous,” he says. “Mother had a housekeeper, and so she never dealt with the help at all. That was the housekeeper’s job, to keep everybody happy, and to do all the hiring and firing.”

  Such efficiently run households, however, did not necessarily result in efficiently run children. “My family tried to put me through the New York day schools,” Mitchell recalls. “I got thrown out of Buckley, I got thrown out of St. Bernard’s—you name every school in New York, and I got thrown out for being incorrigible.” To each of these dismissals, Mitchell’s parents reacted with outraged indignation—not with their son but with the schools, which had obviously failed to understand their sensitive and highly bred child’s special needs. To console him for the indignity he had suffered from expulsion, the boy was showered with more gifts. Being expelled, he decided, was not a bad thing at all.

  Finally, when Mitchell was eleven, it was decided that the boy was ready for a boarding school, and the Fay School, in Southborough, Massachusetts, was selected. Fay at the time was a prepreparatory school, a feeder school for Groton, St. Paul’s, St. Mark’s, and Hotchkiss. Naturally, it was unthinkable that an eleven-year-old boy, whom his “Mother Dear” still called a tiny tot, should make the journey from Manhattan to Southborough by train or any other form of public conveyance. So the tiny tot and Mother Dear set off for Massachusetts in the backseat of a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, with the tot clutching a five-pound box of Louis Sherry chocolates that was his final bon voyage present. He was delivered at the school, and while the other boys who were to be his schoolmates watched “this ridiculous performance” from a discreet distance, Mother Dear, now in a flood of tears, embraced and kissed her darling good-bye again and again. Soon young Mitchell was weeping, too. But finally the disconsolate mother was helped back into her car and driven away.

  The Rolls had no sooner rounded the corner and disappeared from sight than Mitchell was subjected to “the hog pile,” the school’s traditional welcome to new boys. The other boys jumped on him, knocked him down, and formed a sort of human pyramid on top of him. Needless to say, his Louis Sherry chocolates were snatched away and divided up among the others, and when his initiation rite was over, his brand-new clothes from Best’s and De Pinna’s were in shreds and he himself was covered with mud and bruises. “At Fay, and later at St. Paul’s, I was taught discipline in a big way,” he says. “I got knocked around—but properly.” Both Fay and St. Paul’s believed in peer discipline, but there was official discipline as well. At Fay, for example, there was fingernail inspection before every meal and room inspection every morning. Jackets and neckties had to be worn at all times, clothes were inspected for spots, shoes had to be polished, and a clean white handkerchief had to sprout from every breast pocket. For the slightest inattention—for so much as a whisper—in the classroom, the punishment was “the walk”: a one-hour run, in silence, up hill and down dale, in the company of one of the more athletic masters. “When there is no discipline in the home,” Craig Mitchell says, “it’s got to come from the schools. If it hadn’t been for the discipline of my schools, and the discipline I picked up in the army—tough discipline—I honestly don’t think I’d have been able to get through life with the kind of upbringing I had.”

  By 1939, the Era of the Great Splurge was in its final death throes, after nearly a decade of terminal illness, and the end was not pretty to behold. The Great Depression had settled in, it began to seem, forever, and Roosevelt’s New Deal taxation programs were claiming their intended victims. The great yachts had been sold, or put in dry dock, or left to molder and barnacle at their moorings. One by one, the lights in Newport had gone out, and the castles and châteaux—white elephants by now—were either sold, given away, or surrendered to the city for back taxes. Tuxedo Park, perhaps the most frivolous resort idea of them all, was even harder hit. The Tudor mansions, abandoned and vandalized, stood like shattered shipwrecks against the sky. Tennis courts sprouted dandelions, and tall weeds and wild sunflowers overbore the formal gardens. The once crystal lakes were green with the scum of algae. In Southampton, it was as though a vengeful Old Testament deity were seeking retribution against Sodom and Gomorrah: A polio epidemic swept the town with exceptional harshness, claiming some of the town’s most social names as its victims. For an entire summer, Southampton was barricaded, and no one could go into the town or out of it. It became quarantined, an isolation ward, a place of pestilence and dread where the Era of the Great Splurge breathed its last, death-rattling gasp.

  Of course there were a few people who were able to survive the Great Depression and the New Deal without seeming to have to trim their sails at all. Two of the most conspicuous of these were Mr. and Mrs. John Nicholas Brown of Providence and Newport, a couple who did not see fit to alter their fully staffed style of living for more than seventy years. Every evening of their married lives, the Browns dressed formally for dinner, even when they dined alone, though their son, John Carter Brown, suspects that this was principally because his father liked to make use of his large collection of dinner jackets in many styles, colors, and patterns.

  The Browns of Rhode Island can almost be considered in a class by themselves. The very ordinariness of the name has served to give the Browns a certain protective anonymity and privacy, which the Browns have minded not at all. Next to Smiths and Joneses, Browns probably occupy more pages of American telephone directories than families of any other patronym. Then, too, there have been many Rhode Island Browns who have been given the first name John. Plain John Brown does not, it must be admitted, have the drumroll sound of a Leverett Saltonstall or a Godfrey Lowell Cabot, and this fact may have helped keep the aristocracy of the Rhode Island Browns a secret.

  The Rhode Island Browns, it must be pointed out, should not be confused with Massachusetts Brahmins. They are better than that. The Brahmins of Boston have lost much of their social and political clout. The Browns of Rhode Island have not. The first Brown, Chad, arrived in Rhode Island by canoe from Massachusetts in 1638, one of a party of seven that was escaping the kind of rigid Puritanism in the Bay Colony that would lead to Brahminism. Just two years earlier, Roger Williams had arrived to found the city of Providence, the first American settlement dedicated to the precept of religious freedom. In Providence, the Brown and Williams families became allied through marriage.

  Thus the late John Nicholas Brown was a direct descendant of Rhode Island’s founder as well as of the industrialist-philanthropist who endowed Brown University in 1804. But Browns had been prominent in Rhode Island long before that, and by the early 1760s, four Brown brothers—Nicholas, Joseph, John, and Moses—were the most important and richest men in the colony. Moses Brown was a Quaker leader and abolitionist. Joseph Brown was an architec
t. Nicholas and John—the latter of whom characterized himself as “the cleverest boy in Providence”—were in whaling, shipbuilding, and, in a way the present-day Browns rather wish their ancestors had not been, in slavery. (They were involved in the famous triangle route of the slave trade: New England rum traded in Africa for slaves; slaves traded in the West Indies for sugarcane; sugar carried to New England to make more rum.) On the more positive side, the Browns built the first ships for the U.S. Navy, and one of these, the Providence, fired the navy’s first shot in the Revolution. So displeased was the Crown with the activities of John Brown that a price was placed on his head. As an indication of the respect John Brown commanded in Providence, no one came forward to collect the reward.

  From their whaling activities, and profits in whale oil and spermaceti, the Browns became the leading colonial candle makers, selling their candles in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and West Indian ports. At the time the Revolution broke out, the Browns also owned an iron foundry, not a bad thing to have during wartime. With the help of a business ally named Samuel Slater, who had, incredibly, managed to smuggle out of England the designs for textile machinery by memorizing them—at a time when to try to get such plans to the colonies otherwise would have been suicidal—the Browns also came to own a textile mill, and they were involved in the China trade. Everything the Browns have touched has managed to turn to gold.

  At the same time, the Browns have been notably philanthropic with an emphasis on education and the arts. The Browns gave the land on which Brown University now stands and for years resisted having it named after them (it was originally called Rhode Island College). Nicholas Brown II continued the family’s support of the college and, each year, would personally make up any of the school’s deficits out of his own pocket. John Nicholas Brown’s father, John Carter Brown, was also generous to the college, contributing a library of books on the intellectual history of the New World. Because the Brown family businesses are among the oldest in America—the textile business lasted from Revolutionary times into the 1930s—the library is frequently consulted by business historians.

  Browns have been proud to serve both education and God. One of John Nicholas Brown’s more noteworthy gifts was the million-dollar Gothic chapel at St. George’s School in Newport. Nor has public health been overlooked. Butler Hospital in Providence has had a Brown on its board of directors virtually throughout its existence. Part of the Brown family ethos has been a belief in doing the right thing. One of the more newsworthy events during the second attempted-murder trial of Claus von Bülow was the appearance, as a character witness for the defendant, of Mrs. John Nicholas Brown not long before her death. She was testifying on von Bülow’s behalf, she explained with dignity, simply because she liked the man and didn’t believe him capable of inflicting harm on anyone. Witnesses were impressed by the appearance of Providence’s legendary grande dame.

  “There are certain values that are passed along from generation to generation,” says her son, J. Carter Brown, today (who could, but does not choose to, style himself John Carter Brown II to distinguish himself from his grandfather*). “There’s a strong sense of obligation in the family—that if you’ve been fortunate enough to have been given the wherewithal, you owe something back.”

  Along with these values goes a strict sense of priorities. The Brown family’s relationship with Brown University is, understandably, a bit tricky, and as benefactors of the university, the family has tried to make it clear that they do not expect personal favors in return. In 1904, for example, when John Nicholas Brown was four years old, the college made him an honorary alumnus of that year’s graduating class simply because his nanny happened to be walking him in his stroller during that year’s commencement exercises and the small Brown heir was recognized. The family accepted this gesture in the good humor with which it was intended. But some fifty years later, when it came time for the little boy’s son, J. Carter Brown, to be thinking about colleges, his parents were visited by President Henry Merritt Wriston of Brown University. Over tea, it was suggested to the senior Browns that their son would be most welcome at Brown, and, added the president, “You can be sure we’ll do everything to make it easy for him.” Without realizing it, the well-meaning President Wriston had stepped across the invisible aristocratic line dividing appropriate from inappropriate behavior. If there had ever been a question in the Browns’ minds about where their son would be educated, it was decided at that moment, and young J. Carter Brown was sent, as his father had been, to Harvard, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1956.

  John Nicholas Brown’s wife was the former Anne Kinsolving of Baltimore, a descendant of a long line of southern clergymen and related to a constellation of aristocratic southern families including the Lees of Virginia. Her father was the Reverend Arthur B. Kinsolving of Baltimore, and her brother was the Reverend Arthur Lee Kinsolving, for years the rector of St. James Episcopal Church in New York, the city’s most fashionable Anglican house of worship. As a result, Mrs. Brown was raised in a series of elegant, well-mannered rectories that were intended to compensate the rector and his family for the fact that his salary was inconsequential. Anne Kinsolving was “finished” at the Calvert School in Maryland, had no further formal education, and, in the tradition of the southern belle, was expected to do not much more than fox hunt in the Green Spring Valley and marry well. Considering this sheltered and genteel upbringing, then, it is surprising that Anne Kinsolving turned out to be something of a firebrand.

  At age seventeen, for example, to help out a friend who worked for William Randolph Hearst’s Baltimore News, she covered a local party and wrote it up for the society pages. Her editor, while pointing out that her story “contained enough scandal to bring on three libel suits,” was nonetheless impressed with her lively style and hired her as a general-assignment reporter.

  So popular did Anne Kinsolving’s stories become that the News told her she could write about anything she chose. Always interested in music, she then asked to be made the paper’s music critic. Even after her marriage to John Nicholas Brown she continued to write occasional pieces of music criticism, but marriage to a rich man allowed her time to indulge in another enthusiasm: military history. She started her extraordinary collection of tin soldiers that is now in a Providence museum, where, it might be noted, custodial funds have been provided by Claus and Martha Crawford von Bülow. Mrs. Brown’s interest in military history sparked her family’s interest—particularly that of her son Carter—in art history. Anne Kinsolving Brown, for example, could look at a portrait of a Revolutionary general and say, “That portrait could not have been painted as early as 1770. He’s wearing a medal for the Battle of Bennington, and that battle didn’t take place until 1777.”

  Today’s most celebrated Brown is certainly John Nicholas and Anne Kinsolving Brown’s son Carter, who, in 1969, at age thirty-four, made headlines in the art world when he was appointed director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, becoming the youngest major museum director in the world. Since then, the still boyish-looking Carter Brown has mounted and toured exhibits that have broken attendance records all over the United States, including his “Treasures of Tutankhamen,” “The Search for Alexander,” and, most recently, the hugely popular “Treasure Houses of Britain: Five Hundred Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting.” At the time of Carter Brown’s appointment to the National Gallery’s top post, it was reported that, when he was twelve and first saw the National Gallery from the window of the family limousine, he announced, “Someday I’ll be its director.” Not so, said his mother, always a stickler for dates. “It was a year earlier, when Carter was eleven, and used to go sailing with John Walker, who was the museum’s director then, at Fishers Island where the family spent summers.” Carter Brown has a slightly different recollection. “I remember driving by the National Gallery, and admiring that beautiful pink stone building, and saying, ‘Someday I’d like to work in a place like that.’”

 
; Whichever way it happened, others have commented that Carter Brown was especially suited to put together “The Treasure Houses of Britain” since he himself grew up in houses filled with treasures and must have felt completely at home with—and like an aristocratic peer among—the proprietors of England’s stately homes whom he visited in order to assemble his memorable show. The Brown mansions along Benefit Street in the College Hill section of Providence, where Browns have lived for generations, and still live, are architectural showplaces and family treasure houses, as is Harbour Court (English spelling, of course), the sprawling Newport estate overlooking the harbor that Carter Brown’s grandmother built for his father. But the sad fact is that, by 1986, Harbour Court was for sale. “There are eight grandchildren who own it,” Carter Brown explains, “along with spouses, and it’s just too complicated trying to figure out who can use the house, and when, and for how long.” The asking price: $4.5 million.

  As befits a nautical family of whalers, shipbuilders, and China traders (not to mention seventeenth-century canoe paddlers), a love of the sea and sailing seems to have been passed along in the Browns’ genes. The Browns are one of a very few American families—J. P. Morgan’s was another—to have been granted a “private signal,” a yachting burgee assigned to Brown vessels alone. Under this flag, Carter Brown’s father skippered such famous yachts as the Saraband, and the Bolero, the largest boat allowed in the Bermuda Race. Carter Brown is also a sailor, though on a smaller scale, in a Rhode Island-built dinghy. He is, on the other hand, commodore of what may be the most exclusive, and smallest, yacht club in the world: the Little River Yacht Club, named after his weekend retreat in Virginia. The only members of the Little River Yacht Club are the immediate male members of his family. Wives are permitted to be honorary members.