America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  When Carter Brown’s grandfather John Carter Brown died in 1900, John Nicholas Brown was only three months old. His uncle, Harold Brown, was in London at the time, and he and Aunt Georgette immediately booked passage home to Providence for the funeral. But no sooner had the Harold Browns arrived than tragedy struck the family again. Harold Brown contracted typhoid fever and was dead within weeks of his brother. This was how the infant John Nicholas Brown, who inherited from both his father and his uncle, came to be labeled by the press “The World’s Richest Baby,” which was certainly an exaggeration, though not by much.

  The distribution of the Brown fortune was decidedly unequal, but luckily this fact did not create the deep rift of jealousy and ill feeling among the Browns that similar situations have done among other moneyed families. One of Carter Brown’s cousins—a first cousin once removed, in fact—is Mrs. John Jermain Slocum of Newport, a great-granddaughter of the first John Carter Brown. “The English system is by far the best,” says Eileen Slocum emphatically. “Leave everything to the oldest son. That way, properties don’t have to be broken up, and broken up again every time someone dies. John Nicholas Brown got ninety percent of the money. But Granny got the houses, the jewels, the portraits, the china, the silver, and so on. If you’ll go to Harbour Court, you’ll notice there are hardly any portraits. Whereas here”—and she gestures about her Newport mansion, whose walls are covered with portraits and punctuated by carved busts of Browns, along with cousins named Drexel and Sherman and Wilmerding, Peabody and Wetmore.

  Since Anne Kinsolving Brown’s death, Eileen Slocum, the wife of a retired foreign service officer, has become Newport’s reigning grande dame. She is also a force in Rhode Island state politics as cochairman of the state’s Republican party and a four-time delegate to the Republican National Convention. Known locally as a woman of extraordinary spunk and spirit, she once lay in wait in her darkened house in order to accost a burglar who had entered her property. When the burglar slipped inside through a French window, Mrs. Slocum cried, “Halt!”—and the burglar fled. Since that episode, she has acquired a brace of revolvers and has taken shooting lessons from her friend James Van Alen. “Jimmy taught me that the best way to shoot a man is to lie flat on your stomach,” she says. “That way, if the man is armed, you present less of a target.”

  Mrs. Slocum, whose husband’s diplomatic missions have taken the couple to posts in Moscow, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq, as well as Washington, is presently active in a Providence organization called Justice Assistance and in the movement for victims’ rights. In this capacity, she became somewhat at odds with her cousin-in-law Anne Brown in that she supported the von Auersperg children in their grievances against their stepfather, Mr. von Bülow—a case that split Newport down the middle anyway. “All I said was that just before the first so-called Christmas coma, Sunny and Claus von Bülow came to my house for dinner, and Sunny seemed a happy, healthy, normal, charming girl,” she says. “There were no signs of alcoholism, no sign of drugs. I have no idea why Anne decided to testify for him at the second trial, but if you ask me, that trial was rigged!

  “Yes,” says Eileen Slocum with her customary emphasis, “there is definitely such a thing as an aristocracy in America. It is based on breeding and behavior—superior behavior—and a willingness to work and to do what needs to be done. The word ‘lady’ and the word ‘gentleman’ meant a great deal to Mummy and Daddy. We were gentlefolk, and people who weren’t were—well, you could tell who they were. Anyone who would strike a child, for example, or would strike an animal, would not be gentlefolk.”

  Among Eileen Slocum’s other projects and enthusiasms is one that is more difficult to define—“keeping the putty in the stones of the family,” as she puts it. This putty was perhaps most severely tested in the 1960s when the Slocums’ daughter, Beryl, announced her engagement to Adam Clayton Powell III. Not only was Powell black—the son of the Harlem congressman and the nightclub entertainer Hazel Scott—but he was a Democrat, and his father had been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of income tax evasion.

  “We were opposed to it—vehemently,” says Eileen Slocum forthrightly. “We did everything in our power to try to persuade Beryl not to do this thing. But when Beryl was at Radcliffe, she began associating with a number of very radical, left-wing types. Beryl and I don’t see eye to eye on anything, and yet we’re very much alike—stubborn, I suppose. To me, she’s out of focus on what is important. I believe in achievement through work. Beryl’s goals are different—that’s all I really can say about it. She and Adam are separated now. And yet it’s interesting—her son, Sherman Powell, my grandson, is now even more conservative than John and myself!”

  If Eileen Slocum was keeping a stiff upper lip at the time of the marriage, it did not show. The Slocums gave their daughter and Powell a large and social wedding in Washington, as would befit a Brown heiress, and the parents of the bride were photographed wreathed in smiles. Was that difficult to do? “One does what has to be done,” Eileen Slocum says. She and her daughter, and her daughter’s dark-skinned children, are still close. “They’re all coming for dinner at the house tonight,” she says.

  “We’ve always been a very united family,” says Mrs. Slocum. “Our relationships are very close. Never for a moment is the dialogue broken. There must be continuity in a family, and when there is continuity in the things it treasures it is even better. I’ve said to my children, this house is your ancestral home. It is full of memories and it is full of meaning. After I’m gone, you must do everything in your power to keep this house in the family. This house is part of your family’s heritage. If need be, I said to my daughter Marguerite the other day, sell off the front of the property, on Bellevue Avenue—that way the house wouldn’t be taxed as Bellevue Avenue real estate—and use the side street for the entrance. But keep the house. Margie practically burst into tears, and said, ‘But Mother, that would mean taking down all these beautiful trees!’ I said to her, ‘Perhaps you won’t have to do it. But one does what has to be done.’”

  The Era of the Great Splurge passed through and around families like the Browns of Rhode Island, leaving them untouched. Members of America’s secret aristocracy are generally unaffected by social fads and phases. The flurry of pretentious château building that began in Newport in the 1880s and ended in 1929 came and went, and families like the Browns went on doing pretty much what they had always done. The face of Newport changed dramatically. (“When new people come, a place always changes,” says Mrs. Slocum.) Large and comfortable beach houses built in the traditional New England shingle style were replaced with Florentine palazzi and Palladian castles, but behind these cosmetic changes the Browns remained secure in the secret that the real soul of Newport would always belong to them. After all, when one’s family has lived in a place for ten or twelve generations, one gets accustomed to changes in the weather. It’s the climate inside that counts.

  The Browns were a part of the new milieu, of course. They went to the parties and the balls. But at the same time they were not a part of it. The competitiveness and social and fiscal Indian wrestling that characterized the era were of little concern to them. To them, it didn’t matter which Mrs. Vanderbilt built the bigger mansion, which Mrs. Astor was entitled to be called the Mrs. Astor, or how Mrs. August Belmont, Jr., got along with her mother-in-law (badly). Let those people, families like the Browns seemed to say, get all the publicity, all the notoriety. We are a more private people, and we have our own concerns. We will be here long after they are gone.

  And they are.

  There is an easy, gentle style of life that old, aristocratic American families fall into that is special: formal and at the same time laissez-faire. Mrs. John Jermain Slocum, for example, smiles faintly when her butler refers to her husband’s dinner jacket as his “tux coat.” But she lets it pass. Her big stone house is on the “wrong,” or inland, side of Bellevue Avenue and is all but invisible from the street (those trees). Across the street, on t
he side facing Rhode Island Sound, the bigger, newer, showier mansions seem to be fairly jostling each other for attention and to be saying, “Get a load of me!”

  Breakfast at the Slocums’, where the house guests are the Dillon Ripleys from Washington, along with a friend who has dropped by for coffee, is served in the small dining room rather than in the large dining room next door where twenty-four can be seated at one long table. The walls of the small dining room are lined, from floor to ceiling, with glass-enclosed cabinets containing what appear to be thousands of pieces of Lowestoft. But breakfast coffee is served in a chipped cup. In the center of the round table is a kind of lazy Susan, on which breakfast accompaniments are set out: several boxes of dry cereal, their tops sliced off at a diagonal for easy pouring; an opened two-quart carton of milk; a jar of honey; a jar of peanut butter; a jar of catsup. There are paper napkins. An electric coffee maker bubbles on an antique sideboard. A chest containing everyday silver—the good stuff is locked away—sits atop an antique German music box, a priceless family heirloom. In one corner of the room, an aluminum-and-plastic high chair sits waiting for a visiting grandchild. The morning papers—the Providence Journal and the New York Times—lie about while the Ripleys work the Times crossword in a unique way, taking turns. Mr. Ripley fills in one definition in blue ink, then hands it to his wife, who fills in the next in red. A maid in the kitchen answers the telephone, which rings constantly for Eileen Slocum in connection with one or another of her projects; this time it is a fund-raiser for Senator Bob Dole. “Tell them I’m in conference with my lawyer,” she instructs the maid, adding, “That usually scares ’em off for a while.” The butler, in shirtsleeves, pads in and out.

  Harbour Court, long considered the principal Brown house in Newport, is a more formal affair at first glance, built in the Norman style around an entrance courtyard. “Hey, get on in here out of the rain!” cries the cheery maid answering the door. “Great weather for ducks, huh? Sit in any room you like. God knows where Mr. Brown is! He said he was going for a walk. In this weather? He’s crazy!”

  Harbour Court is on the “wrong” side of Newport and not even on Bellevue Avenue. As its name implies, the house overlooks the old town harbor, rather than the Sound. Still, it is very grand, and for years magazines such as Architectural Digest and House & Garden have wanted to photograph the place. But the Browns have been unwilling to have this done, feeling that—at least until it is sold—it is a private family summer place and not for public consumption. One does notice the absence of family portraits. But this is more than compensated for by tables covered with family photographs in silver frames: Browns on horseback, Browns at the rudders of sailboats, Browns as children in sailor suits, Browns as brides and grooms, Browns in evening dress, and Browns in swimsuits at family picnics on the beach: continuity.

  Outside, from the edge of a broad harbor-facing terrace, a famous stretch of manicured lawn drops at a precipitous forty-five-degree angle toward the water. One would be frightened to walk down this steep lawn, much less try to mow it. This is accomplished by gardeners who lash themselves and their machines together with ropes like mountain climbers to keep from plunging into Narragansett Bay.

  The house is full of children—nieces, nephews, cousins. They come and go, in and out of the formal rooms, barefoot, in blue jeans and yellow slickers. Presently Carter Brown rushes in, all smiles and enthusiasm, wearing baggy trousers, a sport shirt, and worn-looking espadrilles. Though technically on vacation, he has spent much of the morning on transatlantic telephone calls between Newport and Athens, where he has been negotiating for a Byzantine exhibition at the National Gallery.

  A teenage nephew, wandering through, smiles at his uncle’s excitement but seems largely unimpressed. Here, after all, Carter Brown is only Uncle Carter, part of the family. There is a feeling, all at once, that while international success and celebrity may come along every generation or so and touch a member of the family, as it has done in the case of Carter Brown, this is all very nice—it is even to be expected—but it is not as important as continuity, family, and keeping the putty in the stones.

  This is one of the secrets of our secret aristocracy: being able to live formally, without standing on formalities, to live pleasantly but not pompously, politely and not assertively, and never to bemoan the loss of an older, more rigid pecking order based on wealth alone.

  Some families, whose wealth is newer, seem not yet to have learned this little trick. Stanley G. Mortimer, for example, is married to Kathleen Harriman, a granddaughter of E. H. Harriman, one of the great nineteenth-century robber barons who helped create the Great Splurge era. Several years ago, Mr. Mortimer was riding with his mother in her car in Tuxedo Park. They stopped at the drugstore in the village for something or other, and Mr. Mortimer stepped out of the car. His mother started to follow him, whereupon, on the sidewalk, she encountered her former butler, whom she had just retired from service. “Good morning, Mrs. Mortimer,” said her ex-butler. Mrs. Mortimer sank back into the seat of her car in a state of shock. When her son returned to the car, he asked, “Mother, what happened? You seemed so shocked when Simpson said good morning.” She replied, “Stanley, did you notice the way he addressed me? He called me Mrs. Mortimer instead of Madam.”

  As Heraclitus put it, there is nothing permanent except change.

  *He could also, quite properly, style himself John Carter Brown III.

  26

  The Family Place

  On January 17, 1986, it was announced in the New York Times that the Jay collection of portraits, most of which had hung at Jay Farm in Bedford for two hundred years, would go under the hammer at Christie’s, the New York auction house.

  It wasn’t that the Jay family needed the money, exactly, though more money is always a pleasant addition to any family. The problem, as with the Browns’ Harbour Court, was multiple ownerships. Seven of the portraits—of Jay, Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and others—belonged collectively, but in varying degrees, to seventeen people. These were the children and grandchildren of the late William Jay Iselin, the last descendant of John Jay to occupy the farm. The portraits represented an important part of the children’s inheritance.

  There were other considerations. Since William Jay Iselin’s death in 1951, Jay Farm—renamed the John Jay Homestead—has become a New York State Historic Site. The portraits, along with other Jay-related antiques, books, papers, costumes, and uniforms, had been left on loan to the homestead, and the homestead lacked the curatorial staff to keep the paintings in shape. Furthermore, there was the insurance burden that William Jay Iselin’s heirs had had to bear since the family farm had been opened to the public.

  Meanwhile, the directors of the Jay Homestead were not pleased with the news that their Gilbert Stuarts, John Trumbulls, and Ezra Ameses were about to be taken down from their walls and sold. The January 25 sale, on the other hand, more than satisfied the heirs of William Jay Iselin, and the seven jointly owned portraits sold for a total of $1,600,000. The Stuart portrait of John Jay himself, commissioned while Jay was on his mission in London and which Christie’s had estimated would sell for between $250,000 and $450,000, fetched double the highest estimate: $900,000. The Ames portrait of Thomas Jefferson was sold to investment banker Richard Jenrette. The Trumbull of John Adams was bought by the White House, which had lacked an Adams. The Stuart portrait of Stephen Van Rensselaer, who was lieutenant governor of New York when Jay was governor in 1795, was sold, appropriately, to a buyer from Albany.

  One woman who certainly would not have approved of the sale of the portraits, and who the family was glad was no longer around to know about it, was William Jay Iselin’s mother. As in the case of Eileen Slocum in the Brown family—and in so many other old families—the chores of keeping the putty firmly in the family stones and of reminding the family of its collective conscience fell upon the shoulders of a strong woman. In the Jay family, for many years, this was John Jay’s great-great-granddaughter, Eleanor J
ay Iselin. And Mrs. Iselin took up her tasks in her own distinctive fashion.

  Eleanor Jay was the daughter of the Civil War colonel William Jay, and she was a woman whose life was devoted to preserving, and collecting, and enshrining, and never throwing away, anything that pertained to her Jay heritage. A family member who remembers her describes her as “the last of the great, aristocratic WASP grandes dames—every inch the cultivated lady, and yet every inch the sportswoman and outdoorswoman. She was elegant and dignified, but she was also a woman of the soil.” Eleanor Jay Iselin’s soil, not surprisingly, was that of Jay Farm, where even Old Fred, the horse that carried her father through the war, was buried under an entablature in the backyard.

  America was invented and developed by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, according to historian E. Digby Baltzell, “because they were outdoors people”—people happy on horseback, riding across open land, and on sailing vessels, plying their way across uncertain seas and up uncharted rivers. They were entrepreneurial adventurers who were attracted to the frontier, drawn to the wilderness, who could look into the virgin forests and see trees felled for lumber and houses, who could forge rivers and streams and see water harnessed for power, and who could cross a lake by canoe and see it one day spanned by a bridge for commerce. They were uncommonly fearless and, like Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin, could comfortably pass the night in an Indian encampment with a group of war-painted braves. The WASPs who came to America, according to Baltzell, seemed temperamentally suited to becoming pioneers, unsuited to urban life, and quickly set off toward the unexplored sunset in the West, even if it was no farther than to a trading post called Albany. This may explain why today, though most large American cities are dominated by other ethnic groups, most of provincial and rural America is still governed by WASPs. From New York City and elsewhere, the old WASP families have fled to the country, where they continued to enjoy their out-of-doors. Eleanor Jay was descended from people like this in all directions—her father’s sister had married a Schieffelin—and, just as many of her male relatives were gentleman farmers, Eleanor Jay was a gentlewoman farmer.