The Right People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Normally, a boy’s name stays on a list for four years—from age seventeen to twenty-one. But the social secretary must be ever on the lookout for things that could disqualify him as a suitable stag. If he should become engaged for example, his name must be removed, or if he should commit some social misdemeanor such as failing to dance with his hostess, drinking too much, failing to reply properly to an invitation, or attending a party to which he had not been invited. Flunking out of prep school or college is not considered a social crime, nor, apparently, is expulsion from school for stealing. A young man of good family, dismissed from his school for theft in a case that even made its way to newspaper headlines, remained on the list and turned up at all the best parties the following season. Drinking of hard liquor has long been a commonplace of debutante parties; if it isn’t provided at the bar—and it usually is—it turns up anyway. When a group of Darien, Connecticut, parents was arrested for serving liquor to teenagers at a debutante party—after which a girl was killed in an auto accident—the parents understandably felt that they had been unfairly singled out. Other parents have been serving liquor to underaged boys and girls at other parties for years. The only rule governing liquor is the vague one that states that a young person should be able to “handle” it.

  Alongside each boy’s name on the list are his parents’ names, his address, his school and his class and—in most cases—a meaningful blank space for “Remarks.” One debutante, looking over the list for her party, wrote “Spits when he talks” under “Remarks.” That boy’s name came off the list. So carefully do social secretaries tend their lists that many debutantes, and their parents, allow the secretaries a free rein with the party invitations. As one social secretary says, “If a boy’s name is on my list, he’s guaranteed to behave.”

  While they all agree that there should be more boys than girls at a coming-out party, each social secretary has her own favorite proportion. Some prefer three boys to every girl; others say four to one is better, “the proportions of a good Martini.” More than four to one is considered undesirable. “The boys gang together then, and shoot craps and talk about the Army,” says one lady. Gate-crashing is a perennial cause for concern. Most ballrooms, private and public, have additional, little-known entrances, through kitchens and pantries where a boy can enter the party with the lobster Newburg, and the secrets of these are passed on from crasher-father to crasher-son, along with the studs and cufflinks. Social secretaries post members of their staffs—called “dragons” by the young men—at strategic spots to keep out the uninvited, and most dragons make it a point to know not only the names but also the faces of the men on their list. But the crashing problem, like the servant problem, is secretly a non-problem. As one social secretary confesses, “If a party doesn’t have a few crashers, nobody thinks it’s a success.” For their thoughtful services—to which one social secretary adds, as a fillip of her own, a hot bath drawn for the mother of the debutante filled with special salts in which Mother is instructed to loll for an hour before the party—social secretaries either charge a flat fee of ten or fifteen per cent of the party’s cost, or receive discounts from the caterer, the florist, the photographer, the orchestra, and the wine merchant. The ladies seldom quote the prices of their clients’ parties, but most admit that they would be uninterested in tackling anything with a budget under five thousand dollars.

  In New York it is now true that any girl can come out—not the best way, perhaps, but at least get out—if her family is willing to spend the money. It is not true in Philadelphia. By tradition, Philadelphia Society is restricted to members of “first Philadelphia families.” Newcomers generally have a hard time of it. One Philadelphia “newcomer,” whose family had been in Philadelphia only since 1860 and who recently sought admission to Philadelphia’s coveted Assemblies, an institution that began in 1748, was, after considerable effort and with the help of many friends, finally allowed to attend—as an out-of-town guest. So stern are the Philadelphia Assemblies’ rules against admitting divorced people that the John Ingersolls (and she a Cadwalader) were not permitted to attend the coming-out of their daughter, since Mrs. Ingersoll had once been divorced. Philadelphians take a superior view of their sister city to the north. “New York is pretty much come-and-go, isn’t it?” asks a Philadelphia lady.

  Unlike New York, Philadelphia has a single official debutante list, printed up by J. E. Caldwell & Company, a jewelry and stationery store, the Tiffany’s of Philadelphia. Caldwell’s employs an official debutante screener named George W. Rehfuss. A mother registers her daughter with Mr. Rehfuss five or six years before her debut and, from that point on, Mr. Rehfuss sees that no debutante’s dates overlap with another’s and that, somehow, each of the city’s hundred to two hundred debutantes gets her rightful share of the important college weekends and of the sixty-eight days of the four debutante seasons. Upstarts who hope to make debutantes of their daughters face their initial barrier in the person of Mr. Rehfuss, and those who treat Mr. Rehfuss as an ordinary clerk or suspect that he will respond to bribery are disappointed. “If someone came to me whose daughter shouldn’t be a debutante, I would know it,” says Mr. Rehfuss.

  Philadelphia’s most powerful social secretary was the late Mrs. Edward J. MacMullan, a woman who lived to be, as the saying goes, a legend in her time. At her death in the summer of 1966, it was a shock to realize from the obituary notices that this striking woman—with her flaming red hair, aquiline nose, boundless energy and Irish temper—was seventy-eight years old. For over forty years she had been, as she herself liked to put it, “the ringmaster of the Philadelphia social circus.” The secret of her ring-mastery was her direct approach to problems. For years, Mrs. MacMullan was Mrs. Edward T. Stotesbury’s personal arbiter elegantiarum, and one of Mrs. Stotesbury’s great difficulties in life was a particular diamond and emerald tiara. It was so heavy with stones that whenever she wore it, it gave her a stiff neck. Mrs. MacMullan said, “You deserve to suffer with that much jewelry on your head. Either attach a few helium balloons to it or wear it without complaining.” The same tiara had a tendency to list to one side and fall over Mrs. Stotesbury’s ear. And so Mrs. MacMullan stationed herself behind Mrs. Stotesbury at parties and, whenever the tiara began to slip, nudged it back into place again.

  Her own background was humble—or so it is said; Mrs. MacMullan herself always preferred to keep her background out of the conversation. But for two generations the foremost families of Philadelphia Society regarded “Mrs. Mac” with something close to awe, and something even closer to dread. “Oh, she’s a devil!” they would murmur, rolling their eyes, and there were catalogued instances where young men—dropped from Mrs. Mac’s list for one reason or another—felt themselves so permanently ruined in Philadelphia Society that they left to start life over in other cities. Mrs. MacMullan’ herself used to laugh loudly at such assertions, but it was clear she enjoyed their being made. “My rules are simple,” she once said. “Manners. Good manners. Rudimentary good manners are all I ask. There’s little enough elegance left in the world. Are a few good manners too much to ask for? Take shaking hands. If a young lady is introduced to me, I expect her to take my hand. Naturally I go to all the parties I plan and, as the young men and women enter the room, I expect them to come up to me, say, ‘Good evening, Mrs. MacMullan,’ and take my hand. That’s all. If they don’t do that much, then they don’t deserve to be in Society.”

  In addition to reportedly knowing the whereabouts of several well-placed family skeletons, Mrs. MacMullan’s great success—and power—as a social secretary stemmed from the simple fact that she planned and ran very good parties. From her triumph at organizing the wedding of Ethel du Pont to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., she went on to establish Philadelphia’s Junior Bal Masque, the Piccadilly Dances, and the Headdress Balls—all now fixtures of the city’s social life. Her inventiveness when it came to adding gay and sparkly side-show features to coming-out parties was endless. At one ball, a replica of a roads
ide diner was built just off the ballroom of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel; from it, short-order cooks served hot dogs, hamburgers, and soft drinks to guests who sat on stools.

  For the debut of Ella (“Tootie”) Widener in 1946, a North Pole motif was selected. There was a real snowstorm, an aurora borealis overhead, and Miss Widener received from an igloo—which was heated, of course. With surprise, guests learned that it was not a MacMullan party, but one designed by her competitior, Mrs. Wirt Thompson. “Trying to copy me, of course,” sniffed Mrs. MacMullan. “Imagine! An igloo! I hear it dripped all over her dress.”

  Mrs. MacMullan was well aware of the hazards of drip-page from overhead. She often used wildlife in her decor—releasing flocks of white doves or, in one instance, four hundred canaries. Beforehand, Mrs. MacMullan had thoughtfully fed the canaries a special seed mixture calculated to induce a mild constipation. Not all her schemes were successful. Once, a herd of peacocks was to parade magnificently across the ballroom, plumes fanned regally but, seeing the guests, the peacocks panicked and caused quite a disturbance. “One of the things came lunging at me, flapping its wings,” a girl who was a guest at the party recalls. “Goodness, if I hadn’t had so much champagne I think I would have fainted!” Flamingoes, it turns out, have considerably more aplomb. Philadelphians will never forget the ball where huge white paper cylinders were suspended from the ceiling of the tent. Everyone wondered what they were for until midnight, when the cylinders flew open releasing thousands of white butterflies. The butterflies came cascading down—all quite dead—killed, apparently, by the fire-preventative that had been sprayed around the tent. But, for all these mishaps, Mrs. MacMullan was a part of Philadelphia Society life. Who can possibly replace her is a subject of agitated speculation.

  Boston is often likened to Philadelphia, but the two cities actually have little in common. “In Boston,” says one Philadelphian, “you simply do not get enough to eat.” This is certainly part of it and, compared to those in Philadelphia, Boston’s coming-out parties are austere. For years, Boston debutantes were presented under simple marquees in their families’ gardens; but with the rising costs of these affairs—costs which wouldn’t make a New Yorker or a Philadelphian blink—more and more Boston girls are being presented at mass debuts, at the Debutante Cotillion held in June at the Sheraton Plaza Hotel, and the Debutante Assembly, held Thanksgiving Eve at the Statler. Before one of these parties not long ago, a debutante complained to a friend that the shoes she was planning to wear were too small and were uncomfortable; she doubted she could bear the pain of dancing in them all evening. “Why not wear sneakers?” her practical-minded friend offered. “Under your long dress they’ll never be noticed.” She wore sneakers; they were not noticed. At the same party, another un-style-conscious debutante wore long woolen underwear under her ball gown, “because it was cold.”

  Boston, like Philadelphia, has a Society that is generally chilly to the upstart. “We don’t snub them,” a Boston lady says, “we side-step them.” Another city renowned for its impenetrable social barriers against outsiders without connections and newcomers without portfolio is Charleston, South Carolina. Although it is not a “Social Register city,” Charlestonians feel that it doesn’t need to be. The city has a rich and glorious past. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, it was the capital of the Plantation System and the birthplace of all that is considered gracious and elegant in the Southern “way of life.” In 1762, Charleston’s St. Cecilia Society was formed. Originally an amateur musical group, it was similar to and only slightly younger than Philadelphia’s Assemblies. For years, the St. Cecilia Society ruled Charleston’s social life; no girl could be a debutante in Charleston unless she was a daughter of a St. Cecilia’s member. Recent pressure, however, has broken down the system. Now about half of Charleston’s debutantes are from non-St. Cecilia families. They can do everything except attend the St. Cecilia Ball.

  In Dallas and other Texas cities where one might expect oil money to have an exuberant influence on debutantes and their affairs, most debuts are subdued and Eastern rather than Western in flavor. Eastern social secretaries are often imported to arrange parties, and this fact alone is enough to give a party great cachet. The same is true in the motion picture colony of Los Angeles, where Society—like everything else about that billowing city-of-villages—is confusing and hard to grasp. At one time there was a genuine Los Angeles Old Guard, composed largely of Spanish land-grant families, many of whom clung jealously to their ancient Spanish titles, and even spoke Spanish in their homes. These were eclipsed, however, by suburban upper-crust families centered around such towns as Pasadena and San Marino where, if one was part of the circle, it was possible to believe that nothing else was going on in Los Angeles at all. Such fixtures of Pasadena social life as the Los Angeles Country Club and the Las Madrinas Debutante Ball excluded, automatically, all movie people; the “Pasadena crowd” and the “Beverly Hills crowd” literally never met. Gradually the great dividing line has begun to blur, and one of the first movie people to integrate with the Pasadena set was none other than the late Walt Disney. His daughter Sharon made Los Angeles social history as the first movie-colony debutante in the Las Madrinas Ball. The occasion even had a touch of Hollywood comedy. Realizing that he and Sharon were the same height in their stocking feet, and that when he led her in the first dance she would tower over him in her high heels, Disney went to his studio’s wardrobe department and had his evening shoes fitted out with tall lifts. Sharon, meanwhile, had thought of the same possibility and so, on the evening of the ball, considerately wore flats. On the dance floor, a towering Disney lurched about with Sharon’s head at waist level.

  Debutantes have undergone some interesting personality changes in the last few decades. In the 1920’s, they prided themselves on being brittle, animated, and witty, and were admired for their boyish gaiety, their ability to swing from chandeliers and to drink and mix cocktails. But in the thirties the movies were promoting the word “glamour,” and debutantes let their hair down to their shoulders, became willowy, languid, and torchy. At the same time, they discovered show business. A debutante named Cobina Wright, Jr., was singing at the Waldorf, and Sally Clark, a Roosevelt relative, was at the Plaza. Eve Symington, a Senator’s daughter, was at a West Side bistro called La Place Pigalle. Paragraphs in Society columns seemed less important than write-ups in Variety, photographs in the tabloids, and gossipy innuendos by Walter Winchell. “Café Society” became a phrase. The Old Guard was more amused than shocked. It all seemed very new and strange and, therefore, exciting. Much of the show business aspect of coming out remains. In 1951, when Life published a full-page picture of Caroline Lee Bouvier, now Princess Stanislaus Radziwill, commenting that “Society editors and arbiters” considered her the leading debutante of the New York season, she was besieged with fan mail. In one letter, a certain Boris Kaplan of the talent department of Paramount Pictures wrote the future sister-in-law of President Kennedy to ask her whether she would be interested in discussing motion picture work. Writing to her at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, Mr. Kaplan urged the rich and beautiful Miss Bouvier to call him at his New York office—“collect.” She has underscored this suggestion, in red, and has placed the letter in a scrapbook with other invitations collected during her debutante year. A daughter of real Society cannot be bought for the price of a twenty-cent call, as Miss Bouvier later proved by launching herself as an actress on her own terms.

  In every season there is a girl who might be called a superfluous debutante—a girl who, long before her debutante year, has received all the acclaim and admiration any girl could dream of, and for whom the ritual of coming out seems to add little of importance. She has been “out” for a long time. Sometimes this Ultimate Girl is a creation of the press. From the thirties one thinks of Brenda Diana Duff Frazier who, fresh from the genteel Miss Hewitt’s classes in New York, became advertised as “America’s Number One Glamour Debutante,” with her long “debu
tante bob,” her dark eyes, her pale skin and thin red mouth “more beautiful than Joan Crawford’s.” She was the Girl-with-Everything, and clever reporters were skillful at inducing dumb-girl quotes from her so that, long before her debutante year was over, she was hated by the Depressionpoor American public, and had to face such ordeals as being hissed when she entered a restaurant. Some thirty years and two collapsed marriages later, Brenda Frazier lives in near-retirement, far from the Society into which she came. Then there was Gloria Vanderbilt, now also several times married, whose coming-out career was singular. Though labeled by the press the “Number One Debutante,” she was never technically a debutante at all since she was never presented at a ball.

  Then, periodically, there are the girls with helpful mothers behind them, pushing them into social prominence, and one recalls the blond and beautiful Joanne Connelley, Debutante Queen of 1948 who, less than ten years after her press-agented debut, was dead of a heart ailment induced by an overdose of reducing pills, and was survived by her ambitious, more robust mother. Of the same vintage as Miss Connelley was a dark-haired girl with a heart-shaped face named Jacqueline Lee Bouvier. Though her debut was not press-agented, she emerged a few years later as one of the most famous women in the world. Ten years later, a beautiful English girl named Henrietta Tiarks—and her mother—arrived on these shores. Henrietta Tiarks was already one of the most come-out girls in recent history. Her debutante career had begun in England when she was presented to the Queen and was heralded in the press as “the last of the debs.” This was not strictly accurate. Royal presentation parties were being discontinued that year as being “out of keeping with the times,” but debutantes have continued to proliferate in England nonetheless. Henrietta’s presentation was followed by a series of luncheons, teas, cocktail parties, dinners, and “one or two balls every night.” In between there were weekends at Oxford, May Week at Cambridge, polo matches at Windsor Great Park, the Henley Regatta, the Eton-Harrow cricket match, Ascot, and the Derby. She gave a ball of her own, in London, and it took up the entire ground floor of Claridge’s Hotel; the party lasted until five, after which there was a trip to London Airport for breakfast.