The Right People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Next came the “little season” in Scotland where, to make it official north of the border, Henrietta came out all over again, and attended “twenty-five or thirty balls.” Then on to Paris, to come out there, and next to Madrid for the same reason. “Paris parties are fabulous,” Henrietta said afterward. “They’re all given in such beautiful houses. Madrid is wonderful, too, but fewer balls are given there.” Arriving in New York, she was enrolled in Briarcliff College, in a horsey part of suburban Westchester, and her mother installed herself in a Manhattan apartment and busied herself keeping Henrietta’s social calendar and pasting Henrietta’s press clippings into big scrapbooks, “So her grandchildren may see what a wonderful year she is having.” Briarcliff—often called “Debutante U.”—could be little more than a place to go and rest between parties because, of course, Henrietta Tiarks was presented to New York Society at two balls and then plunged into the generally hectic Eastern social schedule. For good measure, she also made debuts in Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., and went to balls in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago. How many balls, all told, did Henrietta Tiarks attend? She lost count somewhere along the way. “It was hundreds and hundreds. Looking back on it, it was all quite wonderful,” she said when it was over. “But I’m glad it’s only once in a lifetime. When the clock struck midnight, January first, I said, ‘Hooray! I’m an ex-debutante!’” Her mother, meanwhile, had stuffed five scrapbooks full of photographs and clippings and cried, “I’ve still got drawers and drawersful more!” Such an elaborate coming-out season undoubtedly had its desired long-term result. The Tiarkses, though very rich (Henrietta’s banker father was, among other things, one of the developers of Jamaica’s Round Hill), did not have a title in the family. Now they do. A few years after her coming-out year, Henrietta married the young Marquis of Tavistock, heir to the Duke of Bedford.

  But girls like these are the exception in a debutante season. Ultimate Girls are only rarely national or international celebrities. For the most part they are the pretty products of the Eastern boarding schools—Foxcroft, Miss Porter’s, Westover, Madeira, Dobbs Ferry, Ethel Walker, Chatham Hall. The Ultimate Girl is an artifact of American prep school life, as persistent as the rumor that there is saltpeter in the gravy. She is selected not by a Cholly Knickerbocker but, in an informal election, by perspiring boys who sit sprawled on beds and cracked leather chairs in banner-decked dormitory rooms of such schools as Choate, Hotchkiss, Exeter, St. Paul’s, St. Mark’s, Lawrenceville, Groton, Taft and Hill and in fraternity lounges of both the big and the little Ivy League. Selection is based on her ability to leave male heads dizzy with desire, grief, and frustration. Once picked, she is advertised by word of mouth. She is authoritatively reported to be both fast and frigid, in one breath a Magdalen and in the next a Medusa. Suddenly she receives dozens of invitations to every party there is and when she appears she radiates the “star quality” of a movie queen, with lesser debutantes, eager to share her light, hovering about her like handmaidens. But this Ultimate Girl is not necessarily doomed to a future of divorce, notoriety, alcohol, sleeping pills, and psychiatry. More often than not she simply finishes her debutante year, graduates from college, marries, moves to Scarsdale, has babies, joins the country club and the Junior League.

  The Diana Barrymores, the Brenda Fraziers, and the Joanne Connelleys of the debutante world have given a somewhat lurid connotation to the word. And so coming out has become a point of some controversy in Society. Should one let one’s teenage daughter step into these highly charged and perfumed waters? What are the real values of the debutante ritual, if any? There are many opinions. One handsome young New York woman says, “Daddy asked me if I wanted a coming-out party, and I told him flatly no, I didn’t. To me it’s silly to spend all that money just so that I could have a fabulous party. What’s a party? When it’s all over, what have you got but a ball gown you’ll never wear again? I told him that if he had that much money to spend, he could put it in a savings account for me. Then, when I get married, it will help me buy a house or furniture or educate my children.” Then she added, thoughtfully, “To me a girl who wants to be a debutante is basically insecure.”

  The late Mrs. MacMullan of Philadelphia would have agreed with this, more or less. But she saw in the system factors which, if a girl was “basically insecure,” would cure her of all her emotional problems. “You may say I’m in a luxury business, that it’s a lot of froth,” she once said. “But, believe me, it’s thrilling to see what her debutante year does for a girl! It can turn a shy, awkward child into a radiant, charming young woman. It teaches a girl poise and manners. Do you know there are girls nowadays who don’t know how to perform an introduction properly? Much less pour tea! And think of the employment these parties give to caterers, florists, musicians, marquee men, photographers, and gown shops!”

  The mother of a debutante says, “Why shouldn’t I give her a little gaiety? These are perilous times. She’ll have to face the hard facts soon enough.” And another says, “It’s a gracious tradition that ought to be preserved.” And yet, when the guests at Fernanda Wanamaker Leas’s coming-out party helped dismantle the house where they were staying, dragging mattresses out onto the Southampton beach, some of the graciousness of the tradition seemed to disappear. “What do they drag out mattresses on the beach for?” asks one mother. “That’s what worries me.” A New York father says flatly, “I’m not going to give a party so a lot of drunks and hopheads can rape my daughter.” In a somewhat more restrained tone, a Boston grandmother asks worriedly, “Is it true that all the debutantes nowadays go the whole hog?”

  In the Old Stone Age when a marriageable maiden was preened, fattened, buttered, and presented to the tribe, she was offered as a virgin—yet how many of her modern sisters offer an equivalent degree of virtue is a debatable point. The debutantes of 1966 generally take the view that girls today are no more, and no less, virtuous than they were in their mothers’ generation. Others disagree. Obviously, firm statistics are not available but when, not long ago, an American girl traveling in England announced that she guessed that “at least fifty per cent” of American debutantes were virgins, this was greeted with widespread skepticism. “This would certainly not be true here,” a London Society columnist commented, adding that in England “only a tiny per cent” were pure.

  American parents prefer not to dwell overlong on such aspects of the rite, and instead, try to see in it something worthwhile and reassuring. As one mother says, “I’ve heard all the talk about the Sexual Revolution, but I confess I haven’t seen it. I mean, how can one see something like that going on if one isn’t a peeping Tom? But I have seen the way college girls dress nowadays—with their scraggly hair and sloppy shoes and dirty raincoats. At least if a girl’s a debutante she has to look like a lady!”

  6

  Playing the Game

  According to the best possible source—the Social Establishment itself—the most important college, socially, is unquestionably Yale. Princeton has a lot of glamour, but Yale is solider. Boston, naturally, has always favored Harvard, but it is only a particular part of Harvard—a Harvard centered around such clubs as Porcellian, Fly, and Spee—that is favored. (There are, in a very real sense, two Harvards. In the Porcellian Club, a one-way mirror on the dining room wall symbolizes the division; members, dining, can look out on the rest of the university as it passes by; non-members see only a reflection of themselves. The two Harvards, therefore, neither speak to, nor recognize, each other.) Though Philadelphia prefers the St. Paul’s-to-Yale route, it still sends a number of its upper-class sons to its own University of Pennsylvania, an institution which Philadelphians blandly admit is “second-rate Ivy League,” and which other cities place far down on their lists. For company and solace at the University, the well-born young of Philadelphia huddle together in three select fraternities—Delta Psi (St. Anthony’s), Delta Phi (St. Elmo’s), and Zeta Psi—and quite literally never meet anyone else. These three clubs are s
o selective and conservative that they have occasionally had years when they took in no new pledges at all; there was simply no one suitable to take in. New England’s “little three,” Williams, Amherst, and Wesleyan, are favorites of individual families, with the first two considered “better,” from a social standpoint. Dartmouth has a rather raffish reputation, associated with hard drinking and long winter weekends. “A lot of Dartmouth men go into advertising,” says one non-Dartmouth man. “Also, a lot of them are Irish.” (Nelson Rockefeller, Dartmouth ’30, however, is neither Irish nor in advertising.) Notre Dame is not considered in the social running at all. Yale men are supposed to go into banking. (David Rockefeller, however, who is a banker, went to Harvard.)

  A rough indication—and very rough—of the social standing of American colleges is the Social Register, which lists colleges and classes of the socially registered. The Register has standard abbreviations for all the colleges of the Ivy League—Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and “perhaps Cornell.” For years, however, it listed only two of the “little three”—omitting Wesleyan, though it long included the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Trinity, and, somewhat mysteriously, Union College, Rutgers, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Johns Hopkins, C.C.N.Y., and N.Y.U. For reasons equally mysterious, the only women’s college honored with its own Social Register symbol is Barnard, although Smith, Vassar, and Bryn Mawr, of the “seven sister” women’s colleges, are all a good deal more fashionable. And none of these may be as prestigious as certain of the women’s junior colleges—Bennett, Briarcliff, and Colby. Recently, Wesleyan was recognized and given its own Social Register symbol, “Wes,” indicating a possible improvement of its status. At the same time it has seemed to a few sensitive observers that Wesleyan is only partway into the Social Register. Though other collegiate symbols are translated in full in a key at the front of the book—“J Hop,” for instance, is said to stand for “Johns Hopkins Graduate”—“Wes” is somewhat sneeringly dismissed as “Wesleyan Univ. Grad.”

  The Social Register makes allowances for graduates of both Annapolis and West Point, but has never recognized the United States Air Force Academy, and, of course, regional editions reflect local preferences. The San Francisco Register has symbols for Stanford and the University of California and, of the Eastern colleges, for only Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. The Washington book adds Georgetown and George Washington University, lists all the Ivy League except Cornell, and in another hard-to-fathom move, adds Hobart, which is in upstate New York.

  There are other social “list” books besides the Social Register—though none considered as “reliable”—and a glance at their stand on colleges reveals that there may be a connection between the colleges and universities recognized and the alma maters of the lists’ publishers. The National Social Directory, for instance, in its “The List of Society,” gives the nod to all the colleges of the Ivy League and the “little three,” plus—in an attempt, perhaps, to give the publication the appearance of national scope—four others: Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois; Northeastern University, in Boston; Southwestern University (whether of Los Angeles or of Georgetown, Texas, the “List” does not specify); and Southeastern University in Washington, D.C. Still another list includes the customary Ivy League and “little three” and adds a few surprises of its own—South Dakota School of Mines and McNeese State College, which is in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Book editors are apt to be a class-conscious lot. A Harvard-graduated Boston editor, going over proof of a novel, objected to a line of dialogue that identified one of the characters as belonging to the Porcellian Club. “A fellow like that would never have been taken into the Porc,” he announced. The author, suspicious, checked the editor’s credentials and found him not to have been a member of Porcellian either, but of the Spee Club. He then changed the line to read, “Only a member of the Spee Club. Too bad it couldn’t have been Porcellian.”

  Just as there are certain proper schools and colleges, so are there certain proper college sports. Being able to play the right game is as important a part of being a gentleman or lady in Society as using the right fork and the right accent. American Society, like English Society, has always been strongly oriented toward the out-of-doors, the saddle, the firearm, the wicket and the bat, but just as certain colleges—such as Wesleyan—have a way of going in and out of fashion, so do sports. In the early part of the century, for instance, no gentleman in Society could decently admit that he was unable to play golf, or “the golf,” as it was somewhat flossily called. Golf brought with it the great era of the American country club, each surrounded by verdant acres of greens and fairways. Now, however, golf has become commonplace and is regarded as a middle-class sport. Few country clubs today could support themselves if they offered nothing but golf. Though there is admittedly a certain difference in cost, it is probably also significant of Society’s changing athletic attitudes that a New York contractor, who used to be kept busy building such things, has not installed a private golf course—full-size or miniature—since 1926. He has no end of orders, however, for private tennis courts. And, on the campuses of the better Eastern colleges, the golfer finds himself toward the bottom of the social ladder, along with the long-distance runner, the swimmer, the wrestler, the basketball and baseball player, and the most déclassé figure on the college athletic scene, the cheerleader.

  The “racquet” sports—tennis, squash, and court tennis—have long been mandatory upper-class pastimes, with the latter so “inside” that it has become almost obscure (requiring, as it does, medieval-style courtyards so elaborate that only a handful exist in the United States for the handful of aristocratic court-tennis players, all of whom know each other). Squash and tennis, suffused with an aura of easygoing good-fellowship, have a breezy, casual air about them that blends so perfectly with the Society manner. As a North Shore Long Island lady has said, “I’m always delighted to throw the house open to young men who come up to the Club for our Tennis Week—even if I don’t know them. Of course I’d hardly want to throw the house open to a group of golfers. That would be quite different, somehow—I don’t know why, but it would.” And a member of Amherst’s tennis squad says, “The nice thing about the racquet sports is that they look easy to play, but aren’t, and that keeps the duffers out of the game.” On Eastern college campuses, an argument can always be started over which is the most prestigious sport, tennis or squash. Squash, which is played indoors, is of necessity the sweatier sport, yet squash courts are among the most popular features of the best men’s clubs—and this of course, is the essential difference. Squash is a one-sex sport, but tennis is a sport for both sexes and is associated with summer, youth, and love. As a Yale man says, “It’s more important to know how to play tennis than squash because—well, you play tennis in the spring, which is the most important time of year to make a good impression if you’re looking for invitations to June coming-out parties.” In spanking clean tennis whites, a young man can make an excellent impression—even before swooping down on his opening serve.

  College crew, until a generation ago, was in roughly the same position of importance that tennis is in today, and it used to be taken as an article of faith that anyone rowing on the crew of a decent college bore credentials that were socially impeccable. Those were the days when so much snobbery surrounded crew that the father of Princess Grace, John Brendan Kelly, was told he could not compete in England’s Diamond Sculls because “A man who has worked with his hands should not compete against gentlemen.” Kelly, as the world surely knows by now, was a contractor’s son and, in the most noble purlieus of Philadelphia Society today, it is still said that Kelly “tried to use crew as a means to climb into Society.” Of the same era was the Porcellian stroke of the Harvard crew of whom it was said—according to a persistent legend—“He’s quite a democratic chap. He knows every man in the boat but the three up front.”

  At such schools as St. Paul’s and Kent,
crew continues to lure the sons of noted families but, at college, when athletic habits congeal, crew has had a considerable falling off. No one is quite sure why. The disintegration of the Yale-Harvard Regatta as a social event may be one reason. What was a chic affair in the twenties—involving private railways cars and all the largest steam yachts in the East—has turned into a general traffic jam that ties up all roadways, railways, and riverways around New London, Connecticut, and litters them all with empty beer cans. “Too many alumni got into the act,” explains a Yale senior.

  Another social sport that, like crew, has suffered recently from overcrowding is Rugby. For a number of years, Rugby failed to get an official athletic department recognition at major colleges, which gave its partisans—like the select few who make up college polo teams—the pleasant feeling of being insiders by virtue of being outsiders. Also, on most campuses, Rugby players were not really required to know how to play Rugby; the major talent for Rugby was the ability to muster round-trip plane fare to Bermuda for Rugby Week, the sport’s annual rite of spring. Rugby Week or College Week was once cozy and gay and giggly and distinctly upper class, and mothers had no qualms about allowing their daughters to go, in groups, to attend the event. But slowly, the tiny Atlantic archipelago began noticing annual increases in the numbers of Rugby and non-Rugby playing guests at Easter time. Soon College Week was more crowded than the Yale-Harvard Regatta, more wild-eyed than Derby Day, Yale’s famous (and now defunct) romp. College Week sat in the middle of Bermuda’s sunny season like a drunk at a tea party. “I’ve gone to my last College Week,” said a Princeton sophomore a few years ago. “You can’t believe what it’s like. The hotels are all filled, so guys sleep under rocks on the beach. If you’re lucky enough to have a room, you’re expected to share it with twenty other guys. The bar at the Elbow-Beach Club is packed three people deep and filled with armed Security Guards trying to keep order. And the girls! My blind date one night was a CPA from Chicago. For my money, the whole Rugby thing has gone way, way down.” It was to go even further. Bermuda, displeased with the behavior of its visitors, made them increasingly unwelcome, and soon the young, and the ensuing disturbances, turned to the beaches of Florida, to Fort Lauderdale, and then, a few years later, to Daytona Beach. All pretense at any connection with the sport of Rugby was abandoned, and College Week no longer has any Society overtones at all. Today, the holidaying college crowd tends to favor Puerto Rico and upperclass mothers keep their daughters home—remembering, though, when it was all sweet innocence in Bermuda, with all those nice young Rugby players from the Ivy League. And where are the nice young men today if they are not playing Rugby? On the nearest ski slopes they can find.