The Right People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Society fathers expect their sons to have learned, by the time of their maturity, to ride and respect horseflesh, to handle a firearm or a trout rod, to sail a boat, and to be kind to pedigreed dogs. Girls are expected only to be able to ride. From these areas of interest stem any number of specialist and rarefied sports which are determinedly, perennially, and almost exclusively aristocratic; such as yacht-racing, fox hunting, polo, and beagling. These sports seem incapable of losing their upper-class gloss. But other sports, like Rugby, have suffered social reverses, and the most notable of these is Eastern college football which, for several decades, has undergone a long decline. Often called “King Football,” the sport certainly is among the more enduring symbols of college life. For years, football games were the centers of huge, happy, sentimental, and generally well-bred gatherings. Saturday after Saturday, autumn after autumn, the packed station wagons threaded their way across the New England landscape toward the famous stadiums and bowls. And yet, though to an outsider all might have seemed well with college football, there were signs that it was sickening at its heart. It was not so much that Society boys no longer played football—there never have, really, been many Society football players—it was that the youngsters of Society were not attending football games with their old enthusiasm. The oldsters continued to flock to the games and to open the backs of their station wagons and spread out picnics with cocktails, chafing dishes, wines, and, in any number of cases, a white-coated houseboy in attendance to help serve. But they had not come to watch football being played as much as to pass around the thermos of iced Martinis, and to meet old friends at Portal Nine. After the game—or, more likely, before it was over, in order to beat the crowds—the oldsters left the stadium to wander over to Zeta Psi where a goodly number of football enthusiasts had already gathered for a drink and to inquire, in a bored and genial sort of way, about the victor and the final score.

  During the games, cheering sections failed to materialize or, if they did, failed to cheer loudly enough to be heard across the field. Cheerleaders flopped about, calling for shreds of enthusiasm. Brilliant plays went unnoticed by larger and larger sections of the stands, and college newspaper editors editorialized halfheartedly about “lack of spirit” and “apathy.” Friday nights were given over to listless pep rallies, and the social standing of football on the Ivy League campus slid lower and lower.

  After World War II, when returning veterans—most of whom considered football kid stuff—flooded the campuses, football sank to its knees. Football players were openly and loudly kidded and lampooned. They became the butt of every joke. College humor magazines depicted them as bulky dimwits who were able to stay in college only if they took the simplest “gut” courses and received elaborate scholastic coaching from their friends. If a particular fraternity happened to attract mostly football players to its membership, it became known as “The Ape House,” or “The Gorilla Cage,” or “The Jungle Club,” and Zeta Psi—which, on practically every campus it exists, is among the most exclusive—seriously discussed excluding football players from its Williams chapter. “They can give the house a bad name,” it was said at the time.* College professors, rather than seem to be giving football players a break, often seemed to be giving them a harder time than other students, calling on them to recite excessively, ridiculing them if they made mistakes. “Musclehead” and “meat-head” became popular expressions of derogation.

  In the twenties and thirties, days when the image of Princeton’s great Hobey Baker hung in the sky, girls from Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley were the football hero’s for the asking. In the late forties and fifties, the football player—a hero no longer—had trouble finding himself a date. “Quite frankly, they don’t make good weekend dates,” said a Wellesley girl. “At least not during the season. If they’re playing, you have to go with one of their friends. After the game, if they’re not banged up somehow, they’re tired. Their training rules mean they don’t have much fun at parties. They go to sleep, and there you are.” During the week, too, life at the training table had the effect of isolating the football player from his fellow students. Lonely and neglected, he sought out the only company that was available to him—the company of other football players. Coincidentally, as the sixth decade of the century progressed, professional football increased enormously in popularity. Society turned on its television set or headed for the big pro games and, of all things, professional football became an upper-class spectator sport. At Yale today, the men who consider themselves the college’s social leaders have never met members of the Yale football team. They indulge, instead, in a sport that would horrify their grandfathers—touch football.

  Does this mean that Eastern college sports have gone all effete and namby-pamby—that future sporting events will be limited entirely to those which can be held under green-and-white striped awnings, where spectators, seated in rows of folding chairs, will show their appreciation of exceptional plays not with stomping or cheering, but with polite applause? Not exactly. Two fairly rough and tumble sports, hockey and lacrosse, have been rapidly moving up the social ladder to fill the gap left by college football. Field hockey, too, is becoming popular at men’s colleges, as it long was at women’s. “Do you know what I think the chic-est college sporting event in the entire East is at the moment, bar none?” asks a Bennington girl. “It’s the annual Williams-Bennington field hockey game. You should see us out there in our little knickers!”

  * Several years later, fraternities themselves were banned at Williams.

  7

  The Dirty Part

  In a large stone house outside Philadelphia, surrounded by acres of venerable lawn, at the end of a long graveled driveway that is raked so often that each car approaching leaves fresh furrows in it, lives a certain little old lady with servants and roomfuls of family photographs. At tea time, on designated afternoons, she receives her brothers and cousins, her nieces and nephews and little grand-nieces and grandnephews, most of whom live nearby, and, as she pours from a large, heavily embossed silver service, the conversation is witty and cultivated and intimate and gay. “Gentle talk,” she calls it. Mostly it is family talk, but often it ranges to art, the opera, the symphony, the local dances. Politics is a rare topic; so is the theatre—unless, of course, someone “knows someone” who has made the unusual move of “going into politics,” or is “taking a fling” at going on the stage. The talk, in other words, centers around “people we know.” When tea is over, the children kiss their elderly relative good-by and leave with parents or governesses, and a few adults stay on for cocktails and a few of these old members of the family may remain for dinner. At eleven o’clock, the great doors of the house close for the night.

  This lady is a member of one of Philadelphia’s oldest and wealthiest and most distinguished families. At eighteen, she was the city’s most beautiful and popular debutante. Strangers ask why she never married. This is a subject that is not discussed much in the family any more; the reasons why no longer matter much. But, if pressed for an answer, close friends will tell the story of how once, when she was a young girl, she fell in love. The man she loved was out of her class, and was Jewish—either one of which circumstances might have been remotely tolerable, alone. But together they made the situation impossible. She never fell out of love, never fell in love again. Once, it is said, she asked her father for permission to marry the man. Papa, very gently, explained that it was out of the question. She bowed to Papa’s wisdom. This story, in its classic simplicity, presents a classic truth: love, among the rich, can be cruel.

  Love among the rich is different simply because the rich are rich, and for no other reason. (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sensitive observation about the rich that they are “different” from you and me and Ernest Hemingway’s flat-footed rebuttal of it, that they have more money, reveals only that one man understood the power of money and the other did not.) “Power,” states an old Chinese proverb, “is ancient wealth.” And it is to this thinking that mos
t American rich, knowingly or not, subscribe. The adjective here is most important. In order for the power—the influence, the prestige, the ability to control other people and shore up reserves against the world’s inequities—to be at its fullest, the money must age. This is why the newly rich are very different from the anciently rich. Money, like a good strand of pearls, improves and grows more lustrous with each generation that wears it.

  This, of course, explains why so much of the talk among the very old rich is family talk. Money is part of the bloodline, inextricable from it, celebrated along with it so that the two are tacitly considered to be the same. Family money is a thing that, from generation to generation, must not only be preserved, but must also be enriched and fed and nourished from time to time, from whatever sources are at hand, resupplied from other wells of ancient wealth. Otherwise, any family fortune—unless the strictest rules of primogeniture are adhered to—dissipates quickly through division, taxation, and simple spending. Marriage, therefore—the right marriage—is of prime importance. “Love”—taken to mean romantic love, or even sex—must be subordinated to that, or at least made equivalent to that. Among the rich, money and love and marriage go together like a horse and a pair of carriages—the money being the horse that pulls the caravan. In upper-class love, money is always raising its ugly head. Before the demands of love can be met, the demands of money must be. In marriage, money is definitely the dirty part; sooner or later all the implications of that five-letter word must be faced.

  The rich in America are often accused of living in the past, but this is not really the case. The past, the family, and where the money came from provide a textured background for what goes on today, but the true concern of the rich is for the future: where the money will go. A child is more than a child. He is also the carrier of the money into the next generation, and the one after that. This is the reason for the unquestioning obedience and observance of ritual and tradition that accompany upper-class child-raising—a process that Wilmarth Lewis compares to the Oriental practice of foot-binding. This constrictive atmosphere is designed not to stifle romantic love, but to put it in its proper perspective, to help the young see love for what is it. The attitude is that love is cheap. Money isn’t.

  “Bringing up a child is so difficult these days,” a New York woman sighed recently. “At schools and colleges, there is getting to be such a range of people.” Of course. At the so-called “rich-boys’ schools,” it is increasingly difficult to be sure that one’s son will meet only other rich boys, who are likeliest to have rich sisters. There are apt to be a few poor boys in these schools nowadays, and there are even more apt to be rich boys who are “the wrong kind of rich.” This means that, to compensate for schools that “open their doors to practically everybody,” more attention must be paid to what goes on in—and who goes to—the private dancing classes, the parties, and the subscription dances where little boys meet little girls. “I have to screen my list of boys’ names so carefully,” says Mrs. William Tew, the social secretary, “to see that someone who doesn’t belong, or of whom parents would disapprove, is not invited.” Parents themselves begin screening the list of their children’s friends even earlier—from the first days of nursery school.

  Why is it considered so important for the rich to marry rich? There are many reasons. “It’s better that way,” says a New York mother. “Then the young people will have the same interests, the same backgrounds.” Oil and water don’t mix. Also—always—there is the question of the money. When rich weds rich, there is less chance that one of the partners is a fortune hunter (though there is nothing to prevent a person with a fortune from setting out to bag an even larger fortune; not all fortune hunters are poor). When money marries money, the union of wealth not only assures that the young couple will have few worries over household bills, and few arguments over who is spending too much of whose income, but it provides, for the generation following and the generation following that, an even greater financial cushion. There is less chance of the money’s running out; instead, the wealth will grow more ancient, bringing even greater power and greater respectability, into perpetuity. This is why so many of the rich have a curious habit of growing richer. And, if there is one consolation for an old-rich-new-rich marriage, it is that, two generations from now, the money will all be old-rich.

  Still, the marriage of two rich young people is less like a giant corporate merger than it sometimes seems from reading the newspapers. Instead, the money is joined in a kind of polite legal handshake. It is set up in this manner by attorneys and the trust officers of banks. The money is only married up to a point. Beyond that, against the unfortunate but very practical possibility of divorce, it is kept separate. In this way, when Thomas M. Bancroft, Jr., (whose mother was of the banking Woodwards, and related to the Astors) married Margaret (Peggy) Bedford, of a considerable Standard Oil fortune, it was called “a perfect marriage,” and the Bancroft and Bedford fortunes joined hands. When the couple divorced, to allow Mrs. Bancroft to become Princess Charles d’Arenberg, the two fortunes slid apart and returned smoothly to their respective sources. Alimony is considered untidy, and, when both parties to a divorce are wealthy, it is quite unnecessary. In contrast to the Bancroft-Bedford arrangement was the $5,500,000 share of another Standard Oil fortune demanded, and won, by Mrs. Winthrop (“Bobo”) Rockefeller in the 1950’s—a tabloid hullabaloo that causes all Rockefellers to this day to turn pale when it is mentioned in their presence.

  Often things go wrong when two fortunes attempt to disengage themselves in a divorce action. One California bridegroom, in a happy nuptial daze, put his signature to a number of legal documents in the process of taking a wife, without reading any of them carefully. A year or so later, in the process of a particularly bitter divorce suit, he discovered that one item he had acquired—for reasons that are still unclear to him—was half-ownership of a piece of real estate upon which his wife’s parents’ swimming pool reposed. To the distress of his in-laws, and to the dismay of their lawyers who could devise no legal way of excluding him, he came regularly to swim throughout the divorce proceedings, sometimes bringing large parties of friends but always, he says, “Being careful to swim only at my end of the pool.”

  In the East not long ago, a pretty girl whose homes are in New York City and Sands Point, Long Island, was more foresighted about divorce. While she and her young husband were honeymooning in Mexico they decided, after a particularly altitudinous evening on the town, to get a Mexican divorce. As she explains, “We were having such a marvelous, glorious time—a perfect holiday. We got the divorce for a lark, mostly. We were there, it was easy to get, and we thought—after all—we might want to use it some day.” With their speedily obtained decree, the couple flew merrily home to New York, framed the document and hung it on their bathroom wall where, from friends, it provoked appropriate laughter. But, says the wife, “Later on we got to feeling rather funny about it. We didn’t really know whether we were married or not. Some of our friends said the Mexican thing wasn’t really legal, but others said it was. If we weren’t married, it didn’t seem quite right for us to be living together. So we sort of drifted apart …”

  They have continued to drift. The young woman remarried, but she and her first husband are still “the best of friends,” and the first husband continues to sail his boat out to Sands Point on summer weekends to visit his former wife’s parents and to call on his former wife who is sometimes there for the weekend too. Sometimes, if the second husband doesn’t happen to be in the vicinity, the former couple appear at parties together, “acting just like newlyweds.”

  There is always a good deal of clucking and headshaking about the morals of the rich. And it is true that when there is plenty of money a divorce can be both cheap and easy. But among a larger and less publicized group of American rich, divorces are not supposed to happen. Divorce is not considered respectable or practical. It casts an unfavorable light upon the families, and on the way they live, and on
the money. It blurs, rather than strengthens, the bloodline. And, because the press pays more attention to divorces among the rich (HEIRESS SEEKS DIVORCE, scream the headlines) than it does to divorces among the poor, a divorce can be embarrassing. In this group, a marriage is supposed to last and last and last. It need not be happy, but it should last. Husbands and wives may stop speaking to each other, but they should not separate. American Society has, in fact, erected for itself a few bulwarks—flimsy, perhaps, but bulwarks nonetheless—to try to see to it that its marriages do last. One of these is Philadelphia’s antique rule against divorced people attending its Assembly Ball. And, in Philadelphia, when one of the well-placed Ingersolls told his mother that he was getting along poorly with his wife, his mother sympathized and said, “Then I think you should take a mistress, dear.”