A less spectacular group of Grosse Pointers would argue with this. To them, the salt-Ford kind of wealth is more acceptable. It is older money, and it is quieter money. It has more generations behind it to give it temperance and tone. Still others would point to the old Fords as symbolizing the gracious way of life—in their comfortable and modest house, surrounded by comfortable, well-used things and family heirlooms and portraits.
It is the people who subscribe to the salt-Ford set of values who speak most frequently of “all these new people—who are they?” And who bemoan the fact that the nouveaux riches are robbing Grosse Pointe of its original character. On the other hand, says Mrs. F. C. Ford, “Everybody was nouveau to begin with, wasn’t he? This place was built by the nouveaux of different generations, as far as I can see. The only difference is, we used to feel we knew everybody in Grosse Pointe. Now we don’t. But the change is good. I get so tired of people at parties who say, ‘I don’t know anybody here!’”
“Grosse Pointe is a friendly town, don’t you think?” a hostess asked her guest the other day, a trifle anxiously. Her guest agreed that it was. There is a kind of open-handed generosity and kindliness about the place, a take-me-as-I-am quality that greets the visitor, a quality that is particularly Middle Western. “We love visitors,” another woman says. “We love anything that gives us an excuse to have a little party.” Visitors are scooped up, taken on a jolly round of parties and entertainments, invited to play golf, and in general are given a warmer welcome than a similar visitor would expect to get in a suburb of Philadelphia or Boston or, for that matter, New York or San Francisco.
Grosse Pointe wants terribly to be liked. This is not to say that the friendliness is forced, but Grosse Pointe has achieved a poor national “image.” Everyone in Grosse Pointe is aware of this, but not everyone is certain what to do about it. “The trouble is,” one woman says, “that Grosse Pointe seems to have ‘arrived’ somehow—it’s on the map now, and it’s become a symbol of something it really isn’t—or is it?” Another resident says, “Whenever I go anywhere and say I’m from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, I get a funny look—a look that says, ‘Well, where’re your emeralds? Where’s your Cadillac?’”
Grosse Pointe has become a symbol of wealth, but of wealth with pomposity and very little taste. The revelation, not long ago, that Grosse Pointe realtors operated an elaborate “point system” designed to keep Jews and other “undesirables” from the area did not help the community’s reputation. Then, to add insult to injury, there was a television broadcast which noted that several members of Detroit’s infamous “Purple Gang” had established themselves in flossy, heavily guarded residences in the Windmill Pointe section of Grosse Pointe Park—which left the impression that, while it did not welcome Jews or Negroes, Grosse Pointe did not mind a mobster or two. It has been called “Gauche Pointe,” and “the last stronghold of tail-fin culture.” But to tick off Grosse Pointe as any of these things is to miss the point, or Pointe.
More than anything else, Grosse Pointe is nervous. Under the facade of good-natured geniality run ripples of anxiety. The community is nervous about Negroes. (“There’s a real kind of fear here about that,” says Mrs. F. C. Ford.) Detroit’s Negro population has climbed to about thirty per cent of the total—a larger percentage share than in New York or Chicago—and the 1967 riots were terrible proof of a long-explosive situation. Grosse Pointe is nervous about its own expanding Negro population, even though it relies on Negroes almost exclusively for domestic help. It is nervous about appearing anti-Semitic, and it is also nervous about Jews. The so-called point system did operate—though most Grosse Pointers insist they were unaware of it—and there are those who say that it still does. At the same time there is a feeling which one woman expresses with marvelous candor: “There’s no religious prejudice in Grosse Pointe. We’ve seen to that. There’s never been anyone here to be prejudiced against.” There is nervousness about gangsters. “We have gangsters living across the street from us—I think,” one Grosse Pointe Park woman says. And then adds, “At least they keep to themselves.” The parent of a Little Leaguer in this same section of town was startled to hear his son say, “I’d better not strike out today. If I do, the captain of the team says he’ll have his father bump me off.”
Grosse Pointe is nervous about the role religion is playing in the community, and theological arguments lately have had less to do with whether God is dead than with whether or not He is being misused as a social-climbing device. Traditionally, community life has been strongly centered around Grosse Pointe’s three churches—Christ Church (Episcopal), Memorial (Presbyterian), and St. Paul’s (Roman Catholic)—and joining one of these churches is a traditional first step for newcomers to take if they hope to be accepted in the town. But Mrs. Alexander Wiener, a prominent Episcopalian, expressed distress not long ago by the way her church, at least, is being used as “an avenue to status and respectability. People are using the church to help them jockey for social position.” Prominent Catholics and Presbyterians, meanwhile, worry that their respective churches—always considered a notch or two down, socially—may lose followers because of this.
Though it likes to think and talk of itself as a steady, settled community, Grosse Pointe is in fact relatively young as suburbs go. It has grown up fast, shot out of its clothes, and some of the nervousness may be laid to suburban adolescence. Clifford West says, “There’s always been a kind of raw-boned quality about Detroit. The first generation were young and vigorous go-getters. They went to Grosse Pointe and became custodians of a kind of culture. But now the old castles are coming down and, at the same time, the Detroit slums are being renewed. Everything is different. The third generation is young and vigorous, too, and eager to learn. They know that the rich are supposed to become idle and decadent—but they’re determined not to. They’re searching, instead, for some kind of mission of their own.”
Mrs. Raymond Dykema, of the older generation (she was a “one-l Russel,” also a first-cabin family), says, “There was a feeling of importance as I grew up, watching the ships go by in front of our house, knowing that my father built them—a feeling of belonging to the city, of helping shape it.” And James Earl, of the younger generation, says, “There’s a philosophy that the young here have—which is that I am my only asset. My body, my being, my mind, my self—Me. And, as long as this ‘me’ is making money, I’ll spend it, by God!” This comes close to pinpointing Grosse Pointe’s special flavor, its boyish, coltish, high-stepping, sometimes awkward behavior. If one closes one’s eyes for a fraction of a second, one can almost see the shade of young Sam Dodsworth at the country club dance. Grosse Pointe is not Zenith by a long shot, but the spirit of Sinclair Lewis’s wealthy, bumbling hero is everywhere.
If, while it is restlessly looking for “some kind of mission,” the young generation of Grosse Pointers has nothing else, it has money—a lot of it. There is endless talk of money in the community—not smug talk, or envious talk, but frank and excited talk. New or old money, the theme is the same. Money is fun—to spend and to make. It also offers a kind of nostrum for nervousness. “Whenever I get depressed, I remember that I make $100,000 a year,” one young man—barely out of his twenties—said. “If I make that much money, I’ve got to be good, don’t I?” ($100,000 a year is the yardstick for success in Grosse Pointe; anyone making less than that is considered a failure.) Oscar Olsen is apt to buttonhole an acquaintance of no more than a few minutes to say, “Come on down to my office—I want to tell you about a deal I’ve got going that’s going to make ten million.” In the living room of the Walter B. Fords’ (the Ford-Fords) hangs a Picasso head of a woman who appears to be gazing at an oblong slip of paper. Jokingly, to friends, Ford says, “That’s a picture of Dodie writing a check,” and one gathers that it would not be too difficult to persuade him to reveal the present balance in her account.
To an Easterner, bred in the polite and powdered ways of Philadelphia or Boston Society, such openness about
money might seem more than slightly vulgar. On the other hand, one transplanted Eastern woman says, “I was startled at first. Then I decided that it was rather refreshing. After all, if you’re rich, why not be honest about it?”
If a new family moves to Grosse Pointe and cannot get “in” socially, the cause is likely not to be that its appearance or its manners are lacking but that its money-spending is insufficient. “Is it easy to be accepted in Grosse Pointe?” Helen Howard asks rhetorically. “Well, yes and no. A college friend of mine moved here from the East with her husband a while ago. My Grosse Pointe friends really knocked themselves out for those two—entertained them all over the place—for a while, at least. But my Eastern friends just couldn’t hold up their end, financially. Look, if a couple is attractive, and likes sports, they have an easier time. But let’s face it: more than anything else, they’ve got to have the scratch.”
With singular determination (perhaps fearing that too much luxury may make them soft), Grosse Pointers hurl themselves into athletics, and Grosse Pointe is one of the most sports-minded communities in the country, specializing in activities somewhat different from those considered upper class in the East. Paddle tennis is enormously in vogue—“Nothing like paddle tennis for a hangover,” says one woman—and, to help Grosse Pointers work off their nervous energy, there are golf, swimming, sailing, speedboat races, riding, field dog trials, and sports car races for both sexes (one young wife helps her husband in the mechanics’ pit at the track wearing a “pit suit” of gold lame). In winter, there are skiing, skating, ice-boating. Grosse Pointers fancy sports in which there is an element of danger, and sky-diving has become a fashionable pastime. On weekends, in season, the men are off to their private marshes and duck blinds and fishing streams. (“My husband used to rent eight miles of salmon,” Mrs. Joseph Schlotman recalled not long ago. “He had to rent. It seems you can’t buy a river.”) The women hunt, shoot skeet, fence, and bowl.
Much of this activity centers around the various Grosse Pointe clubs—the Country Club of Detroit, the Grosse Pointe Club (called “the little club”), the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, and the Hunt Club. But a number of adventuresome Grosse Pointers have established sporting outposts in horsey Metamora, Michigan, southwest of Detroit, where there are two clubs: on the northern shore of Lake St. Clair, where there is a club called “the old club” (“a hunting, fishing, and oh-hell-a-bit-of-drinking club,” according to a member); and in Gaylord, Michigan, a five-hour drive to the north, where there is a private ski club.
Grosse Pointe has also made a “sport” of traveling. When not planning hunting, sailing, or fishing trips to northern Michigan and Canada, Grosse Pointers are departing for grouse-shooting expeditions to Scotland, skiing trips to Austria or Chile (depending on the season), skin-diving trips to the Aegean Islands, and safaris to East Africa. “We always say Grosse Pointe is a nice place to be from,” says Helen Howard, adding that to be constantly “from” somewhere requires “scratch” too.
Sam Dodsworth was an outdoorsman and, if there had been television in his day, he would doubtless have been a TV fan too—as Grosse Pointe is, to a man and to a woman. Television is one of Grosse Pointe’s favorite forms of relaxation and, not surprisingly, the sports programs are the most popular. On Sunday afternoons in autumn, the golf courses are deserted and Grosse Pointers are in their houses, with their friends, with their eyes fixed on the colored screen. This is not to say that Grosse Pointe has forsaken the social tradition of the Sunday afternoon cocktail party; on the contrary, it has merely expanded upon it so that the cocktail party includes television-watching. Sometimes several sets are put to use so that several football—or World Series baseball—games can be watched simultaneously; the announcers’ voices describing plays provide a muted backdrop to cocktail party conversation.
“We’re all nuts about pro football here,” one man says. “If you call a friend up and ask him over on a Sunday, the first thing he asks is, ‘Which game are you watching?’” Grosse Pointe is similarly nuts about pro football players. “They’re much nicer than professional baseball players,” says one woman who often has a quarterback or two at her parties. “You can be sure they’ve had at least four years of college somewhere.” One of the easiest ways to be accepted by Grosse Pointe Society is to be a member of the Detroit Lions team. (One Grosse Pointe woman is such a Lions fan that she had a diamond wristwatch made to order with the letters DETROIT LIONS representing the twelve digits on the dial.) The all-time record for the number of television sets going at a single party may belong to Ray Whyte, the ebullient head of several million-dollar electronics businesses. (“I’m president of seven companies. I’ve had a lot of luck.”) Once, at a gathering at his house, it took twelve sets to keep the guests informed of the scores. His wife Celeste always travels with her own TV so that she may never be more than a button’s-push away from a Lions game.
These attitudes are in sharp contrast with those encountered on the North Shore of Long Island at the summer home of the Denniston Slaters. Not long ago, before he retired, Whitey Ford dropped by the Slaters’ for a visit, and Slater excitedly telephoned neighbors and friends to say, “Whitey Ford is here! Come on over!” Slater says, “They all came, of course. But half of them thought that Whitey Ford was a bandleader, and the other half thought it was Henry.”
“I couldn’t stand the physical set-up of Grosse Pointe,” says Mrs. Clifford West who “escaped” to Bloomfield Hills—some twenty-five miles to the northwest of Grosse Pointe physically, and even farther away emotionally. “It was so close. I felt there was no air. I couldn’t breathe! But look at what we’ve got here.” She gestured out the window of her large, rambling house toward a long expanse of rolling lawn and an ancient willow tree standing like a fountain at the edge of a shaded pond. “I also didn’t approve of the way they bring up their children there—the coming-out parties and all that, and the lessons the children are forever taking! French lessons, riding lessons, sailing lessons, swimming lessons, tennis lessons, skating lessons, dancing lessons, fencing lessons. Things are much more relaxed and less organized here.”
And yet Mrs. West takes her children often to visit her aunt, Mrs. Schlotman, the salt Ford. “I do want them to see what it was like,” Mrs. West says, “because Aunt Stella is one of the last ones to live on that enormous scale—in her huge house with the elevator to the ballroom, with a score of servants. I want them to see it before it goes—and to know that it really wasn’t vulgar, but had such dignity, such manner, such taste, and such integrity.”
Other Bloomfield Hills residents consider their town the “answer” to Grosse Pointe. “We’re not stuffy, not inbred, not old-fashioned the way they are in Grosse Pointe,” says a Bloomfield Hills man. “We’re a community of individuals here. In Grosse Pointe, they do everything together. They belong to the same clubs, go to the same parties—see the same old faces, year in and year out. When they travel, they travel together, in packs, and wherever you see a Grosse Pointer in Europe you can be sure there are at least a dozen other Grosse Pointers in the same hotel.”
And yet it is this “family” feeling that buoys Grosse Pointe up and holds it together. Families who were friends in one generation find that their children are friends in the next, and this gives Grosse Pointers a comfortable, cozy feeling of unity and continuity. When, as sometimes happens, a son—gone East to prep school and college—announces his intention of moving permanently to New York, the news distresses all Grosse Pointe, for the community wonders whether the tight fibers that bind it may be flying apart. A Grosse Pointer does not object—indeed, sees nothing wrong—that his house stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the houses on either side. The disadvantage of crowding has become an advantage. “You never need to be afraid in a community like this,” says one woman—a community where, if you need one, you can reach out and touch a friend just a few feet away. Congestion here breeds contentment. A good many years ago, an edition of the Social Register was published for Det
roit. It languished and died from lack of interest. “We didn’t need it here,” one woman explains. “A Grosse Pointe address has always been enough to tell us who belongs here from who does not.”
As the population of Grosse Pointe has grown within its seven square miles, the one-big-happy-family feeling has intensified. The knots that secure the relationship of one to all have become stronger. When the day comes—which would not seem too far off—when there is simply no more room in the five towns for large brick houses, Grosse Pointe will not be upset; the family circle will then seem complete. As Grosse Pointe has grown, it has grown inward upon itself, and away from the city of Detroit. With its own shops and golf courses and churches close at hand, it is increasingly unnecessary for a Grosse Pointe woman to venture outside her town, except when she goes to and from the airport; Detroit is the men’s city. The most important city, as far as the women are concerned, is New York; it sets their style. “We go to New York,” one woman says. “Never to Chicago, never to Cleveland, never to Pittsburgh.”
Grosse Pointers don’t like Detroit much, either. “It’s such an ugly city,” one woman says. Another says, “The nice thing about Grosse Pointe is that when you’re here it simply doesn’t seem possible that Detroit is ten minutes away.” Still another says, “I had to go to Detroit the other day—and I had to drive right by one of those plants when all the workers with their lunch boxes and tool kits were coming out. It was scary!”
The Right People Page 18
