The Right People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Two Main Line ladies, lunching at the Barclay Hotel in Philadelphia—the Main Line’s favorite in-town eating spot—were overheard in a conversation that was ritually punctuated with little cries of, “Oh, my dear, how ghastly!” And, “Oh, my dear, how divine!” Her precious poodle, the first woman was saying, had come down with Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and had had to be “put to sleep.” (“Oh, my dear, how ghastly!” her friend commented.) The disease, furthermore, could be communicated to humans, and so the poodle owner’s doctor had insisted that everyone in the household receive inoculations against it. They had all, then, received their shots—except the family cook who, for religious reasons, had refused. Well, sure enough, the storyteller continued, the cook had come down with Rocky Mountain spotted fever and had died. (“Oh, my dear, how ghastly!”) “But,” the first woman added, “she was really something of a trial—always singing hymns in the kitchen. I have a new girl now that I like much better.” “Oh, my dear,” said her friend, “how divine!”

  Like Grosse Pointe, the Main Line insists that racial and religious prejudice do not exist there. Unlike Grosse Pointe, the Main Line believes that it is telling the truth, though it would be truer and more exact to say that the manifestations of prejudice are very few—since they would not be tactful. There are sizable Negro populations, for example, in Bryn Mawr and Ardmore, and a smaller one in Radnor, but there are few signs of racial strife. Everyone points out that “Woodmont,” the huge turreted castle built by the late Alan Wood in Gladwyne, is now owned by Father Divine and his Angels, “and nobody minds their being there.” A young Negro executive of the General Electric Corporation recently bought a house in a select section of Bryn Mawr and moved in without incident. The family has not precisely been clasped to the bosom of Main Line Society but, again, “nobody minded.” As for Jews, one Main Liner says proudly, “Jews are more accepted here than in any other American city,” and, in a sense, this is true. It depends on what sort of Jew one is. In the early days of Philadelphia, many prosperous Jewish families mingled freely with—and married—members of the Christian upper crust, with the result that many, if not most, “old” Philadelphia families today have a Jewish ancestor or two, and many non-Jews have “Jewish-sounding” names. Subsequent “waves” of Jewish immigrants from Europe have fared differently, however, and today an apartheid exists between the “old” Sephardic families, the somewhat newer Germans—both of which are socially acceptable—and Jews from Eastern Europe, notably Russia and Poland, who are not. Pockets of the Main Line remain restricted against Jews of any variety, and Mrs. Irving Fried, who is Jewish, speaks humorously of “the border patrol” around one area in Wynnewood where Jews are unwelcome. “Still,” says another woman, “they can do everything—except, of course, join the clubs.”

  That is, they cannot join certain clubs—the clubs of the inner Main Line. These—the Philadelphia Country Club, the Merion Cricket Club, the Merion Golf Club, the Gulph Mills Golf Club, and the Radnor Hunt Club—are strung out along the length of the Main Line, and, as they march westward from the Philadelphia Country Club (the least fashionable of the five), they become increasingly exclusive until one reaches the Gulph Mills where, as they say, “someone has to die” before a new member can be taken in, and the “dear old cozy” Radnor Hunt, a paddock, as the name implies, for the horsey set. (Good Americans, Oscar Wilde once observed, go to Paris when they die; good Philadelphians, it is locally believed, just go farther out on the Main Line.) Whether all these clubs, which are traditionally Gentile, actually and actively discriminate against Jews is a question many Jewish Main Liners have pondered. The clubs themselves, of course, politely say that they do not. But still the Jewish population remains wary. Jews have been entertained as guests of members at the Merion Golf Club, and Jewish children take tennis lessons at the Merion Cricket. But, when it comes to applying for membership, Jewish families have preferred not to risk embarrassment or rebuff. “My husband wants to try, but I just don’t want to be snubbed,” one woman says.

  The one Main Line club “which no Jew would ever dare to try to join” is the quaintly named Philadelphia Skating Club and Humane Society. The Society was organized more than a century ago, when the Main Line passion for skating on the Schuylkill was at its height, and when the skating parties were punctuated by mass drownings as shelves of ice broke loose and skaters were carried over dams to the tune of the “Skater’s Waltz.” Members of the Humane Society skated with lengths of rope lashed to their shoulders for rescue operations. Today, however, humanity and humaneness are secondary concerns of the Skating Club. It remains the area’s most socially important and exclusive club. Meanwhile, the answer to the anti-Semitism of many Main Line clubs has been the formation of Jewish clubs—such as the Radnor Valley Country Club—which are just as exclusive in their own way.

  Early in life, Main Line children acquire the attitudes and values of their elders. Two small boys in the sixth grade were recently picked up at school by a local car pool, and were overheard in the following conversation:

  “Where did your mother make her debut?”

  “Well, she never did, actually.”

  “That’s funny. My mother made her debut, and she’s not even pretty.”

  When a Main Line ten-year-old was showing his collection of old automobile license plates to a visitor, he was asked how he had managed to come by plates from such remote states as Idaho and Wyoming. “My father suggested that I take the Social Register and look through it for people with out-of-state addresses,” he explained. “I wrote to them, then, and asked for their old plates—and of course I told them who I was, and how I’d found their names.” A Wynnewood mother, whose fourteen-year-old had been entertaining a classmate from Episcopal Academy with an afternoon of rather noisy horseplay, stormed into her son’s room to say, “Now you two boys get this mess picked up!” Later her son said to her sternly, “Mother, do you realize that you were screaming at the Pretender to the royal throne of Portugal, Miguel de Bragança?” “Oh?” said the mother sarcastically. “And how is his father, the King?” “It’s not his father,” the boy explained, “it’s his grandfather.”

  Because of its excellent school system, many wealthy Main Line families—particularly those with newer money—send their children to local public schools, rather than to the private academies, and this has had a somewhat disquieting effect on the public school population. The private schools have a more or less socially homogeneous enrollment, and opportunities for snobbery are few. The public schools, however, according to observers, have lately become the scene of “a great deal more social and money snobbery.” Here the line between the Main Line rich and the Main Line poor is more sharply, and cruelly, drawn. A definite “rich kids” clique exists, and the poor—among them Negro children—are forced to join in bands of their own. Very little intercourse exists between the groups except as eruptions and something very close to gang fighting. But again, among the Old Guard, whose children do not go to public schools, there is little concern, or even awareness, of this situation.

  The Old Guard of the Main Line have, as a result of their attitudes, been depicted as stuffy, stupid, and self-satisfied, obsessed with formality and ritual. But to those who compose the Old Guard, the situation is quite the opposite. Within Society’s comfortable circle, a jolly air of good-fellowship prevails. It is all grand fun, and nobody bothers to dress up much or to fuss over expensive jewelry or furs or other “frills.” Such social life as does not center on athletics revolves happily around entertaining, and Main Line parties are known for their number, their size, their supplies of good food, and their good wines. Terrapin and canvasback duck mark a hearty, and traditional, Main Line feast. The cocktail hour is firmly entrenched here, and often goes on for a good deal longer than an hour. Petal-scented evenings rock with bibulous laughter from drawing rooms, terraces, and poolsides. Some people say the Main Line does a bit too much tippling, and various clergymen have taken their congregations to
task about it. Because most of it goes on in private homes and clubs, its effects are seldom publicly apparent.

  Perhaps things were more stiff and formal here in the days when Mr. and Mrs. George W. Childs Drexel used to receive guests while seated on golden thrones. But nowadays it is not uncommon to sit down to dinner in a “great” Main Line house, with servants in attendance and with silver spread like xylophone keys on either side of your plate, and find the catsup bottle on the table. One eats amid cries of, “Pass the rolls!”

  “I believe we were the first city in America,” Mrs. George Roberts once said, “to omit the sherry with the soup course.” Since then, Philadelphia Society has dispensed with many other amenities and formalities, and the result is an atmosphere that is warm, convivial, cozy, and just-plain-folksy. So unaccustomed to courtliness was one Main Line hostess that recently, when an attentive male guest from out of town pulled out her chair for her as she was about to sit down to dinner, she sat down hard on the floor. Being a Philadelphian, she rose perfectly to the occasion. She got up, went through with her dinner party, and then reported to her doctor with a fractured coccyx.

  The Main Line also has the ability, which can be quite endearing, to laugh at itself. The true Main Liner thoroughly enjoys all the irreverent jokes about the Main Line, the parodies of it, even the broadsides hurled at it and the accusations that it is a dead and stultifying place. Tell a story that makes a Main Liner—particularly an old Main Liner—seem pompous, silly, or downright stupid, and the whole Main Line will laugh and slap its thighs. Such stories, perhaps, reconfirm the Main Liner’s impression that his is a rare and special place to live. The Main Line loves its depantsed dowagers and it displays a very English affection for its local eccentrics. Anyone who is a little odd, and rich enough to get away with it—money is the only thing an eccentric needs—is a huge source of entertainment. For all the vitriol he hurled about him while he lived, the Main Line loved having the “terrible-tempered” Dr. Albert C. Barnes in its midst (the vast Barnes art collection, housed in his Merion mansion, can now be viewed by the public), and it enjoys recounting all the outrageous things he used to do and the naughty things he used to say. It tells with relish the story, apparently true, of the gently-bred lady art patron who came begging permission to see his paintings, and whom Barnes told, “The last woman I let in here gave me the clap!” One Main Line man says that he loves living there because, “I think it’s the funniest place in the world,” and, to be sure, it may be.

  Along with sherry-with-the-soup have gone other Main Line rules. (“Never call on newcomers until you’ve seen their wash hanging out to dry; if they have ragged sheets or linen, you don’t want to know them.…” “Never speak to anyone on shipboard until you’re four days out …” were two that were handed out by a Main Line mother to her daughter thirty years ago.) It is still not easy to be accepted by Main Line Society. But it is certainly easier today than it was a generation ago—and for a reason involving one of the ways in which the Main Line really is changing. As the late great social secretary, Mrs. MacMullan, once put it, “Philadelphia Society has not stood up against the new money the way it might have”—and ought to have, she seems to have implied. Old money, in other words, should stand up against new money as a matter of principle. But instead, old money has let down some of its bars, and the new money has come in.

  It used to be the rule that “It takes at least three generations to be accepted here.” Now many people manage it handily in one, or even less. “Look at the young Liddon Pennocks,” Mrs. MacMullan used to say, “one of the most popular couples in Philadelphia, even though it’s first-generation money, and he’s in trade.” Pennock operates a flower shop.

  Society here, as elsewhere, has been involved in the business of creating enduring families—families bound by blood and common interests—and in building from these families an enduring community of wealth. To fill its ranks, and replenish its coffers, Society has had to turn to the newcomers with the new money. “I’m really very anxious to meet some of these new people,” said one Main Line mother of a debutante daughter. “Of course I want to meet the attractive new people.” But with so many Main Line people working so hard at being attractive, attractive people are not hard to find. In addition to a blurring of old money with new, there has been a noticeable new mingling of the generations, who seem to be enjoying one anothers’ company more wholeheartedly. The “sets” of Society still form small islands of special interests, but nowadays, at the best Main Line parties, silver heads are side by side with gold.

  Though the complexion of Main Line Society may be slowly changing, something else is going on which in the long run may mean that Main Line attitudes and the Main Line manner will become even more thoroughly crystallized and localized in the string of towns. This has a lot to do with the new shopping centers and—as is the case in Grosse Pointe—the new self-sufficiency of suburban living. It has always been, first and foremost, the Philadelphia Main Line, with an iron cord, symbolized by the railroad, binding the suburbs to their mother city. Today, however, it is increasingly unnecessary for a Main Liner—a woman, particularly—to venture into the city at all. At the same time, as corporations build plants and research centers in the area, more and more men are to be found who both live and work on the Main Line.

  The cultural life of Philadelphia, represented most strongly by the Art Museum and the Philadelphia Orchestra, still draws the suburbs to the metropolis. But there are already indications that the Main Line, by means of local art shows, local musical and theatre groups, may be developing a solid cultural life of its own—again, as in Grosse Pointe. Some Main Liners are already beginning to feel themselves somewhat cloistered. Not long ago, a group was formed which whimsically called itself the Society for the Preservation of Cultural Relations Between the East and West Banks of the Schuylkill, in an attempt to bring the Main Line and Chestnut Hill into communication through the medium of an annual dance. But whimsy sits oddly upon both the Main Line and Chestnut Hill. Also, when faced with the disruption of a tradition, the Philadelphian digs in his heels. Response to the S.P.C.R.B.E.W.B.S. has been only halfhearted.

  If the present trend continues, with the Main Line growing more self-sustaining, more self-nourishing, the area may one day be completely self-sufficient, totally insular, socially and emotionally, and intellectually withdrawn from the great “city of four million” beyond it. Whether or not this will be a pleasant development, no one knows. But not long ago the Main Line was presented with an alarming statistic—some thirty per cent of its young people, according to a study at Villanova University, are moving to other parts of the United States; Society is losing manpower here. Actually, this percentage of deserters is not significantly different from that to be found in other prosperous suburbs, but this is no consolation to the Main Line—which always presumed it had special statistics. Now there is anxious talk to the effect that what is happening everywhere is now happening on the Main Line—the young are flying from the nest.

  But the inner, Old Guard Main Line is not really alarmed. As Mrs. Wintersteen puts it, “In one form or another, there will always be a Main Line.” To have its attitudes die, or be dissipated elsewhere, would, in the long run, never be permitted. Mrs. Wintersteen, to be sure, is of the older generation of the Establishment. What of the younger? Again, they seem to stand with her.

  One member of this generation recently heard from was nineteen-year-old Alan McIlvain, Jr., heir to a fortune which the J. Gibson McIlvain Company, one of the largest wholesale lumber companies on the East Coast and one of the oldest family-owned businesses in America, has been building for Main Line McIlvains for nearly one hundred and seventy years, the equivalent of eight generations. From the wings of this imposing establishment, young McIlvain, the elder son of the company’s president, says, “I plan to enter the business in the tradition of my forefathers.”

  In addition, he is interested in all the traditional activities of a proper Main
Line gentleman. He lists hunting, fishing, skin-diving, soccer, tennis, squash, and swimming (“in their designated seasons”) as his favorite athletic pastimes. Like young gentlemen everywhere, he is properly interested in young ladies in their designated seasons, and manages one or two dates a week except during the heavy winter social season, when the pace for debutantes and their escorts picks up. Like so many sons of wealthy parents, he is given a Spartan spending allowance—one dollar a week. Any other money he must earn “by doing jobs around the place” (it is a very large place, with much to do) and, of this, one half is banked for the future.

  Alan McIlvain displays an aristocratic aloofness toward matters political. “Though I enjoy trying to analyze political strategy,” he says, “I would never seriously consider entering politics.” Looking ahead, he says, “Besides just inheriting the business, I want to improve and utilize it to its benefit. I hope to exploit [sic] new fields, and exercise the knowledge I will have spent so many years receiving. I would also like to have a happy social life by marrying and settling down in the Main Line.”

  13

  The Company Town: West Hartford, Conn. 06107

  Hard by every major United States city it is possible to encounter at least one suburban stretch containing the styles and attitudes which have come to a kind of climax on the Main Line. There are the celebrated North Shores of both Chicago and Boston; Cleveland’s Shaker Heights; Pittsburgh’s Sewickley; the Clayton-Ladue towns west of St. Louis; San Francisco’s Peninsula; and the Pasadena-San Marino complex outside Los Angeles. But the suburbs of smaller cities have somewhat special sets of problems.

  Hartford, Connecticut, unlike most New England cities which have a tendency to sprawl smokily at river mouths, has a skyline of a certain drama. From whatever direction one approaches the city, the skyline signals with a single exclamation point: the tower of the Travelers Insurance Company, a pinnacle that has served as the city’s symbol of success since 1918. Around the Travelers Tower cluster a number of much more modern structures, glittery with glass, including several other insurance companies. At night the Travelers’s pale beacon floats above the city lights, and can be seen by airplane pilots from as far away as Providence. When the Prudential building was completed in Boston, the Travelers Tower became New England’s second tallest building—a bitter pill for Hartford to swallow, but Hartford swallowed it with traditional dignity. An insurance city knows how to take disaster in stride.