The Right People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Getting into the Chevy Chase set is not at all as easy as getting into official Washington Society. The social center of the set is the exclusive Chevy Chase Club, considered “much more exclusive” than the Metropolitan Club—but not so exclusive as the 1925 F Street Club, which is called “the most exclusive club in the world,” and “so exclusive that no member knows who the other members are.” Members of the Metropolitan are a little bitter about the Chevy Chase because it was the Metropolitan that got the unfortunate publicity when a group of members, led by Senator Robert F. Kennedy, resigned in protest over the exclusion of diplomatic emissaries from new African nations. The Chevy Chase Club, Metropolitan men point out, is even more exclusive—and many of the men who resigned from the Metropolitan continued, quietly, to be members of the Chevy Chase.

  If Washington’s feeling about Negroes is not surprising, considering the city’s geographic location, its anti-Semitic streak is more mysterious. The Washington Junior League, for instance, has a firm policy against Jewish members. During the Kennedy administration, the League was confronted with a ticklish problem. To its annual bazaar, it customarily invites all cabinet officers and their wives—but what was it to do in the cases of Secretaries Goldberg and Ribicoff? The ladies solved the dilemma ingeniously—by not issuing invitations to Secretaries Goldberg, Ribicoff, and Stewart Udall, a Mormon.

  “Washington is just a country town,” says Carolyn Shaw who compiles the Washington “social list.” And Mrs. David Bruce, wife of the former American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s says, “Why, Washington is like—like Cranford, New Jersey! Morgan’s Drug Store, right here in Georgetown, is the clearinghouse for news about practically everybody.” Mrs. Wilfried Platzer, wife of the Austrian ambassador, says, “Every year or so they say, ‘Look how Washington has changed!’ But I don’t think new people coming in ever change Washington. To me, it seems the other way around. Washington is such a vivid, live place that it simply makes the new people conform to it.”

  All these observations come close to describing Washington. Washington has a bit of everything—Southern hospitality, Western openness, New England Puritanism (particularly in matters of dress), New York sophistication, Cranford gossipiness, French cooking—all mixed together in a special concoction that is particularly American, and which Washington serves with a special gusto. Perhaps the rarest thing about Washington Society is that it approaches everything it does with joy. Unlike her social sister in New York, arranging yet another charity ball, the Washington hostess planning a party is not looking for an escape from boredom. She is looking forward with a kind of breathless excitement to the possibilities the evening may hold. “Of course I don’t have any figures to prove it,” one woman says, “but I’m sure there’s a lower percentage of people going to psychiatrists here than in New York or Los Angeles.”

  Washington Society is based on love and duty. It loves the world’s Oshkoshes, and wants their love in return. It is snobbish, but snobbish in recognizing achievement and hard work. Its particular sense of power lends it a sense of purpose, too. And through the whole fiber of Society runs an old-fashioned sort of Fourth of July patriotism, binding everyone together with red-white-and-blue bunting.

  Those outside official Washington Society will always complain that it is “all come and go,” and insist that it is the cave-dweller group of families that supply Washington with both standards and continuity. But, says one cave-dweller, “It does sometimes seem as though the rest of them are having more fun than we are.”

  Part Three

  HOW MONEY PLAYS:

  A. Selection of Pleasures and Playgrounds

  15

  “Society’s Most Enduring Invention”

  The newest form of en masse fun to be devised by man, with the possible exception of the rumble, is undoubtedly the cocktail party. The first cocktail party was certainly held in 1920, shortly after the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment; before that, social drinking was done almost exclusively in public saloons and was therefore an almost exclusively masculine pastime. But Prohibition forced America’s drinking population underground. The safest place to drink became the living room where, of course, the ladies were. The ladies couldn’t have liked it more.

  Cocktail parties were a gesture of defiance against those who had inflicted Prohibition on the country. They were the bold, the daring, the naughty thing to do. There was an air of excitement about those primordial parties, the kind of excitement that is generated by jauntily breaking the law. Each cocktail was an adventure too. Depending upon the bootlegger, a few swallows might make one pleasantly tiddly or violently ill. Bathtub gin (which, incidentally, was hardly ever mixed in such quantities as required a bathtub) could be made with alcohol, glycerin, essence of juniper, and a few other odds and ends, and had a taste that cried to be covered up by some other substance—sugar, bitters, fruit juices, or syrups. The same was true of other bootleg liquor. And so came the invention of the hundreds of cocktails, slings, punches, toddies, and nogs that now fill the pages of The Bartender’s Guide. H. L. Mencken once estimated that 17,864,392,788 different drinks could be concocted from the available ingredients, and many of them were. There was rivalry, which added to the fun. Each cocktail party host tried to come up with better, or cleverer, cocktails. Recipes were invented, sampled, and quickly passed around. Into the shakers went whites of eggs, yolks of eggs, milk, honey, Worcestershire sauce, orange-flower water, wines, herbs, spices, and mixers of every and the most incompatible variety. Weirder grew the drinks, scarcer got the real stuff, and higher went its price. Still people cried, “Come for cocktails!” A Chicagoan recalls not being the least surprised at being invited to parties where he was charged for drinks. Instantly, the cocktail ritual—and the cocktail party—were taken up by Society. They have never been dropped. “Cocktails,” the late Elsa Maxwell once said, with more than a bit of a sneer in her voice, “are Society’s most enduring invention.”

  Miss Maxwell also said with her usual asperity, “Cocktail parties are ghastly businesses! I can not bear them. I don’t give them, and I rarely go to them. There are a number of people in this world whom I don’t care to meet, and whenever I go to them, there they all are! Cocktail parties! They’re full of noisy chatter, wretched people, and horrible hors d’oeuvres made with rancid mayonnaise and tired tomatoes, poisonous little finger-sandwiches, warm drinks made with inferior liquor. Cocktail parties! They’re boring, dull, and inefficient—the most miserable form of entertaining there is, and also the cheapest. Cocktail parties! I avoid them like the plague.” Miss Maxwell added, “Fortunately, I was born drunk.” Unfortunately, real Society never paid much heed to Miss Elsa Maxwell, nor was it lucky enough to be born in her state of intoxication. It has always needed a little drink. Cocktail parties have endured despite her.

  In Westchester County, where cocktail parties on Sunday evening—a favored moment everywhere when one is in the “country”—create traffic jams on the parkways, most hostesses hire one or two servants from catering firms. Over the years, certain bartenders have grown to be much in demand. A visiting Englishman who had been entertained in Westchester turned to his hostess one evening and said, “You know, it’s funny. That man of yours. I’ve a feeling I’ve bumped into him somewhere before.” “Well,” his hostess replied, “he serves at all the best parties in Bronxville.” At a party in New York, meanwhile, given by Mrs. Whitehouse Harjes, a particularly courtly and decorative antique passed the drinks. “Your man!” whispered a guest to Mrs. Harjes. “I’ve got to have him for my next party. Where did you rent him?” “He happens,” said Mrs. Harjes icily, “to belong to the family.”

  Servants or no, “a cocktail” is certainly the civilized world’s easiest form of entertaining. This helps explain why cocktail parties survived after their reason for being—Prohibition—had disappeared. When the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed in 1933, ending the fun by making it legal, cocktail parties should have gone into a long decline, but th
ey didn’t. It has been said that cocktails had become a national habit; it was too late to stop. It has also been said that cocktail parties continued to be given out of nostalgia, as wistful, bibulous reminders of the era of wonderful nonsense. All this may be true, but it is also true that with repeal came the Depression. Though cocktail parties were robbed of their old raison d’être, there now was a new one. Cocktail parties may not be the “cheapest” way to entertain, but they are certainly among the most economical. Though the country’s fiscal picture is brighter than it was in 1933, cheapness and ease are qualities appreciated by the rich as well as the poor.

  “I can give a cocktail party for fifty or sixty people, and pay off everybody, and—if I want—handle it all by myself,” a well-to-do New York woman says. “Or, I can hire a bartender to fix the drinks and a girl to pass the canapés. But I couldn’t give a dinner party for that many people without twice or three times that many servants.” Large dinner parties, she points out, are simply beyond the capacity of most modern households. Gourmet food? “Climbers serve that,” she says, “you know, all those dreary little ladies who watch Julia Child on television.” Cocktails, once the daring way to entertain, have become the practical way. And there is another modern advantage: they can be tax deductible. “We always throw in a few business friends at a cocktail party,” one woman says. “That way, we can write it off.”

  “They’re so easy to give, it’s insidious,” says a bachelor. “What I do is, I mix the first round of drinks, and after that I let every man take care of himself. That way, I can sit and relax and enjoy my own party just like a guest. I usually ask a date—to do the washing-up after.” A Chicago man gives cocktail parties by placing glasses, bottles, and bucket of ice in a child’s red express wagon and pulling the wagon around the room. The William H. Vanderbilts are similarly casual cocktail hosts and, after drinks, guests may retire to the kitchen of their large house while Mr. Vanderbilt cooks pancakes and the guests pitch in with the dishes. In artless Philadelphia, afternoon tea moves with no difficulty at all into the cocktail hour, particularly at the John Ingersolls’. Mr. Ingersoll pours a little inexpensive Vermouth into a bottle of medium-priced gin, shakes the mixture vigorously with his thumb over the bottle top, and then offers his guests room-temperature Martinis poured directly from the bottle.

  It has become, in fact, a habit in Society to serve less expensive liquor. It is essential that the bar be well-stocked, but the appearance of a costly label is said to be the mark of the parvenu. Even more the mark of the parvenu is the trick—which one woman calls “utterly middle class”—of starting out with “good” liquor and then, after an hour or so, “when no one notices,” bringing out the cheaper stuff. The American upper class starts right off with the mediocre—and never apologizes. Victor Bergeron, the “Trader” of Trader Vic’s restaurants, has reported a cocktail party at which he became suspicious of what was being served him under the guise of “Scotch.” He quietly explored the bar and found that the heavy and expensive crystal decanters—variously labeled “Gin,” “Rum,” “Vodka,” “Brandy,” “Rye,” and “Scotch” on heavy and expensive silver necklaces—all were filled with an identical cheap blended whiskey, except for the decanter labeled “Rum,” which actually contained, perhaps by accident, Scotch.

  This was a party in New York. It would probably not have happened in San Francisco, as Mr. Bergeron was the first to point out. Cocktails are taken with considerably more seriousness in the Western United States than in the blasé East. The news that someone is about to give a cocktail party stirs up little excitement among New Yorkers, but, for some mysterious reason, it sends a flutter through the hearts of residents of Tulsa, Boise, Lincoln, and Bakersfield, and may actually make its way to the pages of the morning paper. Perhaps there is a “social time lag” between the East and West Coasts, as has been suggested. Certainly parties, moving westward, become more elaborate. Hostesses spend more time preparing for them, pay more attention to table decorations, flowers, and food; lady guests pay more attention to their clothes. A Western visitor in New York expressed surprise and shock at being served a paper napkin; an Eastern visitor in the West appeared at a party in a cut-out, peek-a-boo dress, and was told politely, “Not in Denver, dear.”

  In smaller cities, deprived by their size of such things as charity balls and debutante cotillions, cocktail parties become an adjunct to Society; they rate Society-page attention. In the Modesto, California, Bee not long ago a write-up of a cocktail party ran to two-and-a-half columns long, with photographs, describing the table decorations, listing the guests, telling who wore what—all with a fulsomeness that the New York Times would consider extreme, even to describe a Rockefeller wedding. To a certain extent this is true in Hollywood, too, a city that in many other ways resembles a commuter suburb of New York. Even the simplest Hollywood cocktail parties seem to have been produced in Cinemascope. In Washington, so mandatory is the cocktail to social ritual that elaborate measures must be taken to maintain sobriety—which is also mandatory. The most popular method is to sip tall glasses of champagne on ice—a practice that appalls wine fanciers. “They look like highballs, and you can drink a lot more of them,” explains a Washingtonian.

  Regional differences aside, as the cocktail party has become a social institution, the cocktail itself has become a fact of life. It cannot be avoided. It must be faced. In Society, one must serve drinks, and one must drink them. One must drink them not only often, but well. Dr. Ernest Dichter, the noted Motivational Research man, talks of “the vast swing to suburban living,” and says, “The cocktail hour is changing from an exclusively party-associated interlude to a family-centered custom.” In Society, there is more to it than that. Outsiders are frequently impressed—if not astonished—at the amount of liquor consumed throughout a perfectly average, unremarkable Society day. It is consumed steadily, slowly, in regulated amounts, throughout every waking hour. While it would be incorrect to say that Society is intoxicated all the time, it is certainly true that most of Society is never entirely sober most of the time.

  One lady of the New York Old Guard, who would never, by her worst enemy, be called a drunkard, likes, and is always served, a whiskey sour by her butler on her breakfast tray. So the day begins. As it proceeds, through the rituals of morning—a glance at the papers, an inspection of the mail, the morning telephone calls, a note or two dictated or dashed off—such a lady may sip a glass of beer or a Bloody Mary. Lunchtime is approaching, and if there are to be friends or family at the table, there will be preluncheon cocktails—Daiquiris, perhaps, or White Spiders, made with vodka and white crème de menthe. Then there is lunch, with wine or beer and, very probably, a little something afterward—a Starboard Light, say, which is the same as a White Spider but made with green mint liqueur. A Scotch or two is usually called for to carry one through the afternoon until, of course, one achieves the cocktail hour. “By drinking light, sweet drinks, drinking them slowly and spacing them with a certain care,” says one observer of the social scene, “they manage never to appear drunk or even visibly tiddly. They hardly ever become boisterous or unmanageable. This helps convince these people that they are not in the least addicted to drink. Yet, when—as occasionally happens—they find themselves in a situation where liquor is unavailable, their displeasure becomes ferocious and their anxiety extreme.”

  After a particularly strenuous April in Paris Ball in New York not long ago, the ladies trooped into the Colony restaurant next day at lunchtime, enthusiastically comparing notes on the night before, effusively greeting and kissing Gene Cavallero, the restaurant’s maître d’hôtel, and ordering their pre-luncheon cocktails. “Just think of it,” said a wondering stranger to Cavallero. “These women were working on the Ball Committee all day yesterday. Last night, they danced until four and five o’clock in the morning. And here they all are today—raring to go. Where do you suppose they get their energy?”

  Mr. Cavallero replied, “From alcohol.”

&nbs
p; “It was one of the great troubles with Mister F. Scott Fitzgerald, you know,” an elderly New Yorker recalled recently. “He wanted so badly to be taken into Society, and to be accepted as Society, and he was certainly attractive and amusing enough to have made it easily. But he drank so badly, you see. He would get blind drunk, or he wouldn’t show up—he was very unreliable, a very disorganized sort of man. No one minds a bit of drinking—social drinking—we all do that. But there must be organization. Without organization, Society simply cannot exist.”

  16

  “July Was Always for the Shore”

  The theory behind the summer resort was that it allowed one to broaden one’s range of acquaintance somewhat, that it permitted the upper class of one city to mingle a bit with the corresponding numbers of another. Allied with this was the upper-class belief that outdoor sport, particularly lawn tennis, was good for one, particularly for young people; it kept their minds from impure thoughts. One might drink and dance until the wee hours at a coming-out party, but one was expected to show up in one’s whites on the court the next day, ready to be nimble and healthy. This is why, in wedding announcements, it is considered better when both partners to the union can produce two addresses, when each can say he is from somewhere, and somewhere else. This not only indicates money enough for the upkeep of two houses; it also advises that the couple have broader-than-usual backgrounds.

  Where one is from and from is, naturally, of vast importance. An upstart, apparently trying to impress Alice Whitehouse Harjes, said to her, “I’m from New York and Massachusetts.” Mrs. Harjes, whose debut at the family’s summer home in Newport featured warships of the United States Navy which cruised offshore and bathed the party with their searchlights, replied coolly, “Well, those are both familiar states.”