What counts in a summer resort, or in any other playground of Society, is not necessarily grandness. In fact, resorts generally have followed a curious law: the more elaborate the concept, the more rapid the decline. Take Tuxedo Park. Founded not so many years ago by Pierre Lorillard, the tobacco man, and built in the wooded hills of Rockland County, New York, near the village of Tuxedo,* the place was conceived on a magnificent scale. Not one but three lakes were installed between the hills—one for boating, one for bathing, one for fishing. Miles of bridle paths were threaded through the forest. A court for court tennis—still one of a mere handful in the country—was built and, since neither Mr. Lorillard nor any of his friends knew how to play the game, a court tennis instructor was imported from England. So marked was the distinction between the Park and the village of Tuxedo beyond it, that a speaker at a female gathering which included residents of both the Park and the village once opened his remarks, “Ladies of the Park … and women of the Village …” Today, however, though Tuxedo Park continues to hold its annual Autumn Ball, which it insists is the “official” opening of the New York winter social season, the place has a decidedly seedy air. Many mansions, in need of paint and gutter work, stand empty; others have been turned into apartments. A new house has not been built in Tuxedo Park for years.
Or take Newport, often considered the queen of American resort cities. Newport became fashionable as early as the late eighteenth century. As John and Jessica Bridenbaugh wrote in Rebels and Gentlemen: “Over a hundred Philadelphians … voyaged to Newport for summer sojourns between 1767 and 1775, there to mingle not only with native New Englanders but also with wealthy South Carolinians, Georgians, and West Indians who were likewise investing the profits from commercial enterprise in a few months of expensive recreation in the refreshing northern climate.” New York, seventy years later, was still not much of a city, but Philadelphia was, and Newport was well on its way to queendom. As Sidney Fisher wrote of Newport in 1844:
No other resort could exhibit a crowd so distinguished for refinement, wealth and fashion. The number of persons who were vulgar or underbred was so inconsiderable as to produce no appreciable effect. Far more recherché indeed than … our cities where society is rapidly losing its tone. Philadelphia was very well represented—Mrs. Ridgeway, the beauty of the season. Mrs. Jno. Butler, Mrs. Wilcocks, Miss Waln, Pierce Butler, etc. We had two balls each week, and two fancy balls. Among the novelties was a new dance, the Polka, just introduced in this country. It is somewhat like a waltz. Ten years ago everyone would have been shocked by it, but we are improving.
The only thing that Mr. Fisher complained about was that, in coming to Newport, the train was “crowded to excess with all sorts of people … The masses in this as in everything else have destroyed all decency. In coming from New York there were 5 Negroes in the same car with me. This I have never seen before.”
Life in Newport in those days was decorous and seemly. For all the heavy schedule of balls, days were spent in sport, in eating large and healthy meals, and in ritual exposure—from verandas and under parasols—to the reputedly salubrious sea air. A certain rusticity was cultivated, and Newport’s “cottages” were, though commodious, really cottages. It was not until after the Civil War that the age of the gilt-and-marble Newport palace began, and vulgarity was introduced by such “new” wealthy people as the Burdens and the Vanderbilts. The phenomenon that is today castle-lined Bellevue Avenue came to be, with the Vanderbilts contributing “The Breakers,” certainly the most famous, if not technically the largest, of Newport’s mansions. Once again, the concept of the place had become too grand. Newport was being spoiled by ostentation. Older people of “refinement, wealth, and fashion” took a horrified look at what was happening, and began moving quietly away.
A few families—the more “intellectual” ones, it was said at the time—removed themselves from Newport by crossing Narragansett Bay to Saunderstown, Rhode Island, where their houses stand today and appear to frown at the glitter of Newport across the water. But such folk as the Butlers, Walns, Wilcockses, and Mrs. Ridgeway retreated, for their summers away from the city, northward to Bar Harbor on Mount Desert Island in Maine. It was hoped that in Bar Harbor the elegance that had been Newport might be recaptured. Once more, everybody tried to be rustic and athletic. Lawn tennis was an essential activity, but so were hiking, blackberrying, and swimming in the island’s icy waters. Everyone tried to climb as many of the island’s hills as possible in the morning, and then sat down for picnic lunch where, according to one report, “the servant busied himself with the lunch, and put the wine to cool in the brook …”
But, once again, new money followed old, and mansions started to go up. It was Newport all over again. Along came Mrs. Edward Stotesbury who bought the A. J. Cassatt house, pronounced it “too small”—it had only fifteen servants’ rooms—tore it down, and built another on its site with forty servants’ rooms. When this house was finished, she visited it, walked through it, said, “No, it won’t do,” and had it torn down too. A third and larger house finally satisfied her expansive tastes, and the Stotesbury yacht was permitted to dock at the foot of the lawn. Once again, the “old” families, particularly the Philadelphia group, felt obliged to move on—this time to the other side of Mount Desert Island, to Northeast Harbor. New money continued to pour into Bar Harbor—from the Dorrances of Campbell’s Soup, from the Atwater Kents, a radio fortune, who built a house with a fifteen-car garage. But soon it was clear that Bar Harbor, too, had got too big for its britches; hard Maine winters took an expensive toll on the Renaissance palaces which were not designed for New England weather. The marble portico of one house, which had filled a freighter’s entire hold when it was carried from Italy, filled with frost and cracked apart during its first winter in Maine. Other mansions began going to seed. Mrs. Stotesbury’s great house was presently being sold—for five thousand dollars—to a junk dealer who was interested only in salvaging the lead in Mrs. Stotesbury’s plumbing. Her gold doorknobs left him unimpressed.
In 1947, for the ancient sin of hubris, Bar Harbor was punished by avenging gods. A great fire swept across the place, destroying nearly all the great houses remaining—many of which by that point stood untenanted and untended. At the time, families who had migrated to Northeast quietly congratulated each other on the wisdom of their move. “That,” murmured one woman, “will show those upstarts in Bar Harbor.”
The few holdouts in Bar Harbor today occasionally find themselves in odd company. Mr. J. Howland Auchincloss, for instance, of the New York Old Guard, still keeps a Bar Harbor house. Not long ago, when a “new fellow” bought the house down the road, Mr. Auchincloss decided to do “the decent thing,” and invited his new neighbor to lunch. The man accepted and, as the two were chatting before the meal, the new neighbor said, “Excuse me, Auchincloss, but may I use your urinal?” Later Mr. Auchincloss—a silver-haired gentleman of great presence—asked, aghast, “Do you suppose he’s installed one in that lovely old place?”
Northeast Harbor, Maine, proved a certain point. The proper upper-class summer resort, to be successful and enduring, should not look or act stridently rich; it should not proclaim itself with spires or minarets, nor with gates emblazoned with golden family crests. One can often say more with a wisteria-shaded veranda than with two hundred granite columns, and the weathered “shingle-style” can be both more appropriate and more meaningful than a portico of Carrara marble. Also, it seems to help if the resort can maintain a certain one-city cast.
Other miniature, or at least scaled-down, Newports have evolved throughout the country. New York has its North Shore of Long Island, the “Gold Coast” whose capitals are Locust Valley and the Piping Rock Club. It also has Southampton, on Long Island’s South Shore. Though there is a certain amount of rivalry—and even more competition—between these two places, both are considered “merely extensions of New York city life,” revolving around “parties, drinking, and dressing up in expensive clothe
s and jewels,” according to one New Yorker. Other, quieter members of New York Society find much to favor in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, while still others prefer Edgartown, Massachusetts, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Of these two places, one woman says, “Watch Hill is very stylish and gay while still being a very family place. Edgartown is more boat-y and Bermuda-short-y.”
One can get the best of both these latter two worlds on Fishers Island, New York, a tiny principality of New York Society in the middle of Long Island Sound. Here, though a public ferry goes back and forth between the island and the mainland, the islanders are never troubled by tourists or other outsiders because, as one woman puts it, “There is simply nothing here at Fishers that anyone who doesn’t belong here would want.” Another woman says, “We’re glad that Fishers Island isn’t very pretty. This way, there’s nothing to attract people here.” On Fishers Island, everything is kept deliberately second-rate. The landscape is flat, barren, and rocky, and little more than poison ivy can be coaxed to grow in the island’s acid soil. The beaches are mediocre, and the weather is quite often simply terrible. (No less imposing an affair than a Vanderbilt wedding was once called off because of an impending hurricane.) The two clubs—the Hay Harbor Club and the Fishers Island Yacht Club—are dowdy affairs. Tennis courts are inferior, and the two golf courses on the island are considered the world’s least challenging. Yet this of course is just as Fishers Island wishes it. Life here is barefoot and elaborately “unsocial,” and one gets the strong impression of the rich playing at being poor. (Actually, there are some practical reasons for this: servants are hard to induce to Fishers and, once induced there, hardly ever want to stay for there is no place for them to go and nothing for them to do.) Fishers Island is Society’s Petit Trianon, sort of, and the little telephone directory—a page and a half long—reads like a condensation of the New York and Philadelphia Social Registers, with Alsops, Bakers, Blagdens, Canfields, Coles, du Ponts, Firestones, Peabodys, Rutherfurds, Whitneys, and Wilmerdings predominating. No addresses are given in the phone book; why should such people need street names, much less numbers? At the same time, when a surprising name appears on the list, such as that of Mr. A. R. Grebe, the list points out that he is an “electrical contractor.” The Reverend Arthur Lee Kinsolving, of St. James’s in New York (and whose wife is a Blagden), is there in the summer months to guide his little flock (who are also his close friends) along the paths of Episcopalian righteousness and, as one old resident says, “What else could we possibly want?”
Boston, too, is fragmented when it comes to ocean resorts. But each resort that Boston favors is kept distinctly Bostonian in flavor. Much of old Boston prefers the North Shore of Massachusetts Bay—such venerable resorts as Swampscott and Nahant (where lawn tennis was first introduced to Americans). Others go farther north along the Bay, to the towns of Prides Crossing, Beverly Farms, and Manchester. In Boston, certain family groups traditionally summer in certain towns. Frothinghams and Cabots can be found at Beverly Farms. Chandlers go to Small Point, Maine. Members of the venerable Fuller family, and several nearly-as-venerable Bowditches, have claimed a tiny and select stretch of New Hampshire’s diminutive coastline called Little Boar’s Head. The Adamses, often considered the grandest family in America, show their superiority to fad and fashion by summering on the South Shore, in Minot and Scituate, Massachusetts.
Northeast Harbor, meanwhile, which might be considered the model for the above resorts, continues to be remarkable. Here, in splendid isolation, and in large but determinedly unflashy houses, is summer Philadelphia in its home away from home. Here, after the first week in July, is everybody one has seen a week before in Philadelphia, ready to pick up the threads of friendship once more. Everything that mattered to a Philadelphian has been brought, intact and in person, to Northeast. Here a group of men from Philadelphia’s Rabbit Club established, in 1899, a summer version—the Pot and Kettle Club. Like its parent, its membership is strictly limited—to fifty—and, like the Rabbit, it is “a gentlemen’s cooking club.” At one time it was said that the Pot and Kettle’s membership controlled eighty-five per cent of America’s wealth—though where this imposing figure came from is not clear. It is possibly another example of the Philadelphian’s tendency to inflate statistics pertaining to his city. But it is true that, at one of the Pot and Kettle’s dinner meetings, as many as thirty-five yachts have been counted moored off the club’s float.
For years, the headmasters of Philadelphia’s two favorite schools, Groton and St. Paul’s, summered at Northeast Harbor; the rectors Endicott Peabody and Samuel S. Drury mingled there with their students and alumni. Each summer Sunday Dr. Drury held Holy Communion and conducted his Bible class. Both men were fixtures of Northeast’s social life, though Dr. Drury once wrote in his diary, “‘Sassiety’ … this lunching & munching that knocks a whole day askew, this kid glove silliness … We come home exhausted, and hug our cottage fire.” (Concordia,” the Drurys’ Northeast “cottage,” was hardly as primitive as the rector makes it sound.)
The Episcopal Church, too, was very much a part of the summer life at Northeast Harbor. In 1911, Dr. Drury wrote from “Concordia,” “As I sit here I hear the clicking of another and rival typewriter. It is that of the Bishop of New York! Bishops! I should say so! They are as thick almost as the blueberries on yonder bush.” Northeast Harbor still draws easily the largest bushload of Bishops in the East. The Reverend Matthew M. Warren, present headmaster of St. Paul’s, may also spend a bit of summer time at Little Boar’s Head, but he does not neglect his boys, old and new, at Northeast, helping provide a continuity of family, religion, and education—fibers that strengthen the fabric of the resort’s life.
Continuity builds loyalty—blind, sentimental, absolute. “I simply cannot imagine a summer without Northeast,” one woman says. In 1899, George Wharton Pepper spent the summer there with his fiancée and father-in-law-to-be. “Thereafter,” he writes in his autobiography, “there have been only three summers in fifty-four years when we have failed to visit our beloved Mt. Desert.” And when Mrs. J. Madison Taylor of Philadelphia died in 1952, it was noted in her obituary that she was preparing for her seventy-fifth consecutive summer at Northeast Harbor.
“Talk about continuity!” cries an old friend. “She was Northeast.”
She still is.
* The “informal” or “country” style of formal wear for men, the tailless dinner jacket, worn buttoned, without a vest, and with a black instead of a white tie, came into fashion at Tuxedo Park, and the tuxedo thereby earned its name.
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“August Was Always for the Mountains”
The July-for-the-seashore-August-for-the-mountain rationale—which has something to do with the scheduled appearance of biting insects—has never had much basis in fact. The no-see-ums of Maine and the black flies of the Adirondacks have never seemed to consult a calendar before making their appearance in their respective places. Instead, there are definite “shore people” who see nothing to be gained from the mountains, and there are “mountain people” who cringe at the thought of salt spray. Which air was better for the health—mountain or sea—used to give Society something to argue about. Now it is simply a matter of taste. Furthermore, whether one prefers shore or mountains has nothing to do with status. It is not like the New England Shore as opposed to the New Jersey Shore, where one has cachet and the other is second-rate. Mountain people and shore people know that both are fashionable. But mountain people and shore people just don’t see much of one another during the summer. It is like the difference, in winter, between those who ski at Stowe and those who ski at Vail.
Each locality has its favorite range of mountains—Philadelphia’s is the Poconos—but the mountains with the longest and most complicated special history in America are the Adirondacks of upper New York state. An Indian legend is worth re-telling here.
So long ago that only the eldest of the tribe remembered it, the Great Spirit had tried to imprison all the
doers of evil in the hollow trunks of trees that stood along the trail. Some had struggled to escape through the encircling bark, and their agonized, uplifted arms and clutching fingers could still be seen as gnarled and twisted branches. A few had managed to free themselves altogether, and one of these was Oquarah, a wicked sachem of the Saranacs.
For several years, so the legend goes, there had been friendly rivalry between two young braves of the tribe—the Wolf and the Eagle. Whenever the Saranacs raided the Tahawi, the two youths vied with each other as to who would bring back the greater number of Tahawi scalps. The contests between the two friends delighted everybody in the tribe except Oquarah, who longed only for dissension. One day, hunting together in the forests, the Wolf and the Eagle became separated. The Wolf spent hours searching and calling for his friend until, at day’s end, he returned sadly to the camp to announce that the Eagle was lost. Old Oquarah saw his chance. “I hear a forked tongue,” he cried. “The Wolf was jealous of the Eagle, and his teeth have cut into the Eagle’s heart!” Stoutly the brave insisted that he did not lie. The argument grew heated, and suddenly Oquarah leaped at the Wolf with his hatchet raised. Seeing this, the Wolf’s young wife threw herself in front of her husband and Oquarah’s blade sank into her skull. A moment later, Oquarah too was dead, with the Wolf’s knife in his heart, and immediately there was chaos in the camp. Two factions formed. The Wolf—with half the tribe—fled down the Sounding River to new hunting grounds; the rest remained behind. In the years that followed, whenever the two halves of the divided Saranacs met, the rivers ran red with blood.
The Right People Page 26
