The Right People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Mr. Richard E. Bishop, retired president of the A. C. Horn Chemical Company, says he has spent “about $50,000” turning his 55 by 18 foot trailer into a facsimile of Mount Vernon. “I’m not quite sure how we got started on Mount Vernon,” he says, “but we put on the big porch across the front with the white columns, and one thing sort of led to another.” The Bishops’ maid has a separate, smaller trailer of her own, also in the Mount Vernon style. Mount Vernon is topped by an enormous flagpole from which Old Glory can be seen from miles around, and upon which Mrs. Bishop occasionally hoists a flag emblazoned with a coffeepot, signifying that she would welcome other ladies for a Kaffeeklatsch. The Bishops also frequently fly the cocktail flag by way of asking neighbors over “for a little drinkie.”

  “People in other trailer parks around here call us ‘the Blue Skies snobs,’” one trailer owner says, “and frankly we’re proud of that label. We’re a more international group than you’ll find in other parks, and we’re more social too. I mean Bing drops around for songfests, we hire professional entertainers for our shindigs, we have twenty-dollar-a-plate dinners—things like that. We’re the only park that has cocktail parties. And sure we’re exclusive.” Blue Skies operates, he explains, as a private club. “No Tom, Dick or Harry can move into this place. We want nice people living here. We check on everybody. We even find out if they snore.”

  Meanwhile, the eyes of Blue Skies’s manager Rex Thompson grow misty as he dreams of an America covered with mobile-home parks, based on the success of the Blue Skies venture. “I’m responsible for Dana Point, too,” he explains. “I’m starting a whole chain of deluxe parks across the West! I’m building one right now in Vegas—it’ll have everything this place has, plus slot machines! Most people in the East don’t understand trailer living. Easterners look down their noses at trailer people, but tell ’em to come out to Blue Skies and see the aristocratic types we’ve got. Captains of industry! Why, these folks here hobnob with the cream of Palm Springs Society!”

  Exactly what the cream of Palm Springs Society consists of is worth considering. It is a Society based—as elsewhere—on money and, in most cases, newly made money: first-generation fortunes that still have a bright, fresh taste in the fortune makers’ mouths. It is a Society, moreover, that makes no attempt to disguise the fact that money is the whole point. As one man says, “Out here we say we’re living on our heirs’ money. So what? My son comes to me and says, ‘Pop, you’re dipping into capital!’ I ask him, ‘Who made it?’ Why should I leave him ten million bucks? Let him go out and make it like I did.”

  There is a great deal of talk about exclusiveness, and which golf or country club is more exclusive than another. But there is a simple rule: the most exclusive clubs are the most expensive. Thunderbird, Eldorado, and Tamarisk are, therefore, three very exclusive golf clubs. Originally, Thunderbird was built as a Gentile club which specifically excluded Jews, and Tamarisk was its Jewish and equally exclusive answer (though it was happy to accept the non-Jewish Frank Sinatra). In recent years, however, the memberships of both clubs have blurred considerably, religious lines are no longer drawn and, as one Thunderbird member says, “All you need to get in here is the scratch.” Eldorado, meanwhile, had the cachet of Eisenhower. Perhaps an even more exclusive club than these is Smoke Tree Ranch, which does not encourage golfers. Smoke Tree is not a country club but a private community of homes with a main guest building and cottages surrounding it, where life is determinedly ranchy. There are cookouts, riding picnics, chuck wagon breakfasts. For riding up into the chilly morning hills, members carry saddle flasks of vodka. The Bermuda Dunes Country Club, meanwhile, has the distinction of possessing the largest golf layout in the Palm Springs area. Its golf cars have refrigerated compartments for drinks. Bermuda Dunes is also the only local club with its own airport, its own hangar for private planes, its own fire department, and—for a reason that has never been quite clear—its own resident dentist All these clubs are in the real estate business, and offer lots for sale, apartments for lease, or condominiums along the fairways for purchase.

  For years the traditional club for movie stars was the Racquet Club, with its éminence grise, the retired actor Charles Farrell. Here, at various times, such movie people as Charles Butterworth, Warner Baxter, Carole Lombard, Gilbert Roland, Ginger Rogers, Mervyn LeRoy, Mary Pickford, Frank Morgan, Marlene Dietrich, and “Big Boy” Williams could be seen playing tennis. Indeed, it was the arrival of Farrell and the club’s co-founder, Ralph Bellamy, in Palm Springs in the mid-1930’s that turned the first big spotlight of publicity on the area. The Tennis Club, on the other side of town, was created as the answer to the Racquet Club; it did not welcome movie stars or Jews. But here again, as Palm Springs has mushroomed, with all clubs furiously competing for members and in the selling of lots, membership restrictions have been dropped in both places, and movie stars and rich people of all faiths can be found in both.

  Another very expensive and exclusive club is the Palette Club. Its membership, predominantly female, is composed of people who paint—the wives of millionaires and movie stars who clubbed together a few years ago to prove, as one member said, “that there is so some culture in Palm Springs!” The Palette Club occupies a comfortable old Spanish house which has been fixed up with antiques, mirrors, chandeliers, and a bar. Here, under the guidance of an affable bachelor named John Morris, the ladies gather for a painting lesson or a cocktail, or a painting lesson and a cocktail, draping their furs over their easels. Here one can see “Mousey” (Mrs. William) Powell working industriously on a still life, or the pretty young wife of an aging Texas oil man (“She’s not that young,” whispers Morris, “she’s just had her face lifted”) doing something “which expresses me.” The club has frequent invitation-only shows of Western painters, and of its own members’ work. The latter are particularly successful because, as one woman says, “We’re very loyal about buying each other’s paintings.” During the summer months, John Morris, a genial Pied Piper, guides his little band of lady painters on an artists’ tour of France, where his name becomes Jean Maurice.

  But for all the talk about Society the plain fact is that Palm Springs isn’t very social in the ordinary American sense. For all the vast sums of money Palm Springs people spend building and decorating their houses, the amount of entertaining done is relatively modest. So is its scale. Large parties are infrequent, the average get-together consisting of as many people as will fit around the piano bar. Hostesses keep things simple in terms of menus, party decor, and flowers. The never fading plastic blossom has been found to be intensely practical. The lavish wedding, the debutante ball, and so many other events that stamp Society in other resorts from Newport to Santa Barbara, do not take place in Palm Springs. There is only an occasional charity ball. Life in the desert becomes introverted, and the “type most gregarious” of Mrs. Potter’s poem has a poorer time of it than those who are “hermit inclined.” Palm Springs houses are built to hole up in, and some of the costliest places have never been known to entertain a guest. People who move here from other cities, expecting to find the advertised friendliness, are often disappointed. A new acquaintance promises to telephone, but never does. People are invited to dinner, and forget to come. “There’s something about the climate here,” one woman says, “that makes you fail to remember things.”

  Then there are those wealthy Indians who, in a sense, have had a bad time of it. The tribe was initially given thirty thousand acres of land; they were given “every other section,” which divided the area in a checkerboard pattern. The grid design is quite apparent from the air as the pattern of a Palm Spring’s development because, unfortunately, clear title to Indian land for years could not be got for outright sale, and Federal law prohibited the land’s lease for longer than a five-year period, which did not appeal to developers. So, while alternate sections have sprouted motels and golf courses, Indian lands lay bare. Recently, Congress declared that Indian lands could be leased for ninety-nine years,
and so their development is under way. Also, under the Equalization Act, each individual member of the tribe was given land valued at $335,000. At today’s soaring Palm Springs prices, each Indian—man, woman, and child—is worth easily a million dollars. The tribe, however, has dwindled. There are presently barely a hundred Indians left, and the number judged to be “competent adult Indians” is about forty. The wealth of the others is in the custodianship of banks. By the rest of Palm Springs’s population, the Indians are simply ignored.

  The real Old Guard of Palm Springs consists of exactly one woman, Mrs. Austin McManus, and even she is not a native. Still, Mrs. McManus, known throughout the valley as Auntie Pearl, is easily the First Lady of Palm Springs. She is a cheerful-faced woman in her eighties who looks considerably younger, and she says, “My heart is bound up in the desert!” So, it might be added, is her considerable fortune. Her father, Judge John Guthrie McCallum, arrived in 1884, having sought out the desert air for the sake of a tubercular son. Palm Springs was a sleepy Indian settlement called Agua Caliente.* He became the area’s first white settler. Judge McCallum bought up between five and six thousand acres of land, built an aqueduct to carry water down from the mountains, nineteen miles of irrigation canals, and began growing citrus, fig, and other fruit trees. He never lived to see his investment become a success. At the time of his death an eleven-year drought had dried up his canals and aqueduct—this was before Palm Springs was discovered to rest on a series of underground lakes which made water plentiful and cheap—and his fruit orchards had withered and died. “Father died of a broken heart,” Mrs. McManus says sadly.

  But his considerable land passed on to his daughter who has managed her properties with a shrewdness that has won her the admiration of every real estate man in town. She has also exercised a good deal of taste, and the buildings for which she is responsible show a style and dignity unusual in the town. It was she who built the handsome Tennis Club—which has been called, with customary Palm Springs excess, “the most beautiful two acres in America,” but is nonetheless a lovely place—as well as a number of the better-looking commercial buildings downtown.

  Because she is widowed and childless, without direct heirs, Mrs. McManus has begun to think in terms of foundations and other beneficiaries of her money and properties. She recently became interested in the newly founded College of the Desert, a junior college outside Palm Springs, only to discover that this institution, too, seemed to have become afflicted with the curious logy-mindedness of the desert.

  Not long ago she sent the college a check for $7,000. The president called to thank her for the gift, and suggested that the money might be spent to purchase new robes for the college choir. “Now wouldn’t you think,” said Mrs. McManus indignantly to a friend, “that the college—any college—could find something better to spend that money on than choir robes? Why not books, for example? Choir robes!”

  It is real estate fever, Mrs. McManus admits, that has kept her young. Standing on the wide veranda of her comfortable but unpretentious pink-stucco house overlooking Palm Springs and the acreage her father bought, she talked not long ago of “whole new cities, whole new communities” being carved out of the far-off mountains and hidden canyons beyond. She had been taken on a private helicopter ride over some of those wild, lost ridges, and became excited about their development. “You see,” she said with a smile, “I own some of those mountains.”

  “You see, son, this is real Society out here,” said one of the many local boosters recently. “The real thing. Not your flibberty-gibbet fly-by-nights with fancy manners and their pinky in the air. This is money, son, and the men that make America run. The men that make Palm Springs are bigger than any city—why, they’re international men, men that Presidents listen to, that can call up the heads of the biggest banks and give ’em hell. I’m talking about Ben Fairless, Len Firestone, Paul Hoffman, Monty Moncrief, Conrad Hilton, Greg Bautzer, Ernie Breech, Dan Thornton, Ray Ryan—that caliber. These men are the movers and the shakers and the doers, son—captains of finance, leaders of industry! That’s what I call Society, son—the big wheels. As far as the other kind of Society goes, son, that’s dead!”

  * Whenever an important visitor—a President, say—is scheduled to make a nighttime arrival, Palm Springs pool owners are alerted to turn on their underwater lights “for the best possible impression.”

  * Named for the warm mineral spring which bubbled up through the sand, now the site of the Palm Springs Spa and “The world’s most beautiful bath house,” which also belongs to the Indians.

  Part Four

  BUT IS IT REALLY DEAD?

  20

  “Obedience to the Unenforceable”

  It is one of the drawbacks of being rich and reasonably celebrated. It happens occasionally to Astors, and with dreary regularity to Fords and Rockefellers. They are always getting letters from people bearing the same name, but of whom they have never heard, claiming kinship. The letters come from strange way stations around the world, and sometimes the would-be cousins live near at hand. The Manhattan telephone directory lists several “unreal” Rockefellers along with the real ones. And, as often as not, the claimants can offer legitimate and documented proof that they are relatives. But, whenever a new member of a prominent family shows up, with or without credentials, it is a distressing event. Because, in nearly every case, the “relative” comes with an outstretched arm and an upturned palm. “Dear Uncle …” began a letter received by one of the Vanderbilts not long ago and, after a few amenities, continued:

  … My Mother who was your Own Mothers cousin (in cradle with her when they was two) always tell me when things turn bad for me you will lend a hand. Last fall when I broke my back …

  And so it familiarly went.

  Fortunately for the American clan of Auchincloss, this cannot happen to them. It is one of several singular facts about this singular tribe. Every one of the hundred-odd Auchinclosses now living in the United States is a member of the family, and they are all accounted for. There are no unreal Auchinclosses. And yet, a number of years ago, Mr. Hugh D. Auchincloss—or “Hughdie” as he is pet-named in the family—received a curious communication from an undertaker calling himself Auchincloss. The man was planning, or so he said, to do some advertising along the lines of “Let Auchincloss give you a classy funeral,” or “Be. Buried Like An Aristocrat Would—By Auchincloss.” What, the undertaker wanted know, did Mr. Hugh D. Auchincloss think of that proposal? Hughdie Auchincloss was, quite naturally, alarmed. Was the man attempting a kind of blackmail? Such advertising would be embarrassing, to say the least.

  Hughdie Auchincloss weighed the matter carefully for several days. Then he remembered something his father had once said to him: “You are not responsible for your relatives. You are only responsible for your friends.” Hugh-die Auchincloss ignored the communication. The man was not heard from again.

  If it is true that Society in the United States is based on nothing but money, then the Auchinclosses, again, are something of an exception. Though Auchinclosses have been prominent in Society for generations (a good seven, in fact), and though most of them have been, as Louis Auchincloss puts it, “respectably affluent,” there has never been an Auchincloss family fortune as such. Indeed, if there ever had been, it would—unless strictest rules of primogeniture had been adhered to—have long ago been dissipated by division and taxation. It is rather like the Auchinclosses to have made assets out of these facts which, in other families, would have been considered distinct disadvantages. When John Winthrop Auchincloss (an uncle of Hugh D.) built his Newport house, “Hammersmith Farm,” in 1892, he did not build it on Bellevue Avenue, Newport’s fashionable “ocean side” where all the greatest mansions are, but on the Narragansett Bay side, or “wrong side” of Newport. And “Hammersmith Farm” itself—though a very large house and a handsome example of the shingle style, surrounded by seventy-five acres of land—is a dollhouse compared with the gilt and marble palaces for which Newport is
famous. And yet, since John Winthrop Auchincloss was who he was, he made a number of Vanderbilts, Astors, and Goelets who had houses on Bellevue Avenue feel, uncomfortably, that they had done it all wrong. Perhaps John Winthrop had hoped they would feel this way; perhaps not. But such, by the end of the last century, had become the mystical power of the Auchincloss name in Society.

  It all started in 1803, when the first Auchincloss, also named Hugh, set foot on these shores, having sailed from Greenock, Scotland, aboard the ship Factor. He was twenty-three years old, and enterprising. Within a short time he operated his own dry-goods store in downtown Manhattan. In 1806, he married a Philadelphia girl of Scottish descent named Ann Anthony Stuart whose father, though not wealthy, was a man of property. His will shows that he was able to bequeath his heirs such items as a “gold watch,” “gold jacket-buttons,” and a “Negro wench” to each of his children.

  Hugh and Ann Auchincloss’s was the first of many auspicious Auchincloss weddings. Hugh, meanwhile, was parsimonious, persevering, Presbyterian. Obituaries of him describe him in ominous negatives. He was not tightfisted, they insist He was not disagreeable and mean. That was just his appearance. “The fiber of his nature was strong rather than delicate,” stated his funeral orator, “hence some misapprehended him as blunt and harsh. The deceased was not a man of smooth words or disguised flatteries.…” It would seem that the Auchinclosses, at that point, had a long way to go. In a tintype of the first Hugh, he certainly looks sour, his mouth turned down in a perfectly inverted crescent. In her tintype, Ann Anthony Stuart Auchincloss merely looks glum. Because her maiden name was Stuart, her grandson, John Winthrop, had the crest of the Royal House of Stuart emblazoned on his silverware. His claim to the crest is particularly fuzzy. Ann Anthony Stuart Auchincloss was a tiny woman, so diminutive that she crawled into the family cradle to nurse each of her thirteen children. She was also, alas, no beauty. The prominent “Auchincloss nose” appears to have descended from her, and therefore should properly be called a Stuart nose.