The Right Places

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Local boosters keep trying to pump more life into the tourist trade, which is, after all, the primary industry not only in Fort Lauderdale but in all of Florida. Because it was a boat, if for no other reason, the old Queen Elizabeth was for a while tied up at Port Everglades as a “tourist attraction.” The Queen failed to attract, and went elsewhere to die. Another enterprise has also turned out to be something of a white elephant. This is an expensive-looking complex called the Swimming Hall of Fame, which features an Olympic-size pool and depictions of swimming “greats,” plus exhibits and mementoes of the breaststroke, backstroke, and Australian crawl. Johnny Weissmuller, now a bit paunchier than when he was Tarzan, was made the Hall’s director. “The general reception to the Swimming Hall of Fame has been sort of ho-hum,” admits one resident.

  It used to be, in Fort Lauderdale, with its generally WASP-y and Birch-y complexion, that Jews were “not encouraged” to buy houses in Fort Lauderdale proper. “You’d really be much happier, I think, in Hollywood,” used to be the realtor’s tactful approach to the situation, referring not to Hollywood, California, but the town in Florida, just a few miles below Fort Lauderdale. As a result, Hollywood Beach became a resort with a decidedly Jewish cast. Today, however—with social anti-Semitism not only unfashionable but unacceptable in most circles—all this has changed. Still, it is said that neither the Coral Ridge nor the Lauderdale Yacht Club really wants Jewish members, though there are a few in each club.

  Real estate restrictions do, however, apply to blacks. This is a Southern city, and one hears the oft-repeated Florida refrain: “The Northerners who move down here start off with Northern ideas, but it’s not long before they’re even more Southern than the Southerners when it comes to how to treat the blacks.”

  The black ghetto of Fort Lauderdale is a dismal place—not far from the center of town and yet, as is the case in other Florida resort cities, conveniently out of the way and out of sight. You would have to be looking for it, or else be hopelessly lost, to find it. Whenever Lauderdale mayors have tried to do something to improve the lot of the blacks, these mayors have had poor luck getting reelected to office. Lauderdale has been proud, though, that it has had no riots. There was “trouble” a couple of summers ago, but it was cleared up, if in typically Southern fashion. The trouble began in a large vacant lot that black youths used for drag racing. There were complaints, and counter-complaints. A council was called to listen to the blacks’ grievances; what they wanted, the blacks explained, was to have the city build a drag strip so that they would not have to use the vacant lot. A drag strip would have cost about forty thousand dollars. Instead, the city of Fort Lauderdale purchased a forty-three-thousand-dollar “monster”—a riot-control tank armed with guns, tear gas, grenades, and so on. The problem was declared solved.

  As Fort Lauderdale has been growing from a cloistered resort to a fair-sized city with industries other than tourism, and a large permanent population, a number of people have been giving thought to what the city was losing, as well as to what it was gaining, in the process. Many observers felt that whereas Fort Lauderdale might be strong in terms of boats and boating, it was weak in terms of culture. They, like the young revolutionaries in Kansas City, have set about to change all this.

  Today, as a result, Fort Lauderdale has a full-scale symphony orchestra. The Metropolitan Opera arrives regularly with a touring company, and performances are often sold out weeks in advance (but then, so are lectures by such as the “prophetess” Jeane Dixon). The War Memorial Auditorium, built for sports events, will soon be razed and rebuilt so that it can more comfortably accommodate the opera than it does at present. Nearby stands the Parker Playhouse, and there are plans to turn this entire area into a full-scale cultural center. All at once, everybody in Fort Lauderdale is almost as aware of the arts as of boats.

  Two energetic ladies, Mrs. William Maurer and Mrs. Francis McCahill, each of whom has carved out a segment of Fort Lauderdale’s cultural life for her own particular enthusiasm, exemplify what is currently going on.

  Fort Lauderdale, for example, has never had a decent newspaper. A “pink section” of the Miami Herald devoted to Lauderdale is probably the place where most Lauderdale people turn for news of their city. Five years or so ago, Yolanda Maurer decided to publish a magazine devoted to Fort Lauderdale, called Pictorial Life. Admittedly, Pictorial Life concentrates primarily on social goings-on, sports, and the yachting world. “It’s what sells magazines down here, after all,” Mrs. Maurer admits, but the magazine has been successful. And, with success, it has been able to devote more of its pages to less frothy matters, to city government, problems of the local slums, pollution, education, economics. It is beginning to seem as though at last Fort Lauderdale has found a “voice.” Mrs. Maurer’s property has become a valuable one, and she has had offers to buy the magazine. She won’t sell.

  Mrs. Maurer charges through her daily schedule like an express train—selling ads and subscriptions, and chasing stories. Equally busy is Mrs. McCahill, whose crusade is for the Fort Lauderdale Museum of the Arts. At present, the art museum is housed in a small and unsatisfactory building, and has had the problems any new institution always has getting under way. Ten years ago, the idea of an art museum in Fort Lauderdale was considered insanity, but Mary McCahill has made the museum her personal project. A rich woman, she has for the last several years been personally paying the curator’s salary, and if one day Fort Lauderdale does not have a first-class museum, Mary McCahill will know the reason why.

  Like many strong-willed women, Mary McCahill has made enemies, but no one seriously questions her conviction nor the worthiness of her goal. She has been able to enlist the support of many of the newly-rich people who have come to Fort Lauderdale—Mrs. Theresa Castro, for one.

  “This is a funny place,” Mary McCahill said not long ago. “So many people come here from other places, and when you try to raise money there’s an ‘I-gave-at-the-office’ kind of attitude. Because they gave to the museums and the symphonies back in Dayton and Cleveland, they don’t see why they should now help Fort Lauderdale. They’ve come to Fort Lauderdale to be through with all that, and it’s like pulling teeth to get them moving again, to convince them that they can’t come to Fort Lauderdale to vote against school appropriations, just because they paid so many school taxes back in Detroit. It isn’t fair to their new home. It’s a new attitude we’ve got to try to build here—to get people to think of Fort Lauderdale not just as a place to retire to, but a place where people live!”

  Both Mrs. McCahill and her husband—who is, technically, “retired”—put in a full day’s work at the museum every day. The McCahills have a big house on Isla Bahia Drive, the “Millionaires’ Row” of Fort Lauderdale, and their house, not surprisingly, backs up on one of Fort Lauderdale’s myriad canals. But gesturing around her still-very-little museum downtown, Mary McCahill says, “Here is where we really live!”

  Not long ago, the McCahills sold the big boat that used to park at the foot of their backyard garden. Indeed, a new wave may be coming.

  Photo by Rowland Scherman, Life Magazine © Time Inc.

  “Jay” Rockefeller—the right place is West Virginia

  5

  West Virginia: “In These Hills and Hollows”

  Why would the heir to one of the largest private fortunes in the world choose—indeed eagerly elect—to make his home on the fringes of Appalachia? It is all a part of the new style and meaning of wealth in America, where the value of all the old trappings of money is rapidly disappearing, and where the wrong places are becoming the right places.

  It all began, oddly enough, with a rumor that a nudist colony for “Northern swingers” was about to be built in the heart of these bleak and profitless hills. It seemed hardly possible, but that was the talk. There had been a sudden and mysterious flurry of land-buying in the wild, green, mountainous, and—if one can overlook the periodic stains of poverty that streak the hillsides—extraordinarily beautiful vas
tness of Pocahontas County, West Virginia, a region so remote and silent that it was thought to be worthless for anything other than rabbit and quail shooting and, perhaps, the discreet manufacture of a bit of moonshine whisky. Who was buying this land, and why? Almost anyone who wants to purchase land almost anywhere in West Virginia creates some sort of stir, because he must either have discovered a new vein of bituminous coal, or else gone crazy. West Virginia is one of the four poorest states in the country—only South Carolina, Alabama, and Arkansas have a lower per capita income or a higher rate of unemployment—and the possibility of new money finding its way into the state is usually considered so remote that even West Virginians despair of its ever happening. Here, where life at its best has for such a long time been hard and grim and sour, even the old-timers who love their “hills and hollows” wonder why anyone else would want to come to West Virginia. But Pocahontas County land was being bought up in parcels of hundreds of thousands of acres.

  The purchaser or purchasers remained, meanwhile, shadowy and anonymous, and the deals were being negotiated with extreme secrecy through a series of New York law and real estate firms. More rumors billowed from hill to hollow. It was Howard Hughes, about to turn this corner of the state into another Las Vegas. It was Aristotle Onassis, planning to create a huge redoubt on the scale of his private island in the Aegean. It was the federal government, with a design to erect a super-penitentiary where—West Virginia being what it is—only the hardest and most incorrigible prisoners would be interned. There were a number of local people who wanly hoped that the wilderness would be the site of some sort of factory, where some of the dirt-poor menfolk of the region could find jobs. But the most “reliable” rumor insisted on a nude playground.

  Needless to say, when printed invitations arrived in some five hundred Pocahontas County mailboxes, asking all and sundry in the region “to meet your new neighbors,” there was a heavy turnout on the appointed day. The guests assembled, and presently a tall, slender, amiable-looking, dark-haired young man stepped up onto the makeshift stage, leading a pretty, blonde, blue-eyed young woman by the hand, smiled, and said, “Hi, I’m Jay Rockefeller, and this is my wife, Sharon. We want to build a house in this beautiful country of yours, and make it our home.” A great cheer went up. It was just another example of the easy and winning charm of this youthful politician who swamped the Republican opposition in 1968 to become West Virginia’s Democratic secretary of state (under a Republican governor), who in 1972 won the Democratic nomination for governor, and who could—as an active and growing band of Jay Rockefeller–watchers insist—be a winning candidate for President of the United States in 1980.

  “Jay” Rockefeller is, of course, John Davison Rockefeller IV, great-grandson of the dynastic founder of the Standard Oil Company, and Jay’s wife, Sharon, is the daughter of Illinois Senator Charles H. Percy, who is not exactly poor, either. The young Rockefellers’ big barbecue-picnic at their new three-thousand-acre-plus spread in rural West Virginia was an immediate and enormous success. Sharon, golden hair swinging, was all bounce and smiles and earnestness, moving about from guest to guest, nibbling at a chicken leg and licking her fingers, asking questions (“Is there a good market nearby for fresh vegetables?” “Is there a diaper service?”), listening to the answers, performing introductions, showing an astonishing facility for remembering names, and, very quickly, getting on a first-name basis with everybody. Jay meanwhile, strolled about giving big, hearty handshakes, delivering friendly back-slaps to his neighbors, kissing babies, squeezing the shoulders and elbows of little old ladies (as a politician, he is even more of a toucher, a grabber, a hugger than his Uncle Nelson), and grinning down at the younger women with his big dark eyes and telling them just how gosh-darned pretty they looked. (Since moving to West Virginia, Jay Rockefeller has demonstrated something close to a professional actor’s command of the local speech and idiom; it is certainly a far cry from any accent he might have picked up at Exeter or Harvard, and it works wonders). By the end of the afternoon, everyone was agreeing that—rich folks or no—Jay and Sharon Rockefeller were “just plain folks, no different than you and me.” If these were nudists, they were certainly nice ones. This, of course, was just the impression Jay Rockefeller had been trying to cultivate in West Virginia from the beginning.

  Even Jay’s father, John D. Rockefeller III, managed to do himself proud at the party—and to some people’s surprise. The senior Rockefeller is the shyest, the most withdrawn and introspective of the five Rockefeller brothers (which include Nelson, David, Winthrop, and Laurance). At large gatherings, Mr. Rockefeller often seems to be ill at ease, and this has been interpreted as snobbishness, or at least aristocratic aloofness. But at his son’s picnic he mingled right in with the West Virginia farm folk, many of whom had never set foot outside their corner of the state. At the Rockefeller family estate in New York’s Westchester County, John D. Three, as they call him, is something of a gentleman farmer, and that afternoon, talking with one of Jay’s new neighbors, Mr. Rockefeller was overheard saying, “Why, I had that exact same trouble with my pigs!” The neighbors all wanted to know where Mr. Rockefeller was staying “out here in these hills and hollows,” and he explained that he was putting up at the Green-brier Hotel. Many West Virginians may be poor, but they are fiercely proud of their Southern hospitality, and the Pocahontas County farmers said to Mr. Rockefeller, “Now don’t you waste your money any more at that Greenbrier. My Lord, they’ll charge you forty dollars a day for a room! Next time, you-all just come and stay with us.”

  “And if you get to New York,” replied John D. Rockefeller III earnestly, “you-all come and stay with me.” Hearing this, Jay Rockefeller took his father aside and said, “Dad, down here they take these things literally. If you keep talking like that, you’re going to have a whole slew of West Virginia farmers for house guests in New York.”

  Though Jay and Sharon Rockefeller have lived in West Virginia since 1964, enthusiastically insisting all the while that they find the place the most fascinating, challenging, and lovely in all the world, and that they would not willingly live anyplace else, there is still something outwardly a bit incongruous—to some of their parents’ generation, at least—in the fact that these two enormously handsome and rich young people would have chosen this hardscrabble state in which to settle and make their future. Did they do so solely for political reasons? Bobby Kennedy, a few years ago, to establish himself politically, moved to New York City. Do the Rockefellers really like it here, or is there some hidden ulterior motive? Not long ago, out campaigning for governor against the incumbent Republican, Arch Moore, Jay Rockefeller tapped on the front door of a tiny house in a little West Virginia town named Sod (pop. 63). An elderly person, whose head was wrapped in a blue kerchief, looked pleased when she recognized her caller, and then complained that her toes were most certainly giving her misery.

  Sod, West Virginia, is perhaps an even more woebegone place than its name implies. A derelict washing machine stood on the porch of the woman’s tarpaper house, and behind the house an exhausted-looking privy leaned against a tree. A skinny chicken pecked in the dirt outside. In his J. Press jacket, button-down shirt, gray flannel slacks, Church’s shoes, and a “sincere” regimental-striped necktie (for reasons he admits are political, Jay Rockefeller adopts the 1950s-collegiate style of dress), the Democratic candidate for governor was telling this particular voter about his dream of turning Lincoln County (one of the state’s very poorest) into—well, into something maybe a little better. Down the road, a sign painted on an abandoned barn commanded: CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO!

  “The answer is to attract new industry to the area,” Jay Rockefeller was saying, and the old woman was nodding, agreeing, envisioning new industry coming to Sod. Across the street, in a sweater and skirt and a purple wool coat with shiny silver buttons—no jewelry other than her small emerald engagement ring, no visible makeup—Sharon Percy Rockefeller was standing in the used-car lot next to Mitchell’s Esso
station, listening with sympathy to a man who had had an ear, an eye, and half of his face blown away in a mining accident. That was over a year ago, he said, and he had still had no help from welfare.

  The contrast between the surroundings of the young Rockefellers and their relatives in the North is almost grotesquely sharp. Five hundred miles away, back at Pocantico Hills, the Rockefeller family compound in Tarrytown, New York (why was it so much a part of the old style of the rich to cluster together in sealed-off family fiefdoms, one wonders?) there is, among other things, the playhouse. This is the playhouse where Jay Rockefeller and his sisters played when they were children. The playhouse itself is three stories high, with an indoor swimming pool (of course there is an outdoor one as well), a four-lane bowling alley, a squash court, a gymnasium, and an embarrassment of other pleasures including a tennis court and a golf course. The playhouse, in other words, is a private Rockefeller country club—for the children.