The Right Places

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “After he bought it,” his grandson recalls, “everybody told him it wasn’t worth but eighty-five cents an acre.” In any case, with his new land Mr. Tufts went to work building what amounted to a private town. It included hotels, a library, churches, stables, stores, a post office, greenhouses, garages, and the Pinehurst Country Club, which today has five eighteen-hole golf courses—each with a first tee right at the clubhouse—along with a driving range, putting greens, a lawn bowling green, and tennis courts.

  “Ninety holes of golf!” Mr. Tufts was able to advertise to a nineteenth-century, golf-hungry nation. Ninety-one holes of golf became the local joke, with the Ninety-first Hole being the name of the clubhouse bar. Among the remarkable things about the remarkable Mr. Tufts and his enterprise was that he bought his land in June 1895 and was able to open his complete resort just six months later, in December. Builders today build slower, not faster, than they used to build. Also, for seventy-five years after its founding, the resort and the town remained firmly in the hands of Mr. Tufts’s direct heirs and members of the Tufts family. Then, to everyone’s distinct surprise, in 1970 the Tuftses sold their interests to something called the Diamondhead Corporation, which no one had ever heard of. There were mutterings about “Mafia connections.” But, in recent months, residents have adopted a live-and-let-live attitude about the new proprietors, and all continues as peacefully as before.

  Because Mr. Tufts was from Boston, Pinehurst became, and has remained, a resort particularly popular with New Englanders. The Victorian clubhouse of the Pinehurst Country Club and the Carolina Hotel remain very New England in flavor, and much of the architecture in Pinehurst follows suit. Driving along Pinehurst’s shaded streets, one might easily be in a Massachusetts village. Modern houses are zoned out, though a few almost-modern ones have crept in behind the tall shrubbery. Even the name of the town has New England origins. While the village was taking shape, it was known locally as Tufftown, a name that did not strike Mr. Tufts as particularly appealing. He began casting about for another. The Tuftses had a summer place on Martha’s Vineyard, where a local real estate outfit was conducting a name-the-development contest. “Pinehurst” was one of the names submitted in Martha’s Vineyard, though it was not the name chosen, and Mr. Tufts liked it and took it for his town. It was prophetic. When Tufts first bought the land, heavy lumbering had bared the earth of all growth. But soon afterward the pines began to reappear. Now they are everywhere.

  Today, those of the Tufts family who are still around think that “the charming sound” of the word Pinehurst had a lot to do with the town’s quick success. At first, Mr. Tufts had planned it as a resort for consumptives—who, before development of drug treatment of the disease, were big business for woodsy hotel-builders. But when, lured by the splendid golf, nonconsumptives began clamoring to play the Pinehurst courses, Mr. Tufts saw that he had a tiger by the tail. Soon the consumptives were being politely but firmly asked to leave, and today all deeds of houses sold in Pinehurst specify that no one with tuberculosis may buy a house. Pinehurst is one of the few places in the world where discrimination based on state-of-health is actively practiced.

  Led by the Tufts enterprises and the enormous popularity of the game over the past half-century, Pinehurst became golfdom’s Mecca. Today you can get into a heated argument in Pinehurst over whether there are twelve or thirteen other golf courses in Pinehurst besides the Pinehurst Country Club. The fanciest new club is called the Country Club of North Carolina. Though there is disagreement about the architecture (it employs a good bit of glass), its eighteen holes of golf are generally less crowded and pleasanter to play than those of the Pinehurst.

  Golf in Pinehurst has, in the meantime, created its own social systems. The elite of the golfing world here are members of something called the Tin Whistle Club, an organization that derives its name, supposedly, from the fact that, years ago, a tin whistle hung from a tree near the approach to the ninth hole on one of the golf courses. When this whistle was blown, drinks were served. The Club, with a membership of about two hundred men, and sprinkled with Boston Saltonstalls and Standard Oil Bedfords, is today devoted almost entirely to bibulous pleasures. Ladies are rigorously excluded from all functions, and for its headquarters the Club uses a pleasant book-lined room off the main lobby of the Pinehurst Country Club.

  Even more exclusive, since there are only about forty members, is the Wolves Club, also all-male, devoted to after-golf bridge-playing. The Wolves got its name from an old Webster cartoon showing Mr. Caspar Milquetoast, “the Timid Soul,” cowering under the gaze of three vulpine creatures who are his partner and opponents at the bridge table. Bridge, at a quarter of a cent a point, is taken very seriously by the Wolves in their tiny clubhouse, which has room for only three bridge tables, a few chairs for passing kibitzers, and of course a bar. Liquor, though it is consumed with great enthusiasm, presents something of a problem in the Pines. Restaurants are allowed to sell nothing stronger than beer or wine, and customers are required to “brown bag” their harder liquor if they want to drink. Clubs serve liquor, but only from members’ own bottles. There is no bar in the Carolina Hotel, a fact which has brought dismay to the face of many an arriving conventioneer. State liquor stores will sell no more than five bottles to a customer at a time, but, as one resident points out, “You can go right back in and buy five more bottles as many times as you want.”

  Perhaps the most unusual local club of all is the Dunes Club, which looks like a roadhouse from an old John Garfield movie and yet is, of all things, a quite fashionable and absolutely illegal gambling club. Right in the heart of the Baptist Bible Belt, where it’s hard to turn on your radio without hearing part of a sermon on sin, the Dunes’s green baize tables are active even on Sunday. Renowned for its food, the tables open up after the dinner hour. “Every now and then the Dunes gets raided, but the police always warn them ahead of time,” one man says. “Oh, and they make them close it down every so often, but it opens up again right away. The Dunes is a real institution here. We couldn’t get along without it.” And so a pattern of Pinehurst life involves golf in the morning, drinks and lunch with the Tin Whistle crowd at midday, on to the Wolves for a rubber or two of bridge, and then home to pick up the wife for a steak at the Dunes and some gambling.

  There are some unkind souls who have had the poor taste to call both Southern Pines and Pinehurst “stuffy” and anachronistic in their struggle to remain unchanged in the face of a changing world. And it is true that with their New England roots there is a certain amount of upper-class Yankee reserve about the towns. Both are resolutely Republican, even though Mrs. Ernest Ives, the late Adlai Stevenson’s sister, is an enthusiastic resident—and an outspoken Democrat. One overhears some surprising things, such as, at a party recently, a woman saying, “When Eisenhower won the presidential election unanimously …” And a Boston-bred woman asking another of her ilk, “But how can you know anyone from Philadelphia well enough to stay with them?” Because of its proximity to Fort Bragg, Pinehurst can say, “We could make two baseball teams out of the retired generals who’ve moved here.” The late General George Marshall was a long-time resident. Retired generals, as a group, tend to be a conservative lot. Fort Bragg is a training center for airborne troops, and it is no surprise to look up on a sunny afternoon and see thousands of little men dropping from the sky in parachutes. Throughout the Vietnam war, the Pines have remained hawkish, unreconstructed.

  A great deal of time, in both Pinehurst and Southern Pines, is still spent discussing social nuances. How, for instance, should one treat the Raymond Firestones’ head stable man, who goes to all the parties? Obviously, he is considerably above the ordinary stable-groom category, but where does one draw the line? The horsey Raymond Firestones, who have built a splendid house, are very much admired in Southern Pines. Not long ago, when the visiting lecturer at the Thursday night “Forum” at the country club—a cultural series—arrived without his white tie, the management politely whispere
d to Mr. Firestone, asking if he might have an outfit at home that the lecturer could borrow. It was the assumption that Mr. Firestone alone in Pinehurst might possess a white tie and trimmings, and to be sure Mr. Firestone did—several, in fact, for the visitor to pick from. That visiting lecturers in Pinehurst-Southern Pines are required to dress in white tie is an indication of the degree to which local residents are willing to go in order to maintain links with a more formal past.

  A few months ago, at a Southern Pines party, a guest from out of town was tasteless enough to begin a long harangue with Mr. Firestone about what he considered to be the poor quality of Firestone tires. The next day, the hostess called Mr. Firestone to apologize for her guest’s behavior. Mr. Firestone murmured that it was quite all right, really, and then he added, almost timidly, “Is there anything else your friend would like to know about tires?”

  Another glamorous figure in the area is Joe Bryan, a bachelor said to be “even richer than the Cannons”—the towel people—who has built a magnificent house-cum-stable on a high hilltop overlooking a man-made lake which he built “because I like to watch my horses drinking.”

  Perhaps the most striking quality of the area is the restful slowness of Southern life. Everything seems to take extra long to do, and there are some people who do find this restful. Others, more accustomed to a brisker Northern snap and efficiency, find the slow pace highly irritating, and inveigh against the fact that it takes so long, in Pinehurst and Southern Pines, to get anything done. Here, for example, is a bit of dialogue between a man from the North, wanting to buy a pocket comb, and a salesgirl, overheard at the Pinehurst Drug Store:

  MAN: “Do you have any pocket combs?”

  SALESGIRL: “We sure do!”

  “May I have one please?”

  “A pocket comb?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What color comb you-all want? A black one?”

  “That’d be fine, yes.”

  “Black? You-all sure?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Any special size?”

  “Well, pocket size, I suppose—about so big.”

  “About so big?”

  Etc., etc.

  This is, of course, the American South, and another settlement, West Southern Pines, is the black neighborhood which visitors are rarely taken to see. It is, needless to say, less resplendent than Pinehurst and Southern Pines proper, and white people are advised that it is unsafe to travel there at night. On the other hand, it is considered more respectable than the black ghetto of Fort Lauderdale. One is also told that an “unwritten rule” prevents blacks from walking on the streets of Pinehurst or Southern Pines after dark. But one woman asks, with a certain logic, “Why would anyone, black or white, want to walk there anyway? There’s no place to go, nothing to see, nothing to do.”

  But those who live here would live nowhere else, while the arguments about Pinehurst versus Southern Pines go on and on. “They get very dressy and chi-chi over there, in Pinehurst,” one woman says, “but over here we’re much more informal. Nobody here cares what you wear—but you’d better not be seen sitting on a bad-looking horse. Also, we’re just enough off the beaten path so people let us alone. A lot of people don’t know we exist, which is just fine with us. We’re not easy to find, so we get lots of privacy. A reporter from Playboy came to do a story on this place. He fell off his horse, first thing! We were all delighted.”

  And Mrs. Donald Parson, who has had a house in the area for many years and whose comfortable life has bridged both towns, says, “It doesn’t really matter which place you live in. It’s the feeling of the place that counts, the mood. It’s easy here, it’s relaxed. We don’t aspire to a Palm Beach, or a Camden. No one cares here if you have five cents or five million. We wander across each other’s lawns and gardens at cocktail time, and we’re always welcome wherever we end up. There’s no effort that goes into it, no striving or ambition in that sense. It’s known, you know, as ‘getting sand in your shoes’—that’s what happens when you fall in love with this place—sand in your shoes from these lovely old Carolina sandhills. We’ve all got sand in our shoes here. And once you get sand in your shoes, it never shakes out.”

  Photo by Murray Radin

  The Villa Cornfeld, Geneva

  7

  The Alpine Set: “You Can Live Forever Here”

  There is a breed of wanderer that is forever seeking new and unspoiled paradises. In order to qualify as “unspoiled,” a paradise must be cheap. Even though such places are increasingly hard to find, this kind of traveler is relentless in his quest.

  But there is another sort of voyager whose approach is perhaps more sophisticated, whose pocketbook is certainly fatter, who has relented. He has settled for a paradise that is thoroughly spoiled. Tamed. Civilized. He has gone to live in Switzerland. Tiny Switzerland (though if it were flattened out, it might be as big as Texas) probably contains more quietly rich expatriates per mountainous square foot than anywhere else on earth. It has also become a haven for the jaded, the overpublicized, the world-weary—people who have been everywhere, met everybody, had everything, and who now wish only to be pampered and cosseted and waited upon by a discreet manservant. “Life here,” says Sir Noel Coward, one of the Old Guard of what calls itself the Alpine Set, speaking from his pink-and-white villa high above the clouds, “really is terribly sweet.”

  And sweet it is—not so much in the la dolce vita sense as in the candy-box sense of the word. Consider what Switzerland offers to those who have settled here among never-never-land mountaintops like so many beautiful birds after a long flight. It offers a kind of perfection. Everything works. The trains arrive and depart on time, letters are delivered in a twinkling, telephones never produce wrong numbers, Swiss plumbing never falters. In restaurants and hotels, when buttons are pushed, service appears—superb service.

  To the overurbanized American, Switzerland offers a Walt Disney movie version of life, the kind with Fred MacMurray in the leading role, where all problems are happily resolved at the end. There is no crime rate because there is no crime. There are no race problems because there are no races; the Swiss are nearly all white and Protestant. There is no violence, no student unrest. An unescorted woman is quite safe in any park at any hour of night. There is no smog, no unemployment, no poverty, no garbage in the streets, no strikes. If you wish to cross the street, the traffic politely stops. If you take a taxi, the driver will not volunteer an opinion of Mayor Lindsay in New York or of Mayor Daley in Chicago, or of anyone else, unless it is specifically solicited. The Swiss police, who seem to have been hired for their good looks as much as anything, do no more than look mildly pained if you drive into a one-way street from the wrong direction. And this is hard to do because everything in Switzerland is carefully marked. Directions are clearly printed everywhere. It is impossible to get lost.

  The Swiss are notably honest. “In all the years we’ve lived here, we’ve never gotten gypped,” exults Irwin Shaw, a Swiss convert from many years back. The climate is benign. Palm trees grow in winter along the northern shores of Lake Geneva, and for skiers there is skiing in the high glaciers all summer long. There are no health hazards and, if one should get sick, the country is full of excellent doctors. Even old age seems to have disappeared here, where restorative baths and spas and cures and sanitariums abound, all dedicated to rejuvenation and longevity. “There’s this wonderful little virility man …” murmurs James Mason. For the ailing psyche, Swiss psychiatrists are notably soothing. At Vevey, not far from Lausanne, is one of the most remarkable institutions devoted to the eternal youth of the human species. This is La Clinique Générale “La Prairie” of Dr. Paul Niehans, where such people as Somerset Maugham, Konrad Adenauer, Gloria Swanson, Bernard Baruch, and even Pope Pius XII have paid an average of $1,285 a week for treatments designed to restore the flagging vital organs and halt, or at least slow down, the normal aging process.

  Dr. Niehans’s theory, very broadly stated, is t
hat as our bodily organs age, cells within them deteriorate and die. Niehans replaces these less-than-perky cells by injecting the patient with live cells taken from the embryos of animals—from the testicles of unborn bulls, for example. These new cells, it is claimed, prosper within the human patient’s body and revive the ailing organ. The treatment at Vevey begins with a test that is designed to pinpoint the areas of the body most needful of the restorative new cells. In all, fourteen bodily organs are covered in the tests, and a separate injection may be required for each—at $150 and up per injection. (This, plus $300 a week for the clinic and $200 for the tests, makes up the cost of the treatment.) The commonest ailment at Vevey is cirrhosis of the liver, and it is perhaps significant that La Prairie insists that patients refrain from all alcoholic beverages for at least three months following their discharge.

  The alumni of La Prairie speak ecstatically of their new youth and vigor, but medical opinion in the United States is much more guarded in its enthusiasm. “It’s like the heart transplants,” one doctor says. “It’s much too early to say whether what Niehans is doing really works.” “Nonsense,” replies a recent Niehans patient. “Dr. Niehans has proved that it’s no longer necessary to grow old!” Switzerland is Shangri-La.

  Famously neutral and uncommitted, the Swiss are noncontroversial and apolitical. There is, of course, a Swiss government, but it is delightfully unobtrusive, even invisible. It sometimes seems possible that the country is run by elves and gnomes from a secret mountain workshop. “I know we have a government, but I couldn’t tell you who is in it,” says one Swiss gentleman with typically Swiss good cheer. Switzerland is a kind of Oz. Even its physical makeup seems contrived and artificial—lakes, mountains, hillsides covered with wild narcissus; a little bit of Germany, a little of Italy, and a bit of France. It is true that the waters of Lake Geneva may not be as pellucid as when Browning wrote of them. It is true that prices are high. But, as Irwin Shaw, who was born in Brooklyn, says, “The more civilized a country is, the higher the prices. Every time you go to a place that’s cheap, you know the people are suffering. I don’t like countries like that. Forget ’em.” Best of all, Swiss taxes are very, very low—among the lowest in the world. Few Swiss pay more than ten to twelve per cent income tax. And the Swiss have a charming way of deciding what sort of tax you ought to pay. You sit down with the tax collector and discuss it. Yes, life can be sweet indeed, and private.