Commuting in and out of Fairfield County has developed into something very close to an art form, and each train has a character, and conveys a status, that is all its own. The 7:37 A.M. out of Westport, for example—or, even more so, the one before it, the 6:59—is the sort of train for the bright, aggressive, ambitious young man on his way up, doing well and bucking for a promotion he will very likely soon get. He rushes to the front of the train each morning—in order to be the first one to get off—busies himself with briefcase work at his seat, and will be at his desk by eight-thirty. The mood on these early trains is tense, absorbed, unsociable. A little later on, on the 9:13, the passengers are quite a different lot. Here are the bankers, the lawyers, the heads of companies whose first engagements of importance on any given day occur not much before lunchtime. These men will stroll into their offices around ten or a little after, and secretaries and staff will have coped with their day until then. On this train, populated with decision-makers, the atmosphere is more relaxed, serene. In the smoker, bridge-players quietly play for gentlemanly stakes. There is another class of man on this train, though, who tries very hard to seem relaxed—the man who is for the moment unemployed, and who is on his way into town for an interview.
Still another commuter type is the man who belongs to a private car association. He sits grandly in the last car on the train, window shades lowered to screen him from the gaze of common mortals, served by a white-coated steward. The grandest of the private cars is the Southport Car, which also picks up a few select passengers in Westport and Darien. Though it costs only about two hundred dollars a year plus commutation to belong to a private car club, it is said that “someone has to die” before you can join one, and even then rigorous tests must be passed. One Southport man, for example, moved away not long ago in disgrace when he was blackballed by the Southport Car. A similar car, and association, serves Greenwich and Rye (just over the New York state line in Westchester County), while another serves New Canaan.
Wednesday is ladies’ day on the New Haven branch of the Penn Central, and by eleven in the morning the coaches are bright with female chatter—women bound into town for lunch, a bit of shopping, and a matinee. By three o’clock in the afternoon the trains fill up with commuting schoolchildren armed with transistor radios. And of course the most déclassé trains of all are those departing for New York around five in the afternoon. These are filled with cleaning ladies and handymen returning home to Harlem and the Bronx.
Returning home to a Fairfield County town presents its own set of problems—in particular, how to get out of the commuter parking lot as fast as possible, ahead of all the other commuters. Wives wait tensely at the wheels of cars, motors racing, while their menfolk sprint across the tarmac to meet them. In Westport, a shortcut to the parking lot has been discovered which involves scaling a fence. To those who don’t understand commuting, its rules and rituals and handicaps, the sight of well-dressed men in Brooks Brothers suits, with Gucci attaché cases, scrambling over a fence to get to their cars is a bewildering one. There are other commuting techniques. One type of commuter has his wife meet him at, say, the train arriving at 7:51 P.M. The man himself will then take the train which arrives at 6:02, and will spend the intervening time at the station tavern.
A new arrival in Fairfield County not long ago was surprised by what he took to be the rudeness of his fellow passengers on the train. “I’d meet guys socially, at parties on weekends,” he says, “and then I’d run into them again on the train, and they’d look right through me as though they’d never met me.” Eventually, he learned that rudeness was not the cause of this behavior. “I discovered that each man has his own commuting pattern,” he says. “He reads his paper, does some work, takes a nap, or has a drink in the club car—but the important thing is that it’s his pattern. He’s used to it, and he isn’t going to change it. He tries to sit in the same seat in the same car of the same train every day. He either wants conversation or not—usually not. In order to cope with the commuting, you have to defend your personal pattern. So if you see someone you know, who might want to talk to you or sit with you, or who threatens to break the pattern, you have to ignore him. Everybody ends up doing this.”
The good life in Fairfield County—the good schools, the pleasant clubs, the green grass, the lakes, the wooded hills—has its drawbacks as well as its rewards. Many parents feel that the celebrated “rural character,” so carefully preserved, does not make for a particularly good place to raise children. It has been said, albeit facetiously, that if all the students in Westport’s luxurious Staples High School who are using marijuana and other drugs were expelled, there would be no school to run. In towns like Weston, where specific businesses are zoned out, there are no movie theaters, no bowling alleys, no pizza parlors or other traditional places of teenage enjoyment. All these must be sought elsewhere. On the streets of Westport in the afternoon, after school, a group very much resembling Greenwich Village hippies hangs out, looking bored, listless and disaffected. There have been incidents of vandalism and breaking and entering—all laid to teenage idleness and boredom. Being a teenager in Fairfield County can also be lonely. With two- and four-acre zoning, one’s best friends frequently live far away. After school, the kids monopolize the telephone, calling up each other. The easiest solution is to give the children their own telephone line. There are no buses or other public transportation through the best neighborhoods. If the children are to visit friends, someone must supply a ride. A solution, when they’re old enough: get them their own car. Until then, if Mother and Father are too busy to do the driving, kids are given charge accounts with taxi companies. Taxi charge accounts are also required by Fairfield County maids.
Out of boredom, kids do stupid things. They steal things they don’t need, or that their parents would probably buy for them if they asked, from local shops, and when this happens, the parents themselves are no help at all. A Westport shopowner says, “I saw a sixteen-year-old girl take a twenty-dollar cocktail ring from a counter and drop it in her bag. I knew the girl, and I called her mother. Her mother began screaming at me, saying, ‘My daughter would never do a thing like that! You’re a liar, and I’ll never set foot inside your store again.’” Shop-owners are reluctant to call in the police on matters like these, for fear of offending and losing customers. And the police are faced with a special problem. Darien, not long ago, got its name unpleasantly spread across newspaper headlines in connection with a matter that involved teenage drug-taking and drinking. A Darien girl was killed in a car driven by a drunken boy. This gave Darien a bad name which it has not yet lived down, and it is said that local real estate values were damaged. Nobody in Fairfield County wants what happened in Darien to happen in their town, certainly not the property-owners or the public servants or the police. To avoid the publicity and scandal of “another Darien,” the police departments of other villages admit that they play down, and hush up as quickly as possible, matters of youthful delinquency. Alas, the youth know all this and behave accordingly.
There are other difficulties involved in being a parent in an affluent community. Sonny Fox, who describes himself as “a kid from Brooklyn,” moved to Fairfield County partly so that his children could have some of the much-touted “advantages” which he himself never had. But sometimes he feels that the youth of Fairfield are overprivileged. He was startled when his son asked for a motorcycle and explained, “All the other kids have them.” On another occasion, he excitedly told his children that they had been invited to swim in a friend’s pool. One of his children asked, “Is it heated?” The Fox house is situated by a pretty stream. The children complain that the water is nearly always too chilly for swimming.
But for all its shortcomings, Fairfield County is, to those who love it, a very special sort of place. They regard it with a special affection very close to love. Bette Davis, who has been coming to Westport for over twenty years, has now made the town her permanent home. She lives in a comfortable Colonial hou
se on the banks of a lively river, a house with large airy rooms done in bright colors—splashes of purple, yellow, and pink. Nearby, in Weston, her daughter lives with her husband and their child. Not long ago Miss Davis was having a drink and smoking in her emphatic way, and said, “I’m a Yankee. I was born in New England. Oh, I know a Connecticut Yankee is supposed not to be a real Yankee—not the kind of Yankee who comes from Maine and talks about his farm ‘down East.’ But there’s still a Yankee thing here, and it rubs off, some of it, on everybody who comes here. The Yankee doesn’t care what you are. It’s who you are, as a person, that he cares about. All kinds of people have moved here, and they’ve learned that lesson. If you want to be left alone they’ll leave you alone. If you want friends they’ll be friendly. They’ll give you anything you want. Also, I admit I’m a conservative. I like Fairfield County exactly as it is. I don’t want to see it change a smidgeon—ever!”
Others are more realistic, more accommodating. They see that Fair-field County cannot be kept under a bell jar, not even by zoning laws, as a preserve for rich and private people. They see not only the new rich changing the face of Fairfield, but the old rich changing their ways too, willing to make way for changing times and faces, creating an inevitable blending of the social classes—creating a place, perhaps, where white and black, Jew and Christian, wealthy and not-so-wealthy, can live and enjoy the beauty of Fairfield’s hills and streams and beaches. One woman who appreciates Fairfield’s changing role, and who intends to make the best of it, is Barbara W. Tuchman, the historian, who lives most of each year in Greenwich. Barbara and Lester Tuchman also have a large antique-filled Park Avenue apartment, but living on a lavish scale is not Barbara Tuchman’s style—though it was her father’s style, and very much so. Her father, Maurice Wertheim, was a super-millionaire investment banker who headed Wertheim & Company on Wall Street. His Greenwich estate originally consisted of a hundred and twenty acres with a huge main house, stables, a jumping course, and a great many outbuildings. The place was tended by French maids, German governesses, stable boys, and a staff of gardeners.
Now the estate has been broken up—the Tuchmans have forty of the original acres, and Barbara Tuchman’s sister has the remaining eighty—and the Tuchmans’ Greenwich house is simplicity itself. Low and rambling, all on one floor, it makes use of a lot of glass and consists, really, of one large living-dining room, a small kitchen, and, beyond an open breezeway, three bedrooms. Barbara Tuchman does her own cooking. Her car, one of the lower-priced three, is used to pick up her commuter husband, a New York physician, at the Greenwich station. It is not that the Tuchmans are poor—far from it. Barbara Tuchman inherited a sizable fortune from her father. It is just that their scale of living has been reduced to something more in keeping with the times.
“I do my writing in a little one-room house I built on top of the hill up there,” Mrs. Tuchman says. “It has no telephone, and up there I’m completely alone, cut off. When I’m ready to join my family, I come down out of my tiny little ivory tower, back to this house. Do you notice something architecturally a little odd about this house? It’s really a double house, you see, two buildings joined by the breezeway—and I’m someday going to close that breezeway in, so I won’t have to put on a coat to walk to bed on chilly nights. But the fact is that these two buildings, on my father’s estate, were the henhouse and the potting shed. As you can see, in my father’s day even the hens lived very well, and there must have been a lot of potting done because it was a lot of shed. I love to remind myself of what these buildings used to be. Nobody, of course, can live the way my parents and my grandparents lived—in that great, grand, vast manner. I think that if my father, or my grandfather—who was a Morgenthau, and the Morgenthaus were even grander than the Wertheims—knew that I am now living in the old henhouse and the potting shed, thrown together, why, I’m sure they’d be spinning in their graves.”
Part Three
THE SIMPLE PLAYGROUNDS
Courtesy of the Sun Valley News Bureau
Those were the days in Sun Valley: (from left) “Rocky” Cooper, Jack Hemingway, Ingrid Bergman, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable
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Sun Valley: “Mr. Harriman’s Private Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More”
The late Mrs. Edward MacMullan, who for many years more or less ruled the social seas of Philadelphia, once complained: “It’s getting so difficult these days to find places where one can be sure of meeting one’s own kind.” She was referring to the no-longer-exclusive nature of such social institutions as private schools and private clubs, as well as to neighborhoods, committees, coming-out parties, and even churches. (Being an Episcopalian, Mrs. MacMullan pointed out, no longer seemed to carry much weight—not even in Philadelphia.) The same today is true of what were once the private playgrounds of the rich. As Mrs. MacMullan liked to put it, rolling back her eyes in dismay, “The camel has gotten into the tent.”
Sun Valley, Idaho, for example, was designed to be next to impossible to get to. That was the whole point: it was not a resort for “most people.” For years it sat there, shining and serene, aloof and inaccessible, like a queen at a command performance—very much there, and yet very much removed from the general audience. No stranger would have dreamt of approaching her without the proper introduction. This is not to say that Sun Valley was stuffy. On the contrary. She was merely self-assured. After all, she was America’s original ski resort, the first resort in the world to be created purely for winter sports, and created in a day when only a very special breed of the very rich could get away in winter. As a queen, Sun Valley was proud and, as a queen, she regally bestowed lavish favors upon her most loyal subjects.
Most great resorts have been built within so-called “resort areas”—the Adirondacks, the mountains of northern New England, the Florida coastland. Not Sun Valley. She was special, and above all that. She was built as herself, pure and simple, and she was all there was for miles and miles. For years, her only neighbors were the harshly soaring peaks of the Sawtooth Range which guarded and enclosed her sunny, Shangri-La-like glen—a formidable spite fence. As a queen, Sun Valley was not to be easily wooed by commoners.
From the beginning, Sun Valley’s fate was guided by large sums of money. Young Averell Harriman had inherited some one hundred million dollars from his father, E. H. Harriman (the “little giant of Wall Street”) and had, by the early Thirties, become board chairman of his father’s Union Pacific Railroad. Harriman the younger, and his second wife, Marie, had also become avid skiers, but had to journey to Austria or to Switzerland in order to enjoy their sport, since skiing was then almost unheard of in America. The Harrimans were regarded as very exotic types, and Sun Valley was the exotic brainchild of Marie Harriman—who simply wanted a stateside place to ski. Sun Valley was the money child of Averell Harriman, who agreed to pay for what his wife wanted. At her suggestion, he hired an Austrian Alpine expert named Count Felix Schaffgotsch to go into the American West and find a perfect spot for a ski resort.
Count Felix spent months looking at mountains. He visited Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, Yosemite, and any number of mountains of the San Bernardino range. He scouted the areas around Salt Lake City and around Lake Tahoe. He also spent considerable time in Colorado and crossed the Teton Pass in winter to get a view of Jackson Hole. None of these places—where numerous ski resorts now exist—struck his fancy. The mountains were either too high, too windy, too near a large city or too far from a railhead. Then someone suggested that he look at Ketchum, Idaho. Ketchum—once a mining boomtown of two thousand people—had shrunk to a hamlet of two hundred and seventy, nearly half of whom left the valley in wintertime. Soon after the count’s arrival, little Ketchum buzzed with the news that an Austrian nobleman was out there in the snow, climbing mountains and going down them on skis, of all things, and talking of building a million-dollar hotel. “Heck, we’d tied boards on our feet to go out across the snow and get our mail, if you call that skiing,” recalls old Jack Lane,
a prominent sheepman of the area. After one look at the crazy-acting foreigner, Jack Lane cautioned his fellow businessmen, “Don’t cash any of his checks.”
A mile north of Ketchum the count skied into a windless basin surrounded by totally treeless slopes, and with pine-covered Baldy Mountain towering at the valley’s western mouth, seeming to close the valley off from all intruders. The topography of the place was immediately striking, for hills in this region all have two features in common. Their north-facing flanks, shielded from the sun, remain cool and moist and therefore are covered with thick stands of pine. But the south-facing slopes, drained of moisture by the sun’s heat, are bare of vegetation and smooth as a baby’s cheek. This, the count figured, meant unimpeded skiing. It also eliminated the need for cutting trails. The count wired Harriman that he had found his spot. Within ten days, Harriman was at Ketchum with his private railroad car, and a Union Pacific check was written to pay for an initial forty-three hundred acres.
The Right Places Page 12
