The Right Places

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  There have been one or two beneath-the-surface and decidedly ungentlemanly ripples in the world of yachting. One of these occurred in 1962 when Mr. Emil (“Bus”) Mosbacher skippered the American yacht Weatherly to victory (as he managed to do again with Intrepid in 1967). Mr. Mosbacher was, it appeared, not a member of the club. At least one of his credentials was out of order: he was Jewish. According to ancient tradition, winning America’s Cup skippers have always been taken into membership of the New York Yacht Club. And after a certain amount of huffing and puffing, Mosbacher was taken in. But there were some tense moments and, today, as one member says, “No one talks about it.”

  It has also been inevitable that a certain amount of commercialization should have entered the America’s Cup scene. Several years ago, Mr. Rudy Schaefer, who heads the company whose beer bears his name, and who is an ardent sportsman and yacht-fancier, hit upon the idea of having an exact replica of the original America made, a complete copy in every detail—the original having crumbled into decay during World War II. Researched by the Smithsonian Institution, built by the finest marine architects, engineers, and sailmakers he could find in the world, Mr. Schaefer had in mind to have his elaborate toy join the spectator fleet at the 1967 Cup races. The new America was launched on May 3 of that year, exactly one hundred and sixteen years after her namesake, and Schaefer—who won’t tell the exact cost—says that his line-for-line copy set him back “about thirty times” the price of the original, or somewhat in excess of a million dollars. Schaefer’s America is indeed a lovely thing and, at the moment, rides the waves in New York’s City Island Harbor. Her cabin contains a large keg of you-know-what beer, and she is used for promotional tours, meetings and Schaefer executive junkets. At the moment, Schaefer is having a disagreement with the Internal Revenue Service over whether America is or is not a deductible business expense. The IRS seems to feel that Schaefer’s America is not commercial enough to be considered part of the brewery’s advertising effort. “If we painted ‘Schaefer’ in red all over the sails, they’d be happy,” a Schaefer executive says. But that, of course, would be bad form. It has been claimed, but not proven, that if the new America were placed in competition today, she would do as well as her predecessor and beat all the others cold—to borrow the slogan of another beverage company.

  In 1970, it all happened again. In Newport, the great old “cottages” were opened up to party after party, all leading up to the glorious event itself. An America’s Cup race was all that social Newport needed to remind itself that it, too, is a living monument to upper-class values, however ephemeral they may seem. The 1970 cast of characters was a particularly colorful one. There were two challengers. There was blustery, burly, self-made Sir Frank Newson Packer, known as “Big Daddy” of a vast Australian communications chain which includes newspapers, magazines, and television stations all over the archipelago. It is estimated that Sir Frank’s worth may run to over a hundred million Australian pounds. The yacht whose syndicate he headed was Gretel II, and she arrived in Newport from Sydney. The second challenger was a titled Frenchman, Baron Marcel Bich, the suave industrialist whose BIC pens have become household standards wherever ballpoint touches paper. Baron Bich spent, it is said, over two million dollars on the yacht France, in order, hopefully, to bring the bottomless cup from West Forty-fourth Street to the Champs Élysées.

  Defending “our” cup were four yachts: Intrepid, the 1967 winner—souped up and refurbished—entered by a syndicate headed by William Strawbridge and Briggs Dalzell. Then there were Weatherly, the 1962 defender, and Valiant, designed by Olin Stephens (who also designed Intrepid) and owned by a syndicate headed by Robert McCullogh (oil) and George Hinman (banking); McCullogh was his own skipper. A third yacht, and something of a dark horse, was Heritage, which was designed and skippered by a brash newcomer named Charley Morgan, Jr., of St. Petersburg, Florida. Morgan had what amounted to a one-man syndicate, a terrific gamble. Also, Heritage was the first Florida-built boat in the America’s Cup. Morgan and Heritage were the long shot.

  Gentlemen all? Well, perhaps, if one does not press the point too hard. Baron Bich at least had a title, but there were a number of nitpickers who didn’t think Bich was playing quite by the rules. His challenging France was a glorious sight afloat—her spinnaker billowing and emblazoned with the Great Insignia of the Province of Paris. But the fussers of small points noted that while France seemed to comply with the rules in every way—completely built in France, that is—the man who designed her sails was an American. Shouldn’t this disqualify France? they argued.

  In any case, in the selection races between Gretel II and France, Gretel II was victorious. And in the trials for the defense, Intrepid won the honor against the newer boats. The contest itself was the closest in America’s Cup history, even though the challenger won only a single race. The first race went to Intrepid, and in the second, Gretel II was disqualified due to a collision at the start—making it the first time in America’s Cup history that a race was lost on a foul. Intrepid then won the third race, but Gretel II came back to win the fourth, lifting the hopes of the Australians and “Big Daddy” Packer, who was exceptionally bitter over the previous disqualification. But Intrepid then won the final race, retaining the Cup for our side, maintaining America’s honor.

  And so the Cup remains, slightly tarnished, in its resting place—reminding those who bemoan the commercialization of yachting and complain that it’s a sport now that anybody can play, anybody with money, and particularly—like the folks who are now giving you Bergdorf Goodman—a rich conglomerate. To some, the Cup is somewhat remindful of a funerary urn—bolted down, in its niche on West Forty-fourth Street.

  Photo by S. Hedding Fotch. Courtesy of the Saint Andrew’s Golf Club

  The dawn of golf in America; Yonkers, N.Y., 1888

  17

  “Come and Join Our Exclusive Club … Please?”

  When novelist John O’Hara was gathered to his ancestors, literary and otherwise, not long ago, it was noted in the press that few authors have written more, or more accurately, about the intricacies and subtleties of that peculiarly American institution, the country club. Remember the country club? It was that cozy old place where all the best people in town, along with those who wanted to be, met for locker-room gossip before Sunday golf games, sat down for endless creamed-chicken lunches, and showed up for boozy Saturday night dances where sweet-smelling girls in pretty dresses could sometimes be coaxed out onto moonlit fairways and no one minded because it was all “people we know.”

  The critics also pointed out that O’Hara’s was an oddly truncated vision, that his focus had remained rooted on the kind of country-club world that had existed before 1930. What seemed overlooked was the fact that O’Hara’s view was a nostalgic one of a world that ceased to exist long ago, and that, as a result of a variety of social, economic, and political factors, has changed utterly in the years since—and is bound to change even more. Not even twenty years ago, for example, when Donald Ruggoff, a film distributor who operates a chain of New York movie houses, was about to marry his non-Jewish wife, his future father-in-law warned the couple, “You’ll never be able to join the Worcester Country Club, you know!” In the 1950s, these were words to be taken seriously. Today, they would be greeted with a hoot of laughter.

  It is significant of the predicament in which private clubs find themselves that one of several dark little clouds which Judge G. Harrold Carswell found hanging over his nomination to the Supreme Court was his involvement with, of all things, a country club in Tallahassee, Florida. It seemed that Carswell had assisted with the club’s transfer from a municipal to a private, segregated, status. Here, a matter that would have been ignored twenty years ago had become one of pressing seriousness. It helped lose Carswell his approval by the Senate.

  But there is more plaguing private clubs these days than the conflict between civil rights and the social “right of private association.” In Westchester County, one golf club
is wondering how it is to pay for the winter potholes that have appeared along its miles of private roads, and another closed its beach facility because it had received an offer for the property that was too lucrative to resist. In Dallas, a club is worried about spiraling costs of labor, maintenance, and taxes—and about the reluctance of its wealthy membership to agree to higher dues. In San Francisco, a club in which literally “someone had to die,” up until a few years ago, before a new member could be taken in, there is now an energetic drive to recruit new members to fill its sagging rosters. In the cases of “certain especially desirable new members,” the once-mandatory five-thousand-dollar initiation fee is being waived. In New York, the cutoff age for junior membership was recently and discreetly raised from forty to forty-five in the hopes that an influx of the less well-heeled will fill the cavity left by the departing rich. Other clubs have taken to using such devices as offering “house memberships” which, for a reduced fee, give members only partial club privileges—everything but golf, for instance. New York’s American Yacht Club used to insist on the distinction that it was a sailing club, and motor vessels were sneeringly referred to as “stinkpots.” Today, the American seems delighted with its fairly lengthy list of stinkpot-owning members, as well as with a number of new members who have no interest in yachting—motorized or nonmotorized—whatever, and who are happy just to sit on the terraces, watch the races, and eat the meals which are being advertised as “very much improved.”

  The same sort of thing is happening in clubs all across the country—at Boston’s Somerset Club, Philadelphia’s Racquet Club, Washington’s Metropolitan, and San Francisco’s Pacific Union. “We have decided for a variety of reasons,” commenced a letter from one of these august clubs to its members not long ago, “to accept a certain number of new members in the Club. Such new members, of course, should be of a calibre compatible to the present membership.” And not long ago, a visiting Englishman was lunching at New York’s Knickerbocker Club, and could not help but notice how many luncheon tables for two were occupied by one elderly and pink-scalped gentleman, and one pink-cheeked and longish-haired youth. Had upper-class Americans, he inquired, adopted the somewhat sophisticated European convention of “le petit ami”? Gruffly he was told that there was nothing at all unnatural going on between these luncheon couples. It was simply the Knickerbocker’s drive to attract new members.

  In other words, there is today a new and poignant meaning to Groucho Marx’s famous comment, “Any club that would take in me as a member I wouldn’t want to join.” Now, any club that will take you in as a member will also take in any number of friends you want to bring along.

  To the would-be clubman, this is very much a buyer’s market, and newcomers—particularly to the suburbs of the larger cities, where there are many clubs to choose from—are well advised to shop around. Not long ago, when applying to a supposedly “exclusive” club on Boston’s North Shore, a man was asked to supply his “Mother’s Maiden Name.” He couldn’t recall it, and left the space blank. He got in anyway, which—as the old-timers shake their heads and say—would never have happened in the days John O’Hara knew so well. And faced with a sea of problems in a sea of change, the owners and managers of American social and recreational clubs have banded together to form the National Club Association, with headquarters in Washington, and the Association has been holding agonized meetings about the current state of what is accurately called the “club industry”; the main question seems to be whither-are-we-drifting.

  One of the problems with clubs in America may be that they are suffering from growing pains—that they have proliferated so rapidly that there are suddenly more clubs than we need. As an institution, the country club is not really very old, and its growth has almost exactly paralleled the growth in popularity of golf. Golf first made its appearance in the United States as early as 1779, when an advertisement appeared in Rivington’s Royal Gazette which read:

  To the Golf Players! The season for this pleasant and healthy exercise now advancing. Gentlemen may be furnished with excellent CLUBS and the veritable Caledonian BALLS, by enquiring at the Printers.

  But it was not until more than a century later that golf received any sort of national attention, and this happened in 1887 when a Yonkers man named Robert Lockhart returned from a trip to Scotland with a set of clubs and a supply of balls. Lockhart interested his friend John Reid in the game, and the two men laid out a crude course over several acres of Westchester pastureland. It was Reid’s suggestion that a club be formed, and thus the St. Andrews Golf Club—the first in America—came into existence, and it continues to exist in Ardsley-on-Hudson, New York.

  Up to then, all the best clubs in America had been the men’s city clubs, where the men of society retreated elaborately from their wives and families. The most venerable of these include New York’s Union Club and Knickerbocker Club, Philadelphia’s Philadelphia Club and Fish House and Rabbit Club, and Boston’s Somerset Club and Tavern Club. It was not until 1903 that New York got its all-lady Colony Club—founded by such as Mrs. John Jacob Astor III—and clubs which admitted children as well as women would have been considered downright un-American. But golf got the club idea out of the city into the countryside, and, once there, women proved a hard species to keep out. In the beginning, country clubs sprouted across the face of the land—before the sexual barriers were broken down. Next came the age barriers. Today, a few clubs have firm rules about when women and youngsters are permitted on the golf course, but these are always under attack, and in most places, the country club—with its kiddies’ wading pool, its swings and teeter-totters, its hairdressing salon, baby-sitter service, snack bar, ladies’ sauna and ladies’ card room—is very much a family preoccupation.

  Women have certainly helped diminish the importance of the once-powerful men’s clubs. In the dining room of New York’s Union Club not long ago, a woman glanced icily across the room and commented to the headwaiter, “I see you now also admit the mistresses, as well as the wives, of members.” The headwaiter replied, “Only if they are also the wives of other members, madam.” And meanwhile, the same sort of thing is going on across the street, as it were—at the once-exclusive women’s clubs such as New York’s Colony and Cosmopolitan, Boston’s Chilton Club, Philadelphia’s Acorn, and San Francisco’s Franciscan Club. These clubs now admit men. They are also, in as ladylike a way as possible, going after new members. Because they also are languishing.

  Part of the trouble has been the steady decline in the quality of service the social clubs have been able to offer. It is increasingly difficult to staff a club with bowing and scraping waiters and superb chefs, and to surround a member with the cozy sensation of belonging to some place decidedly privileged and special. Not long ago Colonel and Mrs. Charles A. Lindbergh arrived for dinner at the Cosmopolitan Club in New York, where Mrs. Lindbergh has maintained a membership for years. The Lindberghs of course had a reservation, but when the headwaitress approached them she inquired rather crossly, “Name, please?” “Charles Lindbergh,” replied the Colonel politely; and of the man who, for a while at least, was the most famous figure in the world, the headwaitress asked, “How do you spell it?” And at New York’s august Union Club a member was startled when a young waiter approached him and asked to borrow money. “Just till payday,” the waiter said.

  Meanwhile, back in the country, golf has achieved such an enormous popularity that what had started out as a polite sport for the propertied gentleman is now taken up not only by women but by men who actually work for a living. Today, golf is enjoyed by the milkman as well as the millionaire and has been taken over by those the sociologists group as the “upwardly mobile middle class.” Today, accordingly, there are country clubs designed to suit almost every social and economic bracket. Starting times at local golf courses are announced over local radio stations. Big companies, which for a number of years have been paying the initiation fees of their executives to help them get into the best clubs in an area
—on the theory that membership in the best club enhances the reputation of the company—have started building country club-like facilities for their lesser employees. So have labor unions, for their members. Then, since World War II, there has been a rash of municipal clubs, with memberships open to all residents of a certain town or city. Often these municipal clubs have come about as, for taxes, a community has bought up the languishing facilities of a private club. Then, of course, there are always the public golf courses.

  All this golf-playing by the so-called silent majority has had a profound effect upon the old-line country clubs—the clubs á la John O’Hara’s novels—which were built for the so-called effete snobs. Much of the effect is economic. Costs have risen, as have taxes, and members have taken to asking, “Why should I pay five hundred a year to belong to the country club when I can play golf for a pittance a week on the public course?” To make ends meet, private clubs have been forced to go into something very closely resembling the hotel business. They have taken to catering outside parties and offering to sell their facilities for weddings, debuts, and bar mitzvahs. They have even gone after convention business, offering “outings”—days when the club will be closed to regular members and turned over to a corporation for meetings, followed by golf. But at this sort of thing a club must be careful. Tax laws specify that if a club earns more than fifty per cent of its revenue from outside sources it can lose its special club status. The club industry, understandably, complains that it is being “persecuted” by the Internal Revenue Service.