The Golden Dream

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Cincinnati is also a city that loves gossip, and since it is a small place where everybody is not only related to everybody else but also knows everybody else, there is nearly always some new and juicy tidbit making the regular party rounds—such as when, several years ago, Mayor-elect Gerald Springer was discovered to have been patronizing a naughty massage parlor across the river in Kentucky, and had to step down. (He was caught because he unwisely paid for its services with either a personal check or a credit card; the stories varied.) Recently, too, there was a delicious public quarrel between Cincinnati’s two leading civic ladies: Mrs. Fred Lazarus III and Mrs. Ralph Corbett, who live within hair-pulling distance of one another in Hyde Park. Irma Lazarus was reported to have said something to the effect that the Corbetts could afford to give $250,000 to the Symphony but were too cheap to buy a ticket to a performance. Patricia Corbett was naturally furious. The two ladies stopped speaking, their respective friends and adversaries fanned the flames, and the affair escalated to the point where Women’s Wear Daily got the story and printed it. It took a letter from Ohio’s then governor, John Gilligan, to get Women’s Wear off the gossipy scent. But it required a third Hyde Park neighbor, Mrs. Leo Weston, to get the two women to kiss and make up; at her behest, they met to talk things over. For her role as peacemaker—as well as for her lovely old antique-filled house overlooking the river, her excellent food, and her bright chatter—Phyllis Weston has been elevated to the position of being considered one of Cincinnati’s most important hostesses. Among other things, she was one of the first “social” Cincinnati women to invite blacks to her house for dinner.

  Cincinnati thinks of itself as a city that is not easily ruffled, where everything will turn out for the best in the end, given patience, politeness, and time. But early in 1975, there was deeply disturbing news. Oscar Robinson and his wife, it was learned, had made an offer on a house in Hyde Park—and on Grandin Road, no less. Oscar Robinson and his wife are black. There was no question but what the Robinsons were exceptional people. Voted the National Basketball Association’s Most Valuable Player, a former co-captain of the United States Olympic Gold Medal Team, a former guard with the Cincinnati Royals and, later, with the Milwaukee Bucks, listed in Who’s Who in America, Oscar Robinson would have seemed a credit to any neighborhood. But still … he and his family were black. And it was Grandin Road. There was a great deal of agonized soul-searching over the prospect of having a black family move into an otherwise all-white neighborhood. People took sides. Hackles rose. Neighbors stopped speaking to neighbors. While all this was going on in Hyde Park, Indian Hill watched with a certain interested detachment, happy for the most part that such a crisis was not being faced in Indian Hill—yet.

  Then, all at once, the problem evapoarated, blew away as though in a summer breeze. The Oscar Robinsons bought a house in another part of town. Like most problems in serene Cincinnati—like the feud between Irma Lazarus and Patricia Corbett and countless other controversies—this one had an ending that was happy and serene. For the time being, at least.

  7

  Pointes and Points

  Old Mrs. Henry B. Joy of Detroit was determined to make it clear that her money was “pre-gasoline.” To emphasize the point, for fourty-four years, until her death in 1958 at the age of eighty-eight, she maintained—and drove herself—a 1914 brougham car that operated on electricity. The shiny little two-seater, which was unable to exceed a speed often miles an hour, was quite a sight around Grosse Pointe, where her neighbors (the Henry Fords, the Walter Chryslers, the John and Horace Dodges, the Ransom Oldses, and a great many brothers named Fisher) were all regarded by people like the Joys as “ex-bicycle salesmen who came in with internal combustion.” Mrs. Joy’s only concession to Detroit’s automotive aristocracy was to permit her vehicle to be displayed at the 1957 Automobile Show. “I am very respectful of the age of my little car,” she said at the time. “I have to treat it very carefully because it is very difficult to get parts.”

  Mrs. Joy was a Newberry, and the Newberrys are another old-line Detroit family that put down roots in the city early in the nineteenth century, long before automobiles were dreamed of and when, it seems, Detroit was a place quite unrecognizable in relation to what it is today. In the mid-1830s, for example, an English writer and social historian named Harriet Martineau visited Detroit and later wrote, in a book called Society in America: “The Society of Detroit is very choice; and, as it has continued so since the old colonial days, through the territorial days, there is every reason to think that it will become, under its new dignities, a more and more desirable place of residence.” Miss Martineau’s vision may not have been clear about Detroit’s social future, and according to another Detroit historian, John L. Oliver: “We don’t know exactly to whom La Martineau alluded.” But he adds: “As the names of Newberry, Joy, Buhl, Alger, Barbour, Lothrop, and Hinchman begin to appear, our ears prick up and things begin to look more familiar.”

  Mrs. Joy was not at all the eccentric that she might have seemed—though she set some sort of record in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, by spending fifty-nine consecutive summers at her home there. Her husband was a dour sort, whose nickname was “Kill Joy,”* but Mrs. Joy was a perky little lady devoted to the Grosse Point Memorial Church—“I can’t enjoy church until I get my gloves off,” she used to say—and to the city of Detroit. At the time of her death, she was a member of a total of eighty-three civic and philanthropic organizations in the city, and she had never missed a meeting of a single one of them. Summers she was active in the Watch Hill Improvement Society, and “to keep fit,” she regularly swam the choppy course around the Watch Hill lighthouse.

  Her forebears were an equally doughty lot. The first Newberrys—the brothers Oliver and Walter—arrived in Detroit from the East as early as 1826, and went into the dry goods business. They prospered. Then they expanded into Great Lakes shipping, real estate, and lumber. They prospered further. They left no direct heirs, but their considerable fortune went to a nephew, John Stoughton Newberry, who, after graduating from the University of Michigan in 1847, went into partnership with a man named James McMillan in a firm that billed itself “Newberry & McMillan, Capitalists.” He married Helen Parmalee Handy, daughter of the Truman Parmalee Handys, of the illustrious Cleveland family. Helen Newberry Joy was his youngest daughter.

  Though Mrs. Joy was devoted to Detroit (if not to its motorcar millionaires) and to the suburb of Grosse Pointe, where she lived, she would doubtless be depressed at the sight of what Grosse Pointe has become in the twenty years since her death: high-rises and apartments in Grosse Pointe Shores, for example, and most of the big shorefront estates along Lake St. Clair torn down, broken up, and turned into much smaller, though still expensive properties. Furthermore—and this would distress her most—Grosse Pointe has become a suburb that has turned its back, almost completely, on its parent city.

  Detroit, it might be argued, could be an easy city for a suburb to shrug off. It has evolved into a metropolis with few of the “dignities” Miss Martineau envisioned for it. Even its gleaming new Ford-sponsored Renaissance Plaza, it has been pointed out, has the air of being an elegant, encapsulated city within a city—a group of buildings that seems to look inward upon itself, each building connected to the others by passageways so that occupants need encounter only one another without venturing into the street or facing the burgeoning indignities of the city beyond. In Grosse Pointe, where many Renaissance Plaza executives hang their hats, the sense of separation from the city is even more complete. One Grosse Pointe woman claims: “I haven’t set foot in Detroit in years. The only time I ever see it is when I’m on my way to the airport.”

  It is true that Grosse Pointe is remarkably independent of Detroit. Everything the Grosse Pointer needs is right there in Grosse Pointe—in its shops, markets, movie theaters, restaurants, and, of course, its clubs. Charity balls are held in big Detroit hotels, and are subscribed to by Grosse Pointers, but they rarely attend them. The De
troit Symphony performs in the Ford Auditorium in Detroit, but Grosse Pointe usually has something better to do than attend. Plays and operas come to Detroit, but Grosse Pointers have either already seen them in New York or will do so later on. No one would dream of going to Detroit for dinner at a restaurant: “Why should we, when we have the club?” Detroit, in the minds of Grosse Pointe people, exists as a gray area where some men have to go for business, and from which they escape at night.

  Actually, Grosse Pointe is not one town but five. Reading northward along the lakeshore, there are Grosse Pointe Park, Grosse Pointe City, Grosse Pointe Farms, Grosse Pointe Shores, and Grosse Pointe Woods. The five communities occupy a strip of real estate not quite six miles long and barely a mile wide. This narrow ribbon provides the addresses of some sixty thousand people, who live under somewhat crowded conditions but nonetheless comfortably.* The Grosse Pointes may not comprise the richest community per capita in the United States, but there are certainly more rich people here per square foot than anywhere else on earth.

  The first thing a newcomer notices is that Grosse Pointe, for all its reputation, is not really very pretty. Aesthetically, it would compare very poorly with Philadelphia’s Main Line, with Santa Barbara, or even with Fort Lee, New Jersey. The terrain of Grosse Pointe is pancake flat. Lake St. Clair, really an arm of polluted Lake Erie, which the Grosse Pointes face and which periodically has to be banked with sandbags to keep it from flooding over them, is lead-colored and also flat. Grosse Pointe’s streets, since there are no hills to traverse, run flat and straight and are laid out in a grid. Grosse Pointe houses, though large and frequently imposing, are of necessity close together. Neighbors can look into each other’s windows and, because fences are zoned against, into each other’s backyards. The shoulder-to-shoulder appearance of Grosse Pointe residences gives the place an air of tightness, compression, and restraint, as well as of conformity. Construction is of dark Middle West brick. The occasional “modern” house stands out starkly and uncomfortably.

  Of the five communities, Grosse Pointe Farms is easily the best address. It is the roomiest and, with the Country Club of Detroit roughly at its center, has the most air to breathe. At the bottom of the status scale is Grosse Pointe Woods, the only one of the Grosse Pointes that has no lake frontage—and since so much of the land of Grosse Pointe Woods has been cleared for housing developments and apartment houses, there are no more woods in the Woods and hardly any trees. The other three communities hover somewhere between respectable and chic, with Grosse Pointe Park occupying a somewhat special position. The Windmill Pointe section of the Park is an area of large, well-tended, somewhat Mediterranean-looking houses which, several years ago, a television broadcast identified as the residences of a number of members of Detroit’s Purple Gang. Indeed, many of the families in Windmill Pointe have Italian names, and the houses, with their gates and guardhouses, do rather resemble the one Marlon Brando occupied in The Godfather. At the time, the rest of Grosse Pointe was a bit ruffled by this publicity. “After all, they stick to themselves, they don’t bother anybody,” says one woman. There is also in Grosse Pointe Park a feeling that having members of the Mob as neighbors is a definite plus; they provide a certain protection, as it were.

  Grosse Pointe has had a lot of bad publicity over the years. It has been depicted as a symbol of nouveau riche tailfin vulgarity, of the crassest kind of money snobbery and prejudice. Several years ago, for example, it was revealed that Grosse Pointe real estate people sold houses on a “point system,” designed to keep “undesirables” out of the community. A prospective buyer, under the system, had to have a hundred points in order to buy a house in Grosse Pointe. If he was Jewish or black, that was ninety points against him from the start. Today, most Grosse Pointe people deny that such a system was ever in operation, or if it was, that they were ever aware of it. It certainly exists no longer, they say, pointing out that several—though not very many—Jewish families now own houses in the Grosse Pointes, and a few middle-class blacks have also moved into the area. If Jews and blacks have not been motivated to move to Grosse Pointe, it is because the country club—which, as in other areas like this, dominates the social life—still takes no black or Jewish members.

  Grosse Pointe has also been accused of representing nothing but automobile money, as tasteless and chrome-plated as most annual models. And it is true that the fortunes of the local automobile companies play a large part in the lives of Grosse Pointers. Each year, the sales figures on new-model cars are watched anxiously, for whether a model year is successful or not will have a large part to play in the area’s economy. The fluctuation of the automobile market, and of automobile stocks, affects everybody. Even the old “first-cabin” families such as the Joys, Newberrys, Buhls, and McMillans, who made their original money in other endeavors, have managed, over the years, to acquire automotive interests. “We all loaned money to old Henry Ford when he was first starting out,” says one woman, “and he paid us off with stock in his little company. Nobody thought he’d be successful, of course.”

  And automobiles, as might be expected, are a popular topic of conversation in Grosse Pointe. The most frequent question the newcomer is asked is: “What kind of car do you drive?” (Needless to say, foreign makes are frowned upon.) Grosse Pointe tends to identify its citizens in terms of their automobiles: “She’ll be driving a gray Seville,” or “He drives a blue Skylark,” or “Mine’s the red Granada.” (Also needless to say, it is a sin for an auto executive to drive a competitor’s product; when Henry Ford was arrested for speeding in New York a few years ago, everyone was shocked—not by the offense, but by the fact that Ford was picked up driving a rented Chevrolet.)

  Henry Ford II, a big, bluff, cheery, party-loving man, might pass unnoticed in the streets of New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago. But when he appears in Grosse Pointe, he is very much a Presence, and people practically bow and tug at their forelocks out of deference to him. “The Fords are like royalty here,” says one woman—though the royalty started out very humbly, just two generations ago, up on Detroit’s Woodward Avenue, where “nobody” lived. The queen of the House of Ford is unquestionably Mr. Ford’s mother, Mrs. Edsel Ford. When Eleanor Ford makes one of her regal entrances or exits, it is, according to a friend, “like the parting of the Red Sea” as people step aside to make way for the royal passage. Grosse Pointe is so obsessed with Fords—their whereabouts, what they’re wearing, their divorces and love affairs, which ones drink too much—that scarcely a conversation can take place without some mention of them. The remotest relationship to a Ford is a sign of status. Mrs. Robert Kanzler is considered “terribly important” in Grosse Pointe, for example, because her husband happens to be Mrs. Edsel Ford’s sister’s son.

  All the Ford talk in Grosse Pointe can be confusing, however, since there is not one Ford family in the community but three. The richest Fords are of course the royal Fords, or the “car Fords,” as they are called. But far from poor are the so-called salt Fords—the John B. Fords and the Emory Fords—whose money comes from such enterprises as the Wyandotte Chemical Company and the Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Company (soda ash from salt beds is used in glassmaking). Then there are the “old Fords,” who would include the Frederick Clifford Fords; they, though not as rich as the others, have been around longer, and have prospered in such endeavors as law and banking. Frederick C. Ford’s mother was a Buhl. The original Buhl was given a land grant by King George III in the 1760s, and not long ago, when a Buhl wanted to sell off some of the land, an elaborate search was made into the title of it. When no title could be found, Mr. Buhl grew exasperated. “Damn it,” he said finally, “there isn’t any title to that land; the Buhls just took it!” Mrs. Frederick C. Ford is an amateur genealogist and has made an ancestor search of her family, the Brushes—another first-cabin Detroit family. She discovered that the Brushes descend directly from Alfred the Great in the ninth century, so “old” would certainly apply to these Fords. None of the three Ford fami
lies, as far as anybody knew, was related to any of the others until the Frederick C. Fords’ son, Walter Buhl Ford, married “Dodie” Ford, Henry Ford II’s sister. This union created a family known locally as “the Ford-Fords.”

  Grosse Pointe started—as did Westchester County and the Philadelphia Main Line—as a resort, and the old first-cabin families built summer and weekend homes there. There was a logic to it. Detroit’s rich used to live in large city mansions along Jefferson Avenue, and the Jefferson Avenue trolley line ended at the Grosse Pointe line. Beyond that was country, and Lake St. Clair was still clear and sweet, as the name implied. Immigrant French farmers, who gave the fat point of land its name, had small, rectangular farms in the area, and as these were bought up, one by one, by the rich, roads were built along the farms’ borders, which accounts for the strict grid pattern of Grosse Pointe streets today. The French influence lingers in strange ways. A street with the odd name Kercheval is presumed to descend from the French cours de cheval—“horse path.” The old rich built along the lakeshore places that were sprawling, comfortable, countrified, but not particularly grandiose. Life in Grosse Pointe was unhurried and informal. “It was lovely in the old days,” says Countess Cyril Tolstoi, kin of the McMillans and the widow of one of Count Leo’s nephews. The countess, whose house is now on a typically crowded Grosse Pointe street, says: “This place is all that’s left of my grandfather’s farm. His property ran all the way down to the lake, which is now I don’t know how many blocks away. It was a long walk through the woods to the nearest neighbor’s house. Now Grosse Pointe is so big and crowded that when I go to parties I hardly know anybody. I’m introduced to people I’ve never even heard of.” The countess’s butler pours a martini from a silver shaker and, as if to emphasize her remarks, the tinkle of a bell from a Good Humor truck can be heard outside her heavily curtained windows. And Mrs. Raymond Dykema, another old-timer, says: “There was a feeling of importance, growing up in Grosse Pointe in those days. As a girl, I would sit on our veranda and watch the ships go by and know that my father built them. They were our ships. It made one feel as though one were a part of the city and what the city was building and creating and contributing. That feeling is all gone now.”