The Golden Dream

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  But though the Main Line may have been created by artifice and public relations, it has now become extremely serious and solid. And for all its diversity and contradictions, there is a uniformity of feeling on the Main Line, a consistency of tone. Also, though some American suburbs have almost managed to insulate themselves completely from their parent cities—as, say, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, appears to have fully seceded from Detroit—the Main Line towns are always conscious that they are a part, and an important part, of that historic good gray entity that is the City of Brotherly Love and the Cradle of Liberty. There are attitudes and aspects of the Main Line that seem indigenous not only to it but to Philadelphia as well. “The most astonishing thing to me about the place,” says one woman, “is how many people move here from other parts of the country, and begin acting exactly like ‘old’ Main Liners. They begin to dress Main Line and talk Main Line and think Main Line.” This, of course, is due to the towering influence of the Old Guard of Philadelphia society—the Ingersolls, the Biddies, the Robertses, the Morrises, the Wisters, and so on—upon the rest of the populace, and to the tremendous respect in which the Old Guard is held. One New York man whose Main Line friends are newcomers to the area said not long ago: “There’s a funny Main Line practice, have you noticed? The minute you arrive, they pile you into their car and take you on a tour of the best neighborhoods, pointing out all the houses of all the rich people they don’t know.” Old Guard Main Line society is, of course, quite aware that its style and behavior are being studied. This gives the Old Guard a sense of purpose, duty, and responsibility. It must set the tone and point the way.

  “My God!” said one young woman the other day. “My daughter’s started talking with that Main Line accent. She’s picked it up at school. She’s even started using Main Line words, like ‘yummy’ and ‘super.’” As for the accent, Mrs. Hugh Best of Wayne calls it “Philadelphia paralysis,” or “Main Line lockjaw,” pointing out that it is not unlike “Massachusetts malocclusion.” Mrs. Best, who was raised in Southern California, recalls that when she first moved to the Main Line, a native said to her: “My dear, you have the most beautiful speaking voice. I can understand every word you say!” And another parent swears that in her daughter’s elocution class at the Shipley School the children were taught to speak correctly by clamping a pencil tightly between their jaws and then saying what they had to say.

  Some observers have noticed a slight improvement in Main Line couture in recent years, and give the credit to such New York stores as Bonwit Teller and Lord & Taylor, which have opened Main Line branches. But the rule is still “Nothing flashy, nothing low-cut” when it comes to women’s clothes, and the Main Line uniform still relies heavily on the conservative services of Nan Duskin and Peck & Peck, with perhaps, for the adventurous, a touch of New York’s Bermuda Shop. For spring: print cotton blouse by McMullen, cotton skirt; for summer, print cotton blouse by McMullen with a gold circle pin on the collar; for fall, cardigan sweater, pearls, tweed skirt; for winter, good black suit, pearls, mink jacket, and perhaps a little hat for lunch at the Barclay.

  “Most of us have gotten a little better,” says one woman, “but there are, I’ll admit, a lot of women here who think it’s all right to go to a dinner party dressed for golf.” As for men, the Philadelphia banking and law community have always set the style, which is Brooks Brothers’ best. “In dress, we’re very English here,” says one man. “A lot of men have their suits made in London and—well—you know how kind of funny English tailoring fits.” Philadelphia lawyers and bankers are also respectably a little out of press, and since they set the tone, other Philadelphia men follow their example. One man, who is particular about his clothes (and buys them in foreign places like New York and Beverly Hills) and is partial to Gucci loafers, admits that he is teased and kidded by his business associates for “trying to dress fancy, like a New Yorker.”

  But even more distinctive than the Main Line speech and dress is the Main Line manner, which is often unsettlingly aloof and distant. Some attribute this to a certain shyness and a faint feeling that, au fond, Philadelphia is a somewhat second-rate city for which one must in the long run apologize. Others insist that it is just the opposite: snobbishness, and an intractable sense of superiority. One out-of-town houseguest who was taken to a series of Main Line parties recently complained that, while the food was indeed good—and perhaps better than that in Boston—he was never introduced to anybody. “Well,” said his Philadelphia host, “the feeling here is that if you have to be introduced to people, you shouldn’t have been invited—if you didn’t know everybody already, you wouldn’t have been there.”

  “How very calm all these people seem,” said one young woman who was visiting the Main Line. Whether she intended this as praise, or whether she found Main Line calmness faintly off-putting, is hard to say, but since she was from New York, one suspects the latter. New Yorkers enjoy their rapid, competitive pace. A Philadelphian compares Philadelphia with New York this way: “In New York, everybody is so busy making money. In Philadelphia, we have made money.” Others point out that in New York men rarely get drunk at parties; they’re too busy doing business. In Philadelphia, on the other hand, men get drunk at parties rather a lot. Some even say that there is a palpable difference between the way commuter trains leave Grand Central Station for Westchester County and the way the Paoli Local leaves for Bryn Mawr. The New York trains start off with a jolt and a seat-shaking rattle, followed by a lurch, while all the lights flash off and on. The Philadelphia trains, they say, glide out of the station.

  A curious negativism also floats in the Main Line air. “Oh, I don’t think so,” is apt to be the reaction to almost any suggestion. There is a tendency to run everything down a bit—other people, other cities, other parts of the Main Line itself. You may be invited to a club or restaurant where, you will be warned in advance, the food isn’t very good—hardly edible, in fact. If you ask whether there isn’t perhaps a better place, you will be told that yes, there is, but it is always so crowded that no one can ever get a table. You may be invited for a weekend on the Main Line but, your hostess will explain beforehand, you won’t have a very good time; you’ll probably be bored stiff; there’s nothing to do. “It isn’t like Beverly Hills, you know.” Main Liners spend a great deal of time emphasizing what the Main Line isn’t. “It isn’t like New York … it isn’t like Chicago … it isn’t like Washington … it isn’t like Wilmington. Wilmington is nothing except Du Ponts.”

  The Main Liner usually turns out to be against most things—most developments, that is, or anything new. He is against high-rise apartments, against public housing, against day-care centers, against busing, against newcomers—so contagiously that even newcomers who have moved into high-rise apartments quickly become against other high-rises and other newcomers. The Main Liner is strongly Republican, but when he talks politics, he is more anti-Democrat than anything else. When he talks about what is wrong in Philadelphia, it is in terms of what is even more wrong with New York.

  But an even more pronounced characteristic of the Main Liner is his imperturbability. His composure is complete and nothing astonishes him or ruffles him. The Main Liner is proudest of his poise—of how, even in the most awkward moments, he can rise to the occasion grandly and with perfect aplomb. There are, for instance, an unusual number of Main Line stories—most of them surely apocryphal—of how well-placed Main Line ladies have dealt with underpants crises. If all the stories are true, something like Legionnaires’ Disease must have affected the elastic in local panties, because panties seem to have descended with alarming frequency here, and always in important places: while standing in a receiving line at the Assembly, while walking down the aisle of Old St. David’s Church (Episcopal) in Radnor, or while leaving the restaurant at the Barclay. One story has the lady in question merely stooping to collect the fallen garment and putting it quietly in her purse while continuing to shake hands. Another has the debutante picking up the panties and ha
nding them to her escort without comment. Another has her merely stepping out of the collapsed lingerie and signaling to a waiter to carry it away. All these underpants stories are recited with a chuckle but also with respect for the lady in question’s cool self-possession in a situation which would have reduced lesser mortals to crimson-faced embarrassment.

  This nil admirari attitude often means that the Main Liner discovers something that he is very much against long after it is too late to do anything about it. It is characteristic of the Main Line that the huge shopping center in Wynnewood which contained, among other things, a large new branch of Wanamaker’s was completed and open for business before a local group was organzied to oppose its construction. One woman, who resents the prevailing apathy to the continuing spoliation of the local landscape, says: “I swear that these old Main Line people don’t even see what’s going on around them. They think it’s beneath their dignity to even notice such matters. One morning they’ll wake up and see that it’s happened—that there just isn’t any Main Line anymore. They live in their gilded ghettos, and if something ugly is going on next door, they simply draw their curtains, like ostriches burying their heads in the sand.”

  The late Mrs. Katherine MacMullan, a social secretary and party-planner who, for years, ruled the social seas of Philadelphia from a modest flat in the Rittenhouse Tower, once said: “The old money here just hasn’t stood up against the new money the way it should have done.” This is an interesting principle. Old money, in other words, should resist the invasion of new money—the kind of money that builds, and lives in, high-rises—as a principle of aristocratic rule. It is the incursion of “new money” into the Main Line, and the Old Guard’s failure to fight back, that has brought down many of the old barriers of class versus mass. There ought to have been a law.

  Other unwritten Philadelphia laws have fallen by the wayside. It used to be a law that you should “Never speak to a new neighbor until you have seen her wash hung out on the line. That way you can decide whether she is someone you want to know.” Still another was: “Never speak to fellow passengers on shipboard until you are four days out.” And another was: “It takes at least three generations before a family can be accepted here.” Now people say: “Look at the Liddon Pennocks: they’re new, but they’re accepted everywhere. And what’s more, he’s a florist—he’s in trade.” It used to be that no Jews or blacks were welcome on the Main Line. But today, the Walter Annenbergs, who generously support the arts and who give splendid entertainments, are pretty much accepted everywhere, even though Mr. Annenberg’s father spent a certain amount of time in a federal penitentiary. As one woman puts it: “Anyone who is worth ten million dollars or more ceases to be Jewish.” The same rule may eventually apply to wealthy blacks, but meanwhile any number of well-to-do black families have moved to the Main Line without incident.

  Society here, as elsewhere, has been for years involved in the business of creating enduring families—families bound by blood and common interest—and in building with these families an enduring community of wealth. But a camel has staggered into the tent: the newcomers. They cannot be overlooked. (“I’m really very anxious to meet some of these new people,” said—anxiously—a mother of a debutante daughter, “but of course I want to meet attractive new people.”) At the same time, the Main Line was several years ago presented with a shocking statistic: roughly 30 percent of its young people, according to a study made at Villanova University, are moving out of the Main Line and to other parts of the United States. There are deserters in Main Line society’s ranks. Actually, the percentage of deserters is not statistically larger here than in any other prosperous American suburb, but that does not console the Main Line, which always supposed that it deserved special statistics. It is a bitter pill to be told that what is happening everywhere is now happening here, on the Main Line: the young are flying from their golden nests.

  But the inner, Old Guard Main Line is not all that alarmed by what the future holds. As Mrs. John Wintersteen—very Old Guard, whose collection of Picassos alone would make her a millionairess—put it not long ago: “In one form or another, there will always be a Main Line.” And there are young people from her circle of friends who would seem to back her up. Not quite ten years ago, a nineteen-year-old youth named Alan McIlvain, Jr., was asked to write an essay which outlined his life’s goals. McIlvain is an heir to a fortune which the J. Gibson McIlvain Company, one of the largest wholesale lumber companies on the East Coast and one of the oldest family-owned businesses in America, has been building for him and other McIlvains for nearly one hundred eighty years.

  Young McIlvain’s essay demonstrated that the Old Main Line Values were still alive and springing in at least some breasts. “I plan to enter the business in the tradition of my forefathers,” he wrote. He went on to list his favorite pastimes, which included all the proper sports of a proper Main Line gentleman: hunting, fishing, skin diving, soccer, tennis, squash, and swimming, “in their designated seasons.” (No football or baseball, mind you.) He also allowed that he was properly interested in young ladies in their designated seasons. He displayed a correct aloofness toward politics and politicians: “Though I enjoy trying to analyze political strategy, I would never seriously consider entering politics.” Looking again, he said: “Besides just inheriting the business, I want to improve and utilize it to its benefit. I hope to exploit [sic] new fields, and exercise the knowledge I will have spent so many years receiving. I would also like to have a happy social life by marrying and settling down in the Main Line.”

  That was in 1968. And that is precisely how, and where, he has settled today.

  *In Westchester County, one can keep track of the station stops by memorizing: “When the pie was opened, the birds began to cry, ‘Larchmont, Mamaroneck, Harrison, and Rye.’”

  16

  Summer Camps

  A suburbanite is probably lucky if he has a second home to go to in the summer, a “summer camp.” A certain distaste for one’s regular surroundings is maybe a healthy thing. A second home is a handy vent for anger and impatience: It’s good to get away, good to get back, as the cliché goes. Only a few Cincinnatians go away for the summer; they’re too content where they are. No one to speak of in Hudson goes away in summer. New Yorkers, on the other hand, who distrust their city as much as they adore it, could not tolerate the summer without the Hamptons, Connecticut, or the Jersey shore. Boston suburbanites troop off to the Cape, or to Edgartown, Chilmark, and West Chop on Martha’s Vineyard. Main Line families gather at Northeast Harbor, Maine. Certain resorts, in other words, become suburbs of the suburbs.

  Watch Hill, Rhode Island, is one of these suburban suburbs, and it is also, by conicidence, a suburb of the neighboring town of Westerly. Mr. and Mrs. Paul Myers, furthermore, are an exception to the rule—a Cincinnati couple who own a large house in suburban Hyde Park, with a swimming pool and extensive gardens, and yet summer regularly at this pocket-size resort. The Myerses’ two teenage children, in fact, represent the fifth generation of Mrs. Myers’s family who have summered at Watch Hill.

  When Suzie Myers, an attractive woman in her forties who keeps a year-round tan, was a girl, only one event, as far as she remembers, disrupted the tranquillity of the otherwise long, sunny, and breeze-swept summer days. It occurred at the height of the Great Hurricane of 1938, when Mrs. Myers’s Grandmother Anderson was visiting her friend Mrs. Shinkle and the ladies were having their customary afternoon of bridge. Presently Grandmother Anderson, consulting her watch, remarked that it was several minutes past the time she had instructed her chauffeur, Walter, to pick her up and take her home. While the storm raged on, and Walter still failed to appear, Mrs. Anderson became increasingly annoyed. There was a dinner party to dress for, and so forth. When Walter finally appeared, drenching wet and close to hysteria, he explained that not only the car but the entire garage containing it had been swept into the sea. “Nevertheless, Walter,” Mrs. Anderson said crisply, “you must learn to be
more punctual.”

  Watch Hill is that sort of place. Nothing much has disturbed its peace or ruffled its composure since the 1880s, when wealthy businessmen from Hartford, New York, and the Middle West began coming to Watch Hill for duck-shooting, and presently began building large, shingled summer homes for their families on this tiny promontory of land overlooking the ocean. (Watch Hill is the highest point of Atlantic coastline, they say, between North Carolina and Maine, and from it on a clear day there is a view of three states: Connecticut to the west, Fishers Island, New York, to the south, and of course Rhode Island.) Since then, little has changed.

  The old-line Yankee names of the town fathers—names like Nash, Crandall, Vose, and Brewer—are still there, leading the year-round business community. So are the old-line moneyed-society names of the summer colony: the John S. Burkes (ex-B. Altman and Company), the Hunter S. Marstons (American Home Products), the Whitney Addingtons (Sears, Roebuck), the Hugh Chisolms, the Jack Heminways, the George Y. Wheelers, the Britton Browns, the Reginald Fullertons, the George Lauders, and Mrs. George M. Laughlin (Jones & Laughlin Steel). These are, as the Yankees say, “the swells,” who still live in the big, drafty, unheated houses their grandfathers or great-grandfathers built, houses with cavernous basement kitchens and dining rooms served by dumbwaiters. Not long ago, “some real estate people named Murphy” built a modern house, but as Watch Hill says, “We don’t know them.” Other than that, Watch Hill, as a summer colony, has remained a pocket of Victoriana on the New England shore.