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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF STEPHEN BIRMINGHAM
The Auerbach Will
A New York Times Bestseller
“Has the magic word ‘bestseller’ written all over it … Birmingham’s narrative drive never falters and his characters are utterly convincing.” —John Barkham Reviews
“Delicious secrets—scandals, blackmail, affairs, adultery … the gossipy Uptown/Downtown milieu Birmingham knows so well.” —Kirkus Reviews
“An engrossing family saga.” —USA Today
“Colorful, riveting, bubbling like champagne.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Poignant and engrossing … Has all the ingredients for a bestseller.” —Publishers Weekly
The Rest of Us
A New York Times Bestseller
“Breezy and entertaining, full of gossip and spice!” —The Washington Post
“Rich anecdotal and dramatic material … Prime social-vaudeville entertainment.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Wonderful stories … All are interesting and many are truly inspirational.” —The Dallas Morning News
“Entertaining from first page to last … Those who read it will be better for the experience.” —Chattanooga Times Free Press
“Birmingham writes with a deft pen and insightful researcher’s eye.” —The Cincinnati Enquirer
“Mixing facts, gossip, and insight … The narrative is engaging.” —Library Journal
“Immensely readable … Told with a narrative flair certain to win many readers.” —Publishers Weekly
The Right People
A New York Times Bestseller
“Platinum mounted … The mind boggles.” —San Francisco Examiner
“To those who say society is dead, Stephen Birmingham offers evidence that it is alive and well.” —Newsweek
“The games some people play … manners among the moneyed WASPs of America … The best book of its kind.” —Look
“The beautiful people of le beau monde … Mrs. Adolf Spreckels with her twenty-five bathrooms … Dorothy Spreckels Munn’s chinchilla bedspread … the ‘St. Grottlesex Set’ of the New England prep schools, sockless in blazers … the clubs … the social sports … love and marriage—which seem to be the only aspect which might get grubbier. It’s all entertaining.” —Kirkus Reviews
“It glitters and sparkles.… You’ll love The Right People.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A ‘fun’ book about America’s snobocracy … Rich in curiosa … More entertaining than Our Crowd … Stephen Birmingham has done a masterly job.” —Saturday Review
“Take a look at some of his topics: the right prep schools, the coming out party, the social rankings of the various colleges, the Junior League, the ultra-exclusive clubs, the places to live, the places to play, why the rich marry the rich, how they raise their children.… This is an ‘inside’ book.” —The Washington Star
“All the creamy people … The taboo delight of a hidden American aristocracy with all its camouflages stripped away.” —Tom Wolfe, Chicago Sun-Times
The Wrong Kind of Money
“Fast and wonderful. Something for everyone.” —The Cincinnati Enquirer
“Dark doings in Manhattan castles, done with juicy excess. A titillating novel that reads like a dream. Stunning.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Birmingham … certainly keeps the pages turning. Fans will feel at home.” —The Baltimore Sun
Real Lace
America’s Irish Rich
Stephen Birmingham
For my father,
Thomas J. Birmingham
Codla saimh dhiubh agus slan libh
CONTENTS
Foreword
PART ONE. THE F.I.F.’S
1 “What Happened?”
2 In the Beginning
3 “Everything but the Light Bulb”
4 “Murray Bay”
5 Mr. McDonnell’s Gimmick
6 The Greatest Nose Count of Them All
7 The Original Butter-and-Egg Man
8 The Wedding of the Century
PART TWO. THE WHEELER-DEALERS
9 “Ma and Pa D.”
10 The Bubble Breaks
11 The Decline of Mr. Fall
12 The Silver Kings
13 Mr. Ryan’s Fortune
14 And for My Eldest Son, One Set of Pearl Studs
15 The Troubles of One House
16 Why Don’t the Nice People Like Us?
PART THREE. HIGH SOCIETY
17 The Duchess Brady
18 “Atomic Tom”
19 The Buckleys of “Great Elm”
20 The Upward Climb
21 Sons of the Priory, Daughters of the Sacred Heart
22 Royalty
PART FOUR. WHAT DID HAPPEN
23 Problems in the Back Office
24 To the Bitter End
25 Aftermath
26 “Robert the Roué”
Appendix
Index
About the Author
FOREWORD
I grew up in a small New England city where Irish Catholics, or those of “Irish extraction,” were not asked to join the country club, and so—being of that extraction myself—I have long been aware of the strong, and at the same time vulnerable, position of the Irish in American life. But more than my own personal experiences and sentiments have gone into the production of this book, and there are a number of people whom I would like to thank for their assistance, insights, impressions, memories, and materials. Most particularly I am grateful to Mr. John Murray Cuddihy of New York for access to his voluminous data on the Murray-Cuddihy-Bradley-McDonnell family complex, as well as for his own considerable researches on the general topic of the Irish in America. I am also indebted to Mr. Cuddihy’s wife, Harriet De Haven Cuddihy, for help as well as for hospitality, nor should I overlook the two older Cuddihy children, Heidi and John, who—despite the fact that they have a perfect attendance record at their Episcopalian Sunday school classes at St. Thomas’s—helped make the many hours I spent in the Cuddihy household researching their Irish Catholic antecedents peaceful and productive.
I am also deeply grateful to Mr. Cuddihy’s sister, Mary Jane Cuddihy MacGuire of Ste. Agathe, Quebec, for photographs, family recollections, and guidance in both Church and family matters, and I should also thank the Cuddihys’ mother, Mrs. H. Lester Cuddihy, for her help and support. Mrs. Charlotte McDonnell Harris of New York was of great assistance with McDonnell family anecdotes, and Mr. John F. Murray, Jr. of Wainscott, New York, was similarly helpful in terms of his family, the Murrays.
Because many of the Irish families were large, the list of people who have helped me with this book is long, but there are certain individuals to whom I owe a special word of thanks. I would like to thank Mr. and Mrs. Donald W. Marshall of Bedford Hills, New York; Mrs. Alison Murray of Weston, Connecticut; Mr. Clendenin J. Ryan III of Far Hills, New Jersey; Father Regis Ryan, S.J., Mr. J. Patrick Lannan, Miss Mary Pritchard, Miss Martha Butler, Miss Margaret Thalken, Mrs. Marianne Strong, and Miss Julia McCarthy, all of New York, and the Hon. John D. J. Moore of Dublin who, from the outset, took a lively interest in, and encouraged, this project. I would also like to thank Mr. Joseph T. P. Sullivan, President-General of the American Irish Historical Society, for his interest and help. I am grateful to Mrs. Carol Buckley Learsy of New York for permission to quote from letters and memoranda of her late father, William F. Buckley, Sr.; to Father Robert J. Gannon, S.J., for permission to quote from the diaries and letters of the late Francis Cardinal Spellman; and to Mr. William G. Post of Rye, New York, for permission to quote a letter
from his grandmother, Emily Post.
A number of authors proved important sources for this book, including Father Gannon with his biography of Cardinal Spellman; M. R. Werner and John Starr, whose Teapot Dome provided excellent insights into the career of Edward L. Doheny; and L. Clayton Dubois, whose revealing analysis of the Buckley family was published in the New York Times Magazine. Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger offers probably the best account of the Irish potato famine, and John Brooks’s Once in Golconda presents by far the most thorough and accurate version of the rise and fall of Allan A. Ryan.
At Harper & Row, I am grateful to my editors, Cass Canfield, Sr. and Mrs. Frances Lindley, for their help and encouragement. As always, I am indebted to my literary agent, Carol Brandt, for guiding the project throughout with cool precision.
And yet, while all of the above have contributed greatly to my book, I alone must be held accountable for any shortcomings or inaccuracies which may appear.
S.B.
Part One
THE F.I.F.’S.
Chapter 1
“WHAT HAPPENED?”
On an unseasonably warm early spring evening, Thursday, March 12, 1970, strollers past the tall glass windows of McDonnell & Company’s main uptown office at 250 Park Avenue were presented with a curious sight. It was as though, someone commented, burglars had rifled the elegantly decorated offices of this, one of New York’s oldest and most respected brokerage houses. Drawers of filing cabinets and secretaries’ desks hung open, with papers cascading out and strewn about the floor, wastebaskets were overturned disgorging their contents, and lampshades were standing at rakish angles. New Yorkers in the neighborhood had become accustomed, over the years of the firm’s tenancy at that prestigious address, to the normally tidy and ordered appearance of the offices behind the big panes of glass. Now, in their dishevelment, the offices looked as if they had been hastily, even angrily, vacated by the entire McDonnell & Company staff. “What’s happening here?” one puzzled spectator asked.
The next morning, the New York Times provided the ominous answer. The staff had indeed left hurriedly and in some distress the night before because, after sixty-five years in business, McDonnell & Company and its chairman and chief executive officer, T. Murray McDonnell, had, as a result of a spiraling and tangled series of fiscal problems that had at last become insoluble, announced its financial collapse, with over $20 million in debts.
The firm’s troubles, it seemed, were the immediate result of the 1969–1970 stock market decline, the so-called Nixon Recession. McDonnell & Company had become the first major Wall Street house to fall victim to this decline (there would soon be a number of other firms to go under). But the firm’s woes appeared to extend much further than this. It was soon announced that Murray McDonnell himself was being singlehandedly held responsible for his company’s demise, and in a sharply worded statement the New York Stock Exchange accused McDonnell of “failure to provide adequate supervision and control, and … violation of capital, bookkeeping and segregation rules.” The Exchange noted that, in an offer of settlement, “Mr. McDonnell consented to a suspension as a registered representative for a period of 12 months.… In addition, Mr. McDonnell further consented to an imposition of a penalty that he will not make application for, nor be granted, the position of an allied member or member of the Exchange or any supervisory position with any member or members of the Exchange.” This latter punishment, a particularly harsh one, in effect permanently barred Murray McDonnell from ever again becoming an officer or partner of a Big Board member firm—for the rest of his natural life.
Reached by telephone at his home in Peapack, New Jersey, Murray McDonnell said that the suspension from working as a registered representative (which is the formal title for a securities salesman) was “the only thing I think is tough.” It seemed an oddly lighthearted dismissal of the situation. And yet, a few days later, Murray McDonnell, looking shaken and tired, was seen emerging from the residence of Terence Cardinal Cooke behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Madison Avenue, after a conference with the Cardinal. Murray McDonnell was also the chief financial adviser for the Archdiocese of New York, and had for a number of years been managing the quite considerable Archdiocesan funds.
The 1970 failure of McDonnell & Company was more than a gloomy bellwether of worse Wall Street days to come, and more than a personal tragedy and fall from grace of the son of the founder of the company. It was also a stunning blow to a vast, and vastly scattered, family—a blow that would set brothers against sisters, mothers against sons. And it seemed like the dismal final chapter to one of the most brilliant business and social success stories in America, which had been the rise to enormous prominece of the huge and intricately interrelated McDonnell-Murray-Cuddihy families, who, in their heyday, helped make Southampton, Long Island, a fashionable summer resort, and who had often set that community on its ear—such as the time pretty Mary Jane Cuddihy dated Errol Flynn. At one point, the McDonnell apartment at 910 Fifth Avenue had been the largest single apartment in New York, a duplex and a simplex thrown together to accommodate the fourteen children of Mr. and Mrs. James Francis McDonnell (the former Anna Murray). When the dining room chandelier in that apartment crashed to the table one day, the Home Insurance Company paid a $100,000 claim. In Southampton, the McDonnell summer house had required a staff of sixteen servants—or exactly one for each member of the family—and, what with all the Murray and Cuddihy cousins in the family compound, there were never less than twenty for Sunday dinner, with four huge turkeys in the oven to feed them. There were yachts, Daimlers, racing stables, a polo field. In happier days in Peapack, Murray McDonnell had had, as his house guests, the likes of Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her children, in keeping with Mrs. Onassis’s policy of camouflaging her own children with hordes of others so that photographers had difficulty telling one child from another.
The Murrays, McDonnells, and Cuddihys had, furthermore, in just three generations’ time, not only managed to decorate voluminously the pages of the Social Register in various American cities, but they had also managed to ally themselves, through marriage, to a number of other American and international fortunes. Murray McDonnell’s sister Anne, for example, had married Henry Ford II in what had been described at the time as “The Wedding of the Century.” A first cousin, Jeanne, had eloped with Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, and another married a Byers from Pittsburgh, related to Mellons. A niece had been married to the Greek shipping tycoon, Stavros Niarchos, and another to an Italian named Giancarlo Uzielli. The relationships became so mind-boggling that when, not long ago, one of Murray McDonnell’s sisters was asked to list her own brothers and sisters in the order of their ages, she could not do so—though her mother, Anna Murray McDonnell, remembers the names and birthdays of all her sixty-five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. When, in 1957, one of Grandpa Thomas E. Murray’s heirs petitioned, through the Kings County Court in Brooklyn, for a change in the trust set up by his grandfather, all the possible recipients of funds from the trust had to be notified. A legal document addressed to a total of 152* different people had to be composed—people with names such as Cooley, Murphy, Hennessy, Conniff, Sullivan, Harris, MacGuire, Cavanagh, Sheridan, as well as Murray, McDonnell, Cuddihy, Ford, Vanderbilt, Niarchos, and Uzielli, and including several Jesuit priests and at least one Sacred Heart nun. Lawyers had to travel to such places as San Francisco and Beirut to track down signatures.
And now, with the liquidation of McDonnell & Company, and family affairs in a shambles, it seemed that, in just three generations, a whole segment of this dynasty had fallen by the wayside. One episode in the glittering and complicated saga of the American Catholic rich had ended—or, as one of Murray McDonnell’s sisters, Charlotte McDonnell Harris, put it dryly at the time, “The Catholic ex-rich—thanks to my brother.”
What did happen? It is a story that begins, just a little more than a century ago, in the bogs and narrow country lanes of Ireland.
* A l
ater petition, in 1966, turned 241 beneficiaries.
Chapter 2
IN THE BEGINNING
The little town of Drumlish (population 212), County Longford, some fifty miles northwest of Dublin, is a hamlet which contains, in addition to a cluster of stained and woebegone houses all along a single street, a trim little church, a parish house, a greengrocer’s shop, and a pub. A few farms dot the surrounding hills, but that is all. There is only one visible beggar in the town—an aging crone in a black shawl, who wanders up and down the street with hand outstretched to the occasional tourist or passer-by, seeking funds, she says, to send to ailing relatives across the county. But otherwise the atmosphere of Drumlish is one of hard and steady poverty.
There are few people in the town today who remember the McDonnells. One man pauses, scratches his head under his gray cap and says, “Yes, there was a McDonnell who had a farm, years ago, on the hill up there. Decent folk, the McDonnells were. But they’re all gone now.” Other villagers associate the name with great wealth in America, but look startled when told that, until a few years ago, one American McDonnell was married to a man named Henry Ford. “Gotten very fancy, have they?” they ask. And there is a story told in the local pub—possibly apocryphal, as are so many stories told in this land of dreamers and tellers of tall tales—of a rich McDonnell who came back, a long time ago, to visit relatives and old friends in Ireland. At the pub, this McDonnell encountered an old schoolmate from boyhood days, recognized him, clapped the fellow on the back, and said, “Paddy, I remember in the third grade when you came to school in your first pair of shoes!” Slyly the Drumlisher eyed the American for a moment and said, “Yes, and I remember you asking me what they were.”
It is true that in the 1940’s the late James Francis McDonnell, at that point a millionaire, who headed the Wall Street firm of McDonnell & Company with assets in the tens of millions, took his wife and tribe of fourteen children back to Ireland to inspect the McDonnell roots in Drumlish. The family and their retinue of servants took over a huge section of First Class on the old Queen Elizabeth and, as the children recall it, when the family got to Dublin, they managed to “demolish” a good deal of the fashionable Gresham Hotel. There was a great flurry of interest in the Dublin press about the visitors, and the McDonnell children amused themselves by granting interviews and giving out fanciful accounts to the reporters, with exaggerated descriptions of the family yachts, polo ponies, houses, and motorcars. Then James Francis McDonnell engaged a fleet of Daimlers with chauffeurs to take the family to Drumlish, which none of them had ever seen. The visit was, in many ways, a disappointment, for Drumlish was no more prepossessing then than it is today. But the children visited the grocery store and were treated to lemon squashes, and the villagers sang songs and danced jigs for the assembled family, at the patriarch’s request. Outside, in the street, a little boy was playing in the dust and the senior McDonnell stepped across to the lad and asked him his name. “Peter McDonnell, sir!” the boy replied. Delighted that he had found some sort of relative, James Francis McDonnell stepped over to his Daimler, and returned with a sackful of copper pennies, which he presented to the owl-eyed child.
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