Real Lace

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Despite his soaringly liberal views on American atomic policy and world affairs, Uncle Tom had remained staunchly conservative in terms of his Church and family. In 1945 his niece, the beautiful Jeanne Murray, met and eloped to Philadelphia with the millionaire sportsman-playboy, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt. Jeanne had been working as a publicist for Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club, and the two had met there. For days afterward the tabloids were filled with photographs of the handsome pair. Though many an American family might be delighted to have a daughter marry a Vanderbilt, the Murrays were not. Not only was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt not a Catholic, but he had been married before, and divorced, and had a child by his former wife. Vanderbilt men, furthermore, had already acquired a poor record when it came to keeping their wives. Jeanne’s mother, Mrs. Jack Murray, was aghast when her daughter telephoned the news of the elopement, and it was weeks before she could bring herself to mail out a very few restrained wedding announcements. Most scandalized of all by Jeanne’s behavior was Uncle Tom. At the time, he called on Jeanne’s mother at her Park Avenue apartment, and told her, “You must never receive her again. She is not your daughter any longer.”

  Chapter 19

  THE BUCKLEYS OF “GREAT ELM”

  The Buckley family has always preferred to think of itself as in a somewhat special category, set apart from such families as the Murrays and the McDonnells. They are, of course, “connected.” New York Senator James L. Buckley is married to the former Ann Cooley, whose brother, Richard, was married to the former Sheila McDonnell, though the latter couple is now divorced. “We’ve never had the interest in High Society that they’ve had,” says Carol Buckley Learsy. “Our interests, as a family, have turned in other directions.”

  It is true that only a few of the Buckleys have regularly maintained a listing in the New York Social Register. The others have chosen not to be listed. And, in the 1920’s, when a social publicist approached William F. Buckley, Sr., the founder of the family fortune, and said to him, “Mr. Buckley, for a fee of three hundred dollars a month I’ll guarantee that you and your wife and children will appear once a week in society columns, and at least monthly in social magazines,” the senior Buckley replied icily, “Young man, I’ll pay you the same amount to keep me and my family out of the press.” Instead of social position, the Buckleys have devoted themselves to their principles, and such publicity as the family has had has resulted from their public expression of these principles—principles which have led the family to be labeled “America’s First Family of Conservatism.”

  The Buckleys, it sometimes seems, have always been conservative, and almost militantly so, defending their beliefs with more than a touch of steamy Irish temper. In 1793 a William Buckley of Clonmel, County Tipperary, marched to the guillotine, head held arrogantly high, for his leading role in the Royalist counterrevolution. The first Buckley to come to America had been an Orangeman—a member of the secret society organized in the North of Ireland in 1795 to defend the laws and rule of the reigning King of England, and to support the Protestant religion, but he showed his independent nature by marrying a Catholic girl from County Cork. His political stance had put him somewhat at odds with his England-hating Catholic neighbors near Killarney in the South, who took to crossing Buckley’s fields in order to reach their potato farms and pastures. He formally requested them to stop, but they stubbornly refused to comply. One day, after an argument on this subject, Buckley lifted up a plowshare and hit one of his neighbors over the head with it. He was trucked off to jail, where he languished for several weeks while the village waited to see whether the man would die. When he did not, Buckley was released and permitted to emigrate to Canada as a felon. There he took up farming again.

  His son, John Buckley, was an equally stubborn sort. He married an Irish Catholic girl named Mary Lee and then announced to her mother, “I’m taking Mary Lee to Texas.” Her mother cried, “I’d rather see her in the local graveyard than in that savage country!” But, her mother’s wishes notwithstanding, he took Mary Lee to Texas, where they settled in the border town of Washington de los Brazos. This turned out to be a fortunate move for future Buckleys. John Buckley was a great bear of a man who, in those freewheeling post-Reconstruction days, set himself up as sheriff of Duval County, and, armed with a nickel-plated Colt .45 Peacemaker, would strut into saloons to break up fights, ordering gunslinging cowboys to turn over their firearms. He prospered sufficiently to send his son, William F. Buckley, to the University of Texas, where he graduated with a law degree. With two other brothers, Edmund and Claude, William F. Buckley set up the law firm of Buckley, Buckley, & Buckley. This firm prospered, and presently was specializing in legal counsel for the various oil companies that were rapidly springing up on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border. Before long, the Buckleys were looking for—and finding—oil.

  Will Buckley was every bit as tough-minded as his father. In an era and in a part of the world where every man, including his father, carried a gun, William Buckley chose to emphasize his strength of character by going about the streets of the tiny Texas towns and Mexican villages unarmed. Unlike his contemporary, Mr. Doheny, Buckley refused to bribe Mexican officials in order to acquire oil leases, but he was nonetheless able to get his hands on a good deal of choice land. His moralistic stand on bribery did not endear him to the Mexican Government, and for a while he was stalked by an armed assassin named Monty Michael, who already had a considerable reputation as a killer and bank robber. Will Buckley’s approach to Monty Michael was typical of his approach to other problems: he disarmed Michael with his straightforwardness. Buckley knew the gunslinger was under orders to kill him, and so he went out of his way to make Michael’s assignment easier and pleasanter. Once, when he noticed Michael shadowing him down the street, he stepped over to the fellow and said, “Monty, I’m having lunch in this restaurant with a couple of friends. Why don’t you and your boys pick up something to eat in the meantime?” The baffled outlaw stammered, “But, Mr. Buckley—don’t you realize that I’ve been hired to scare you out of Mexico, and—if that doesn’t work—to kill you?” Buckley said gently, “Well, never mind about that, Monty. Meanwhile, you’ll have about an hour before I leave here.”

  Mr. Buckley began making it a point to keep Monty Michael informed of his schedule and intended whereabouts. On chilly nights, while Buckley worked late in his office and while the bad men waited outside for him in an unheated vestibule, Buckley sent out for hot sandwiches, chili, and coffee for them. One very late night, Monty and his men came crashing into Buckley’s office, their faces flushed from tequila. Each carried a Colt revolver at the hip, a cartridge-studded bandoleer over the shoulder, and all brandished sawed-off shotguns. Buckley was startled, but did not lose his composure. “Yes, Monty—what is it?” he inquired politely. Monty said, “We’ve been talking it over, Mr. Buckley. Look, the men who hired us to kill you are in the casino. They’re drunk. Now, if it’s all right by you, my friends and I’ll amble down there and blast them to kingdom come. How’s that, Mr. Buckley? We’d rather work for you.” Mr. Buckley said, “Good heavens, Monty—you can’t do that!” The bewildered outlaw shook his head and said, “Mr. Buckley, I don’t understand you. Pass up a chance like this. I just don’t understand you.” He departed with his friends, and that was the last Will Buckley ever saw of Monty Michael.

  Still, there was something about Southwestern lawlessness that rather appealed to Will Buckley. One of the stories of those days that he liked to tell involved a trip to Mexico City on a railway flatcar with his brother Edmund. There was a revolution going on and, according to Buckley, “Corpses were strung from every telephone pole for miles along the way!” Gazing with awe at the scene, the two brothers agreed, “This is a wonderful country!”

  Wonderful or not, Will Buckley’s most formidable enemy became General Obregón, the revolutionary President of Mexico, but still Buckley would not pay the expected bribes. Obregón once swore, “If I don’t live to kill Will Buckley and
his sons, my sons will live to do it.” Finally, the pressure from Obregón’s government became too much for him, and in 1921 Buckley was banished from Mexico as a “pernicious foreigner” and ordered never to return under penalty of death. Later, Buckley liked to explain to his children and friends that he could have paid the price to avoid expulsion, but that to do so would have meant sacrificing his principles, and this he would not do. Instead, he sacrificed about a million dollars’ worth of oil properties which the Mexican Government expropriated. In any question of money versus principles, he explained, a man’s principles must be served first. In 1922 he came to New York nearly penniless and proud of it. But, in the great boom market of the twenties, he plunged aggressively into Wall Street, specializing in the stocks of oil companies, which he knew best, and presently he was flat broke no longer. In fact, before he was through, he would amass another fortune in the neighborhood of $110 million.

  In 1923, for $22,000, he bought a forty-acre farm and farmhouse in Sharon, Connecticut, which he named, expansively, “Great Elm.” He added onto the house at “Great Elm” until it became the huge Georgian showplace that it is today, filled with antiques, porcelains, crystal, and silver, and presently he acquired a second winter home in Camden, South Carolina. As his tastes grew patrician, he took to sporting a fresh carnation in his buttonhole, pince-nez, and high formal collars. His became a commanding presence in New York and as he strode about the grounds of his two country estates, which he dappled with prize livestock—Merino sheep, Irish hogs, and Jersey cattle.

  He and his wife, Aloise, had ten children, and, as a parent, Mr. Buckley was both a classicist and a perfectionist. The children were tutored in French, Latin, Greek, Spanish, mathematics, history, grammar, poetry, and music. As a former Texan, he insisted that his children be able to sit a horse, and so they had a private riding instructor. Once, fearful that his sons were becoming too effetely Eastern, he imported an entire boxcarful of broncos from the West. The horses proved to be unridable by anyone but a rodeo champion, and so they eventually had to be shipped back again. And there was one Christmas morning when the senior Buckley, dressed as Santa Claus and listening to the babble of children’s voices, turned to his wife and said, “Aloise, has it occurred to you that it’s been years since we understood a word our children say?” Promptly, speech instructors were added to the international retinue of tutors in the Buckley household.

  Politically, he was, like his ancestors, every inch a royalist, standing somewhere to the right of William McKinley, and he lectured to his children endlessly on his suspicions of any kind of compromise, of government in general, and of liberals without exception. Though his relations with the Mexican Government were not cordial, he objected strenuously when President Wilson dispatched Marines to invade Veracruz. This was carrying government too far. He dispatched himself to Washington, where, as an expert on Mexican affairs, he testified before the United States Senate against the invasion, calling Wilson’s decision “typical of the provincial American, who in need of civilization himself, seeks to civilize the rest of the world.”

  He was a vociferous writer of memoranda to the various members of his family, and these dispatches might be directed to one person in particular or to all Buckleys in general. His directives advocated a continuous effort to develop the virtues of self-reliance and self-control, ambition, independence, good sportsmanship and good manners, honor, dependability, and steadfast devotion to the Roman Catholic Faith. They inveighed against smoking, slovenliness in any form, and all manifestations of indolence. A memo might take to task his daughter Maureen’s diction (which was never quite to her father’s satisfaction, despite the instructors), or it might praise his son Jim’s punctiliousness in paying back a ten-dollar loan. He particularly remonstrated against what he considered the overwhelmingly bad American habit of not listening to other people. He inveighed against divorce, overuse of alcohol, and reliance on the automobile for a journey that could be accomplished by shank’s mare.

  His memos—usually signed “W.F.B.”—overlooked few areas of his children’s lives, and were issued from wherever Mr. Buckley’s business might have taken him. Often they were touched with gentle humor. Writing to his son Bill on the subject of his younger brother, Reid, at Yale, he wrote:

  Memorandum to William F. Buckley, Jr.:

  Jane tells me that Reid has quite extensive sideburns. When he started growing them I mentioned them to him very casually and he said that that was required of the Glee Club—which sounds rather extraordinary. If you could gently suggest to him that he remove them, it would be a great relief to the family. I would rather he not belong to the Glee Club.

  And, in another, he wrote:

  Memorandum to the Buckley children:

  I have been much concerned of late with the apparent inability of any of you, at any time, to go anywhere on foot, although I am sure your mother would have informed me if any of you had been born without the walking capacity of a normal human being.

  A few of the older children, notably Priscilla, occasionally walk a few hundred yards behind a golf ball, but all the others “exercise” exclusively by sitting on a horse or a sailboat.

  Concurrently, I have noticed that the roads around Sharon are crowded with Buckley cars at all hours of the day and night, and it has been years since any of you has been able to get as far as the Town Clock, much less the Post Office, without a car, or if under 16, a car and a chauffeur.

  All the cars are left out every night in all kinds of weather, undoubtedly because of the dangerous fatigue involved in walking from the garage to the house.

  I think that each of you should consider a course of therapy designed to prevent atrophy of the leg muscles if only for aesthetic reasons, or you might even go to the extreme of attempting to regain the art of walking, by easy stages of course. The cars might then be reserved for errands covering distances of over 50 yards or so.

  Affectionately,

  FATHER

  In his penchant for memo-writing, Will Buckley was matched only by his contemporary, John B. Kelly of Philadelphia, whose grandfather had emigrated to Vermont, where he had been arrested for stuffing a ballot box. (He had been the only registered Democrat in town, but when the votes were counted there were two Democratic ballots.) Kelly, who had started out as a bricklayer, and had built his business to what was eventually the largest bricklaying concern in the United States, left a will when he died in 1960 that was close to a Buckley memo in both wit and paternal sentiment. To his chauffeur, Kelly bequeathed $1,000 with instructions that the man was to be kept on the family payroll “so long as he behaves himself well, making due allowances for minor errors of the flesh.” His unusual will continued:

  For years I have been reading last wills and testaments and I have never been able to clearly understand any of them at one reading. Therefore I will attempt to write my own will with the hope that it will be understandable and legal.

  Kids will be called “kids” and not “issue,” and it will not be cluttered up with “parties of the first part” or “per stirpes,” “perpetuities,” “quasijudicial,” “to wit” and a lot of other terms that I am sure are used only to confuse those for whose benefit it was written.

  Some lawyers will question this when they read my will; however, I have my opinion of some of them, so that makes it even.…

  I don’t want to give the impression that I am against sons-in-law. If they are the right type, they will provide for their families and what I am able to give my daughters will help pay the dress shop bills which, if they continue as they have started out, under the able tutelage of their mother, will be quite considerable.…

  I can think of nothing more ghastly than the heirs sitting around, listening to some representative reading a will. They always remind me of buzzards and vultures awaiting the last breath of the stricken. Therefore, I will try to spare you that ordeal and let you read the will before I go to my reward.…

  As for me, just shed a resp
ectful tear if you think I merit it, but I am sure that you are all intelligent enough not to weep all over the place. I have watched a few emotional scenes at graves, such as trying to jump into same, fainting, etc., but the thoroughbred grieves in the heart.

  Not that my passing should occasion any “scenes,” for the simple reason that life owes me nothing. I have ranged far and wide, have really run the gamut of life. I have known great sorrow and great joy. I have had more than my share of success.

  In this document I can only give you things, but if I had the choice to give you worldly goods or character, I would give you character. The reason I say this is that, with character, you will get worldly goods, because character is loyalty, honesty, ability, sportsmanship and, I hope, a sense of humor.…

  After ticking off the various bequests to his wife and children, and making it clear that Prince Rainier of Monaco was not to get his hands on any funds inherited by the daughter Kelly mischievously referred to as “Her Serene Highness, Princess Grace,” he added:

  If I don’t stop soon this will be as long as “Gone With the Wind.” So just remember, when I shove off for greener pastures or whatever it is on the other side of the curtain, that I do it unafraid and, if you must know, a little curious.

  He signed his will in green ink. It was all perfectly legal.

  Because he had waited until the age of thirty-six to marry, Will Buckley was regarded, particularly by the younger children, more as a grandfather than a father, and this fact contributed to the awe he was able to inspire among them. The words “I’d like to see you in the Empire Room after lunch” were sufficient to strike cold terror in the heart of an errant child. The meeting in the Empire Room at “Great Elm” would inevitably begin, behind closed doors, with a few general questions: “How are you doing at school?” and so on. Then the senior Buckley would get right to the point: “Reid, I’ve called you in for this talk because I was very sorry to hear that you lost your temper again last week and hit Maureen over the head with a golf club. Did you?” “It was a croquet mallet, Father.” “I am not going to put up with that kind of behavior,” he would begin, and continue with a long, stern lecture on the inadvisability of boys hitting girls, and the importance of manly self-control. At dinner that night, the chastised child would sit in shamefaced silence, so deeply felt was a Buckley’s guilt at having offended the patriarch. But the children loved their father. Within a few days after one of these sessions in the Empire Room, there usually came in the mail, addressed to the errant child, a large check.