Real Lace

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Look out for children” signs along the elm-shaded, oiled streets of Southampton might be the clew to the family life that characterizes this peaceful society resort.…

  Junior activity could fill a social column, what with James F. MacDonald’s [sic—editors of 1938 seem not yet to have learned the correct spelling of the McDonnell name] fourteen children (Mrs. MacDonald was Anna Murray), the seven children, including post debutantes Rosamund and Therese [sic], of the Joseph Bradley Murray’s; the eleven children of the Thomas E. Murray, Jr.’s; the H. Lester Cuddihys’ attractive offspring—Mary Jane—who makes her debut this season; H. Lester, Jr. and John M. Cuddihy, to mention a few. Mrs. Cuddihy is the former Julia Murray. Pat and Jean [sic] are the daughters of Mrs. John F. Murray.…

  As if the number of Murrays wasn’t enough to tax a society editor, there are two Catherines—one, daughter of Mrs. John F. Murray, of Lighthouse Farm; the other, daughter of the James F. MacDonalds, of East Wickapogue Cottage.

  Thomas E. Murray 3rd is the son of the Thomas E. Jr.’s, while Thomas E. Murray 2nd, is the son of Mrs. John F. Murray.

  There are enough Murray children for a gymkhana all their own.… There are always Murray children taking part in these events at local and national horse shows.…

  Reports like this, with their somewhat mocking tone, seem to be making the point that to have many children, which is part of being a good Catholic, is rather vulgar. And, though the above article never says so, the implication is clear enough: These are rich, Irish, baby-having Catholics.

  Interestingly enough, in Catholic High Society in New York, at least two of the grandest grandes dames have not been Irish. One was the late Mrs. Robert Louis Hoguet, a woman of imposing social importance in Catholic affairs, and the Hoguets today are still extremely prominent Mrs. Hoguet had a rather shrill speaking voice, and one day when she telephoned Mrs. H. Lester Cuddihy on some matter, Mrs. Cuddihy assumed that it was one of her friends trying to be funny, and she imitated the shrill voice back to her caller. When she realized that it was Louise Hoguet, she knew that she had committed a sizable social gaffe. The other lady, still very much around, is Mrs. Christopher Billopp Wyatt, the mother of actress Jane Wyatt. Mrs. Wyatt’s full name—Euphemia Van Rensselaer Waddington Wyatt—is the longest name in the Social Register. Families like the Hoguets and the Wyatts may consider themselves a little “better” than the Irish families, but they do their best not to let their feelings show.

  There are a number of Catholic social institutions in New York. One of these is the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner, usually held at the Waldorf-Astoria. A glance at any one of the souvenir programs and seating plans for this event tells an interesting story, and reveals the nature of the Catholic hierarchy in the city. Among the thousands of guests seated in relative anonymity on the main floor of the ballroom at the 1945 event were, for example, people named De Arango, Jacobi, Algase, Calderazzo, Valente, Di Lorenzo, Costelli, Nigro, Bardia, La Rotunda, Mecca, Quaranta, and Borgia. Up on the dais, seated front and center, along with such dignitaries as John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and James V. Forrestal and Archbishop Spellman, were Mrs. James F. McDonnell, Philip A. Murray, Basil Harris (married to a Murray), Thomas E. Murray, Joseph P. Ryan, Joseph P. Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy. Perhaps because they were not Irish, Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Hoguet were not placed on the dais.

  Then there is New York’s Gotham Ball, an annual event that evolved out of the Gotham Dances, first organized in 1912 for subdebutantes and preparatory-school boys of “good” Catholic families. The Gotham Ball, usually held at the Plaza, is now New York’s leading Catholic debutante affair. The Ball benefits the New York Foundling Hospital, which, though a Catholic charity, cares for abandoned and neglected infants of all religions and races until they can be placed in proper homes. A feature of the Ball has always been the formal presentation of the young ladies to the leading prelate of the New York Archdiocese, currently Terence Cardinal Cooke.

  Though members of New York’s First Irish Families support the Gotham Ball, and present many of their daughters there, they tend to regard the Gotham as a somewhat second-rate social event, and if a girl comes out only at the Gotham, and nowhere else, she is not really considered “out” at all. Mary Jane Cuddihy MacGuire recalls going to her first Gotham Ball and says, “My impression was one of just poor taste—a lot of Italians and foreigners and it seems to me a lot of doctors’ children coming out in front of a lot of drunks. I felt sorry for the girls, they looked so innocent.” Later, she says, “We wouldn’t be caught dead going to the Gothams. I don’t think this was a social thing so much as that it was just a punk, stupid party.” Much more exclusive and fashionable—and fun—were the Junior Assemblies and the Baltimore Cotillon (which clings aristocratically to the archaic single-i spelling of the word), neither of which is Catholic, and if an Irish Catholic girl is invited to come out at one of these, she has really entered society in an important way.

  Mrs. MacGuire remembers the family excitement at the time of her presentation at the latter event. This was in the 1940’s, and fashionable girls had begun wearing their hair “up.” She had been wearing her hair up for several months—she had had it expensively styled in Paris—and yet, as the date of the party approached, her mother fretted nervously for fear the other girls at the ball would not be wearing theirs up. Mrs. Cuddihy made several anxious telephone calls to friends to ask their opinions on what would be the correct hair-do for her daughter, and the consensus was that Mary Jane’s hair should be down. On the night of the party—after all hairdressing salons had closed—Mrs. Cuddihy not only personally scrubbed all the make-up off her daughter’s face but also took a hairbrush and tried to brush the hair down. It had been swept upward for so long that “the result was something like a Ubangi—not up or down, but straight out.” She entered the ballroom in a dress of pale-pink tulle with violets at the throat, where her escort presented her with a clashing bouquet of orange and yellow flowers (which she chucked under a coat rack), and was furious to see that all the other girls were wearing their hair up, “but with bobby pins showing, and not properly as mine had been done in Paris.” During the procession, her escort, one Roswell P. Russell (“Who could forget the name?”), stepped on her dress five times, and ripped the hem. When she was being presented at the Junior Assemblies, Mary Jane Cuddihy was in such a high state of nervousness—with her own and all the other mothers gathered on the balcony looking down at the dancers—that she whispered three Hail Marys during the first dance. And yet this was the same girl who, some time later, was seen teaching Errol Flynn to rhumba at the Hamptons’ Canoe Place Inn. “The only reason I dared to date him—he was married to Lili Damita at the time—was because my mother was out of town.”

  Still, though all the best people may not be presented at it, the Gotham Ball confers status of a certain sort. In 1963 the ball’s traditional honoree, Francis Cardinal Spellman, who was also board chairman of the Foundling Hospital, could not attend because he was in Rome for the Ecumenical Council. It was decided, instead, to honor four prominent lay Catholic women. Those selected were Mrs. Thomas E. Murray, Jr., Mrs. Joseph Bradley Murray, Mrs. James F. McDonnell, and Mrs. H. Lester Cuddihy. Instead of the usual cardinal-red roses that are presented to the Cardinal, pink carnations were selected for presentation to the ladies. Among the thirty-two debutantes—which included girls named Caballero, Monte-Sano, and Pallavicini—were four great-granddaughters of Thomas E. Murray.

  Though the Social Register may have adopted a liberal attitude toward the Irish rich, there are still some clubs and resorts where Catholics are not really welcome. The New York Athletic Club, for example, which is notoriously anti-Semitic, is said to have an unwritten “quota” for Catholic members, though many F.I.F.’s belong to it. The exclusive Links Club in New York also has only a handful of Irish Catholic members, though Nicholas F. Brady, Judge Morgan J. O’Brien, John B. Ryan, and William R. Grace—who had worked as a singing waiter and then as
a longshoreman before developing W. R. Grace & Company and the Grace Steamship Line—were all members in their day, and there are Bradys, Graces, and Ryans in the club’s present membership, along with Murray McDonnell. It has often been noted that no Catholic has ever been elected to the Yale Corporation, though Jews and even blacks have been. In the 1930’s Nicholas Brady, Sr. was put up for the Yale Corporation, but was not elected.

  As for resorts, the First Irish Families have tended to cluster in places where they have established sturdy beachheads—the most fashionable being, of course, Southampton. The “Irish Channel” in Manhasset, on Long Island’s opposite shore, is no longer what it used to be when James Cox Brady, Nicholas Brady, Joseph P. Grace, and copper king Cornelius Kelly all had huge houses on vast acreage there. Now Joe Martino has a house on the Channel, and so does William Paley, who is Jewish. There are other resort areas that are largely Irish in character—Saltaire, on the western end of Fire Island, and in sections of the New Jersey shore, around Spring Lake—but these, like the Gotham Ball, are considered to cater mostly to the second-rate. Significantly, Grace Kelly first entertained her Prince on the Jersey shore, in Margate. She may have risen to where she is now, as Her Serene Highness of Monaco, but these Kellys have never been regarded as one of the F.I.F.’s.

  For years, the First Irish Families took winter skiing vacations at the Lake Placid Club in the Adirondacks, which has, from its earliest days, excluded Jews. Lake Placid was then followed by a week or two of spring golf in Pinehurst, North Carolina, although Pinehurst’s Bostonian genesis (it was first developed by Boston’s Protestant Tufts family) was responsible for a detectable chill in the social air. But now the New York F.I.F.’s, not to be put down by anybody, have a ski mountain of their very own. In the early 1960’s the family of Thomas I. Sheridan, who is married to the former Jane Murray, Atomic Tom’s daughter, bought Windham Mountain, an 800-acre tract with a 3,100-foot peak near the Catskill village of Windham, New York, just north of the Borscht Belt. For several years, the Sheridans operated Windham as a public ski area. But, as the popularity of skiing soared—it is now one of the world’s most popular winter participation sports—the Sheridans and their skiing friends grew irked with the long lines that had to be endured before getting on the lifts. In 1967, with $175,000 chipped in from some fifty-four friends and relatives, Sheridan turned the place into the Windham Mountain Club. During weekdays Windham is open to the public, but on weekends it is strictly private and can be skiied by members only.

  Founding members—who each paid $2,000 to join—include Jane Murray Sheridan’s brother, the Rev. D. Bradley Murray, a Jesuit priest; her cousin, Thomas E. Murray II; another cousin, Mrs. John F. Hennessy, Jr., the former Barbara McDonnell; and Basil Harris, Jr., whose brother is married to the former Charlotte McDonnell. Others are the Rushton W. Skakels—he is Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy’s brother—and Dan W. Lufkin, whose aunt was Marie Murray (her first husband was a McDonnell). Ethel Kennedy often skis there, as do the Stephen Smiths, the Sargent Shrivers, the Edward M. Kennedys, and Patricia Kennedy Lawford. The mountain has three lifts, Argentinian ski instructors, a handsome lodge with a sauna, a discothèque with strobe lights, banquettes upholstered in zebra-printed plush, flamenco music, and lots of parties. A number of the founders of the club have built their own $20,000-to-$80,000 chalets in the area, and no one but members is permitted to build there.

  On winter weekends at Windham, it’s much the same crowd one finds in summer in Southampton. “It’s the same people each weekend, so we can organize anything we want,” says one member. “We know each other, so we get no surprises.” There are, of course, the usual throngs of children. Thomas Sheridan, the club’s president, likes to point out that his own six children have ninety first cousins. Does the Windham Mountain Club manage, with $750-a-year family dues, to stay in the black? “Millionaires don’t mind if they lose money,” Mr. Sheridan says. “The main thing is, there’s no waiting in lines.”

  Chapter 21

  SONS OF THE PRIORY, DAUGHTERS OF THE SACRED HEART

  One of the great bulwarks, emotionally and theologically, of the Roman Catholic Church has been its establishment of what sociologists call “parallel structures”—Catholic charities, social organizations, and schools, all designed to keep the Catholic snugly within the confines of his faith, to enwrap him perpetually in his Catholicism. Catholic families feel strongly that their children need constant, daily reminders of their Catholicism, and hence the elaborate network of parochial schools and Catholic colleges and universities. Jewish families may send their children to Hebrew school on Sundays, or to one of a handful of Jewish colleges, but, for the most part, upper-class Jews have tended to educate their sons and daughters at fashionable Eastern and nondenominational boarding schools and even at such schools as St. Paul’s and Kent, which are primarily oriented toward the Episcopal Church. A wealthy Jewish father would rather send his son to Harvard than Brandeis. Something of an exception to this rule was, for a while, the Sachs Collegiate Institute in New York, established in 1871 by Dr. Julius Sachs, which was for many years the favored private day school for the sons of the German-Jewish upper crust. But Dr. Sachs’s school was not a “Jewish” school in the sense that it taught Judaism or employed Judaic ritual, nor was Dr. Sachs a rabbi, and a number of non-Jewish parents sent their sons to Sachs because they admired Herr Doktor Sachs’s stern and Teutonic sense of discipline. After Dr. Sachs’s death, the school changed, and the Sachs Collegiate Institute no longer exists.

  The First Irish Families, on the other hand, have had strong feelings about their children being educated in Catholic schools by Catholic monks and nuns. The first New England boarding school for Catholic boys was Canterbury, in New Milford, Connecticut, established in 1915 “to give Catholic boys sound college preparation, as offered by the best non-sectarian boarding schools, together with thorough training in the doctrines and practices of the Catholic Church.” Classes were conducted by Catholic laymen, there was a resident chaplain, and the school was organized under the patronage of the Bishop of Hartford. Very quickly, Canterbury became the “fashionable” school for wealthy Irish Catholic families.

  Then, in 1926, Portsmouth Priory was founded in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Portsmouth Priory, now called Portsmouth Abbey (its official name is the Benedictine Monastery of St. Gregory the Great), has had an altogether unusual history. The Rev. J. Hugh Diman had been the rugged, ruddy Episcopalian minister of a fashionable Rhode Island summer church. Very much a “society minister,” he was the Arthur Lee Kinsolving of his day, and in 1896 he decided to become a schoolmaster. He had one teacher and eleven pupils when he opened his “Diman’s School for Small Boys” in Newport, but gradually his wealthy Newport neighbors began sending him their sons, and, within twenty years, he had 120 students and a considerable social and academic reputation. Renamed St. George’s, Hugh Diman’s school educated any number of Newport Belmonts and Vanderbilts. St. George’s, Diman thought, came close to providing the ideal of a general education, but, because it taught slowly, and tried to teach character and gentlemanliness and not job skills, it was, as he put it, “clearly and necessarily a school for rich boys,” many of whom would never look for a job in their lives.

  As a schoolmaster, Diman was no Mr. Chips, and preferred respect to affection from his students. His friendliest gesture to a boy was a poke in the ribs with the heavy walking stick he always carried, and he once complained that a photograph of him did not make him look strict enough. Few jokes were told about him, and those that were pertained to his notoriously bad driving (he repeatedly scarred a big maple along a driveway at St. George’s with his car), his general absent-mindedness, and his dislike of office routine (his letters and memos were always worded so that no reply was required). Students and faculty held him in deepest awe, and few got to know him well. Like two other famous Episcopal headmasters—Peabody of Groton and Coit of St. Paul’s—Dr. Diman admired the aristocratic British public (which is to say,
private) school system, which stressed the three C’s—characterbuilding, classics, and Christianity—more than the three R’s. He was an intensely private person, a bachelor who believed that Episcopalian ministers should remain celibate, and he spent long hours in quiet meditation.

  As a High Church Episcopalian, Dr. Diman was, as they say, “very close” to being a Catholic anyway, and, in his fifties, he underwent a religious crisis and began exploring Catholicism. An attack of appendicitis decided him, and he summoned a priest and told him, “If I’m going to die, I’d rather die in the Catholic Church than out of it.” He headed for Rome and the priesthood. At the age of sixty-three, Father Diman entered a Benedictine abbey in Scotland, where he swept corridors, dug ditches, and performed penances with novices in their teens. In 1926 the Benedictines sent Father Diman back to Rhode Island to do for Catholic education what he had done for the Protestants. The result was Portsmouth Priory, just nine miles down the road from St. George’s. By 1946 the Priory had 120 boys and 20 masters (more than half of them Benedictine monks), and, though he retired as headmaster in 1942, Father Diman continued to teach the course in “Christian Doctrine.” In his flowing black Benedictine habit, clipped tonsure, and swinging his ever-present cane, he strolled about the lovely Portsmouth campus overlooking Narragansett Bay. In the process, and probably because of Father Diman’s original Episcopalianism, Portsmouth Priory became the most fashionable Catholic boys’ school in America, outranking Canterbury, and the favored school of such families as the Murrays, Cuddihys, Kennedys, Hoguets, and Wyatts along with a number of titled European families. (The Duke d’Uzès, premier Duke of France, is a Priory alumnus.)