A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth

by Louis Auchincloss

  My brother, you see, needed only himself for an intellectual companion. He was a deep reader and thinker, and a conscientious liberal in a rigidly conservative society to whose tenets he paid no attention but never took the trouble to contradict. When he had to face a long and agonizing death struggle, no one was ever a better or more cheerful patient, making as little fuss as possible for those looking after him and never complaining. "I can do less and less things," he told me once, "but the lucky thing is that I still enjoy those things."

  No less worthy of respect, my uncle Bill, as a Japanese prisoner after the fall of Hong Kong, did all that could be done for his fellows who appointed him as their liaison with the guards and other captors. He and his wife were generally credited with having done everything possible to alleviate the general misery.

  I thought of these two men one weekend when my wife, Adele, and I were visiting her grandmother on Long Island, and I happened to overhear a conversation between her uncle, Douglas Burden, and his elderly mother, Adele Sloane Burden, who was, at the time, more often referred to as Mrs. Richard Tobin. During the talk, Douglas urged her to persuade his brother Jimmy not to play golf at the Piping Rock Club on the north shore of Long Island. Jimmy's game, it seems, was a disgrace to the family, at least as far as Douglas was concerned. Neither his mother nor my uncle would have gone along with this; they were much too kind to have hurt anyone's feelings for such a reason, but they would have sympathized with Douglas's distaste for any public display of athletic incompetence.

  For a time it seemed my sister Priscilla might be deprived of many of life's great satisfactions. This shy and affectionate girl suffered from an even worse case of the depressive condition that plagued my father.

  She and I had adjoining bedrooms on the fourth floor front of the family brownstone on Ninety-first Street. She, being my elder by almost two years, of course occupied the larger room with two windows on the street while I was relegated to the much smaller which had only one. I resented this. The bathroom in the middle of the fourth floor we shared, and I was disgusted at the time she took in it behind a door she always primly locked.

  I was then enrolled at Bovee and she in Miss Chapin's, a few blocks south. Maggie, our nurse, would pick me up at noon and walk me down to Miss Chapin's to get Priscilla. My poor sister, at twelve, was undergoing the severe mental stress of a constant bad conscience over trivial matters. This was all part of her condition.

  Such things were never discussed in those days. People were too apt to jump to conclusions that far exceeded the actual condition. When the doctors treating my father sought to trace the origin of his disease in his family, I kept my sharp little ears open and picked up the legend that, as a Newport debutante, grandmother Auchincloss had tried to drown herself (a tale barely creditable and utterly hushed up) and that a crazy niece of hers had actually murdered a woman friend.

  Although I concealed my finds from the outside world, I was enchanted by such accounts, which made a dull family exciting. Despite the stern parental warnings, I told all my little friends that the doctors were probably going to put my sister in a straightjacket. My poor bewildered parents couldn't imagine where these rumors were coming from.

  My unhappy sister would awake me at night with complaints like: "We were playing tag in the yard at recess today, and I touched a girl on the shoulder and cried 'You're it!' But did I actually touch her? Might I have cheated?"

  You can imagine how much consolation she got from a kid brother angry at being awakened. Besides, I was already convinced that she got too much sympathy from our parents, whose growing alarm over her condition was, of course, not understandable to me. A crisis arose one Christmas when she refused to open a single present marked "For Priscilla," insisting that it might be for Mother, whose namesake she was.

  My sister had a series of female paid companions who were disguised professionals trained to cheer her up and help her to find life interesting. They became, of course, a feature of family life not wholly welcome. I recall one who tried to stimulate conversation at breakfast by asking my father, a devoted Wagnerian, if he did not find the music of Tristan vulgar and sensuous. Another one, a rather pretty Miss Jack, was engaged to a man called Bill, and I used to infuriate her by singing excerpts from the song "My Bill," which Helen Morgan had then made famous in Show Boat: "He's just my Bill, an ordinary man; you'd meet him on the street and never notice him." Finally she actually gave notice, and Mother thought it was so silly she never scolded me.

  The companion who was with us longest, a Miss Warfield, was an amiable, well-meaning, but thickly sentimental woman who was rumored in later years to have been some kin to the duchess of Windsor whom she certainly did not resemble. It was her enthusiastic theory that Priscilla be introduced to "Mother Nature" by spending a night outside in the woods in Maine. Great preparations were made under Miss Warfield's detailed instructions. Sheets, blankets, pillows, pots and pans, breakfast foods, insect deterrents, medicines, flashlights, and Lord knows what else were hauled by our reluctant chauffeur into the woods adjoining our property, and something like a camp was set up.

  In the morning after a sleepless night the chauffeur and Maggie brought the adventurers back to the house, where they gratefully spent the day in bed.

  Expert and expensive psychiatric treatment in those days was centered in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and Priscilla was placed in the care of a famous and fashionable doctor there. His treatment would, I am sure, be considered odd today. He opined that Priscilla's trouble originated in a family with three boys and she must be reintegrated in one with two girls and a doctor. Guess which doctor and guess his fee! Twenty thousand dollars a year, in the 1930s! But Mother believed in doctors and even in their fees. The money was paid and Priscilla moved to Stockb ridge for a year or more. When she came home, she was just the same so far as I could see, but always in the company of a disguised trained nurse.

  Mother, however, was by no means always to be put upon. She and I were once in Grand Central Station waiting for a train to take us to Stockbridge to spend a weekend with Priscilla, when whom should we see but our famous doctor, who had just detrained?

  "Oh, Mrs. Auchincloss, I'm glad to run into you. I've had an emergency call and can't be with you this weekend as planned. But you'll find everything ready for you."

  To my amazement I heard Mother's firm reply. "No, Doctor, that won't do. I'm afraid you'll have to take the train back to Stockbridge with me."

  And he did! She was supporting him.

  Mother did not hesitate to draft the family into her different projects for Priscilla. The family came first, and if one was ailing the others had to defer. Thus when Priscilla, behind as usual in her schoolwork, needed summer tutoring and Mother feared the effect on her of strange teachers, she induced my older brother to give up a trip to Europe to do the job.

  John was something of a saint, always obliging her, but I was different. When Mother asked me to have Priscilla as my guest at the annual school dance at Groton, I flatly refused. Whereas John, at party after party, refrained from dancing that he might be free to rescue Priscilla when she was "stuck" too long with some frustrated youth.

  She was not insensitive nor, by nature, ungrateful, but she never quite realized how much John did for her in these early days. People, even well brought up and thoughtful young women, are rarely inclined to acknowledge those who cover their disadvantages. Priscilla went her own way until the night (I shall never forget it!) when, one might say, she woke up. Her relief from illness must have been gradually arriving, but it was at a club dance where we spotted her, suddenly moving animatedly over the floor with a handsome young man I had never seen before. Both were smiling. I asked John if he had introduced them, and he said no, the man had just cut in. Although I have no intention of trivializing her condition or minimizing the difficulties of alleviating it, it seemed that Priscilla had, that very night, suddenly decided that life might be different. From then on she got better and better, an
d acquired all the friends she needed. She married happily and had three fine children. There were always to be bad times-severe recurrent depressions—but there were good ones as well.

  I have not mentioned my brother Howland as he is still living and can still speak of his experience for himself. I honor him with silence, as I have tried to recapture our siblings, their struggles and kindnesses, with understanding and fairness.

  We were united all of us in our family, but rarely deeply intimate. In the times of which I speak it seems there was more not discussed than otherwise. What was there, after all, to share at length, even among family? Loyalty and consideration—this is how it was among brothers and sisters in the world from which we came: society, as it was known, mostly by those who found themselves admiring its surfaces from the outskirts. Those of us on the inside, feeling the expectations and demands, may have felt somewhat differently. At least on occasion.

  3. What Some Call "Society"

  THERE IS NO such thing as a predominating and generally recognized Society in New York City today, but there are, indeed, many societies. The so-called Social Register has swollen to the size of a fat telephone directory, and it is just as common for people to refuse to be listed as to seek to get in. The announcement of engagements and marriages in the Sunday New York Times lists dozens of couples. In my youth, the social page of the daily Times devoted its left-hand column to a single pair with a large portrait of the bride or fiancée who were apt to be known, or at least known of, by a good portion of the readers.

  In the 1920s and '30s there existed indubitably, however hard to define, a social structure called "society" that regarded itself as just that. These persons resided on the East Side of Manhattan (never west except below Fifty-ninth Street) as far south as Union Square and as far north as Ninety-sixth Street. The members (if that is the word; it doesn't seem quite right) were largely Protestants of Anglo-Saxon origin. (Note that Catholics and nonpracticing Jews were not always excluded if rich enough.) The men were apt to be in business, finance, or law, sometimes in medicine, rarely in the church and almost never in politics. Franklin Roosevelt was an exception and not a popular one, either.

  For the women, society offered a certain power and prestige, but it also tended to reinforce conventions that limited those with ambition. I had known Janet Auchincloss's daughter, Jackie Bouvier, since her mother's marriage to Father's first cousin Hugh D. Auchincloss. But they lived in Washington and Jackie was a good bit younger than I, so I saw her rarely. We all, of course, were drawn by her charm and beauty, but such qualities are not unusual, and none of us predicted her remarkable destiny. I did, however, have a curious premonition of it.

  I was spending a weekend with my brother John in Washington, and he and his wife had asked the Hugh D. Auchinclosses and Jackie for a family dinner. During the meal we learned that Jackie was engaged to a New Yorker called Husted. After the meal she and I sat in the corner, and I quizzed her about him. I had just published a novel titled Sybil about a rather dull girl, which Jackie, perhaps surprisingly, had read.

  "Oh, you've written my life," she told me. "Sybil Bouvier, Sybil Husted. Respectable, middle-class, moderately well off. Accepted everywhere. Decent and dull."

  And then a curious but strong feeling gripped me, quite unlike anything that usually accompanied parlor chatter. Why was this pretty girl talking such nonsense? Didn't she know that a very different fate awaited her? A week later we learned the engagement was off. So sometimes women did break the rules and found that it worked out quite successfully.

  The real and formidable influence of society was, fittingly, social. Those inside society's ranks controlled the private schools, the clubs, the country clubs, the subscription dances for the young, the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches, as well as the larger banks and law firms. It is commonly said that they have been relegated to the past. That is not so. They have simply lost their monopoly; they have had to move over and share their once closely guarded powers with the new rich, who are quite willing to spare the older generation so long as they are allowed to copy, and perhaps enhance, their style. See any Ralph Lauren ad.

  My eight great-grandparents were all natives of Manhattan and all uncritical members of the society I have attempted to describe. As they had multiple siblings and numberless descendants, the city seemed awash with cousins, and I was apt to be surprised if I didn't find one or more in any circle I attended. To me, New York society (we never used the term) was not a class that dominated my world; it simply was that world. It was said of a school that I later attended, Groton, that there was no snobbishness because the boys all came from the same background, and there was actually some truth to this.

  The four principal families of my origin seem to merge together in retrospect into a single unit: an uninspiring but decent and respectable bourgeois tribe. Yet how different they seemed to a growing and observant boy! Father's mother's family, the Russells of New York and simpler pre-Vanderbilt Newport, had been rich from imports and clipper ships prior to the Civil War and prominent in the society described in the diary of Mayor Philip Hone, a cousin. But all was now in the past. Despite their Italian villas and marble busts taken on Roman honeymoons, the Russells, by the time of my childhood, were faintly shabby.

  Much smarter and up to date were Mother's maternal family, the Dixons, a cheerful, close-knit, handsome, and worldly group who set a high but not unreasonable value on appearance in clothes, sport, and general behavior. They were devoted to each other, and their neighboring brownstones on Forty-ninth Street were known as Dixon Alley. But at parties they were less inclined to cluster; they mingled and didn't interfere with family unless a girl was stuck on the dance floor or a boy was spending too much time at the bar.

  The Auchinclosses were the Johnny-come-latelies, not bringing their woolen business from Scotland until 1803. The first Hugh Auchincloss was interned as an enemy alien in the War of 1812 and unsprung by an indignant visit by his wife to President Madison. (Anyone could go to the White House then.) The family produced a high percentage of vigorous males who made their rapid, unopposed entry into society through business and legal aptitude as well as advantageous marriages. The dour Scotch ways were soon abandoned, though I can remember a maiden great aunt who, during a visit to Bar Harbor, refused to go with us to the swimming club because men and women shared the pool. And that was when women's bathing suits covered them from neck to toe with long, black stockings added!

  The Stantons, Mother's father's clan, were too few in number for notice, except for the elegant Uncle Ed, who sent his shirts to Europe to be properly laundered and was so esteemed by his rich friends that they eased him into a job for which he had little qualification: nothing less than general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. His unexpected passion for German opera when the boxholders all preferred the Italian led to his dismissal, and he died abroad of alcoholism.

  New York, unlike Boston, had, even in my young days, scant respect for genealogy. Although some of the Auchincloss wives had distinguished colonial forebears (my great-grandmother Auchincloss could boast that both her grandmothers were Sal-tonstalls), I doubt that had much to do with the family's rise. But an early origin—when combined with a large fortune-will attract a certain awe in the city. To be an Astor or a Rockefeller was to be important even to the oldest New Yorker.

  I remember as a boy Mr. and Mrs. John D. Jr., who summered in Seal Harbor, Maine, visiting the neighboring Bar Harbor Swimming Club. Received like royalty, they passed, nodding graciously, through the umbrella tables on the club lawn where members were having a noontime drink. Mr. Rockefeller was not a noticeable figure, but his wife, who had put the family on the social map and also orchestrated the splendid landscape architecture of their great estate in Tarrytown had a wonderful, almost Edwardian, elegance.

  It was she, notoriously, who had made a philanthropist of her spouse. Yet he had refused to support her in her major interest: the Museum of Modern Art, which he regarded as red and r
adical. This was a problem in the museum's early years, for although Mrs. Rockefeller had money of her own, it was not nearly on the same scale as her husband's. If she gave only, say, $50,000 where a million was expected, too many of the wealthy would also reduce their pledges. Peggy, the wife of David Rockefeller, downplayed any tensions. "My father-in-law," she claimed, "so adored his wife that he couldn't bear to have her not share all his interests." Eager to hear more, I couldn't help pointing out that this wasn't so much love as possession. After this comment, little more was divulged. (Of course the Rockefeller children ultimately followed their mother and became the principal supporters of the museum.)

  While on the subject of such prominent families we must, of course, raise the name of the Vanderbilts, who dominated newspaper accounts of society. But this was not enough to ensure widespread admiration: The dynasty's rather too-palatial residences tainted them with vulgarity to a discriminating minority. Edith Wharton spoke of the family as engaged in a constant Battle of Thermopylae against bad taste, which they never won.

  Revered by all in my boyhood for rectitude and the highest financial responsibility were the partners of the House of Morgan. To my young and naive ears they might have been the twelve apostles. I should note here that my father's law firm represented J. P. Morgan & Co. and that my mother's father had been head of a small trust company that was part of the Morgan empire. As a little girl she had been staying in a summer hotel in Bar Harbor, Maine, when the great Morgan yacht, the Corsair, had steamed in, and an invitation to dine onboard sent to the Stantons, who promptly accepted, though they had another engagement. A fictitious cold was used as an excuse to their previous host when the date was cancelled. When Mother, overhearing all this on the telephone, protested, she was simply told: "When you're older, dear, you'll understand these things."