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

by Louis Auchincloss

  Mother purported to derive comfort from my fourteen-year-old's smart-alecky sagacity. "It's the end of something," I told her pompously, "but not of everything."

  Despite these ruminations the bad luck ended as suddenly as it had come. The bond issue was not invalid, after all; my grandfather's affairs were somehow patched up. Father recovered and went back to work.

  I have never understood my grandfather's financial career. His older sister Sarah returned to Scotland and made a fortunate marriage to Sir James Coats, the great thread tycoon. Grandfather, as a young man, formed a partnership with his brother Hugh Dudley called Auchincloss Brothers to represent Coates Thread in America. They did so well that Grandfather was able to build a summer house in Newport that is still one of the show places of that opulent colony. Yet when Sir James asked him and his brother to take into their partnership an American son-in-law of Sir James, they refused, saying they would choose their own American representative. So that golden business was lost. Grandfather went into other enterprises, some of which failed, and lost his directorship in Illinois Central by talking back to E. H. Harriman. He lived well all his long life, but he was losing money even in the bull market of 1929, and when he died in 1937 he left an estate of only $300,000. His brother Hugh Dudley had done better; he had married the daughter of one of John D. Rockefeller's partners. That there was something a bit cloudy in Grandfather's upper story may explain his belief that an ancestor called Stuart gave him a claim to the throne of Scotland.

  My father's older and my mother's two younger brothers did well enough for themselves in the Depression and caused no concern in the family, but this was less true of Father's three sisters. Aunt Betty, the eldest, had married Percy Jennings, son of the famous and wealthy corporate lawyer Frederick B. Jennings, whose mansion on lower Park Avenue later became the Princeton Club, but whose wealth was largely dissipated by poor family investments. Fortunately, there were some trusts in a bank to ward off total disaster.

  Aunt Caroline, wife of a rich doctor of the Fowler meatpacking family, was the hardest hit, as her husband had invested heavily in mortgaged brownstone residences that were foreclosed on him. She used to say that she sometimes took the Madison Avenue trolley in lieu of the Fifth Avenue bus to save a nickel. Finally there was that perennial victim of hard times, the unwed daughter, my aunt Josie, who became a trained nurse, unique in our family, who used to mildly complain that it was hardly fair to raise a daughter with expectations of economic means and leave her to fend for herself.

  At school in the Depression I heard a great deal of families "cutting down," but in our world it was largely the luxuries that were being eliminated. The children even of the hardest hit were apt to be kept in private schools, often on scholarships originally planned for the impoverished classes. Innumerable cousins and friends still managed to get out of the hot, hot city in summer.

  I think the dividing line for me between the pre-1929 Depression days and all that followed was the line of huge derivative French chateaux and Italian palazzos that lines Fifth Avenue from Forty-second Street to Ninety-sixth. Almost all were destroyed by the 1920s and '30s. They had been erected to show off the new wealth of business leaders in the economic boom that followed the Civil War, and many, particularly those commissioned by the Vanderbilt clan, were designed by Richard Morris Hunt, whose sculpted image appropriately adorns a colonnade of the park side of the avenue near Seventieth Street. Some of the mansions were handsome enough, but the prevailing look was vulgar. It is hard to imagine anyone living in them today.

  It might be difficult today to find men or women who take themselves that seriously. For how can you live in a palace without occasionally imagining yourself royal? We still have rich, even super rich, but they know they're not royal. The guests so festively attired as kings and queens from Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt's famous costume ball in the 1880s may have been not so sure.

  11. The Brits

  I ADMIRED THE WAY Queen Mary occasionally appeared, covered with jewels, in the New York Sunday rotogravure, but I found that my admiration was not shared by my Irish nurse, Maggie. When I asked her once if the queen had to go to the bathroom like ordinary people she retorted: "She does, and makes a big stink."

  Yet Britain played little role in my young life though my ancestry was totally English or Scottish and, with the exception of the Auchinclosses who did not leave their native Paisley until 1803, went back to colonial days. Little contact remained between the American and Scottish branches except for one important one, that between my grandfather and his sister Sarah's husband, James Coats, the severance of which led to a grave reversal in my grandfather's hitherto successful business career.

  I remember my mother's story of her first emotional contact with British history. It was at a school assembly on a January morning of 1901 when the headmistress, Miss Chapin, announced to the girls that the sixty-four-year reign of Queen Victoria of England had come to an end. And she added: "I am going to ask Priscilla Stanton to recite for us Lord Tennyson's dedication of the Idylls of the King to the memory of the Prince Consort, which I know she has by heart."

  Mother, aged thirteen, suddenly inspired with a courage hitherto unknown to her, sprang to her feet and rang out the lines, ending with the invocation to the widowed queen: "Till God has placed thee at his side again."

  Miss Chapin murmured reverently: "And now God has placed her at his side again." Mother used to say, not entirely in jest, that, like Pheidippides, she should have died then and there, at the peak of her glory, and that her whole afterlife had been an anticlimax.

  We didn't go to England as a family until I was fifteen, and then I was thrilled as never before. To me it was like my history book illustrated. I saw King George leaving Westminster Abbey with the little princesses; I counted the double line of Rolls-Royce limousines, each with a coat of arms painted on its door, parked by the Ritz; I reveled in the grandeur of Windsor, and Blenheim. But there was one unfortunate occurrence. There was a drought on, and the newspapers urged their readers to emulate His Majesty and use only an inch of water in their tub. My room in Flemings Hotel on Half-Moon Street was directly over the reception desk, so that the scandal of the tub that I allowed to overflow while I was distracted with a movie magazine was apparent to all.

  Standing with my father in the crowded elevator the next day I had to listen to the speculations of the outraged hotel guests. "Who caused that shocking flood?" "They say it was a Yankee boy." "Oh, of course. You might have known."

  Father gave my ear a painful pinch. "Listen to them! And they're right, too."

  The English are too polite to tell us what they often think of us. I had several experiences during the war while my ship, an LST (landing ship, tank), was operating out of ports in the English Channel. On liberty I would take myself sightseeing. Amphibious officers tended to dress carelessly, particularly when not on duty, and it was sometimes difficult to tell just what we were. As I have a bit of an English accent I was often taken for that by drivers who picked me up when I hitchhiked.

  "Are they as bad where you are as where we are?" they would sometimes ask. "I suppose I should tell you I'm an American naval officer." "Oh, I beg your pardon."

  I understood that it was a hardship for many to have two million GIs parked on them in the south of England. Our boys on the whole were fine, but American arrogance, particularly about their superior equipment, can be hard to take.

  Certainly over the years of my adult life the old legend of the arrogant British has dwindled to almost nothing. But it was very real once. The possession of a world empire of "half of creation," as Kipling put it, and the assumed duty of policing "lesser breeds without the law" hardly engendered humility, and even a slight perusal of English nineteenth-century fiction gives one startling examples of just how superior the superior people used to feel. Jane Austen's Lady Catherine de Bourgh strikes us today as a caricature, but was she? A peer's daughter in Jane Eyre commands a footman to "Cease your chatter, blo
ckhead, and do my bidding," and the Duke of Omnium, Trollope's model for the perfect British nobleman, finds it difficult to accept for the wife of his heir a beautiful and cultivated American girl whose father has been considered a potential presidential candidate. In my own day I knew an imperial relic in India who paid his help by tossing coins at their feet as they stood before him.

  Trollope, whose important position in the post office carried him to all parts of the empire, was certainly one of the great reporters of his day. In his numberless novels he invariably defines the exact social class of every character, supplies his income and the origin of his family, and even lets us know whether he is content with his position in life or hankers to improve it. Class is never neglected. To what is called a gentleman, however, and this is never quite clear, except that it is more a matter of character than of wealth or title, more doors are open. He, as in The Duke's Children, may even aspire to Omnium's daughter, though it's going to be a struggle. And Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice tells Lady Catherine that the fact alone that she is a gentleman's daughter qualifies her to marry the millionaire grandson of an earl.

  I would have, some years later, the chance to witness an instance of the disappearing arrogance of aristocratic Britain. I had been taken by a socially well-connected friend to a very swell house party in a great castle in Wales. It was my only such experience and I was much awed. Of course I knew nobody but the friend who had been allowed to bring me, and my hostess, who had a great title and even greater wealth, thinking that anything might be expected of an unknown and probably impecunious Yankee, took upon herself, perhaps as a kindness, for she was as charming as she was blunt, to warn me that her daughters would have only a pittance, that everything went to the heir.

  She also referred to an American lady, also staying at the castle as a friend of one of her sons, as "common," which she certainly was, though it would have surprised me to hear an American hostess so refer to a houseguest. But English aristocrats of her day said what they pleased, when they pleased, and to whom they pleased. In a way it was rather attractive.

  12. Cohorts

  I GRADUATED FROM Groton School in 1935 with twenty-eight other boys. Their future was not undistinguished. I became a recognized novelist and president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. William McCormick Blair, the number one aide of Adlai Stevenson, would be our ambassador to the Philippines. John Brooks was president of the Celanese Company; William P. Bundy was an assistant secretary of state and close adviser to President Johnson. Marshall Green became ambassador to Indonesia and Australia. James Higgins was president of the Mellon Bank, and Eben Pyne of City Bank. Stanley Resor was secretary of the army, and Robert Whitney would have almost surely become president of J. P. Morgan & Co. had he not been killed in an auto accident. Arthur Gardner also would probably have been heard from in his very untypical Groton career as a Jesuit priest had he not succumbed early to polio, released from his vows so that, dying, he could wed the wonderful nurse who attended to him.

  Not a bad showing for a small class, but what was even more remarkable was that all the others, if less spectacular, had successful business or professional careers. There was not a failure in the crowd.

  Although, as I have stated, my years at Groton coincided with the worst period of the Great Depression, there was no instance of radical or revolutionary political activity on the campus. Alfred Kazin, the great literary critic and my contemporary, told me once that in his West side Manhattan boyhood everyone he knew had been a communist. I replied that in my East side no one I knew had been.

  It was a bitterly divided society but the repercussions were not felt at Groton except when our Scottish history teacher, George Rickey, married on a vacation a radical girl from Greenwich Village and brought her to the school. She soon made her contempt for the smug faculty wives and the "stuffy, spoiled little boys" so manifest that her connection with both them and her genius of a husband had to be severed, and he was left free for the splendid artistic career that soon opened before him.

  I, however, remained true to the family conservatism. A few years later, when F.D.R.'s presidential campaign motorcade came through New Haven where I was a Yale freshman, I waved a huge sunflower, Alfred Landon's symbol, in front of it and got struck in the face by a policeman. It was not until Jack Kennedy that I voted for a Democratic president.

  The families of most of the Groton boys had not only been Republicans but were bitterly anti-New Deal and anti-F.D.R., though the president was a graduate of the school himself and had sent his sons there. We boys were less impassioned than our parents and enjoyed the hustle and bustle and circling of motorcycles that accompanied the presidential visits to the school. They seemed to put us on the map, and I was even proud of a relationship to the great man.

  Father used to claim that the fact that the president's father's first wife had been a Howland cousin did not make us blood kin, but he didn't realize that there had been three Roosevelt-Howland marriages and that he and F.D.R. were indubitably third cousins. New York, however, unlike the southern states, pays little attention to cousins more distant than first, and as there were dozens of people in town in the same relationship to the president, many of whom were not proud of it, it was not a matter of note in our family.

  Overall, I was not especially concerned with things political. At Yale I continued acting with the dramatic society there until I appeared in a Goldoni comedy as a girl disguised as a boy, and my father did not think that this exhibition of confused sexual identity would enhance my image in the college. No doubt I took his criticism too seriously. Father and his Yale classmates were rather what we called too bulldog, but in my disgust I gave up the dramatic society altogether.

  I continued to be stagestruck and went to New York frequently just to go to the theatre. I remember with a particular thrill John Gielgud in Hamlet and Nazimova in Ghosts and The Cherry Orchard. Indeed Nazimova's Mrs. Alving was a unique dramatic experience for me; I went three times to hear her tell her true life story to the incredulous pastor, and I was fascinated at a later time to read Tennessee Williams had given Nazimova in this role as a factor in his becoming a playwright. I like to think that we may have attended the same performance.

  Later in life, I would write several plays, but such was never my thing. The only one that was ever produced was a one-act piece called The Club Bedroom with a cast of three women. A production required only a set with one portrait (an empty frame would do for an imaginative audience). It was done on Channel 13 and several times off-Broadway. I attended every performance, and later, when my wife, Adele, asked me why, I replied with a quip from the New Yorker: "Infatuation with the sound of one's own words department."

  The theatre is indeed a dangerous Lorelei combing her golden hair with a golden comb over the vessels wrecked on the rocky shore below her, and it took a real effort for me to give her up. The trouble is that one always sees one's unproduced drama as it is splendidly enacted in one's imagination. The rejected novelist sees only a manuscript and a bad one.

  The would-be playwright may also be misled by associates in the trade. The theatre world is a world to itself; to some in it nothing else is real. I remember a cocktail party given by Worthington Miner, the producer who was then planning to do a play of mine about which he later changed his mind. The guests were all theatre people, except one, Mrs. Miner's uncle, whom nobody recognized but me. In any other gathering he would have been the center of attention as James Byrne, governor, ambassador, secretary of state, and U.S Supreme Court justice. But here he was nobody.

  As I have said, perhaps too often, given my firm hold on the notion, that at no time in my youth was I an athlete. Far from it, I confess. Nor did I have any interest in or admiration for such greats. My father was an excellent tennis player and once scored a hole-in-one on the Piping Rock Club golf course, but in accordance with the extreme generosity of his nature, he never dropped even a hint that he was disappointed that I hadn't inherited a
ny of his facility or interest in this area.

  Very different were the men of my mother's family, the Stantons, whom I favored in appearance, and who shared some of my athletic disability without any of my compensating indifference to it. My brother John, for example, slaved over his tennis, and later golf, as if his very life depended on them, without achieving more than a decent competence, and Bill Stanton, who had moved to Hong Kong where he could afford to devote his life to horses and polo, became only adequately adept in the latter game, despite numerous nasty falls.

  I'm afraid that I viewed these two men's obsession, as I saw it, on the subject of sport with a faint contempt, as if they were worshipping a lesser god than mine of literature. It has often struck me that, at least in their case, there seemed to be a relationship between the care they took over their personal appearance and the pains with which they trained themselves for their favorite sport. I was on a motor trip with Uncle Bill in Europe when he suddenly realized he didn't have the right suit for the club in Singapore to which he was bound and he cabled his "number one boy" in Hong Kong to put one on the plane for him. I could have almost lived on what my brother expended on shirts and cufflinks. Neither man was possessed of the least ambition for getting ahead in the world, but they both cared strongly about how they looked and how people with whom they associated looked, and whether the latter's manners were good and how they behaved, and what sports they played.