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

by Louis Auchincloss

  Hotels were quick to offer their bigger ballrooms for the now colossal debutante parties, or dinners honoring distinguished citizens or celebrating important birthdays, and charities were quick to perceive how much more could be made by tying an event to a cure for cancer or the building of a new hospital wing. The conscience of the new pleasure seekers was now eased even while they danced and drank.

  To become a society leader the aspiring wife of a rich newcomer in the financial world could do little better than join the board of a large and known charity (a vast contribution will sometimes do the trick—if not, double it) and volunteer to help in preparing a charity ball. Don't kid yourself; it can be real work, and the other board ladies will have a sharp eye out for cheats. But they appreciate a good job, and it will pay off. Be sure on the night of the ball to have a knockout dress.

  It is fashionable for the attendees of charitable balls to downgrade them, to complain of the interminable cocktail hour, the pushing crowd, the tediousness of the speeches if there were any. Yet look for these critics at the next one you go to, and very likely you will find them. For if they love big parties and have the money, where else can they go? It is also true that people hate to feel they have spent their money for nothing, and they have bought their expensive tickets from friends whom they expect to hit for their own charities. Yet it still remains curious to me how patiently the so-called sophisticated citizens of our sophisticated city submit to hours of ennui just to see and be seen.

  A surprising revival in the post-World War II years has been that of the men's clubs; the Colony and the Cosmopolitan were saved by their women, but the men had not done the same for theirs. The legend persisted that these institutions were full of ancient gentlemen who dozed in armchairs before ground-floor windows from which they could spy the comely ankles of women passing in the street below. Even the threat of federal legislation requiring them to accept woman members if any portion of their income derived from sales or services to the public failed to arouse them, and bankruptcy loomed before not a few. Yet suddenly it all turned around. Young men, it seemed, wanted clubs, and new managements began to offer the pleasures of livelier entertainment: lectures, dances, concerts, debates, movies, private theatricals. Perhaps most effective of all was the gesture made to women by clubs that had avoided the law forbidding sexual discrimination. They granted the widows of deceased members the privileges of their late husbands. To have a club was now not only to have a place to go to; it was to have something to do.

  In an era where women had become almost as serious as men about their own professional careers was it possible for society to produce great social leaders like Grace Vanderbilt, Alva Belmont, and Mamie Fish? From what I have read of memoirs of the sometimes-called Golden Age of society in the 1890s and early 1900s, I should think it was very easy. I cannot see that the hostesses of that earlier era needed much but the habit of lavish spending. Mrs. Belmont said she knew of no life more taxing than that of a society leader, but I suspect that her exhaustion came from attending more parties than she had to. She certainly didn't work on making her own entertainments amusing or intellectually stimulating, nor did the other two I have mentioned. Mrs. Winthrop Chanler said of the so-called four hundred, whom she well knew, that they would have fled in a body from "a poet, a painter, a musician or a clever Frenchman." She and her closer friends formed a bore insurance society, which paid you a nice little sum of money if you dined out in New York society and found yourself seated by a listed bore.

  The would-be society leader had to spend a fortune on haute couture, but this was spared the men who wore white tie and tails at parties where ladies were present or at the opera, and for bachelor affairs, a tuxedo and black tie. In time the tuxedo became the appropriate uniform for all occasions.

  The leading lady of New York society at the end of the twentieth century was certainly Mrs. Vincent Astor, the former Brooke Russell, though she was married to Astor for only six years before his death. This, however, had not been altogether a social misfortune, as he was, however intelligent, a bit of a brute who had hated her friends and wanted to keep her all to himself. She was a woman of infinite charm, delightful wit, and warm affections who had been previously twice married, once briefly and unhappily at age sixteen to the wealthy but unpleasant Dryden Kuser, and then to Charles H. Marshall, the "love of her life," whose widow she became after twenty happy years.

  Marshall's sister had married Marshall Field III, and his first wife had been the sister of the first Mrs. Vincent Astor, so Brooke, when she became the third and last of Vincent's wives, took on a "position" with whose duties and privileges she was well acquainted. When she inherited her new husband's wealth she decided to give the bulk of it away. She had the advantage of not being afraid of money and cheerfully willing to part with it. "I know Jayne Wrightsman could buy and sell me several times over," she told me once, "but I still live better than she does."

  It was not all that easy, however. It was all very well for the evening social page to call her a queen, but that does not create loyal subjects. There were important people in society who had been permanently alienated by a marriage so crassly motivated by money, for who could marry Vincent for love? "I had to make some new friends," Brooke told me. A ladies discussion group, the Junior Fortnightly, found her not intellectual enough for membership. And the Thursday Evening Club, created to enable the social world of New York to meet professors of its great universities, welcomed Brooke as a member but rejected her nomination as president. Adlai Stevenson, when elected, asked me only half in jest, "Am I now in the true heart of New York society?" Brooke was much admired, but few in society can escape the query, on the least show of superiority, of Who do they think they are, anyway? I admired Brooke for defying this attitude and dressing her grandest and donning her finest jewels when she visited poor neighborhoods to open one of her foundation's works. "They want to see Mrs. Astor," she explained, "and I'm not going to disappoint them."

  18. The Firm

  IN 1941 I WENT TO work in the famous Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. At that time Sullivan, like most of the major firms, consisted of some twenty partners and perhaps sixty associates, so it was possible for all the latter to know personally with whom they were competing. This is no longer possible in the mammoth firms of today, and there is a consequent diminution of anything like the esprit de corps that used sometimes to exist.

  When I was a clerk, the other young men of that position, almost all of whom were non-New Yorkers and too poor in 1940 and too hard worked to be in a position to enjoy a social life where they could enlarge their acquaintance, tended to meet together on Saturday night drinking parties. Hard up though they were, most were married. Success, which came to a majority of them, altered things considerably, but I am talking of an earlier year. They were inclined, though always friendly, to make harmless fun of my background as passé and irrelevant to modern times, but I would counter by pointing out that every one of them was "working his tail off" to create for his children as close a copy of my background as he was able. It was true, and they all succeeded!

  The firm was dominated by the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen. The former was the managing partner, a great lawyer and future secretary of state under Eisenhower. Allen was less a lawyer than a kind of diplomat; he had many important European clients whose tangled foreign affairs he brilliantly unraveled, making skillful use of the legal expertise of the firm that was always at his disposal. Between them they covered a good portion of the firm's practice. At different times I worked for both men.

  Their personalities were almost opposites. Foster was sober, grave, dedicated to work, deeply religious, and utterly unimaginative in his dealing with clerks and staff. Allen, on the other hand, was hearty, cheerful, outgiving, full of charm and humor. Where he was devoted, perhaps too much so, to the fair sex, Foster was strictly a faithful monogamist.

  I offer a single instance of Foster's incapacity to deal sympathetically
with his employees. I was assigned to the partner in charge of trusts and estates, one who was popular with the associates and used by them as a bridge to the administration of the firm, and I happened to be with him in his office when three of our young lawyers came to consult him. They wanted to know if their fiancées (all were properly engaged) were included in Mrs. Foster Dulles's New Year's Day reception for the attorneys of the firm and their wives.

  "Why, of course they are, my dear fellows," my boss assured them. "And very welcome, too."

  But one of them seemed to need a further guarantee. "Would you mind asking Mr. Dulles, sir?"

  "All right, all right, if you insist," my boss impatiently retorted. He picked up his phone and got the senior partner on the wire. "Oh, Foster, three of our bright young men want to know if they can bring their fiancées to Janet's New Year's party. I've told them of course they may, but they want to be sure it's all right with you."

  My boss's face darkened in the silence that ensued. When he hung up he turned away from his visitors. "I'm sorry, my friends, but Mr. Dulles says a fiancée is not a wife."

  I doubt if John Foster had any idea that he had just made three enemies for life. A fiancée wasn't a wife, was she? Allen, of course, would have shouted a welcome and insisted on being asked to the wedding. Yet, for all Foster's ineptitude and Allen's graciousness, it was the former who had the warmer heart. In the movie about the American spy plane that was shot down over Russia, the actor playing the part of Allen as head of the C.I.A. replies to the officer reassuring him that the captured pilot has a poison pill: "The trouble is they never take them!"

  At Sullivan & Cromwell it was thought that this was an unfair picture of Allen's heartlessness. It wasn't.

  We were retained by the Bank Worms in France, a vast conglomerate of businesses, to protest the allegation made by a Harvard professor in a book called Our Vichy Gamble that the bank had collaborated with the Germans during the occupation, and Allen Dulles had assigned me to the case. He had very wisely made the point with Professor Langer, the author, that a Harvard professor would naturally acknowledge the truth, if we could convince him of it, and that we would not then have to go to court. It would be my job to do the convincing.

  At first this seemed not difficult, as M. Worms was Jewish and had already been cleared in France by three courts of what they called épuration. But when you start digging into the dark and muddy field of who did what and with whom during years of business as usual under an oppressive occupying army, you find yourself in a bewildering maze of contradictions. German submarines were constructed in Worms dockyards. Yes, but they never sailed. And so it went, on and on.

  I finally assembled a brief that induced a very reluctant professor to take back his allegation. He stated flatly that he would never write another book about a living man. The subject would be too liable to sue.

  When I called on M. Worms in Paris, and was about to take a seat before his desk, he almost shouted at me: "Do you care to sit before the arch traitor of Europe?"

  "But M. Worms," I protested, "we're on your side. We never believed the Harvard professor."

  "Harvard!" He spat the word out. "Well you can be sure of one thing. No descendant of mine will ever darken the doors of Harvard."

  "That's all right by me," I assured him. "I'm a Yale man."

  He didn't get it.

  At a later date, when I had drafted a will for Foster Dulles that he wished to execute right away, as he was taking a trip, I asked if I could use his highly efficient secretary, Miss Snell, in the interests of speed.

  "Miss Snell?" he demanded in astonishment. "But Miss Snell is dead!"

  "I'm sorry, sir. I didn't know."

  "Yes, she died of a sudden cancer. Perhaps mercifully rapid. But she had one perfect day before the end. I was still a senator, and she had lunch with me in the Senate dining room and afterward she had her picture taken with me on the steps of the Capitol. Yes, she had one perfect day."

  If you can make yourself realize that this came from the bottom of a heart that really cared for Miss Snell you will have come a long way to understanding Foster Dulles.

  Allen Dulles was the most interesting of the partners to work for, but it was not for the quality of the legal problem presented but because the value of his great international repute somehow colored his utterances, particularly his telephone calls that had nothing to do with the matter in hand. One was always aware that this was the man who had negotiated the surrender of the German armies in north Italy. Of course it was also the man who had gambled disastrously in the Bay of Pigs. I always liked what President Kennedy is supposed to have told him after that: "In England, I'd go. Here, you go."

  Arthur Dean, who succeeded Foster as head of the firm, was brilliant when he knew the law and almost more so when he didn't. I remember his explaining to a client what the marital deduction was when it had just been passed and he hadn't even read it. The statute that he made up as he went along (he loved to play games with himself) was a better one than Congress had passed. Of course he was well aware that the clerk attending the conference would get it all straight when it came to drafting the document. God help him if he didn't. I recall another instance when he sat with me in a meeting with a lawyer representing a family attacking the probate of one of our client's wills. He was new to the case, which had already spawned a large file spread out on the table before us and with which I, of course, was familiar. Our opposing lawyer was wantonly rude and offensive, and Dean, angered, started shuffling at seeming random through the papers on the table. In a few minutes he had put his finger on the weak point in our opponent's case that had taken me hours to dig out.

  Eustace Seligman brought to the firm not only his genius for diagnosing the essence of a legal problem, but many of his relatives of the great German Jewish financial families known as "our crowd." I recall with particular interest his cousin-in-law, Sam Lewisohn, whose art collection adorns today the walls of so many museums. It was not so much his rather routine legal matters that fascinated me but the personality of this collector. Lewisohn was not the type who bought the advice of an art expert; his pictures were the most important things in his life, and he would sit staring at one, literally for hours, as if taking it in through his pores, before adding it to the sacred collection. He was an early riser, and when I had papers for him to sign I would make a point of arriving at his house even earlier than our appointment so that I would have a moment to slip into the darkened dining room and pull the light switch.

  After a brief flicker, the chamber would be gloriously illuminated by Gauguin's Ia Orana Maria and Renoir's In the Meadow.

  Before I left the practice of law I prepared many wills for rich testators, and I encountered the common fear that their progeny would be the victims of fortune hunters. They had hazy ideas of what a fortune hunter was, but they were apt to think of him, in the case of males, as a smooth greasy man of sinister good looks and a phony title. They rarely recognized him as the blue-eyed, blond-haired, athletic, all-American boy next door. They were not often aware, either, that most marriages the world over have been arranged, and many of them happily so. Or that there is very little one can do to protect one's loved ones from their own infatuations.

  That a marriage purely mercenary on one side is not apt to be happy in this country I grant, though I can think of some striking exceptions. But where money is only a part of the attraction, guaranteeing the continuance, as a bride or groom may see it, of the comfortable existence both families have accustomed the affianced couple to, it may be harmless enough. Yet many heiresses are haunted by the fear of being married for their money, a fate which befalls many who never know it. For we are all packets of motives and never aware of the sum total of the reasons for our doing anything. Proust gives the example of a woman who marries a man for the privilege of being able to refer to his fashionable aunt by a popular abbreviation of her title: ma tante de Ch'nouville. Is that worse than being married for one's beauty?

/>   A perfect example of a very happy and totally successful marriage that depended heavily on the wife's fortune was that of Wilmarth "Lefty" Lewis and his wife, my father's cousin Annie Burr Auchincloss. He was a luminary of the Yale board and founder of the Lewis Library there, which published the definitive edition of the enormous Horace Walpole correspondence, a monument in letters. This was all done at the expense of Annie Burr, who inherited from her mother a sizeable chunk of the Jennings standard oil fortune. Lefty's whole life was dedicated to Walpole and would have been impossible without the money that Annie Burr lovingly and happily poured into his project. They worked together in everything and brought the eighteenth century to life for innumerable students and readers in their beautiful house in Farmington, now part of the university.

  I learned in my many talks with Lefty that he was subject to a curious obsession that some might have called a superstition. He believed, even passionately, that he was being assisted in his constant and worldwide search for Walpoliana (not simply letters but books, furnishings, anything that had belonged to Horace) by the spirit of the great letter writer himself. Once in the large library of a fellow collector he was told by his dinner host that the room contained a volume once owned by Walpole. He was challenged to put his finger on it and given twenty minutes. He accepted the challenge, and the company withdrew leaving him alone among the vast shelves of books. At first he dashed about seeking to assess the huge library, but at last he decided to let his secret guide do the trick for him, and he relaxed. Just as his time was up and the crowd reappeared he walked calmly to an alcove and placed his finger on the very volume.