-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Right People - A Portrait of the American Social Establishment
Stephen Birmingham©1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1968
Little, Brown and Company
BostonoToronto
LCCN 68-11525
360pps. out-of-print
--[5]--
5.
"We're Coming Out Tonight"
HISTORY'S first debutantes were, presumably, young women of marriageable age
who were presented at European Courts during the seventeenth century for the
approval of Court ladies, Court gentlemen, and, sometimes, the Monarch. But
there is strong evidence that the practice of introducing eligible virgins to
members of the tribe began considerably before that, and that the debutante
ritual dates from the Old Stone Age, if not before. The ritual has always
carried strong sexual overtones a rite of passage between the ages of
puberty and of marriage and, even in primitive cultures, has been carried
out with trappings intended to demonstrate the debutante's social position
and wealth. Among certain tribes in New Guinea, fathers announce the
marriageability of their daughters by throwing large quantities of coconuts
into the sea the richer the man, the more coconuts he throws. In Africa,
there are tribes which ritually prepare their young women for their debuts by
placing them in "fattening houses" where, for beauty's sake, their bodies are
anointed with butter for weeks on end while the girls are stuffed with food.
Again, it is the richest men who produce the fattest daughters. In most of
these primitive ceremonies the girls wear approximations, or adaptations, of
the wedding costume, just as American debutantes anthropologically just a
step away from their sisters in the savanna today appear in their almost
identical, though "one-of-a-kind" long white gowns, wearing bits of veiling,
carrying bouquets, and stand in receiving lines like make-believe brides.
Otherwise, today's debutantes retain few of the tribal Practices of the Stone
Age, but they have developed some equally interesting ones of their own. The
father of a modern debutante does not toss coconuts into New York Harbor or
San Francisco Bay, but he tosses considerable amounts of money in other
directions.
There are, of course, many degrees of debutante parties, just as there are
degrees of debutantes. Take, for instance, one of the largest and best-known
debutante functions in New York, the Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball.
Customarily given at the Waldorf-Astoria, where the grand ballroom is
decorated in clouds of pink and silver fluff, pink tablecloths and twinkly
lights, the Cotillion annually presents a hundred or more debutantes to
"society." Around the dance floor, the tables are largely filled with members
of New York business firms who have agreed to sponsor bits and pieces of the
Cotillion and, from tiers of boxes above, parents and friends of the
debutantes, plus patrons and patronesses of the Cotillion and members of the
Cotillion Committee, survey the proceedings below. In the bar outside,
whitetied young men press relentlessly toward a small band of perspiring
bartenders, and it is clear that in the face of such a jostling, thirsty
throng, the hotel has abandoned any pretense of seeking proof-of-age from the
young drinkers. In the anteroom outside the ballroom, games of chance offer
rewards ranging from color television sets to ladies' gloves to Waring
Blenders to free photographs "By Famous Fashion Photographer, Irving Penn."
Domestic champagne circulates in this area for two dollars the glass and,
through an opening in the crowd, one may see a shiny new automobile being
raffled off at one dollar the chance. If the New York Cotillion seems to have
a faint odor of commercialism, to say nothing of Las Vegas, this perhaps can
be forgiven, since the whole affair is for the benefit of the New York
Infirmary, and all the merchandise offered as prizes in the lottery games has
been donated. Just how much money the Cotillion makes for the Infirmary is
not recorded as a rule, but, according to Mrs. Eugene W. Ong, a former
Cotillion chairman, "The Infirmary could not keep its doors open without the
Ball."
Within the ballroom the lights dim as the debutantes are presented from the
center of the stage. The orchestra plays a tinkly version of "The Teddy
Bears' Picnic" over and over again as, one by one, the girls step forward,
grip their escorts' hands for wobbly support, and sink into a deep curtsy. A
master of ceremonies intones each girl's name over the loudspeaker. Once
presented, the young women and their escorts perform a series of Cotillion
figures, after which, in somewhat thin and reedy voices, the girls sing "The
Coming-Out Waltz" the lyric of which was written by Mrs. Eugene W. Ong's
daughter when she was a debutante:
We're coming out tonight,
We're having a fling!
Debs dressed in yards of white,
Waltzing we sing -'cause
Beaux flock around tonight,
Flowers are part of the scheme!
Tomorrow may be just another day,
But tonight we are part of a dream!
Which sums things up pretty well, at least during the early part of the
evening.
Later on, it is possible for the mood of the evening to change. A young man
in tails reels drunkenly down a staircase and, all at once, a small crowd
gathers around a sobbing girl. It seems the young man, in passing, stepped on
the hem of her huge white gown, and a large section of the underskirt has
ripped out at the waist; as the girl's mother and friends surround and try to
comfort the girl, the elaborate dress is daintily upraised revealing the
puffs of petticoats, in layers, like the components of a parfait. "Look what
some slob did to Marcia!" the girl's mother cries repeatedly to anyone who
will listen, and others join the group and begin debating what to do. The
cost of the dress is mentioned, and there is talk of legal action and
insurance. Others suggest that the problem be taken into the ladies' room
where, perhaps, the matron can supply needle and thread. Through it all, the
debutante herself keeps crying, "Oh, Mother! Mother! Leave me alone!" her
voice childlike and despairing.
Not all debutante parties should be judged by this one, however. For all the
needed dollars it brings to the New York Infirmary, the Debutante Cotillion
and Christmas Ball is not one of the more fashionable balls in the United
States. In New York, the Grosvenor Ball, given at Thanksgiving time to
benefit the Grosvenor Neighborhood House, is far more exclusive; it not only
presents far fewer girls, but it costs considerably more than the Cotillion.
(To put a girl on the Cotillion's list costs only about one hundred and fifty
dollars; the Grosvenor costs over one thousand dollars per debutante but,
since it benefits a charity, much of this sum is deductible.) The junior
League Ball and & Junior Assemblies are also considered more important,
socially, than the Cotillion, and the Assemblies are more important than the
Ball. At all of these, one can feel surer of being presented to Real Society.
As a New York social secretary explains, "I can almost always arrange for a
girl to be presented at the Cotillion, and, sometimes, the Junior League Ball
using pull, that is. But the Assemblies and the Grosvenor she simply must
manage for herself." A truly important debutante, of course, will be
presented at all of these balls the Cotillion thrown in, as if for good
measure plus a number of others, plus at a ball of her very own. "A girl
who has a little dinner party in the Sert Room, and who has been presented at
the Cotillion afterward and nothing else hasn't had much of a debut,"
another social secretary says. No, for not enough money has been spent.
Another way to gauge the importance, or realness, of a girl's debut is to
consider at which point during her eighteenth year she makes her first, and
therefore official, emergence. The Christmas-to-New Year's holiday season is
perhaps the gayest and the busiest with, in most large cities, several
hotel-based parties scheduled each evening but, within that period, there
are subtle gradations of status. A girl whose debut is placed toward the New
Year's end of the week has less to look forward to, and is therefore less
favored. There are, however, three other distinct "little" seasons, and each
of these has its own connotations. The June, beginning-of-summer coming-out
season is probably the least fashionable; one associates June with
impoverished, shabbygenteel families, with teas, and with unstylish Boston
(where June is as fashionable as any other season). Then there is the
Thanksgiving holiday season which, for its very brevity, was for many years
considered the most fashionable coming-out season of all. But recently the
most wanted season, in terms of everything that matters to a debutante and
her parents, has been the somewhat longer fall "little season" between Labor
Day and the start of school. In New York, this comes to a sort of climax with
the Tuxedo Autumn Ball in Tuxedo Park. In other cities it is the scene of
large and lavish private parties given at country houses and under tents.
Looked at cynically, the fall season gives a girl a fine and early start on a
long social season that will continue through Thanksgiving, move into full
speed at Christmas, carry on through spring and wind her up, exhausted, in
June.
There are other ways for a girl to come out than at a ball. In theory, she
can come out at a luncheon, a tea, or at a dinner dance. But nowadays
coming-out luncheons have virtually disappeared. Teas continue to be popular
in a few cities notably in the South but each year sees fewer of them. (A
debutante tea, of course, is not the one-lump-or-two variety; it is a "great
tea" with champagne, an orchestra, dancing, and "the same guest list you'd
invite to a ball around a thousand.") As one debutante says, "Teas are too
exhausting. They last only two hours, but a girl has to be on her feet the
whole time, receiving." It leaves a girl too tuckered to enjoy any parties
that evening. Dinner dances are also disappearing as coming-out media, and
the reason for the waning importance of all these leaving it a question of
a ball or nothing is that the raison d'etre for the debut itself has
changed gradually in the last fifty years. Formerly, a girl's debut was to
introduce her to friends of her parents, and single men, if present at all,
were as a rule older than she. Today, the reason is boys. Luncheons and teas
are disappearing because, as one social secretary explains, "Boys don't like
to go to parties in the daytime." Adults today are pushed into the background
and, by their own admission, enjoy going to coming-out parties even their
own daughters' far less than their parents did a generation ago. "I
remember what a lovely time we all had in those days," a Boston grandmother
reminisces. "When each of us in our set brought a daughter out, it was a
chance for us all to get together. Now? I don't understand what they do at
these Parties any more. If a granddaughter of a particularly dear friend has
a party, I go, put in an appearance, but I leave as soon as possible." Older
people leaving a party as soon as possible can have consequences, at a large
private ball, more severe than a ripped-out underskirt. It can result in a
rented mansion being vandalized on Long Island or in any number of less
publicized incidents. During the early morning hours at a recent Connecticut
party, for instance, it was for some reason decided by the time the guests
had gathered at the swimming pool to break all the glassware. For several
hours afterward, guests danced and swam with bare and bleeding feet.
And so it has become a rule of thumb that to bring out a daughter properly
she must have a ball of her own. (There was a time when small groups of girls
would band together and, to share the expenses, give a joint ball; in the
affluent 1960's this has become according to one girl "the cheapie way" to
come out.) That Society is now addicted to the private ball was nowhere more
apparent than in San Francisco where the G. W. Douglas Carvers did the
uncommon thing in buying their own ball-sized tent, instead of renting one,
along with the glasses and the folding chairs, from a caterer. The Carvers
point out that their tent is an investment. They have four daughters. Their
tent also makes them popular with their neighbors. (The James Floods borrowed
it for the 1966 debut of their daughter Elizabeth.) And the Carvers like to
point out that theirs is, after all, only a small tent just sixty feet in
diameter. Larger San Francisco parties like that of the William Wallace
Meins for their daughter must still turn elsewhere for tents. To canopy
more than a thousand guests, the Meins had to import one from Los Angeles.
San Francisco parties have gotten so large that Millie Robbins, a local
Society columnist, has commented, "They'll soon have to bring the girls out
in the Cow Palace which might be rather appropriate!"
As the number and scale of private balls have climbed steadily since the
Second World War, so have the possibilities for decorating, outfitting, and
staffing them. When the Henry Fords spent a reported $50,000 on a party for
their daughter, the affair made news and raised eyebrows here and there. But
many American families, with names less well-known to those outside Society,
today spend that much and more to bring out their daughters in what they
consider the proper style. It has become unfashionable to have merely one
dance orchestra on hand; to make their parties sure of success, many parents
hire as many as three one for dancing, one for jazz, one for folk-rock
and place each in a separate part of the garden so that young guests can
traipse from one style of music to another. It is also unthinkable to hire
one of the big Society bands Meyer Davis's, Lester Lanin's, or Peter
Duchin's without its leader. Meyer Davis, though he has some ninety
different orchestras, had, as of 1966, bookings to appear with his band up
into the year 1985 which Davis, a man in his seventies, wryly suggests that
the lawyers handling his estate will have to fill. Davis will not personally
appear with his band for an evening for a penny under five thousand dollars.
The good old days of unbridled spending on parties and such frivolity are not
dead and gone. They are here.
Obviously, a debutante ball on the grandest possible scale is an enterprise
to be undertaken neither lightly nor by the inexperienced and, in recent
years, professional party-planners have found themselves in a lucrative
business. These social secretaries, as they designate themselves, are for the
most part women. Almost all are members of wellconnected (or almost
well-connected) families who, for various reasons (for the sheer thrill of it
all, they say), use their social connections to help them make a living. They
are nearly always gracious and charming and yet, at the same time, they are
shrewd businesswomen who know how to come to quick terms with the most
recalcitrant Teamster or member of the electricians' union should the
occasion demand. The undisputed dean of all social secretaries was the late,
great Juliana Cutting of New York, and New York's three most prominent social
secretaries Mrs. William H. Tew, Mrs. Katherine Palmer, and Mrs. Chester
Burden admit that they carry on in her illustrious tradition and clutch
Mrs. Cutting's image, figuratively, next to their hearts. (Mrs. Tew, probably
the grandest of the three, has actually allowed the myth to grow up around
her that she decides who goes into the Social Register and who does not; this
is untrue.)
A New York parent going to one of these three ladies will first be asked to
select a date for the ball and it is wise to do this as early as possible
literally when the child is a toddler. All three ladies have brought out
their second generation of debutantes, and have dates selected for a third. A
date, once picked, is immediately registered with the other social
secretaries. The three are scrupulously honest; if Mrs. Tew has selected a
date for a debut, Mrs. Palmer would never dream of giving it to a client of
hers, nor would Mrs. Burden. They are competitors, but in ladylike cahoots.
Not all social secretaries are as trustworthy; pirating of dates occurs,
particularly in smaller cities, and it is a practice that plagues innocent
San Francisco. When it happens, there is only one practical course for a
hostess to take make sure that her party is at least twice as lavish as her
rival's. A San Francisco mother, hearing that her claim on a date had been
jumped, rushed to the house of the usurper and, being told by the butler that
the lady of the house was indisposed, seized a precious Chinese vase in her
whitegloved hands, flung it to the marble floor where it shattered into bits,
and cried, "Tell the bitch I know her for what she is!" and departed.
Social secretaries insist that the more completely they are allowed to plan
and run a coming-out, the better it will be. One social secretary recalls a
party where the hostess insisted on making her own arrangements for the
orchestra. On the night of the party, did the orchestra show up? Of course it
didn't, so there you are. Given carte blanche, a social secretary will
arrange for all the catering, the liquor (champagne is recommended because,
as one social secretary says, "It gives them a pleasant little bun on"), the
music, tent, flowers, decorations, invitations, photographs, notices in the
newspapers right up to the cleanup crew the day after. "As a result of
television," Mrs. Tew says, "everybody wants celebrities at their parties."
Celebrities who, for a fee, have appeared and entertained at coming-out
parties range from Victor Borge and Ethel Merman (of whom parents approve) to
Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones (of whom the parents approve less).
A social secretary selects a motif for each party and, looking back, will
recall, "I did her in pink geraniums, and married her a year later in
wisteria," or, "The family colors are purple and white, so we did her in
lilacs and white crocus." But perhaps the most important ingredient that a
social secretary supplies is her list. In New York, such a list may contain
twenty-five hundred names two thousand boys and five hundred girls. The
boys' list is, of course, more important, and each secretary jealously guards
and maintains her names. One social secretary keeps her list in her
safe-deposit box at her bank, and will not even let her own secretary see it;
the quality of her list is a social secretary's most precious asset, and
social-climbing parents with ambitions for their sons must, in order to get
anywhere at all, get their sons' names placed somehow on a social secretary's
list. Actually, it is not all that hard, and the composition of the list is
not much of a mystery.
The names come from prep school and college catalogues, from the Social
Register, from the pupils at private dancing classes, and from those who
attend "Junior" or sub-debutante dances and, in New York, particularly the
Groton-St. Mark's Dance. This dance, given each year by the two schools,
serves as a major clearing house for stags. The behavior of a sixteen- or
seventeen-year-old boy at the Groton-St. Mark's Dance can determine his
social career for years to come, and will decide whether or not his name will
appear on a list the following season. At the dance, which is usually given
at the Hotel Pierre, soft punch and sweet biscuit are the only refreshments
served. Social secretaries post emissaries in the Hotel Pierre bar to take
down names of boys who go there for sturdier libations.
There is one other reason why a boy's name may not appear on a social
secretary's list. In New York and in other large cities, few Jewish boys are
listed or, more exactly, boys with Jewish-sounding names, since social
secretaries have no access to facts about a boy's religion. It is at the
debutante stage that what is known as "The Great Division" begins to take
place, and Jewish and Gentile Society are parted like the Red Sea. In Jewish
Society there is, of course, a similar list of boys' names, similarly
carefully maintained, by Jewish social secretaries for Jewish debutantes; in
New York, its backbone is provided by the pupils of the Viola Wolff Dancing
Classes, the Jewish equivalent of Mrs. William de Rham's. But it is rare for
a boy's name to appear on both a Jewish and a Gentile list; when this
happens, it is assumed to be through an inadvertence.
Normally, a boy's name stays on a list for four years from age seventeen to
twenty-one. But the social secretary must be ever on the lookout for things
that could disqualify him as a suitable stag. If he should become engaged for
example, his name must be removed, or if be should commit some social
misdemeanor such as failing to dance with his hostess, drinking too much,
failing to reply properly to an invitation, or attending a party to which he
had not been invited. Flunking out of prep school or college is not
considered a social crime, nor, apparently, is expulsion from school for
stealing. A young man of good family, dismissed from his school for theft in
a case that even made its way to newspaper headlines, remained on the list
and turned up at all the best parties the following season. Drinking of hard
liquor has long been a commonplace of debutante parties; if it isn't provided
at the bar and it usually is it turns up anyway. When a group of Darien,
Connecticut, parents was arrested for serving liquor to teenagers at a
debutante party after which a girl was killed in an auto accident the
parents understandably felt that they had been unfairly singled out. Other
parents have been serving liquor to underaged boys and girls at other parties
for years. The only rule governing liquor is the vague one that states that a
young person should be able to "handle" it.
Alongside each boy's name on the list are his parents' names, his address,
his school and his class and in most cases a meaningful blank space for
"Remarks." One debutante, looking over the list for her party, wrote "Spits
when he talks" under "Remarks." That boy's name came off the list. So
carefully do social secretaries tend their lists that many debutantes, and
their parents, allow the secretaries a free rein with the party invitations.
As one social secretary says, "If a boy's name is on my list, he's guaranteed
to behave."
While they all agree that there should be more boys than girls at a
coming-out party, each social secretary has her own favorite proportion. Some
prefer three boys to every girl; others say four to one is better, "the
proportions of a good Martini." More than four to one is considered
undesirable. "The boys gang together then, and shoot craps and talk about the
Army," says one lady. Gate-crashing is a perennial cause for concern. Most
ballrooms, private and public, have additional, little-known entrances,
through kitchens and pantries where a boy can enter the party with the
lobster Newburg, and the secrets of these are passed on from crasher-father
to crasher-son, along with the studs and cufflinks. Social secretaries post
members of their staffs called "dragons" by the young men at strategic
spots to keep out the uninvited, and most dragons make it a point to know not
only the names but also the faces of the men on their list. But the crashing
problem, like the servant problem, is secretly a non-problem. As one social
secretary confesses, "If a party doesn't have a few crashers, nobody thinks
it's a success." For their thoughtful services to which one social
secretary adds, as a fillip of her own, a hot bath drawn for the mother of
the debutante filled with special salts in which Mother is instructed to loll
for an hour before the party social secretaries either charge a flat fee of
ten or fifteen per cent of the party's cost, or receive discounts from the
caterer, the florist, the photographer, the orchestra, and the wine merchant.
The ladies seldom quote the prices of their clients' parties, but most admit
that they would be uninterested in tackling anything with a budget under five
thousand dollars.
In New York it is now true that any girl can come out not the best way,
perhaps, but at least get out if her family is willing to spend the money.
It is not true in Philadelphia. By tradition, Philadelphia Society is
restricted to members of "first Philadelphia families." Newcomers generally
have a hard time of it. One Philadelphia "newcomer," whose family had been in
Philadelphia only since 186o and who recently sought admission to
Philadelphia's coveted Assemblies, an institution that began in 1748, was,
after considerable effort and with the help of many friends, finally allowed
to attend as an out-of-town guest. So stern are the Philadelphia
Assemblies' rules against admitting divorced people that the John Ingersolls
(and she a Cadwalader) were not permitted to attend the coming-out of their
daughter, since Mrs. Ingersoll had once been divorced. Philadelphians take a
superior view of their sister city to the north. "New York is pretty much
come-and-go, isn't it?" asks a Philadelphia lady.
Unlike New York, Philadelphia has a single official debutante list, printed
up by J. E. Caldwell & Company, a jewelry and stationery store, the Tiffany's
of Philadelphia. Caldwell's employs an official debutante screener named
George W. Rehfuss. A mother registers her daughter with Mr. Rehfuss five or
six years before her debut and, from that point on, Mr. Rehfuss sees that no
debutante's dates overlap with another's and that, somehow, each of the
city's hundred to two hundred debutantes gets her rightful share of the
important college weekends and of the sixty-eight days of the four debutante
seasons. Upstarts who hope to make debutantes of their daughters face their
initial barrier in the person of Mr. Rehfuss, and those who treat Mr. Rehfuss
as an ordinary clerk or suspect that he will respond to bribery are
disappointed. "If someone came to me whose daughter shouldn't be a debutante,
I would know it," says Mr. Rehfuss.
Philadelphia's most powerful social secretary was the late Mrs. Edward J.
MacMullan, a woman who lived to be, as the saying goes, a legend in her time.
At her death in the summer of 1966, it was a shock to realize from the
obituary notices that this striking woman with her flaming red hair,
aquiline nose, boundless energy and Irish temper was seventy-eight years
old. For over forty years she had been, as she herself liked to put it, "the
ringmaster of the Philadelphia social circus." The secret of her ringmastery
was her direct approach to problems. For years, Mrs. MacMullan was Mrs.
Edward T. Stotesbury's personal arbiter elegantiarum, and one of Mrs.
Stotesbury's great difficulties in life was a particular diamond and emerald
tiara. It was so heavy with stones that whenever she wore it, it gave her a
stiff neck. Mrs. MacMullan said, "You deserve to suffer with that much
jewelry on your head. Either attach a few helium balloons to it or wear it
without complaining." The same tiara had a tendency to list to one side and
fall over Mrs. Stotesbury's ear. And so Mrs. MacMullan stationed herself
behind Mrs. Stotesbury at parties and, whenever the tiara began to slip,
nudged it back into place again.
Her own background was humble or so it is said; Mrs. MacMulIan herself
always preferred to keep her background out of the conversation. But for two
generations the foremost families of Philadelphia Society regarded "Mrs. Mac"
with something close to awe, and something even closer to dread. "Oh, she's a
devil!" they would murmur, rolling their eyes, and there were catalogued
instances where young men dropped from Mrs. Mac's list for one reason or
another felt themselves so permanently ruined in Philadelphia Society that
they left to start life over in other cities. Mrs. MacMullan herself used to
laugh loudly at such assertions, but it was clear she enjoyed their being
made. "My rules are simple," she once said. "Manners. Good manners.
Rudimentary good manners are all I ask. There's little enough elegance left
in the world. Are a few good manners too much to ask for? Take shaking hands.
If a young lady is introduced to me, I expect her to take my hand. Naturally
I go to all the parties I plan and, as the young men and women enter the
room, I expect them to come up to me, say, 'Good evening, Mrs. MacMullan ,
and take my hand. That's all. If they don't do that much, then they don't
deserve to be in Society."
In addition to reportedly knowing the whereabouts of several wellplaced
family skeletons, Mrs. MacMullan's great success and power as a social
secretary stemmed from the simple fact that she planned and ran very good
parties. From her triumph at organizing the wedding of Ethel du Pont to
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., she went on to establish Philadelphia's Junior
Bal Masque, the Piccadilly Dances, and the Headdress Balls all now fixtures
of the city's social life. Her inventiveness when it came to adding gay and
sparkly side-show features to coming-out parties was endless. At one ball, a
replica of a roadside diner was built just off the ballroom of the
Bellevue-Stratford Hotel; from it, short-order cooks served hot dogs,
hamburgers, and soft drinks to guests who sat on stools.
For the debut of Ella ("Tootie") Widener in 1946, a North Pole motif was
selected. There was a real snowstorm, an aurora borealis overhead, and Miss
Widener received from an igloo which was heated, of course. With surprise,
guests learned that it was not a MacMullan party, but one designed by her
competitor, Mrs. Wirt Thompson. "Trying to copy me, of course, sniffed Mrs.
MacMullan. "Imagine! An igloo! I hear it dripped all over her dress."
Mrs. MacMullan was well aware of the hazards of drippage from overhead. She
often used wildlife in her decor releasing flocks of white doves or, in one
instance, four hundred canaries. Beforehand, Mrs. MacMullan had thoughtfully
fed the canaries a special seed mixture calculated to induce a mild
constipation. Not all her schemes were successful. Once, a herd of peacocks
was to parade magnificently across the ballroom, plumes fanned regally but,
seeing the guests, the peacocks panicked and caused quite a disturbance. "One
of the things came lunging at me, flapping its wings," a girl who was a guest
at the party recalls. "Goodness, if I hadn't had so much champagne I think I
would have fainted!" Flamingoes, it turns out, have considerably more aplomb.
Philadelphians will never forget the ball where huge white paper cylinders
were suspended from the ceiling of the tent. Everyone wondered what they were
for until midnight, when the cylinders flew open releasing thousands of white
butterflies. The butterflies came cascading down all quite dead killed,
apparently, by the firepreventative that had been sprayed around the tent.
But, for all these mishaps, Mrs. MacMullan was a part of Philadelphia Society
life. Who can possibly replace her is a subject of agitated speculation.
Boston is often likened to Philadelphia, but the two cities actually have
little in common. "In Boston," says one Philadelphian, "you simply do not get
enough to eat." This is certainly part of it and, compared to those in
Philadelphia, Boston's coming-out parties are austere. For years, Boston
debutantes were presented under simple marquees in their families' gardens;
but with the rising costs of these affairs costs which wouldn't mate a New
Yorker or a Philadelphian blink more and more Boston girls are being
presented at mass debuts, at the Debutante Cotillion held in June at the
Sheraton Plaza Hotel, and the Debutante Assembly, held Thanksgiving Eve at
the Statler. Before one of these parties not long ago, a debutante complained
to a friend that the shoes she was planning to wear were too small and were
uncomfortable; she doubted she could bear the pain of dancing in them all
evening. "Why not wear sneakers?" her practical-minded friend offered. "Under
your long dress they'll never be noticed." She wore sneakers; they were not
noticed. At the same party, another un-style-conscious debutante wore long
woolen underwear under her ball gown, "because it was cold."
Boston, like Philadelphia, has a Society that is generally chilly to the
upstart. "We don't snub them," a Boston lady says, "we side-step them."
Another city renowned for its impenetrable social barriers against outsiders
without connections and newcomers without portfolio is Charleston, South
Carolina. Although it is not a "Social Register city," Charlestonians feel
that it doesn't need to be. The city has a rich and glorious past. Between
the Revolution and the Civil War, it was the capital of the Plantation System
and the birthplace of all that is considered gracious and elegant in the
Southern "way of life." In 1762, Charleston's St. Cecilia Society was formed.
Originally an amateur musical group, it was similar to and only slightly
younger than Philadelphia's Assemblies. For years, the St. Cecilia Society
ruled Charleston's social life; no girl could be a debutante in Charleston
unless she was a daughter of a St. Cecilia's member. Recent pressure,
however, has broken down the system. Now about half of Charleston's
debutantes are from non-St. Cecilia families. They can do everything except
attend the St. Cecilia Ball.
In Dallas and other Texas cities where one might expect oil money to have an
exuberant influence on debutantes and their affairs, most debuts are subdued
and Eastern rather than Western in flavor. Eastern social secretaries arc
often imported to arrange parties, and this fact alone is enough to give a
party great cachet. The same is true in the motion picture colony of Los
Angeles, where Society like everything else about that billowing
city-of-villages is confusing and hard to grasp. At one time there was a
genuine Los Angeles Old Guard, composed largely of Spanish land-grant
families, many of whom clung jealously to their ancient Spanish titles, and
even spoke Spanish in their homes. These were eclipsed, however, by suburban
upper-crust families centered around such towns as Pasadena and San Marino
where, if one was part of the circle, it was possible to believe that nothing
else was going on in Los Angeles at all. Such fixtures of Pasadena social
life as the Los Angeles Country Club and the Las Madrinas Debutante Ball
excluded, automatically, all movie people; the "Pasadena crowd" and the
"Beverly Hills crowd" literally never met. Gradually the great dividing line
has begun to blur, and one of the first movie people to integrate with the
Pasadena set was none other than the late Walt Disney. His daughter Sharon
made Los Angeles social history as the first movie-colony debutante in the
Las Madrinas Ball. The occasion even had a touch of Hollywood comedy.
Realizing that be and Sharon were the same height in their stocking feet, and
that when he led her in the first dance she would tower over him in her high
heels, Disney went to his studio's wardrobe department and bad his evening
shoes fitted out with tall lifts. Sharon, meanwhile, had thought of the same
possibility and so, on the evening of the ball, considerately wore flats. On
the dance floor, a towering Disney lurched about with Sharon's head at waist
level.
Debutantes have undergone some interesting personality changes in the last
few decades. In the 1920's, they prided themselves on being brittle,
animated, and witty, and were admired for their boyish gaiety, their ability
to swing from chandeliers and to drink and mix cocktails. But in the thirties
the movies were promoting the word "glamour," and debutantes let their hair
down to their shoulders, became willowy, languid, and torchy. At the same
time, they discovered show business. A debutante named Cobina Wright, Jr.,
was singing at the Waldorf, and Sally Clark, a Roosevelt relative, was at the
Plaza. Eve Symington, a Senator's daughter, was at a West Side bistro called
La Place Pigalle. Paragraphs in Society columns seemed less important than
write-ups in Variety, photographs in the tabloids, and gossipy in nuendos by
Walter Winchell. "Cafe Society" became a phrase. The Old Guard was more
amused than shocked. It all seemed very new and strange and, therefore,
exciting. Much of the show business aspect of coming out remains. In 1951,
when Life published a full-page picture of Caroline Lee Bouvier, now Princess
Stanislaus Radziwill, commenting that "Society editors and arbiters"
considered her the leading debutante of the New York season, she was besieged
with fan mail. In one letter, a certain Boris Kaplan of the talent department
of Paramount Pictures wrote the future sister-in-law of President Kennedy to
ask her whether she would be interested in discussing motion picture work.
Writing to her at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, Mr. Kaplan
urged the rich and beautiful Miss Bouvier to call him at his New York office
"collect." She has underscored this suggestion, in red, and has placed the
letter in a scrapbook with other invitations collected during her debutante
year. A daughter of real Society cannot be bought for the price of a
twenty-cent call, as Miss Bouvier later proved by launching herself as an
actress on her own terms.
In every season there is a girl who might be called a superfluous debutante
a girl who, long before her debutante year, has received all the acclaim and
admiration any girl could dream of, and for whom the ritual of coming out
seems to add little of importance. She has been "out" for a long time.
Sometimes this Ultimate Girl is a creation of the press. From the thirties
one thinks of Brenda Diana Duff Frazier who, fresh from the genteel Miss
Hewitt's classes in New York, became advertised as "America's Number One
Glamour Debutante, with her long "debutante bob, her dark eyes, her pale skin
and thin red mouth "more beautiful that Joan Crawford's." She was the
Girlwith-Everything, and clever reporters were skillful at inducing dumbgirl
quotes from her so that, long before her debutante year was over, she was
hated by the Depression-poor American public, and had to face such ordeals as
being hissed when she entered a restaurant. Some thirty years and two
collapsed marriages later, Brenda Frazier lives in near-retirement, far from
the Society into which she came. Then there was Gloria Vanderbilt, now also
several times married, whose comingout career was singular. Though labeled by
the press the "Number One Debutante," she was never technically a debutante
at all since she was never presented at a ball.
Then, periodically, there are the girls with helpful mothers behind them,
pushing them into social prominence, and one recalls the blond and beautiful
Joanne Connelley, Debutante Queen of 1948 who, less than ten years after her
press-agented debut, was dead of a heart ailment induced by an overdose of
reducing pills, and was survived by her ambitious, more robust mother. Of the
same vintage as Miss Connelley was a dark-haired girl with a heart-shaped
face named Jacqueline, Lee Bouvier. Though her debut was not press-agented,
she emerged a few years later as one of the most famous women in the world.
Ten years later, a beautiful English girl named Henrietta Tiarks and her
mother arrived on these shores. Henrietta Tiarks was already one of the
most come-out girls in recent history. Her debutante career had begun in
England when she was presented to the Queen and was heralded in the press as
"the last of the debs." This was not strictly accurate. Royal presentation
parties were being discontinued that year as being "out of keeping with the
times," but debutantes have continued to proliferate in England nonetheless.
Henrietta's presentation was followed by a series of luncheons, teas,
cocktail parties, dinners, and " one or two balls every night." In between
there were weekends at Oxford, May Week at Cambridge, polo matches at Windsor
Great Park, the Henley Regatta, the Eton-Harrow cricket match, Ascot, and the
Derby. She gave a ball of her own, in London, and it took up the entire
ground floor of Claridge's Hotel; the party lasted until five, after which
there was a trip to London Airport for breakfast.
Next came the "little season" in Scotland where, to make it official north of
the border, Henrietta came out all over again, and attended "twenty-five or
thirty balls." Then on to Paris, to come out there, and next to Madrid for
the same reason. "Paris parties are fabulous," Henrietta said afterward.
"They're all given in such beautiful houses. Madrid is wonderful, too, but
fewer balls are given there." Arriving in New York, she was enrolled in
Briarcliff College, in a horsey part of suburban Westchester, and her mother
installed herself in a Manhattan apartment and busied herself keeping
Henrietta's social calendar and pasting Henrietta's press clippings into big
scrapbooks, "So her grandchildren may see what a wonderful year she is
having." Briarcliff often called "Debutante U." could be little more than
a place to go and rest between parties because, of course, Henrietta Tiarks
was presented to New York Society at two balls and then plunged into the
generally hectic Eastern social schedule. For good measure, she also made
debuts in Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., and went to balls in
San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago. How many balls, all told, did
Henrietta Tiarks attend? She lost count somewhere along the way. "It was
hundreds and hundreds. Looking back on it, it was all quite wonderful," she
said when it was over. "But I'm glad it's only once in a lifetime. When the
clock struck midnight, January first, I said, 'Hooray! I'm an ex-debutante!'"
Her mother, meanwhile, had stuffed five scrapbooks full of photographs and
clippings and cried, "I've still got drawers and drawersful more!" Such an
elaborate comingout season undoubtedly bad its desired long-term result. The
Tiarkses, though very rich (Henrietta's banker father was, among other
things, one of the developers of Jamaica's Round Hill), did not have a title
in the family. Now they do. A few years after her coming-out year, Henrietta
married the young Marquis of Tavistock, heir to the Duke of Bedford.
But girls like these are the exception in a debutante season. Ultimate Girls
are only rarely national or international celebrities. For the most part they
are the pretty products of the Eastern boarding schools Foxcroft, Miss
Porter's, Westover, Madeira, Dobbs Ferry, Ethel Walker, Chatham Hall. The
Ultimate Girl is an artifact of American prep school life, as persistent as
the rumor that there is saltpeter in the gravy. She is selected not by a
Cholly Knickerbocker but, in an informal election, by perspiring boys who sit
sprawled on beds and cracked leather chairs in banner-decked dormitory rooms-
of such schools as Choate, Hotchkiss, Exeter, St. Paul's, St. Mark's,
Lawrenceville, Groton, Taft and Hill, and in fraternity lounges of both the
big and the little Ivy League. Selection is based on her ability to leave
male heads dizzy with desire, grief, and frustration. Once picked, she is
advertised by word of mouth. She is authoritatively reported to be both fast
and frigid, in one breath a Magdalen and in the next a Medusa. Suddenly she
receives dozens of invitations to every party there is and when she appears
she radiates the "star quality" of a movie queen, with lesser debutantes,
eager to share her light, hovering about her like handmaidens. But this
Ultimate Girl is not necessarily doomed to a future of divorce, notoriety,
alcohol, sleeping pills, and psychiatry , More often than not she simply
finishes her debutante year, graduates from college, marries, moves to
Scarsdale, has babies, joins the country club and the Junior League.
The Diana Barrymores, the Brenda Fraziers, and the Joanne Connelleys of the
debutante world have given a somewhat lurid connotation to the word. And so
coming out has become a point of some controversy in Society. Should one let
one's teenage daughter step into these highly charged and perfumed waters?
What are the real values of the debutante ritual, if any? There are many
opinions. One handsome young New York woman says, "Daddy asked me if I wanted
a coming-out party, and I told him flatly no, I didn't. To me it's silly to
spend all that money just so that I could have a fabulous party. What's a
party? When it's all over, what have you got but a ball gown you'll never
wear again? I told him that if he had that much money to spend, he could put
it in a savings account for me. Then, when I get married, it will help me buy
a house or furniture or educate my children." Then she added, thoughtfully,
"To me a girl who wants to be a debutante is basically insecure."
The late Mrs. MacMullan of Philadelphia would have agreed with this, more or
less. But she saw in the system factors which, if a girl was "basically
insecure," would cure her of all her emotional problems. "You may say I'm in
a luxury business, that it's a lot of froth," she once said. "But, believe
me, it's thrilling to see what her debutante year does for a girl! It can
turn a shy, awkward child into a radiant, charming young woman. It teaches a
girl poise and manners. Do you know there are girls nowadays who don't know
how to perform an introduction properly? Much less pour tea! And think of the
employment these parties give to caterers, florists, musicians, marquee men,
photographers, and gown shops!"
The mother of a debutante says, "Why shouldn't I give her a little gaiety?
These are perilous times. She'll have to face the hard facts soon enough."
And another says, "It's a gracious tradition that ought to be preserved." And
yet, when the guests at Fernanda Wanamaker Leas's coming-out party helped
dismantle the house where they were staying, dragging mattresses out onto the
Southampton beach, some of the graciousness of the tradition seemed to
disappear. "What do they drag out mattresses on the beach for?" asks one
mother. "That's what worries me." A New York father says flatly, "I'm not
going to give a party so a lot of drunks and hopheads can rape my daughter."
In a somewhat more restrained tone, a Boston grandmother asks worriedly, "Is
it true that all the debutantes nowadays go the whole hog?"
In the Old Stone Age when a marriageable maiden was preened, fattened,
buttered, and presented to the tribe, she was offered as a virgin yet how
many of her modern sisters offer an equivalent degree of virtue is a
debatable point. The debutantes of 1966 generally take the view that girls
today are no more, and no less, virtuous than they were in their mothers'
generation. Others disagree. Obviously, firm statistics are not available but
when, not long ago, an American girl traveling in England announced that she
guessed that "at least fifty per cent" of American debutantes were virgins,
this was greeted with widespread skepticism. "This would certainly not be
true here," a London Society columnist commented, adding that in England
"only a tiny per cent" were pure.
American parents prefer not to dwell overlong on such aspects of the rite,
and instead try to see in it something worthwhile and reassuring. As one
mother says, "I've heard all the talk about the Sexual Revolution, but I
confess I haven't seen it. I mean, how can one see something like that going
on if one isn't a peeping Tom? But I have seen the way college girls dress
nowadays with their scraggly hair and sloppy shoes and dirty raincoats. At
least if a girl's a debutante she has to look like a lady!"
pps. 74-98
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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