-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
Boston-Toronto
LCCN 68-11525
360pps. out-of-print
--[7]--
7
The Dirty Part
IN a large stone house outside Philadelphia, surrounded by acres of venerable
lawn, at the end of a long graveled driveway that is raked so often that each
car approaching leaves fresh furrows in it, lives a certain little old lady
with servants and roomfuls of family photographs. At tea time, on designated
afternoons, she receives her brothers and cousins, her nieces and nephews and
little grandnieces and grandnephews, most of whom live nearby, and, as she
pours from a large, heavily embossed silver service, the conversation is
witty and cultivated and intimate and gay. "Gentle talk," she calls it.
Mostly it is family talk, but often it ranges to art, the opera, the
symphony, the local dances. Politics is a rare topic; so is the theatre
-unless, of course, someone "knows someone" who has made the unusual move of
"going into politics," or is "taking a fling" at going on the stage. The
talk, in other words, centers around "people we know." When tea is over, the
children kiss their elderly relative good-by and leave with parents or
governesses, and a few adults stay on for cocktails and a few of these old
members of the family may remain for dinner. At eleven o'clock, the great
doors of the house close for the night.
This lady is a member of one of Philadelphia's oldest and wealthiest and most
distinguished families. At eighteen, she was the city's most beautiful and
popular debutante. Strangers ask why she never mar ried. This is a subject
that is not discussed much in the family any more; the reasons why no longer
matter much. But, if pressed for an answer, close friends will tell the story
of how once, when she was a young girl, she fell in love. The man she loved
was out of her class, and was Jewish either one of which circumstances
might have been remotely tolerable, alone. But together they made the
situation impossible. She never fell out of love, never fell in love again.
Once, it is said, she asked her father for permission to marry the man. Papa,
very gently, explained that it was out of the question. She bowed to Papa's
wisdom. This story, in its classic simplicity, presents a classic truth:
love, among the rich, can be cruel.
Love among the rich is different simply because the rich are rich, and for no
other reason. (F. Scott Fitzgerald's sensitive observation about the rich
that they are "different" from you and me and Ernest Hemingway's flat-footed
rebuttal of it, that they have more money, reveals only that one man
understood the power of money and the other did not.) "Power," states an old
Chinese proverb, "is ancient wealth." And it is to this thinking that most
American rich, knowingly or not, subscribe. The adjective here is most
important. In order for the power the influence, the prestige, the ability
to control other people and shore up reserves against the world's inequities
to be at its fullest, the money must age. This is why the newly rich are
very different from the anciently rich. Money, like a good strand of pearls,
improves and grows more lustrous with each generation that wears it.
This, of course, explains why so much of the talk among the very old rich is
family talk. Money is part of the bloodline, inextricable from it, celebrated
along with it so that the two are tacitly considered to be the same. Family
money is a thing that, from generation to generation, must not only be
preserved, but must also be enriched and fed and nourished from time to time,
from whatever sources are at hand, resupplied from other wells of ancient
wealth. Otherwise, any family fortune unless the strictest rules of
primogeniture are adhered to dissipates quickly through division, taxation,
and simple spending. Marriage, therefore the right marriage is of prime
importance. "Love" taken to mean romantic love, or even sex must be
subordinated to that, or at least made equivalent to that. Among the rich,
money and love and marriage go together like a horse and a pair of carriages
the money being the horse that pulls the caravan. In upperclass love, money
is always raising its ugly head. Before the demands of love can be met, the
demands of money must be. In marriage, money is definitely the dirty part;
sooner or later all the implications of that five-letter word must be faced.
The rich in America are often accused of living in the past, but this is not
really the case. The past, the family, and where the money came from provide
a textured background for what goes on today, but the true concern of the
rich is for the future: where the money will go. A child is more than a
child. He is also the carrier of the money into the next generation, and the
one after that. This is the reason for the unquestioning obedience and
observance of ritual and tradition that accompany upper-class child-raising
a process that Wilmarth Lewis compares to the Oriental practice of
foot-binding. This constrictive atmosphere is designed not to stifle romantic
love, but to put it in its proper perspective, to help the young see love for
what it is. The attitude is that love is cheap. Money isn't.
"Bringing up a child is so difficult these days," a New York woman sighed
recently. "At schools and colleges, there is getting to be such a range of
people." Of course. At the so-called "rich-boys' schools," it is increasingly
difficult to be sure that one's son will meet only other rich boys, who are
likeliest to have rich sisters. There are apt to be a few poor boys in these
schools nowadays, and there are even more apt to be rich boys who are "the
wrong kind of rich." This means that, to compensate for schools that "open
their doors to practically everybody," more attention must be paid to what
goes on in and who goes to the private dancing classes, the parties, and
the subscription dances where little boys meet little girls. "I have to
screen my list of boys' names so carefully," says Mrs. William Tew, the
social secretary, "to see that someone who doesn't belong, or of whom parents
would disapprove, is not invited." Parents themselves begin screening the
list of their children's friends even earlier from the first days of
nursery school.
Why is it considered so important for the rich to marry rich? There are many
reasons. "It's better that way," says a New York mother. "Then the young
people will have the same interests, the same backgrounds." Oil and water
don't mix. Also always there is the question of the money. When rich weds
rich, there is less chance that one of the partners is a fortune hunter
(though there is nothing to prevent a person with a fortune from setting out
to bag an even larger fortune; not all fortune hunters are poor). When money
marries money, the union of wealth not only assures that the young couple
will have few worries over household bills, and few arguments over who is
spending too much of whose income, but it provides, for the generation
following and the generation following that, an even greater financial
cushion. There is less chance of the money's running out; instead, the wealth
will grow more ancient, bringing even greater power and greater
respectability, into perpetuity. This is why so many of the rich have a
curious habit of growing richer. And, if there is one consolation for an
old-rich-new-rich marriage, it is that, two generations from now, the money
will all be old-rich.
Still, the marriage of two rich young people is less like a giant corporate
merger than it sometimes seems from reading the newspapers. Instead, the
money is joined in a kind of polite legal handshake. It is set up in this
manner by attorneys and the trust officers of banks. The money is only
married up to a point. Beyond that, against the unfortunate but very
practical possibility of divorce, it is kept separate. In this way, when
Thomas M. Bancroft, Jr., (whose mother was of the banking Woodwards, and
related to the Astors) married Margaret (Peggy) Bedford, of a considerable
Standard Oil fortune, it was called "a perfect marriage," and the Bancroft
and Bedford fortunes joined hands. When the couple divorced, to allow Mrs.
Bancroft to become Princess Charles d'Arenberg, the two fortunes slid apart
and returned smoothly to their respective sources. Alimony is considered
untidy, and, when both parties to a divorce are wealthy, it is quite
unnecessary. In contrast to the Bancroft-Bedford arrangement was the
$5,500,000 share of another Standard Oil fortune demanded, and won, by Mrs.
Winthrop ("Bobo") Rockefeller in the 1950's a tabloid hullabaloo that
causes all Rockefellers to this day to turn pale when it is mentioned in
their presence.
Often things go wrong when two fortunes attempt to disengage themselves in a
divorce action. One California bridegroom, in a happy nuptial daze, put his
signature to a number of legal documents in the process of taking a wife,
without reading any of them carefully. A year or so later, in the process of
a particularly bitter divorce suit, he discovered that one item he had
acquired for reasons that are still unclear to him was half-ownership of
a piece of real estate upon which his wife's parents' swimming pool reposed.
To the distress of his in-laws, and to the dismay of their lawyers who could
devise no legal way of excluding him, he came regularly to swim throughout
the divorce proceedings, sometimes bringing large parties of friends but
always, he says "Being careful to swim only at my end of the pool."
In the East not long ago, a pretty girl whose homes are in New York City and
Sands Point, Long Island, was more foresighted about divorce. While she and
her young husband were honeymooning in Mexico they decided, after a
particularly altitudinous evening on the town, to get a Mexican divorce. As
she explains, "We were having such a marvelous, glorious time a perfect
holiday. We got the divorce for a lark, mostly. We were there, it was easy to
get, and we thought after all we might want to use it some day." With
their speedily obtained decree, the couple flew merrily home to New York,
framed the document and hung it on their bathroom wall where, from friends,
it provoked appropriate laughter. But, says the wife, "Later on we got to
feeling rather funny about it. We didn't really know whether we were married
or not. Some of our friends said the Mexican thing wasn't really legal, but
others said it was. If we weren't married, it didn't seem quite right for us
to be living together. So we sort of drifted apart . . ."
They have continued to drift. The young woman remarried, but she and her
first husband are still "the best of friends," and the first husband
continues to sail his boat out to Sands Point on summer weekends to visit his
former wife's parents and to call on his former wife who is sometimes there
for the weekend too. Sometimes, if the second husband doesn't happen to be in
the vicinity, the former couple appear at parties together, "acting just like
newlyweds."
There is always a good deal of clucking and headshaking about the morals of
the rich. And it is true that when there is plenty of money a divorce can be
both cheap and easy. But among a larger and less publicized group of American
rich, divorces are not supposed to happen. Divorce is not considered
respectable or practical. It casts an unfavorable light upon the families,
and on the way they live, and on the money. It blurs, rather than
strengthens, the bloodline. And, because the press pays more attention to
divorces among the rich (HEIRESS SEEKS DIVORCE, scream the headlines) than it
does to divorces among the poor, a divorce can be embarrassing. In this
group, a marriage is supposed to last and last and last. It need not be
happy, but it should last. Husbands and wives may stop speaking to each
other, but they should not separate. American Society has, in fact, erected
for itself a few bulwarks flimsy, perhaps, but bulwarks nonetheless to
try to see to it that its marriages do last. One of these is Philadelphia's
antique rule against divorced people attending its Assembly Ball. And, in
Philadelphia, when one of the well-placed Ingersolls told his mother that he
was getting along poorly with his wife, his mother sympathized and said,
"Then I think you should take a mistress, dear."
Caring for the wealth and caring for the bloodline, and seeing that each
reaches a not only ripe but indestructible old age, go hand in hand, but in
assembling the perfect marriage concessions can be made in one direction or
the other. An ample helping of Old Family and less money, on one side, can
usually be brilliantly matched with a smaller amount of family, and more
money, on the other. And a great family name of the magnitude of Adams,
Talbott, or Howard can make up for almost anything, even total poverty. An
Englishman, who had been visiting in Philadelphia, said recently, "I think
that if a rich, social Philadelphia girl married an aging alcoholic
homosexual in a wheelchair without a penny to his name if the name were
Cadwalader or Ingersoll or Biddle or Drexel or Roberts or Wister or Chew
everyone would say, 'What a marvelous marriage!'"
For though a divorce may be awkward it is as nothing compared with the
disaster and the cost that can result from a mesalliance. When the late
William Woodward, Jr., married Ann Eden Crowell, a former actress and model,
and the daughter of a Middle Western streetcar conductor, his parents were
models of stiff-upper-lip behavior. And, when young Mrs. Woodward later
accidentally shot and killed her husband, Mrs. Woodward, Sr.'s lip was the
stiffest anyone had ever seen. "Bill Woodward would be alive today, if he
hadn't married that actress," says one of the elder Mrs. Woodward's friends,
and certainly no one can refute that statement. The Woodward shooting
illustrated a couple of tangential points that the young Woodwards were
doing the customary upper-class thing in maintaining separate bedrooms, and
that shooting one's husband does not get a woman, no matter how lowly born,
removed from the Social Register; the younger Mrs. Woodward retains her place
in its pages, along with her membership in the exclusive Piping Rock Club.
More recently, when the son of a wealthy Chicago manufacturer insisted upon
marrying a pretty California girl of simple origins, the wedding was
described by a guest as "all minks and Mr. John hats on the groom's side of
the church, and all little cloth coats and bonnets on the bride's." It was
hard to decide, this guest confessed, which side of the church looked more
uncomfortable. The young husband, in an attempt to tone up his new in-laws in
the only way he knew how, gave them a sizable gift of money. His in-laws then
did something that, it seemed, they had always dreamed of doing should a
windfall ever appear. They bought a pick-up truck and an enormous house
trailer. When they drove this caravan to Chicago and parked it, complete with
butane tanks and chemical toilets, on the sweeping drive of their sonin-law's
parents' estate on the North Shore, the fiber that held the young marriage
together began to weaken. Another cash gift was tried it went for plastic
awnings and window boxes for the trailer before the young man headed for
the divorce court, another unhappy reminder of the importance of "sticking to
our kind."
"I've told my daughter," says one mother, 41 that if she wants to have a
fling with a stranger she should for goodness' sake have it. But not for a
minute is she to entertain the thought of marrying him." But runaway
daughters are a recurring Society phenomenon, and look what finally happens
to them. Popular candidates for these girls' partners seem to be chauffeurs,
cowboys, ski instructors with fewer chauffeurs than cowboys and ski
instructors because so few people keep chauffeurs any more while, as Mrs. Tew
says sadly, "Everybody skis, everybody goes West A Chicago debutante of a few
seasons back ran off and married her cowboy. When last heard from she was in
Wyoming, trying to raise money through her family and their business
connections, to get her husband a ranch of his own. A San Francisco
debutante, selecting a ski instructor, was last heard from in the mountains
trying to raise money to buy her husband a ski lodge. Moving up fast to fill
the spot being vacated by chauffeurs are service station attendants. Why? So
many girls these days are being given little sports cars as graduation
presents. Sooner or later, each little car needs gas. Will such marriages
last? Hardly ever, in the opinion of Society. Furthermore, when the novelty
of such a mixed marriage has worn off, when it is time for the knot to be
untied, it cannot be untied without cost.
Several years ago, Patricia Procter, heiress to a Procter & Gamble soap
fortune (and a distant relative, through a complicated series of marriages,
to the runaway Gamble Benedict) decided to marry Thomas Greenwood, the
good-looking son of a London greengrocer. There was the customary
consternation in the New York social world in which Miss Procter moved. In
fact, her peppery grandmother (a curious parallel, ten years earlier, to
Gamble Benedict's grandmother, for Mrs. Procter was also her granddaughter's
legal guardian and controlled her inheritance), expressed more than
consternation. "Granny," as Mrs. Sanford Procter was called, was so put out
with the whole situation that, when arguments and blandishments and
entreaties failed, she refused to attend the wedding, a relatively flossy
affair with a reception following it at the Colony Club in New York. Guests
at the reception bravely tried to ignore Mrs. Procter's conspicuous absence,
but as one guest put it, "Granny was everywhere in that room!" (Leaving the
reception line, after politely chatting with the young bridegroom, another
guest moaned, "Oh, God! He even has a Cockney accent!")
Things seemed to go well enough for the young couple after their marriage,
but friends soon became concerned when the Greenwoods moved into an apartment
at The Mayfair House on Park Avenue, a couple of floors away from Granny's
apartment, and when the groom began to seem more interested in the prompt
delights of room service than in going to his job as a car salesman in New
Jersey, an employment be suddenly appeared to find decidedly dull. Trouble,
of a predictable variety, was not far off. There were quarrels, a separation,
a reconciliation, more quarrels, and all the while Granny was right where a
good granny should be, just a short elevator hop away. Soon the affair
erupted unpleasantly in the newspapers. Greenwood was suing Granny for
alienation of affections. Mrs. Procter, Greenwood testified, " through her
great wealth," had systematically gone about breaking up the marriage. But
what Greenwood wanted, it seemed, was not his wife's love back. He wanted
money. There was a public scene in which Granny, a small and erect figure in
aristocratic black, made a dramatic appearance in court. Love letters, and
the opposite of love letters, were hauled out of dresser drawers where they
should have stayed, and were read, and terrible accusations many too spicy
even for the tabloids flew shrilly about. In the end, Greenwood lost his
case, and disappeared. The couple were divorced. Patricia Greenwood, a sadly
disillusioned young grass widow, withdrew from New York social life. Mrs.
Sanford Procter continues to winter in Manhattan and summer at her farm in
Massachusetts, which is called "Fish House," [*] where virtually every stick
of furniture and item of decoration is in the shape of, or bears the stamp
of, a finny creature as though a reminder that a fish cannot survive
outside its water.[ * Not to be confused with the ancient Philadelphia men's
club of the same name, and of which more will be said later.]
Of young Mrs. Greenwood, her friends say, "She should have known. After all,
the difference in their backgrounds . . . ...
pps. 113-121
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substancenot soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
