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 grand-nieces 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 married. 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 upper-class 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 is it. 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 mésalliance. 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 son-in-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, “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 he 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 alientation 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.
Of young Mrs. Greenwood, her friends say, “She should have known. After all, the difference in their backgrounds.…”
* Not to be confused with the ancient Philadelphia men’s club of the same name, and of which more will be said later.