By the Shores of Lake St. Clair
To those who have never been to either place, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, is often considered hand in hand with Lake Forest, Illinois. (“Isn’t Grosse Pointe just sort of a rich Lake Forest?” a New Yorker asks humorously.) No comparison could be more inexact. Lake Forest is rolling and spacious, many miles north of Chicago. Grosse Pointe is flat and compact, and one of Detroit’s closest suburbs—a sliver of privilege barely six miles long and hardly more than a mile wide. The outer edge of this strip of real estate curves along the shores of Lake St. Clair—which might be called a satellite of Lake Erie—and its southern corners brush untidily against a woebegone sector of the metropolis, a maculose region of auto courts, funeral parlors, and dim cafes. Within the strip are tucked “the Grosse Pointes,” no less than five towns named (reading from south to north) Grosse Pointe Park, Grosse Pointe City, Grosse Pointe Farms, Grosse Pointe Shores, and (tucked behind the Shores) Grosse Pointe Woods. Here, in an area roughly the size of Block Island, Rhode Island, live some fifty-five thousand people, compared with Block Island’s seven hundred and thirty-two. The Grosse Pointe complex may not be “the wealthiest community per capita in the United States,” but it may well contain the densest concentration of rich people in the world. Also, according to Mrs. John M. S. Hutchinson of “the boating group,” “We have more sailboats in Grosse Pointe than Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit combined.”
Though its approaches, from the Detroit side, are unpromising, the minute one crosses the Detroit-Grosse Pointe line one is plunged into cool green shade. Next to its profusion of fine old trees, one notices the tight concentration of Grosse Pointe’s houses. They are fitted so closely together, on such relatively small lots, within such neatly squared-off blocks, along such arrow-straight streets, that one tends to lose a sense of scale. The houses appear small. When one gets inside them, however, one discovers that many of them are very large. A city ordinance forbids fences between Grosse Pointe houses, and one can see its point: with fences around them, Grosse Pointe houses, on this level terrain, might look like so many large brownish eggs in a crate. But as it is there is an hysterical appearance to the place; the houses seem to jostle one another, each guards its square of land so jealously. Where windows peer directly into one’s neighbors’, one is swept with a sense of caution rather than security, even of alarm.
There are certain differences between the five Grosse Pointes. Grosse Pointe Farms is certainly the choicest address. It has one of the largest areas, the smallest population, and is zoned exclusively for single-family residences. Running a close second to the Farms is the Shores, the smallest both in land area and in population. Here, too, all residences are single-family except for one or two lonely-looking multiple dwellings. People in Grosse Pointe Park would certainly argue as to whether their town was second- or third-best; it is largest in both area and population, and it is over ninety per cent single dwellings. Grosse Pointe City would argue with Grosse Pointe Park as to whether it deserved third or fourth place, but nobody would argue much about where Grosse Pointe Woods stands—at the bottom of the social ladder. It is, among other things, the only one of the five towns that possesses no lakeshore; it is the most populous and crowded; and it is the fastest-growing. In the last ten years, the Woods population has nearly doubled; it has fallen prey to the developer’s spade and ax and, belying its name, much of the Woods is now bleak and bereft of trees. The Woods is also full of apartment houses. “Very nice apartments, though,” one woman says. “Many of our nice young people start out there when they’re first married—moving into one of those cute little garden apartments on Vernier Road. They wait, then, until they can afford to move into a nicer part of Grosse Pointe.” Still, there have been mutterings in the other four towns to the effect that Grosse Pointe Woods does not really deserve the cachet of the name “Grosse Pointe” and should change its name to something else.
Of course Grosse Pointe “isn’t what it used to be.” Everyone agrees to that. What it really used to be, in the years after Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac established his fort on the banks of the Detroit River in 1701, was farmland. The French settlers built what are now called “ribbon farms”—each farm with a few dozen yards of lake front, to provide water, and extending inland, sometimes for several miles, into the plain. These farms ran in neatly parallel strips perpendicular to the shore and, today, Grosse Pointe streets follow the boundaries of the ribbon farms. But the loss of the French farms is not what Grosse Pointers mean when they talk about how the place was changed.
In the late nineteenth century, when Detroit became a city and an important port for Great Lakes shipping, fortunes were made: in shipping, banking, real estate, and—importantly—in the timber and mining lands of northern Michigan. Detroit Society was born, and families with such names as McMillan, Joy, Newberry, and Alger (still considered the Big Four “old” Detroit names) labored to create the impression that they were just as grand as slightly older families in the East, and arranged themselves in gingerbread palaces along Jefferson Avenue, on the riverbank. As the city grew, Society moved farther and farther out along Jefferson, toward Grosse Pointe—the “fat point” of land the French settlers had named—and, presently, was building elaborate summer residences there. Then, because the growing city of Detroit pushed harder than Society could push back, Society found itself in Grosse Pointe altogether. The summer places became year-round homes, and there were more and more of them. Detroit is still pushing. McMillans, Joys, Newberrys, and Algers are plentiful in Grosse Pointe today, but under somewhat more crowded circumstances. The genesis of Grosse Pointe, in other words, was similar to that of Westchester, but on a smaller scale.
“It was lovely to be a girl growing up in Detroit,” said the Countess Cyril Tolstoi not long ago. The Countess is a McMillan relative, the widow of a nephew of Count Leo and, though a grandmother, is as slim and chic as a fashion model. “Jefferson Avenue was a beautiful street. There were huge elms on either side, and their branches met in the middle overhead. I remember coming out here to Grosse Pointe for parties and dances. We came in private trolleys—it was the fashionable thing to do. It was the era of the private trolley-car party. Once, my escort took me to a party in a trolley that he’d hired just for the two of us! This place used to be my grandfather’s farm—his property ran all the way down to the lake. We’d cut across wide, wide lawns and through woods to the place next door. Now, I look up and down this street and realize I hardly know anybody. I occasionally go to parties and find there’s not a human being there I’ve ever heard of.” The Countess’s butler served her an impeccable Martini and, as though to punctuate the Countess’s remarks a Good Humor truck tinkled its merry way down the street outside her windows.
In the early days, there was another important residential street in Detroit besides Jefferson—Woodward Avenue. Woodward Avenue was where “the other people” lived. “We didn’t know the people who lived ‘up Woodward,’ as we used to say,” said the Countess. “I’m sure they were nice people. But we just didn’t know them.” And, between that golden day and this, there was a development that spelled the end of, among other things, the trolley-car party: the invention of a vehicle that ran on gasoline. If there is one thing that irritates an Old Guard Grosse Pointer it is to have Grosse Pointe considered purely the product of the automobile industry. Lest there be any doubt about where her family’s money came from, the late Mrs. Henry B. Joy drove, until 1958, a 1914 electric car. “Grosse Pointe was fashionable long before the automobile,” said the Countess Tolstoi. Then she added with a little smile, “The first Henry Fords lived ‘up Woodward.’ We didn’t know them.” As for Bloomfield Hills, Detroit’s other select suburb, “That’s the town that automobile money built.” Bloomfield Hills is far up, almost at the very end of Woodward, where, as far as Grosse Pointe is concerned, it belongs.
Whether Grosse Pointe was fashionable before the internal-combustion engine or not, it is automobile money, more than anything else, that has turned the place into what it is today. A man doesn’t have to be in Grosse Pointe long before someone asks him, “What kind of car are you driving?” To drive a foreign-made car is to fly in the face of Grosse Pointe convention, good manners, good taste, and—one gathers—morality. A woman, ordering her car brought round by the doorman at the Detroit Country Club in Grosse Pointe Farms does not ask for a “yellow Oldsmobile.” She asks for a “Sahara Sand Super-88.” According to one Grosse Pointe man, a lawyer, “The automobile industry has such a terrific effect on the economy of Detroit that no businessman, whether he’s remotely connected with the automobile business or not, can afford to ignore it. Each fall, when the new models are introduced, everybody holds his breath. Depending on how well the new cars go over—that’s how well we’ll all eat during the coming year.” What’s good for General Motors is definitely good for Grosse Pointe.
As automobile fortunes created a new clutch of millionaires, the millionaires moved their families into Grosse Pointe. “Naturally,” says one woman, “they wanted to be Society so the first thing they did was to move to where Society was.” Motor money built Loire-inspired châteaux along Lake Shore Road next to the châteaux, castles, and manor houses that were already there. As property values and taxes have risen, many of the proudest Lake Shore houses have come down, and “old money” houses and “car money” houses have suffered about equally. The Truman Newberry house, “built of the most beautiful rose-colored brick” (and lumber money) has been razed, and some of its paneling and fixtures repose in newer car-money houses. The Roy Chapin mansion (he was president of the Hudson Motor Company) still stands, but probably would not if Henry Ford II had not bought it a few years ago for his own home. Mrs. Joseph Schlotman (pre-automobile money) still owns an imposing Lake Shore estate, but is resigned to the fact that it will be torn down and subdivided after her death. Mrs. Russell Alger’s house is now the Grosse Pointe War Memorial. Mrs. Joy’s property is the Crescent Sail Yacht Club. The Seabourn Livingstone house (“Grandfather cornered the wheel market—for buggies, that is,” according to his granddaughter, Helen Livingstone Howard) recently fell to the wrecker’s ball. Mrs. Horace Dodge, Sr., still keeps “Rose Terrace,” her huge house on the lake, and her two hundred and forty foot yacht, Delphine, lies in wraps at the pier at the foot of her lawn. The Delphine contains, among other delights, a $10,000 pipe organ; she requires a twenty-seven-man crew, and she has not stirred from her berth in years. (In fact, according to boating experts, the Delphine no longer can be taken out; her hull is said to lie encased in lake-bottom mud like a frankfurter in a bun. There she may stay forever, a plump reminder of a grander, more naïve time.)
Lake Shore Road has been labeled “Widows’ Row.” Of those who still occupy the great houses, most are widows. “The other day, having nothing else to do,” said Mrs. Joseph Schlotman, “I made a list of all my friends. I wrote down a hundred and twenty-five names—all women, all widows. We entertain each other—back and forth. We play cards, have teas, and little dinners. We watch rather a lot of television. If a man’s face ever appeared at one of our tables—why, we wouldn’t know what to do! Sometimes—I wonder. Why has this happened? Did we women work our men too hard?”
Nowadays it is hard to tell where pre-automobile money leaves off and automobile money begins. “We all lent money to old Henry Ford,” one woman says, “and he gave us stock in his little company. Who ever dreamed he’d be so successful?” So, many non-automotive families made automotive fortunes whether they liked it or not—and there is no evidence to show that they did not like it. But if the sources of some families’ wealth are no longer clear-cut, one name must stand as an exception—Ford. Fords are so integrally a part of Grosse Pointe, and Grosse Pointe is so obsessively conscious of Fords, that scarcely a waking hour passes without some mention of them. “That’s Mrs. Robert Kanzler,” someone may whisper. “Her husband is Mrs. Edsel Ford’s sister’s son.” Just as customers in English pubs gather and talk about the Queen, so do guests at Grosse Pointe cocktail parties gather and talk—and speculate, and gossip, and exchange the latest bit of news—about the Fords. It is a persistent, though unproven, tale in Grosse Pointe that the rector of one of the local churches not long ago let his tongue slip and said, “Now let us bow our heads and praise the Ford.”
As a new arrival to Grosse Pointe soon realizes, however, there is not one important Ford family in existence but three—none of them remotely related—and sorting out the Fords is a newcomer’s first social chore, not an easy one. The richest Fords are, needless to say, “the car Fords” as they are called, represented by Mrs. Edsel Ford, her three sons, Henry II, Benson, and William, and her daughter, “Dodie.” Then there are the John B. Fords and the Emory Fords, known as “the salt Fords” because their family enterprises include the Wyandotte Chemical Company (built on Wyandotte’s rich salt beds) as well as the Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Company (soda ash from the salt beds is an ingredient in glassmaking). Finally, there are “the old Fords,” who include Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Clifford Ford; he is a retired investment banker. These last Fords are not wealthy by the standards of other Fords, but their name has the patina of age. Mrs. Ford, an amateur genealogist, has traced the family right back through the Plantagenets to Alfred the Great in the ninth century. “Lord knows how we got mixed up with Alfred the Great,” Mrs. Ford says, “but there he is—right in the book.” In this tracing, she did not encounter a single automobile manufacturer or buggy-maker. Mrs. Ford was a Brush and Mr. Ford’s mother was a Buhl—both “first-cabin” families in Detroit. The original Buhl was given a land grant by King George III in the 1760’s and when one of the Buhls was selling some property recently an elaborate search was made into his legal title to it—a search that never was successful. “Damn it,” said Mr. Buhl finally, “there isn’t any title to that land. The Buhls just took it.”
To confuse Ford matters further is the fact that, while the Frederick Clifford Fords are old Fords, the Frederick Sloane Fords (no kin to Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors) are salt Fords. Also, the Frederick C. “old” Fords’ son, Walter Buhl Ford, married “Dodie” Ford, daughter of Mrs. Edsel “car” Ford. She is therefore twice a Ford, and she, her husband, and their children are known as “the Ford-Fords.”
Each of the three Ford families occupies a special niche in Grosse Pointe life, and each has carved for itself its own area of community endeavor. The car Fords have generally taken over the “glamour” charities—the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Detroit Symphony, the Opera, and the various museums. As a result, Mrs. Edsel Ford is without doubt the grandest grande dame in Grosse Pointe Society. So surrounded with servants and secretaries and other “protectors” is she that telephone calls to her have become heroic feats. Getting “put through” to Eleanor Ford can consume an afternoon and, whether she herself is aware of this state of affairs is a matter of perennial conjecture. When she appears at a private party—seldom—or at an important public function—less seldom—a great hush falls upon the room which she does not seem to notice either. A pleasant-looking white-haired woman with no particular sense of fashion, her appearance would not inspire awe in any other city. Her conversation is chatty and housewifely—she always wants to hear about her friends’ children—conducted in a down-to-earth manner in a Middle Western accent. “Now don’t you go off and go home without me, hear!” she called to her escort at a museum opening not long ago. Yet, at her entrance, crowds part like the waters of the Red Sea.
The salt Fords have tended to concentrate their labors on such social-welfare causes as the Planned Parenthood Federation, the United Fund, and the local hospitals. The old Fords enthusiastically—and appropriately—support the Grosse Pointe War Memorial Center, the historical society, and the Episcopal Church.
Each of the three Ford families stands for a certain set of values for a certain group of Grosse Pointers. “Every class of society has its royalty image,” says the painter Clifford West (whose wife is a salt Ford), “the image of the people it would most like to be like and be accepted by.” Grosse Point has at least three such heads of state, all named Ford. To Grosse Pointe’s new millionaires (not surprisingly, since Henry Ford’s is the most spectacular success story in the annals of American business) the car Fords represent the apex of society, and Henry II, Benson, and William are the kings. Oscar L. Olsen, for example, has become enormously wealthy in what his wife calls “the steel and plastics business,” but what he enjoys calling “the toilet seat business.” (Olsenite Toilet Seats, with Mr. Olsen’s slogan, “Tops for Bottoms,” are among his products.) He says, “To me, Mrs. Edsel Ford is the great lady of Grosse Pointe. Do you want to know what a great lady she is? Well, sir, my wife sent her an invitation to a charity ball with a little note saying she hoped Mrs. Ford would come. And do you know what that great lady did? She picked up the phone and called my wife to tell her she couldn’t come! That’s what I call a great lady!”
The car Fords also represent the sort of large-scale fun that can be had with large amounts of money. When the Henry Fords threw a coming-out party a few years ago for their daughter Anne—a party reported to have cost in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars, the affair was lampooned in several national magazines, and was criticized generally in the American press. Among the new millionaires in Grosse Pointe, however, the party and its cost were vigorously defended. “Why, when you stop to think that the Ford Foundation gives away an average of half a million dollars a day, why shouldn’t the Fords have fun with what they’ve got left? Old Henry never had any fun with his money. Why shouldn’t young Henry have a little fun with his?”
A less spectacular group of Grosse Pointers would argue with this. To them, the salt-Ford kind of wealth is more acceptable. It is older money, and it is quieter money. It has more generations behind it to give it temperance and tone. Still others would point to the old Fords as symbolizing the gracious way of life—in their comfortable and modest house, surrounded by comfortable, well-used things and family heirlooms and portraits.
It is the people who subscribe to the salt-Ford set of values who speak most frequently of “all these new people—who are they?” And who bemoan the fact that the nouveaux riches are robbing Grosse Pointe of its original character. On the other hand, says Mrs. F. C. Ford, “Everybody was nouveau to begin with, wasn’t he? This place was built by the nouveaux of different generations, as far as I can see. The only difference is, we used to feel we knew everybody in Grosse Pointe. Now we don’t. But the change is good. I get so tired of people at parties who say, ‘I don’t know anybody here!’”
“Grosse Pointe is a friendly town, don’t you think?” a hostess asked her guest the other day, a trifle anxiously. Her guest agreed that it was. There is a kind of open-handed generosity and kindliness about the place, a take-me-as-I-am quality that greets the visitor, a quality that is particularly Middle Western. “We love visitors,” another woman says. “We love anything that gives us an excuse to have a little party.” Visitors are scooped up, taken on a jolly round of parties and entertainments, invited to play golf, and in general are given a warmer welcome than a similar visitor would expect to get in a suburb of Philadelphia or Boston or, for that matter, New York or San Francisco.
Grosse Pointe wants terribly to be liked. This is not to say that the friendliness is forced, but Grosse Pointe has achieved a poor national “image.” Everyone in Grosse Pointe is aware of this, but not everyone is certain what to do about it. “The trouble is,” one woman says, “that Grosse Pointe seems to have ‘arrived’ somehow—it’s on the map now, and it’s become a symbol of something it really isn’t—or is it?” Another resident says, “Whenever I go anywhere and say I’m from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, I get a funny look—a look that says, ‘Well, where’re your emeralds? Where’s your Cadillac?’”
Grosse Pointe has become a symbol of wealth, but of wealth with pomposity and very little taste. The revelation, not long ago, that Grosse Pointe realtors operated an elaborate “point system” designed to keep Jews and other “undesirables” from the area did not help the community’s reputation. Then, to add insult to injury, there was a television broadcast which noted that several members of Detroit’s infamous “Purple Gang” had established themselves in flossy, heavily guarded residences in the Windmill Pointe section of Grosse Pointe Park—which left the impression that, while it did not welcome Jews or Negroes, Grosse Pointe did not mind a mobster or two. It has been called “Gauche Pointe,” and “the last stronghold of tail-fin culture.” But to tick off Grosse Pointe as any of these things is to miss the point, or Pointe.
More than anything else, Grosse Pointe is nervous. Under the facade of good-natured geniality run ripples of anxiety. The community is nervous about Negroes. (“There’s a real kind of fear here about that,” says Mrs. F. C. Ford.) Detroit’s Negro population has climbed to about thirty per cent of the total—a larger percentage share than in New York or Chicago—and the 1967 riots were terrible proof of a long-explosive situation. Grosse Pointe is nervous about its own expanding Negro population, even though it relies on Negroes almost exclusively for domestic help. It is nervous about appearing anti-Semitic, and it is also nervous about Jews. The so-called point system did operate—though most Grosse Pointers insist they were unaware of it—and there are those who say that it still does. At the same time there is a feeling which one woman expresses with marvelous candor: “There’s no religious prejudice in Grosse Pointe. We’ve seen to that. There’s never been anyone here to be prejudiced against.” There is nervousness about gangsters. “We have gangsters living across the street from us—I think,” one Grosse Pointe Park woman says. And then adds, “At least they keep to themselves.” The parent of a Little Leaguer in this same section of town was startled to hear his son say, “I’d better not strike out today. If I do, the captain of the team says he’ll have his father bump me off.”
Grosse Pointe is nervous about the role religion is playing in the community, and theological arguments lately have had less to do with whether God is dead than with whether or not He is being misused as a social-climbing device. Traditionally, community life has been strongly centered around Grosse Pointe’s three churches—Christ Church (Episcopal), Memorial (Presbyterian), and St. Paul’s (Roman Catholic)—and joining one of these churches is a traditional first step for newcomers to take if they hope to be accepted in the town. But Mrs. Alexander Wiener, a prominent Episcopalian, expressed distress not long ago by the way her church, at least, is being used as “an avenue to status and respectability. People are using the church to help them jockey for social position.” Prominent Catholics and Presbyterians, meanwhile, worry that their respective churches—always considered a notch or two down, socially—may lose followers because of this.
Though it likes to think and talk of itself as a steady, settled community, Grosse Pointe is in fact relatively young as suburbs go. It has grown up fast, shot out of its clothes, and some of the nervousness may be laid to suburban adolescence. Clifford West says, “There’s always been a kind of raw-boned quality about Detroit. The first generation were young and vigorous go-getters. They went to Grosse Pointe and became custodians of a kind of culture. But now the old castles are coming down and, at the same time, the Detroit slums are being renewed. Everything is different. The third generation is young and vigorous, too, and eager to learn. They know that the rich are supposed to become idle and decadent—but they’re determined not to. They’re searching, instead, for some kind of mission of their own.”
Mrs. Raymond Dykema, of the older generation (she was a “one-l Russel,” also a first-cabin family), says, “There was a feeling of importance as I grew up, watching the ships go by in front of our house, knowing that my father built them—a feeling of belonging to the city, of helping shape it.” And James Earl, of the younger generation, says, “There’s a philosophy that the young here have—which is that I am my only asset. My body, my being, my mind, my self—Me. And, as long as this ‘me’ is making money, I’ll spend it, by God!” This comes close to pinpointing Grosse Pointe’s special flavor, its boyish, coltish, high-stepping, sometimes awkward behavior. If one closes one’s eyes for a fraction of a second, one can almost see the shade of young Sam Dodsworth at the country club dance. Grosse Pointe is not Zenith by a long shot, but the spirit of Sinclair Lewis’s wealthy, bumbling hero is everywhere.
If, while it is restlessly looking for “some kind of mission,” the young generation of Grosse Pointers has nothing else, it has money—a lot of it. There is endless talk of money in the community—not smug talk, or envious talk, but frank and excited talk. New or old money, the theme is the same. Money is fun—to spend and to make. It also offers a kind of nostrum for nervousness. “Whenever I get depressed, I remember that I make $100,000 a year,” one young man—barely out of his twenties—said. “If I make that much money, I’ve got to be good, don’t I?” ($100,000 a year is the yardstick for success in Grosse Pointe; anyone making less than that is considered a failure.) Oscar Olsen is apt to buttonhole an acquaintance of no more than a few minutes to say, “Come on down to my office—I want to tell you about a deal I’ve got going that’s going to make ten million.” In the living room of the Walter B. Fords’ (the Ford-Fords) hangs a Picasso head of a woman who appears to be gazing at an oblong slip of paper. Jokingly, to friends, Ford says, “That’s a picture of Dodie writing a check,” and one gathers that it would not be too difficult to persuade him to reveal the present balance in her account.
To an Easterner, bred in the polite and powdered ways of Philadelphia or Boston Society, such openness about money might seem more than slightly vulgar. On the other hand, one transplanted Eastern woman says, “I was startled at first. Then I decided that it was rather refreshing. After all, if you’re rich, why not be honest about it?”
If a new family moves to Grosse Pointe and cannot get “in” socially, the cause is likely not to be that its appearance or its manners are lacking but that its money-spending is insufficient. “Is it easy to be accepted in Grosse Pointe?” Helen Howard asks rhetorically. “Well, yes and no. A college friend of mine moved here from the East with her husband a while ago. My Grosse Pointe friends really knocked themselves out for those two—entertained them all over the place—for a while, at least. But my Eastern friends just couldn’t hold up their end, financially. Look, if a couple is attractive, and likes sports, they have an easier time. But let’s face it: more than anything else, they’ve got to have the scratch.”
With singular determination (perhaps fearing that too much luxury may make them soft), Grosse Pointers hurl themselves into athletics, and Grosse Pointe is one of the most sports-minded communities in the country, specializing in activities somewhat different from those considered upper class in the East. Paddle tennis is enormously in vogue—“Nothing like paddle tennis for a hangover,” says one woman—and, to help Grosse Pointers work off their nervous energy, there are golf, swimming, sailing, speedboat races, riding, field dog trials, and sports car races for both sexes (one young wife helps her husband in the mechanics’ pit at the track wearing a “pit suit” of gold lame). In winter, there are skiing, skating, ice-boating. Grosse Pointers fancy sports in which there is an element of danger, and sky-diving has become a fashionable pastime. On weekends, in season, the men are off to their private marshes and duck blinds and fishing streams. (“My husband used to rent eight miles of salmon,” Mrs. Joseph Schlotman recalled not long ago. “He had to rent. It seems you can’t buy a river.”) The women hunt, shoot skeet, fence, and bowl.
Much of this activity centers around the various Grosse Pointe clubs—the Country Club of Detroit, the Grosse Pointe Club (called “the little club”), the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, and the Hunt Club. But a number of adventuresome Grosse Pointers have established sporting outposts in horsey Metamora, Michigan, southwest of Detroit, where there are two clubs: on the northern shore of Lake St. Clair, where there is a club called “the old club” (“a hunting, fishing, and oh-hell-a-bit-of-drinking club,” according to a member); and in Gaylord, Michigan, a five-hour drive to the north, where there is a private ski club.
Grosse Pointe has also made a “sport” of traveling. When not planning hunting, sailing, or fishing trips to northern Michigan and Canada, Grosse Pointers are departing for grouse-shooting expeditions to Scotland, skiing trips to Austria or Chile (depending on the season), skin-diving trips to the Aegean Islands, and safaris to East Africa. “We always say Grosse Pointe is a nice place to be from,” says Helen Howard, adding that to be constantly “from” somewhere requires “scratch” too.
Sam Dodsworth was an outdoorsman and, if there had been television in his day, he would doubtless have been a TV fan too—as Grosse Pointe is, to a man and to a woman. Television is one of Grosse Pointe’s favorite forms of relaxation and, not surprisingly, the sports programs are the most popular. On Sunday afternoons in autumn, the golf courses are deserted and Grosse Pointers are in their houses, with their friends, with their eyes fixed on the colored screen. This is not to say that Grosse Pointe has forsaken the social tradition of the Sunday afternoon cocktail party; on the contrary, it has merely expanded upon it so that the cocktail party includes television-watching. Sometimes several sets are put to use so that several football—or World Series baseball—games can be watched simultaneously; the announcers’ voices describing plays provide a muted backdrop to cocktail party conversation.
“We’re all nuts about pro football here,” one man says. “If you call a friend up and ask him over on a Sunday, the first thing he asks is, ‘Which game are you watching?’” Grosse Pointe is similarly nuts about pro football players. “They’re much nicer than professional baseball players,” says one woman who often has a quarterback or two at her parties. “You can be sure they’ve had at least four years of college somewhere.” One of the easiest ways to be accepted by Grosse Pointe Society is to be a member of the Detroit Lions team. (One Grosse Pointe woman is such a Lions fan that she had a diamond wristwatch made to order with the letters DETROIT LIONS representing the twelve digits on the dial.) The all-time record for the number of television sets going at a single party may belong to Ray Whyte, the ebullient head of several million-dollar electronics businesses. (“I’m president of seven companies. I’ve had a lot of luck.”) Once, at a gathering at his house, it took twelve sets to keep the guests informed of the scores. His wife Celeste always travels with her own TV so that she may never be more than a button’s-push away from a Lions game.
These attitudes are in sharp contrast with those encountered on the North Shore of Long Island at the summer home of the Denniston Slaters. Not long ago, before he retired, Whitey Ford dropped by the Slaters’ for a visit, and Slater excitedly telephoned neighbors and friends to say, “Whitey Ford is here! Come on over!” Slater says, “They all came, of course. But half of them thought that Whitey Ford was a bandleader, and the other half thought it was Henry.”
“I couldn’t stand the physical set-up of Grosse Pointe,” says Mrs. Clifford West who “escaped” to Bloomfield Hills—some twenty-five miles to the northwest of Grosse Pointe physically, and even farther away emotionally. “It was so close. I felt there was no air. I couldn’t breathe! But look at what we’ve got here.” She gestured out the window of her large, rambling house toward a long expanse of rolling lawn and an ancient willow tree standing like a fountain at the edge of a shaded pond. “I also didn’t approve of the way they bring up their children there—the coming-out parties and all that, and the lessons the children are forever taking! French lessons, riding lessons, sailing lessons, swimming lessons, tennis lessons, skating lessons, dancing lessons, fencing lessons. Things are much more relaxed and less organized here.”
And yet Mrs. West takes her children often to visit her aunt, Mrs. Schlotman, the salt Ford. “I do want them to see what it was like,” Mrs. West says, “because Aunt Stella is one of the last ones to live on that enormous scale—in her huge house with the elevator to the ballroom, with a score of servants. I want them to see it before it goes—and to know that it really wasn’t vulgar, but had such dignity, such manner, such taste, and such integrity.”
Other Bloomfield Hills residents consider their town the “answer” to Grosse Pointe. “We’re not stuffy, not inbred, not old-fashioned the way they are in Grosse Pointe,” says a Bloomfield Hills man. “We’re a community of individuals here. In Grosse Pointe, they do everything together. They belong to the same clubs, go to the same parties—see the same old faces, year in and year out. When they travel, they travel together, in packs, and wherever you see a Grosse Pointer in Europe you can be sure there are at least a dozen other Grosse Pointers in the same hotel.”
And yet it is this “family” feeling that buoys Grosse Pointe up and holds it together. Families who were friends in one generation find that their children are friends in the next, and this gives Grosse Pointers a comfortable, cozy feeling of unity and continuity. When, as sometimes happens, a son—gone East to prep school and college—announces his intention of moving permanently to New York, the news distresses all Grosse Pointe, for the community wonders whether the tight fibers that bind it may be flying apart. A Grosse Pointer does not object—indeed, sees nothing wrong—that his house stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the houses on either side. The disadvantage of crowding has become an advantage. “You never need to be afraid in a community like this,” says one woman—a community where, if you need one, you can reach out and touch a friend just a few feet away. Congestion here breeds contentment. A good many years ago, an edition of the Social Register was published for Detroit. It languished and died from lack of interest. “We didn’t need it here,” one woman explains. “A Grosse Pointe address has always been enough to tell us who belongs here from who does not.”
As the population of Grosse Pointe has grown within its seven square miles, the one-big-happy-family feeling has intensified. The knots that secure the relationship of one to all have become stronger. When the day comes—which would not seem too far off—when there is simply no more room in the five towns for large brick houses, Grosse Pointe will not be upset; the family circle will then seem complete. As Grosse Pointe has grown, it has grown inward upon itself, and away from the city of Detroit. With its own shops and golf courses and churches close at hand, it is increasingly unnecessary for a Grosse Pointe woman to venture outside her town, except when she goes to and from the airport; Detroit is the men’s city. The most important city, as far as the women are concerned, is New York; it sets their style. “We go to New York,” one woman says. “Never to Chicago, never to Cleveland, never to Pittsburgh.”
Grosse Pointers don’t like Detroit much, either. “It’s such an ugly city,” one woman says. Another says, “The nice thing about Grosse Pointe is that when you’re here it simply doesn’t seem possible that Detroit is ten minutes away.” Still another says, “I had to go to Detroit the other day—and I had to drive right by one of those plants when all the workers with their lunch boxes and tool kits were coming out. It was scary!”
Several prominent Grosse Pointe women, including Mrs. John McNaughton (“Her husband’s sister is Mrs. Benson Ford”) and Mrs. Kirkland Alexander have journeyed to Detroit to work with the Detroit Artists’ Market in the center of town—a nonprofit gallery for local artists, staffed by volunteers. But women like these are the exceptions. The Detroit Symphony, too, has its “set” of supporters in Grosse Pointe, but opening nights are nowhere near the social events they are in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or San Francisco. Subscription seats are seldom more than partially filled. “No, we didn’t go,” one woman said of a recent Symphony opening. “There were riflery lessons at the club that night.” Similarly, the large charity balls given in hotels in downtown Detroit are well-subscribed to by Grosse Pointers, but scantily attended by them. No one goes to Detroit for restaurants or nightclubs—“There aren’t any.” If, as one young woman explained, “there’s nothing going on at the club, there’s always Al Green’s”—Grosse Pointe’s own restaurant-nightclub. It is not that Grosse Pointe is uninterested in the arts. “Practically every women here goes to her painting class—it’s the thing to do.” Paintings done at these classes run heavily to views of Grosse Pointe. As for the Symphony, “Grosse Pointe now has its own symphony orchestra.”
As Grosse Pointe has turned its back on Detroit, it is perhaps not surprising that Detroit, in return, shows little cordiality to the suburb. “I did some volunteer work downtown once,” one woman says. “When they learned I was from Grosse Pointe, the secretaries in the office stopped speaking to me. They were actually hostile. They hated me. I was the enemy.”
Around itself, Grosse Pointe has built an invisible wall. The brawny, violent city seems to heave against it. So far, the wall has seemed secure and impregnable. If it ever comes tumbling down, of course, all Detroit will come tumbling in. One Grosse Pointe man, a long-time resident, says, “You know, there’s so much potential here. There’s so much essential decency. Most of them are nice people, and there is a great deal of wealth and power. If only—some day—in some way—this potential could find a means of expressing itself in some important way. Then—” His voice trailed off.
Meanwhile, Grosse Pointe floats among the restless seas outside.