The Main Line Eternal
While the social attitudes of Grosse Pointe seem to be in a state of nervous flux, those of Philadelphia’s Main Line seem to have come serenely to rest.
Not long ago a guest from out of town was rushed late at night to the emergency room of the Bryn Mawr Hospital for treatment of a sudden and mysterious intestinal complaint—the result, it turned out, of a heavy and gravied Main Line dinner. While the doctor was quieting the lady’s stomach, she supplied a nurse with the vital statistics hospitals require—patient’s age, place of birth, and so on. This done, the lady asked the nurse anxiously whether she thought everything would be all right. “Oh,” said the nurse, “since you weren’t born here you couldn’t possibly die here. We wouldn’t permit it.”
This is not to say that none of the inexorable rules of time and tide, which plague such places as Grosse Pointe and Westchester, do not apply to the Main Line. But in the jagged-edged seventeen-mile-long stretch of townships that together make up the Main Line (townships which, on the map, follow a broken line leading out of Philadelphia), there are actually two Main Lines. There is the visible Main Line—the various and burgeoning suburban spread with its new highways, tract houses, and, recently, the discreet invasion of some light industry. Its population is mixed—white and Negro, poor and well-off, old and young; some residents have moved to the Main Line recently, others have lived there all their lives; some are executives, some are laborers; some are permanent, some are transient.
But there is also the old, or inner, Main Line—the legendary rampart of Philadelphia Society, composed of families who have been there and have known each other, as they will tell you, “always.”
But the situation is not really so cut and dried. For one thing, quite a few people of the outer Main Line would like very much to be taken in by the inner—and, just possibly, they could be. The outer Main Line is divided, according to one woman, “between people who take the Main Line seriously, and people who don’t give a damn—between people who believe in the Main Line, and people who just live here because of the good schools, the fresh air, and the quick commute to Philadelphia. Some people are here because it’s a suburb, but some are here because it’s the Main Line, and it stands for something they want to have. What do they want? Eventually, it’s dinner with the Cadwaladers—any Cadwaladers. Me, I don’t give a damn.”
The don’t-give-a-damn Main Line is the real Main Line.
Still, it isn’t that simple. The inner Main Line knows well who its members are. But just who, or how many, of the outer Main Line would like to be inner is hard to say. The Philadelphia Social Register lists some two thousand families with Main Line addresses, but the Social Register has never been a reliable guide, and is even less so in Philadelphia. Many are listed who do not “deserve” to be. “It’s a telephone book,” says Mrs. Samuel Eckert, who very much belongs in it (her father was a Longstreth, an old Quaker name). “Still, it’s better to be in it than out of it,” she adds. Better for what? “Just—better.” Polarized around Main Line Society, there are many groups at varying distances from its magnetic core. Some of them are in the Social Register, and some are not. There are some who think they have joined the inner group, but in reality have not. There are those who once did not care about joining, but now are beginning to somewhat. There are those who could never get in, but nonetheless go right on trying. On the Main Line, Society is like a lovely but stern old grandparent of whom everyone is a little frightened, but whose vagaries and peccadilloes everybody smiles at, and whom everyone in the long run respects and admires. Society here is such a solid and imposing affair that it may sometimes seem as though its pinnacle must be scaled because, like Everest, it is there.
People talk of how drastically the Main Line has changed—for the worse, needless to say—particularly people who have been away from it for a while, and have returned. “I just can’t believe it,” one young man said. He had been born and raised on the Main Line, and was visiting it again after a few years’ absence in another city. “It’s terrible. All the big estates have been broken up, or turned into schools or convents, or rest homes. There’s hardly a tree left on Lancaster Avenue—nothing but apartment houses and subdivisions and shopping centers, nothing I remember any more.” On the other hand, William Mirkil, a successful young real estate man from Ardmore who has not been away from the Main Line, looks startled at such a suggestion. “Of course the Main Line hasn’t changed,” he says. “What’s more, I don’t think it ever will change. The tone of the place has been preserved better than in any other area in the country.” And a woman, also of the old Main Line, says, “But Lancaster Avenue never was a good address!” To those who believe in the Main Line, the more it changes, the more it remains the same.
Unlike Grosse Pointe, the physical look of the Main Line is not readily apparent. One certainly cannot see it from a window of the Paoli local as it clatters its way westward from Philadelphia, carrying all those commuters on whom the line loses so much money. All one can see from the train is the succession of railroad stations with their painted signs of red and gold. “Old Maids Never Wed And Have Babies, Period” is the phrase one must memorize to keep track of the first few station stops—Overbrook, Merion, Narberth, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, with “period” standing for Paoli at the end of the line. Between Bryn Mawr and Paoli, the phrase makes less sense: “Really Vicious Retrievers Snap Willingly, Snarl Dangerously. Beagles Don’t.” (Rosemont, Villanova, Radnor, St. Davids, Wayne, Strafford, Devon, Berwyn, Daylesford). But there are those who say that those communities themselves don’t make much sense. The Main Line breaks a number of rules, among them the rule that suburban addresses generally become “better” the farther away from the city one goes.
Nor can the Main Line be seen from Lancaster Avenue, the wide street that runs roughly parallel to the railroad tracks through most of the above communities. It is along Lancaster that the developer’s hand has been the most savage and arbitrary, and a rigid corporation style has been imposed. One passes automobile showrooms, the tall and prison-like apartment houses, the motels giddy with glass and gassy with neon, the bunched gas stations—often engaged in furious price wars—and the ubiquitous shopping centers. As is the unerring way of such “centers,” they have not been placed in the real centers of the towns at all, but out along the highway. While the new centers create a traffic problem, the real centers show the economic effects of this deployment, and look shabby and discouraged and embarrassed. “And the diners,” says Mrs. Hugh Best, a relative newcomer to the Main Line. “Don’t you think we have beautiful diners? We have them in every shade of chrome. When I first came here from California, I drove out to see what the Main Line was like. I got to Ardmore, which I’d heard was nice, and it was hideous. I drove on to Bryn Mawr, which I’d heard was even nicer, and it was worse. I couldn’t imagine what all this ‘Main Line’ talk was all about.”
To find what all the talk is about, one must venture off Lancaster Avenue for a little distance. Here you can find yourself in a trim suburb with clipped hedges and manicured lawns, with houses showing a Pennsylvanian regional fondness for brick and local stone. Or you can find yourself in a landscape of rolling, wooded hills, green fields dotted with lakes and ponds (dotted, in turn, with ducks and swans), where roads wind narrowly in and out of shadowy ravines, past old rail fences and stone walls, across ancient bridges and beside cascading waterfalls. It is in these boskier regions that the rich of the Main Line live, and it is easy to understand why this has been called one of the most beautiful residential areas in the United States. Spring and early summer are the loveliest seasons here, when azaleas, rhododendrons and roses offer their abundant blooms, when the sun warms the stone or white-painted brick of the low, rambling, Pennsylvania Colonial, Federal, and Georgian houses (many are actually old, and many more have been built to look old); and when even the newer, split-level houses of redwood and glass seem to blend comfortably into the terrain. Through these sections, the tree-lined lanes twist, turn, change direction so precipitately—and change their names so abruptly—that it is very easy to get lost. One route sign blandly informs drivers that they are, at that point, going both north and south, and newcomers admit that several months of painful experiment are required to learn to navigate the area. (Old Main Liners find their way around with a kind of Main Line radar, honking their horns authoritatively as they approach tight corners and blind intersections.) But it is delightful to the eye, and none of it, as everyone who lives there will soon reveal to the visitor, is more than twenty minutes from the heart of Philadelphia on the new Expressway, or more than ten minutes from the mud-colored shopping centers of Lancaster Avenue.
“The edges of Main Line towns all run together,” says one woman, and so they do, “and all the Main Line towns are pretty much alike, so it doesn’t matter where you live. It’s all Main Line.”
This—like so many other things Main Liners are apt to say about their environment—is not exactly true. There are subtle differences between certain communities, and some that are not so subtle. The most important thing to remember about the Main Line is that it could have only happened in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia is a city with a habit of making up myths about itself which it knows are myths and yet believes. One learns, for instance, not to argue with a Philadelphian when he refers to Philadelphia as “the second largest city in the United States,” even though it is only fourth largest. Philadelphians seem to believe that if they repeat this non-fact long enough it will become true. Philadelphia’s notion of its population is equally surrealistic. It is almost always referred to as “a city of four million,” even though the latest United States census figures indicate only 2,002,512—a decline in population, actually, from the figure of ten years before. Philadelphia is also fond of pretending that everything in the city was founded by Benjamin Franklin—if not by some Cadwalader, Wister, Morris, Ingersoll, Biddle or Roberts a century or so before Franklin. The names of Franklin, George Washington, William Penn, and General Anthony Wayne are so liberally applied to Main Line banks and insurance companies—to say nothing of roadhouses, motels, and diners—that it is easy to suppose that these great men actually lived here. One can also get the impression—so pervasive is the train of thought—that the city of Philadelphia was founded by the Main Line and not, as was the case, the other way around, and that the Main Line has been what it is, where it is, exerting the social force it does, since the dawn of American history.
Actually, the Main Line as a social suburb is not even a hundred years old. The area was conceived, designed and developed by the Pennsylvania Railroad as a real estate venture in the 1870’s and ’80’s when the railroad was pushing its tracks westward and was hoping to stir up freight and passenger business along its route. The railroad built a chain of resort hotels along this “Main Line of Internal Improvements of the State of Pennsylvania,” and declared that these hotels were fashionable. When the hotel venture was not immediately successful, the line added houses and when these, too, failed to sell well, it decreed that all railroad executives of stature must build large estates there—a thing many railroad men, and their wives, were not at all eager to do. At the time, Philadelphia Society lived either on Society Hill, in the city, or in Chestnut Hill (though Chestnut Hill has always looked like a suburb, it technically is not since it is within the Philadelphia city line), or in the Whitemarsh-Penllyn area—all of them on the opposite side of the Schuylkill River from the Main Line. Germantown and West Philadelphia were not, in those days, to be sneezed at either.
Since the Pennsylvania Railroad was a social force in itself to be reckoned with, its executives and large stockholders reluctantly did as they were bidden, and the railroad helped out with financing the estates it wanted. It is the only suburb known to have been made fashionable by force.
For the next fifty years, like Grosse Pointe, the Main Line was considered largely a summer resort. It was not until the 1920’s that the Main Line began to be what it so solidly is today, an area with a year-round population including, perhaps, the densest concentration of the upper class in America.
There is some justification for the preponderance of Main Line towns with Welsh names, just as there is a reason for the French in Grosse Pointe. A colony of Welsh Quakers had farmed the region before the arrival of the railroad. But many of the communities—such as Bryn Mawr, Narberth, and Radnor—were given their names Welshly, and rather spuriously, by none other than the railroad. Since then, private builders, developers, city planners and estate owners have contributed to the Welshification process with names of their own devising, until now almost everything on the Main Line that does not commemorate a member of the Continental Congress has a name that at least sounds Welsh. It was apparently too late to do anything about “Paoli,” an incongruous, winy whiff from the shores of Corsica.
As wealth moved to the Main Line, the position of Chestnut Hill declined. But Chestnut Hill has never for a moment felt that it was socially eclipsed by the upstart creation of the locomotive. Chestnut Hill continues to insist that it is where “the real power” of Philadelphia lives, and it enjoys quoting a somewhat elderly (1940) statistic showing that seventy-eight per cent of Chestnut Hill families are in the Social Register, a figure the Main Line can nowhere near approach. Chestnut Hill dismisses the Main Line as “mostly nouveau riche—those railroad builders, you know, were hardly gentlemen,” and calls the Main Line, “Philadelphia’s answer to Long Island.” Chestnut Hill people like to say, “No one but Welsh peasants lived on the Main Line until the railroad came along and built it up.” A certain way to start an argument in Philadelphia is to ask whether Chestnut Hill or the Main Line is better.
The railroad, and the railroad men who moved there, also decided that the north side of the tracks was the nicer side. Today, the illusion persists, though there is no basis for it in fact. The wealthy, and the old and good Philadelphia families have established well-tended outposts in both directions. But south-siders are still apt to say defensively, “I live on the south side, and I’m not ashamed of it.” Others point out, “After all, the Merion Golf Club is south of the tracks.” The famous and somewhat more splendid Merion Cricket Club, on the other hand, is on the north side.
And one’s address does matter on the Main Line. Bryn Mawr and Villanova are the two most fashionable places, and Haverford runs a close third. Poor Narberth, however, is at the bottom of the status ladder. “Narberth just never did have any style!” one woman says. Bala-Cynwyd still contains pockets of wealth, but has lost a lot of its once rural charm; now much of it appears to be an extended shopping center. Radnor is considered “very nice.” (“Very nice,” says one man, “is the Main Line way of saying ‘filthy rich,’” and perhaps even a little vulgar.) Paoli is “more horsey.” Wynnewood is “a very nice young community.” So is Penn Valley. But Penn Valley has a heavy cross to bear. It must use “Narberth” as a mailing address. The Post Office Department not long ago dealt a similarly cruel blow to a corner of Wynnewood; its mail, it was announced, would afterward be addressed—of all things—“Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19151.” Devon is fortunate. It has the famous Devon Horse Show to give it the prestige it might otherwise lack. Wayne is a problem. Wayne’s houses are large and substantial, but Wayne is not considered a good “social address.” Wayne is beloved by the people who live there, who call it “the friendliest place on the Main Line” and Wayne people do seem to see a lot of one another and to have relatively few non-Wayne friends. It is considered “a nice family sort of place,” and one Main Liner who owns a chain of movie theatres in the area, says, “It’s mysterious. A Walt Disney movie—and I mean a real lousy Walt Disney movie that’s done terrible business everywhere else—will break all box office records in Wayne.” One reason may be that Wayne’s comfortable old houses appeal to young couples with small children.
As for Gladwyne, “Gladwyne,” says one woman, “can be either-or.” The late Mrs. Edward MacMullan, Philadelphia’s historic social secretary, once said, “People who live in Gladwyne who have chauffeurs use Bryn Mawr as their mailing address—the driver, you see, can be sent to the next town to collect the mail. But if you have to have the postman bring the mail to your door, then, of course, you have to use Gladwyne.” Interestingly enough, the greatest amount of Main Line wealth is concentrated in Gladwyne, but in Philadelphia, of course, it is not just money that counts. And Gladwyne, as Main Liners caution the visitor, “is just a little bit Jewish.”
But more interesting than the stratification of the various communities is the way Main Line Society—and the satellite members of would-be Society—has formed little groups or sets. The only way to get into Society here is to get into a set. Near the top of the scale, socially, is the “Arty Set,” a term which in Philadelphia does not mean what it means in Greenwich Village. Mrs. John Wintersteen, trustee of the Philadelphia Art Museum, who lives in Villanova with her definitive collection of Picassos, is the doyenne of this group—even though, as she modestly says, “I’m only a first-generation Philadelphian.” Her brother, Henry McIlhenny, when not away at his castle keep in Ireland, is the male leader of the Philadelphia art world, and around him are such art—and Society—figures as Ernest Biddle and Emlen Etting, both painters. Art has long been Philadelphia’s number one cultural pursuit, with music, the dance, theatre, and literature following in that order down the ladder of acceptable endeavors. One Main Line newcomer who was working on a committee for the local library, was asked by a bemused old Main Liner, “The Library? What Library?” “The Bryn Mawr Public Library,” was the newcomer’s reply, to which the other woman answered, “How very interesting! I never knew Bryn Mawr had a public library.”
At the same time, the Main Line is proud of its own authors, and numbers among them Catherine Drinker Bowen, the biographer, who, as a member of the oldest Main Line Society, is known as Mrs. Thomas McKean Downs of Haverford.
“The surest, quickest way to be accepted here is to collect paintings and support the Art Museum,” says one woman. As an example of a couple who has done just that, in the face of what might seem insuperable odds, everyone points to Mr. and Mrs. Walter Annenberg. He is the wealthy publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer. On the surface, Walter Annenberg might seem to have little to recommend him to membership in the highest of High Society in the nation’s most socially conscious city. He was born elsewhere—in Milwaukee; though not a practicing Jew, his forebears were; and his father, as a result of a disagreement with the Internal Revenue Service, spent some time in jail. (“But nobody here talks about that.”) Yet the Annenbergs, who live in Wynnewood, are now considered “one of the most popular couples on the Main Line. Nobody would turn down an invitation to their house. And they did it through their devotion to the community, and to Art.”
Another excellent way to get into Main Line Society is to raise horses, or at least to ride and hunt. “An arty person can be horsey too,” one woman explains. “But horsey people are a class unto themselves. In seating a dinner party,” she adds, “if I have a girl who’s horsey, I have to seat her next to a man who at least knows the front end of a horse from the rear. Otherwise the two would have absolutely nothing to talk about.” In its own way, the horsey set is just as exclusive as the Arty Set. The limitations of horse language being what they are, it may be even more so.
The Main Line has always been strongly oriented toward athletics. There is a cricket set, a golfing set, a tennis set, a swimming set. There is also a beagling set, including such prominent Main Liners and beaglers as Mr. and Mrs. David Randolph. The Gardening Set on the Main Line is not exclusively a female preserve; many Main Line gentlemen are avid gardeners. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society was founded by a group of men. The Gardeners, however, is a women’s group, and a number of years ago a group called the Weeders was formed by a group of dissident Society girls who got tired of waiting to get into the Gardeners. At the time, the name “Weeders” was considered a great joke. Today when someone like Mrs. Samuel Eckert says, “My mother was a Weeder,” you are not supposed to laugh. Recently a new Main Line group was informally organized—the Safari Set. Well-connected Main Line families who know each other have taken to shooting expeditions in Africa, and are apt to come home comparing notes on rhino, dik-dik, and white hunters. The stuffed carcasses and skins blend oddly with the chintz-covered chairs and cabriole-legged tables and highboys that characterize so many Main Line interiors.
Still, for all its diversity and contradictions, there is a uniformity of feeling on the Main Line, a consistency of tone. There are attitudes and aspects of the Main Line that seem indigenous to it, which can be encountered in any of its groups and throughout its length. There are traits which the Main Line owns, and which it clings to. “The most astonishing thing to me about the place,” says one woman, “is how many people move out here from other parts of Philadelphia, and from other parts of the country, and begin acting exactly like ‘old’ Main Liners. They begin to dress Main Line and talk Main Line and think Main Line.” This, of course, is due to the towering influence of the Old Guard Society upon the rest of the populace. There are always the Ins, and always the Outs, and the two groups eye each other cautiously all the time. One New York man whose Main Line friends are still Out, said recently, “There’s a funny Main Line practice, have you noticed? The minute you arrive they pile you into a car and take you on a tour of the best neighborhoods, pointing out all the houses of all the people they don’t know.” Main Line Society, meanwhile, is aware that its behavior is being watched, that its style is being studied, and this gives Society a sense of purpose, duty, and responsibility; it must set the tone and point the way.
On the Main Line, Society does not fulfill the function it does in Chestnut Hill (where “nearly everybody” is in it anyway); here it feels it must truly guide, nobly lead. The inner and outer Main Lines do more than complement and balance one another; the two groups actually support and nourish one another, each feeding the other’s dreams.
“My God!” said one young woman the other day. “My daughter’s started talking with that Main Line accent. She’s picked it up at school. She’s started using Main Line words—words like ‘yummy.’ The other day I asked her how a certain party had been, and she said, ‘Oh, Mummy, it was such a giggle!’” Children attending the Main Line’s private schools—Shipley, Agnes Irwin, or Baldwin for girls; Haverford or Episcopal for boys—seem to acquire the accent and language by osmosis, if they have not already acquired it from listening to their parents. The terminology is quaintly special, one might say precious. One is not startled on the Main Line to hear a businessman conclude a deal with a cheerful “All righty-roo!” Or to depart from a party with a bright “Nightie-noodles!” to his host and hostess. As for the accent, Barbara Best calls it “Philadelphia paralysis,” or “Main Line lockjaw,” pointing out that it is not unlike “Massachusetts malocclusion.” Mrs. Best recalls that when she first moved to the area a native said to her, “My dear, you have the most beautiful speaking voice. I can understand every word you say!”
Some observers have noted a slight improvement in Main Line couture in recent years, and give the credit to such New York stores as Bonwit Teller and Lord & Taylor which have recently opened up Main Line branches. A young woman named Ann Pakradooni has opened a small, expensive boutique in Wynnewood where she designs dresses and where her stated aim is to “style up” the Main Line woman. The Main Line woman, meanwhile, considers Mrs. Pakradooni’s clothes “amusing,” but a bit outré. The rule is still, “Nothing flashy, nothing low-cut” when it comes to clothes, and the Main Line uniform remains Peck & Peckishly immutable: for spring, print cotton blouse, cotton skirt; for summer, print cotton blouse, Bermuda shorts; for fall, cardigan sweater, pearls, tweed skirt; for winter, good black suit, pearls, good junior-cut mink jacket, little hat.
“Most of us have gotten a little better,” says one woman, “but there are, I’ll admit, a lot of women here who think it’s all right to go to a dinner party dressed for golf.” As for the men, the Philadelphia banking community has always set the style and bankers have probably never, as a group, been known as fashion plates. “In dress we’re very English here,” one man says. “A lot of men have their suits made in London and—well, you know how kind of funny English tailoring fits.” Philadelphia bankers are also respectably a little out of press, and the rest of the Philadelphia men follow their example. One man, who is particular about his clothes (and buys them in New York), is always being kidded by business associates for “trying to dress fancy, like a New Yorker.”
But even more distinctive than the Main Line dress and speech is the Main Line manner. An out-of-towner who had attended a Main Line party honoring a gentlman of an old Main Line family, said afterward, “He seemed like a nice enough fellow, but the poor chap must have had a few too many drinks beforehand. He sat there all evening, absolutely rigid and glassy-eyed, and never said a word.” “But he wasn’t drunk,” a friend explained. “That’s just his manner. He didn’t know who you were, you see.” But there is more to the manner than immobility in the face of strangers. Not long ago, at a Main Line gathering, a young woman from out of town said, “How very serene all these people seem.” Whether she intended this as praise, or whether she found Main Line serenity faintly unsettling, it is hard to say. Since she was from New York, however, one suspects the latter. New Yorkers enjoy their active, competitive pace. There are even those who insist that there is a palpable difference between the New Haven Railroad trains leaving for Westchester County, and those of the Pennsylvania Railroad, leaving for Bryn Mawr. The New Haven starts off with a jolt and a rattle; the Pennsylvania, they say, glides out of the station serenely.
A curious negativism floats in the Main Line air. “Oh, I don’t think so” is apt to be the Main Line response to any suggestion. There is also a tendency to run everything down a bit—other people, other cities, even the Main Line itself. You may be invited to a restaurant where, you will be warned in advance, the food is not very good—hardly palatable, in fact. If you ask whether, perhaps, there is a better place, you will be told yes, there is one, but it is always so crowded that no one can ever get a table. You might be asked to come out to the Main Line for the weekend although, your hostess may explain, you will doubtless be bored stiff; there is nothing to do. Main Liners spend a great deal of time explaining what the Main Line isn’t (“It isn’t like Boston … it isn’t like New York”) and hardly ever get around to what the Main Line is.
The Main Liner usually turns out to be against most things—most developments, that is, or anything new. He is against high-rise apartments, against public housing, against newcomers—so contagiously against them that the newcomer who has just moved into a high-rise apartment quickly develops into an opponent of high-rise apartments and newcomers too. The Main Line is strongly Republican but, when it talks politics, it is more anti-Democrat than anything else. The Main Line remains loyal to Philadelphia, but when it talks about Philadelphia it is often in terms of what is wrong with New York.
Main Liners are masters and mistresses of the flat reply. Sometimes, this can leave the impression of startling, disarming honesty. At other times, it emerges as naïveté, or simple rudeness. Not long ago, a woman who had recently moved here was planning a party for some out-of-town friends. As a neighborly gesture, she invited the couple who lived next door—Main Liners of long, long standing. She mailed the invitation, and two weeks went by without a word. Finally, with the date of her party at hand, she telephoned the neighbor: Had the invitation been received? “Oh yes,” said the neighbor, “we got it, but we didn’t think we’d be interested in coming. There’d be nobody there we’d know.” Later, the hostess said, “I was hurt beyond belief at the time, but now I’m beginning to understand how they felt. That’s the way things are on the Main Line—settled. We moved too quickly. We put them off.”
An even more pronounced characteristic of the Main Liner is his imperturbability. His composure is complete in the most crucial moments; almost nothing astonishes him or ruffles him. There are the many local tales of ladies who have lost their underpants while standing in receiving lines. If all the tales are true, there has hardly been an Assembly, wedding, or debutante ball without its underpants crisis, and the elastic in Philadelphia lingerie must be particularly unstable stuff. In every anecdote, the woman in question bears an ancient Philadelphia name, and the point is always the magnificent aplomb with which she carried the situation off. One woman bent over, picked up the collapsed bloomers, slipped them in her purse, and went on shaking hands. Another stepped out of them and continued down the aisle of Old St. David’s Church (Episcopal) in Radnor, without missing a beat of the wedding march. Still another, pushed the garment aside with the toe of her slipper and gestured to her footman to pick it up. The Main Line chuckles endlessly over these alleged episodes. But each Main Line woman knows that there is only one way to behave when, at some glittering gathering, her own drawers descend.
The nil admirari attitude often means that the Main Line discovers the things that it is against long after it is too late to do anything about them. It is characteristically Main Line that the giant new Wynnewood shopping center, including a large branch of Wanamaker’s and a larger traffic problem all around it, was finished and open for business before a group came forth to oppose its construction. One woman, who resents the prevailing apathy toward the spoliation of the landscape, says, “I swear most of these old Main Line people don’t even see what’s going on—or else they think it’s beneath their dignity to notice such matters. One morning they’ll wake up and see that it’s happened—that there isn’t any Main Line any more.”
Two newspapers, the Main Line Times and the Main Line Chronicle, cover affairs in the area, and the two present wildly differing pictures of what life on the Main Line is really like. The Times, according to Ben Kramer, publisher of the rival Chronicle, “caters to the Main Line psychology,” and the Main Line psychology is that all is well, or soon will be. To be sure, Times readers are regularly reassured that nothing much is happening, and that there is no threat of anything happening in the future. According to Mr. Kramer’s Chronicle, however, things are in a dreadful state everywhere from Overbrook to Paoli. “Lewd teenagers” are being “fined as drunks”; child molesters prowl the playgrounds; exposure artists ply their trade from parked cars in broad daylight; a naked man “prances” through a popular bar at night. “Sluts,” “thugs,” and “teenage toughs” throng nightly to a local riverbank which the paper has labeled “Boozer’s Beach,” where they do goodness knows what-all. Call girls, meanwhile, do a brisk business from the lobby of a new motel. Petting parties, gambling, marijuana, LSD, murder, and suicide abound in the Chronicle’s Main Line. “Out-of-town sluts,” “hoods,” “thugs,” “mugs,” and “boozers” from alien places like South Philadelphia are often singled out as the chief troublemakers, but it is just as pat to be “a member of a fine Main Line family,” and through it all the police are accused of laxity, and respected town officials are suspected of misdemeanors ranging from graft to sex offenses.
The truth about the local situation probably lies between the two papers’ views. The Chronicle’s Kramer—who says, “I’ve spent thirty years studying the Pennsylvania libel laws”—is a soft-spoken, courtly man quite at odds with his newspaper’s journalistic mien. He admits that he would like to “shake the Main Line up a little,” and rattle it out of its traditional air of complacency. Some of the articles he publishes may be injected with a bit of artificial fervor. Still, his has been an uphill job. The elite of the Main Line euphemistically call the Chronicle “controversial,” and therefore do not read it—not officially, at least. One woman, quoting something she had read in the Chronicle, hastily explained, “It was an item my cook pointed out to me.” And Kramer insists he is making some headway against the wall of indifference; at least one Main Line dowager has begun to function as an unofficial tipster for him. Early in 1961, for example, the lady telephoned his office to say—in a husky whisper—“If you really want a hot scoop, Ben, I’d look into what’s going on between Nelson Rockefeller and Happy Murphy.” Ben looked into it, and scooped every newspaper in the country with a story that said Nelson Rockefeller’s first marriage was in trouble.
But on the whole, the Main Line is secure in the belief that everything turns out for the best in this best of all possible places. Partly this is due to the Main Line notion of tact. It is not polite to get aroused over issues, or to behave otherwise than agreeably. This studied equanimity often affects Main Line attitudes toward human relationships, and even conventional morality. A Main Line matron confided recently that she was “really very annoyed” with a young bachelor friend who had been a guest at her home for a weekend. “I’ve put him on probation,” she explained, “and told him that he will not be invited back for at least six months. After all,” she added, “he raped my maid. After everybody was asleep he went into her room and raped her. You can imagine the commotion it created—absolutely ruined the whole weekend. All the next day she was in tears, and wouldn’t come out of the kitchen to serve. And there I was, with a houseful of guests! She was a treasure of a maid, too.” The lady and her husband had decided “simply not to mention” the affair to the offending gentleman but, as she put it, “The next afternoon, over cocktails, my husband couldn’t resist kidding him a little about it.”
Two Main Line ladies, lunching at the Barclay Hotel in Philadelphia—the Main Line’s favorite in-town eating spot—were overheard in a conversation that was ritually punctuated with little cries of, “Oh, my dear, how ghastly!” And, “Oh, my dear, how divine!” Her precious poodle, the first woman was saying, had come down with Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and had had to be “put to sleep.” (“Oh, my dear, how ghastly!” her friend commented.) The disease, furthermore, could be communicated to humans, and so the poodle owner’s doctor had insisted that everyone in the household receive inoculations against it. They had all, then, received their shots—except the family cook who, for religious reasons, had refused. Well, sure enough, the storyteller continued, the cook had come down with Rocky Mountain spotted fever and had died. (“Oh, my dear, how ghastly!”) “But,” the first woman added, “she was really something of a trial—always singing hymns in the kitchen. I have a new girl now that I like much better.” “Oh, my dear,” said her friend, “how divine!”
Like Grosse Pointe, the Main Line insists that racial and religious prejudice do not exist there. Unlike Grosse Pointe, the Main Line believes that it is telling the truth, though it would be truer and more exact to say that the manifestations of prejudice are very few—since they would not be tactful. There are sizable Negro populations, for example, in Bryn Mawr and Ardmore, and a smaller one in Radnor, but there are few signs of racial strife. Everyone points out that “Woodmont,” the huge turreted castle built by the late Alan Wood in Gladwyne, is now owned by Father Divine and his Angels, “and nobody minds their being there.” A young Negro executive of the General Electric Corporation recently bought a house in a select section of Bryn Mawr and moved in without incident. The family has not precisely been clasped to the bosom of Main Line Society but, again, “nobody minded.” As for Jews, one Main Liner says proudly, “Jews are more accepted here than in any other American city,” and, in a sense, this is true. It depends on what sort of Jew one is. In the early days of Philadelphia, many prosperous Jewish families mingled freely with—and married—members of the Christian upper crust, with the result that many, if not most, “old” Philadelphia families today have a Jewish ancestor or two, and many non-Jews have “Jewish-sounding” names. Subsequent “waves” of Jewish immigrants from Europe have fared differently, however, and today an apartheid exists between the “old” Sephardic families, the somewhat newer Germans—both of which are socially acceptable—and Jews from Eastern Europe, notably Russia and Poland, who are not. Pockets of the Main Line remain restricted against Jews of any variety, and Mrs. Irving Fried, who is Jewish, speaks humorously of “the border patrol” around one area in Wynnewood where Jews are unwelcome. “Still,” says another woman, “they can do everything—except, of course, join the clubs.”
That is, they cannot join certain clubs—the clubs of the inner Main Line. These—the Philadelphia Country Club, the Merion Cricket Club, the Merion Golf Club, the Gulph Mills Golf Club, and the Radnor Hunt Club—are strung out along the length of the Main Line, and, as they march westward from the Philadelphia Country Club (the least fashionable of the five), they become increasingly exclusive until one reaches the Gulph Mills where, as they say, “someone has to die” before a new member can be taken in, and the “dear old cozy” Radnor Hunt, a paddock, as the name implies, for the horsey set. (Good Americans, Oscar Wilde once observed, go to Paris when they die; good Philadelphians, it is locally believed, just go farther out on the Main Line.) Whether all these clubs, which are traditionally Gentile, actually and actively discriminate against Jews is a question many Jewish Main Liners have pondered. The clubs themselves, of course, politely say that they do not. But still the Jewish population remains wary. Jews have been entertained as guests of members at the Merion Golf Club, and Jewish children take tennis lessons at the Merion Cricket. But, when it comes to applying for membership, Jewish families have preferred not to risk embarrassment or rebuff. “My husband wants to try, but I just don’t want to be snubbed,” one woman says.
The one Main Line club “which no Jew would ever dare to try to join” is the quaintly named Philadelphia Skating Club and Humane Society. The Society was organized more than a century ago, when the Main Line passion for skating on the Schuylkill was at its height, and when the skating parties were punctuated by mass drownings as shelves of ice broke loose and skaters were carried over dams to the tune of the “Skater’s Waltz.” Members of the Humane Society skated with lengths of rope lashed to their shoulders for rescue operations. Today, however, humanity and humaneness are secondary concerns of the Skating Club. It remains the area’s most socially important and exclusive club. Meanwhile, the answer to the anti-Semitism of many Main Line clubs has been the formation of Jewish clubs—such as the Radnor Valley Country Club—which are just as exclusive in their own way.
Early in life, Main Line children acquire the attitudes and values of their elders. Two small boys in the sixth grade were recently picked up at school by a local car pool, and were overheard in the following conversation:
“Where did your mother make her debut?”
“Well, she never did, actually.”
“That’s funny. My mother made her debut, and she’s not even pretty.”
When a Main Line ten-year-old was showing his collection of old automobile license plates to a visitor, he was asked how he had managed to come by plates from such remote states as Idaho and Wyoming. “My father suggested that I take the Social Register and look through it for people with out-of-state addresses,” he explained. “I wrote to them, then, and asked for their old plates—and of course I told them who I was, and how I’d found their names.” A Wynnewood mother, whose fourteen-year-old had been entertaining a classmate from Episcopal Academy with an afternoon of rather noisy horseplay, stormed into her son’s room to say, “Now you two boys get this mess picked up!” Later her son said to her sternly, “Mother, do you realize that you were screaming at the Pretender to the royal throne of Portugal, Miguel de Bragança?” “Oh?” said the mother sarcastically. “And how is his father, the King?” “It’s not his father,” the boy explained, “it’s his grandfather.”
Because of its excellent school system, many wealthy Main Line families—particularly those with newer money—send their children to local public schools, rather than to the private academies, and this has had a somewhat disquieting effect on the public school population. The private schools have a more or less socially homogeneous enrollment, and opportunities for snobbery are few. The public schools, however, according to observers, have lately become the scene of “a great deal more social and money snobbery.” Here the line between the Main Line rich and the Main Line poor is more sharply, and cruelly, drawn. A definite “rich kids” clique exists, and the poor—among them Negro children—are forced to join in bands of their own. Very little intercourse exists between the groups except as eruptions and something very close to gang fighting. But again, among the Old Guard, whose children do not go to public schools, there is little concern, or even awareness, of this situation.
The Old Guard of the Main Line have, as a result of their attitudes, been depicted as stuffy, stupid, and self-satisfied, obsessed with formality and ritual. But to those who compose the Old Guard, the situation is quite the opposite. Within Society’s comfortable circle, a jolly air of good-fellowship prevails. It is all grand fun, and nobody bothers to dress up much or to fuss over expensive jewelry or furs or other “frills.” Such social life as does not center on athletics revolves happily around entertaining, and Main Line parties are known for their number, their size, their supplies of good food, and their good wines. Terrapin and canvasback duck mark a hearty, and traditional, Main Line feast. The cocktail hour is firmly entrenched here, and often goes on for a good deal longer than an hour. Petal-scented evenings rock with bibulous laughter from drawing rooms, terraces, and poolsides. Some people say the Main Line does a bit too much tippling, and various clergymen have taken their congregations to task about it. Because most of it goes on in private homes and clubs, its effects are seldom publicly apparent.
Perhaps things were more stiff and formal here in the days when Mr. and Mrs. George W. Childs Drexel used to receive guests while seated on golden thrones. But nowadays it is not uncommon to sit down to dinner in a “great” Main Line house, with servants in attendance and with silver spread like xylophone keys on either side of your plate, and find the catsup bottle on the table. One eats amid cries of, “Pass the rolls!”
“I believe we were the first city in America,” Mrs. George Roberts once said, “to omit the sherry with the soup course.” Since then, Philadelphia Society has dispensed with many other amenities and formalities, and the result is an atmosphere that is warm, convivial, cozy, and just-plain-folksy. So unaccustomed to courtliness was one Main Line hostess that recently, when an attentive male guest from out of town pulled out her chair for her as she was about to sit down to dinner, she sat down hard on the floor. Being a Philadelphian, she rose perfectly to the occasion. She got up, went through with her dinner party, and then reported to her doctor with a fractured coccyx.
The Main Line also has the ability, which can be quite endearing, to laugh at itself. The true Main Liner thoroughly enjoys all the irreverent jokes about the Main Line, the parodies of it, even the broadsides hurled at it and the accusations that it is a dead and stultifying place. Tell a story that makes a Main Liner—particularly an old Main Liner—seem pompous, silly, or downright stupid, and the whole Main Line will laugh and slap its thighs. Such stories, perhaps, reconfirm the Main Liner’s impression that his is a rare and special place to live. The Main Line loves its depantsed dowagers and it displays a very English affection for its local eccentrics. Anyone who is a little odd, and rich enough to get away with it—money is the only thing an eccentric needs—is a huge source of entertainment. For all the vitriol he hurled about him while he lived, the Main Line loved having the “terrible-tempered” Dr. Albert C. Barnes in its midst (the vast Barnes art collection, housed in his Merion mansion, can now be viewed by the public), and it enjoys recounting all the outrageous things he used to do and the naughty things he used to say. It tells with relish the story, apparently true, of the gently-bred lady art patron who came begging permission to see his paintings, and whom Barnes told, “The last woman I let in here gave me the clap!” One Main Line man says that he loves living there because, “I think it’s the funniest place in the world,” and, to be sure, it may be.
Along with sherry-with-the-soup have gone other Main Line rules. (“Never call on newcomers until you’ve seen their wash hanging out to dry; if they have ragged sheets or linen, you don’t want to know them.…” “Never speak to anyone on shipboard until you’re four days out …” were two that were handed out by a Main Line mother to her daughter thirty years ago.) It is still not easy to be accepted by Main Line Society. But it is certainly easier today than it was a generation ago—and for a reason involving one of the ways in which the Main Line really is changing. As the late great social secretary, Mrs. MacMullan, once put it, “Philadelphia Society has not stood up against the new money the way it might have”—and ought to have, she seems to have implied. Old money, in other words, should stand up against new money as a matter of principle. But instead, old money has let down some of its bars, and the new money has come in.
It used to be the rule that “It takes at least three generations to be accepted here.” Now many people manage it handily in one, or even less. “Look at the young Liddon Pennocks,” Mrs. MacMullan used to say, “one of the most popular couples in Philadelphia, even though it’s first-generation money, and he’s in trade.” Pennock operates a flower shop.
Society here, as elsewhere, has been involved in the business of creating enduring families—families bound by blood and common interests—and in building from these families an enduring community of wealth. To fill its ranks, and replenish its coffers, Society has had to turn to the newcomers with the new money. “I’m really very anxious to meet some of these new people,” said one Main Line mother of a debutante daughter. “Of course I want to meet the attractive new people.” But with so many Main Line people working so hard at being attractive, attractive people are not hard to find. In addition to a blurring of old money with new, there has been a noticeable new mingling of the generations, who seem to be enjoying one anothers’ company more wholeheartedly. The “sets” of Society still form small islands of special interests, but nowadays, at the best Main Line parties, silver heads are side by side with gold.
Though the complexion of Main Line Society may be slowly changing, something else is going on which in the long run may mean that Main Line attitudes and the Main Line manner will become even more thoroughly crystallized and localized in the string of towns. This has a lot to do with the new shopping centers and—as is the case in Grosse Pointe—the new self-sufficiency of suburban living. It has always been, first and foremost, the Philadelphia Main Line, with an iron cord, symbolized by the railroad, binding the suburbs to their mother city. Today, however, it is increasingly unnecessary for a Main Liner—a woman, particularly—to venture into the city at all. At the same time, as corporations build plants and research centers in the area, more and more men are to be found who both live and work on the Main Line.
The cultural life of Philadelphia, represented most strongly by the Art Museum and the Philadelphia Orchestra, still draws the suburbs to the metropolis. But there are already indications that the Main Line, by means of local art shows, local musical and theatre groups, may be developing a solid cultural life of its own—again, as in Grosse Pointe. Some Main Liners are already beginning to feel themselves somewhat cloistered. Not long ago, a group was formed which whimsically called itself the Society for the Preservation of Cultural Relations Between the East and West Banks of the Schuylkill, in an attempt to bring the Main Line and Chestnut Hill into communication through the medium of an annual dance. But whimsy sits oddly upon both the Main Line and Chestnut Hill. Also, when faced with the disruption of a tradition, the Philadelphian digs in his heels. Response to the S.P.C.R.B.E.W.B.S. has been only halfhearted.
If the present trend continues, with the Main Line growing more self-sustaining, more self-nourishing, the area may one day be completely self-sufficient, totally insular, socially and emotionally, and intellectually withdrawn from the great “city of four million” beyond it. Whether or not this will be a pleasant development, no one knows. But not long ago the Main Line was presented with an alarming statistic—some thirty per cent of its young people, according to a study at Villanova University, are moving to other parts of the United States; Society is losing manpower here. Actually, this percentage of deserters is not significantly different from that to be found in other prosperous suburbs, but this is no consolation to the Main Line—which always presumed it had special statistics. Now there is anxious talk to the effect that what is happening everywhere is now happening on the Main Line—the young are flying from the nest.
But the inner, Old Guard Main Line is not really alarmed. As Mrs. Wintersteen puts it, “In one form or another, there will always be a Main Line.” To have its attitudes die, or be dissipated elsewhere, would, in the long run, never be permitted. Mrs. Wintersteen, to be sure, is of the older generation of the Establishment. What of the younger? Again, they seem to stand with her.
One member of this generation recently heard from was nineteen-year-old Alan McIlvain, Jr., heir to a fortune which the J. Gibson McIlvain Company, one of the largest wholesale lumber companies on the East Coast and one of the oldest family-owned businesses in America, has been building for Main Line McIlvains for nearly one hundred and seventy years, the equivalent of eight generations. From the wings of this imposing establishment, young McIlvain, the elder son of the company’s president, says, “I plan to enter the business in the tradition of my forefathers.”
In addition, he is interested in all the traditional activities of a proper Main Line gentleman. He lists hunting, fishing, skin-diving, soccer, tennis, squash, and swimming (“in their designated seasons”) as his favorite athletic pastimes. Like young gentlemen everywhere, he is properly interested in young ladies in their designated seasons, and manages one or two dates a week except during the heavy winter social season, when the pace for debutantes and their escorts picks up. Like so many sons of wealthy parents, he is given a Spartan spending allowance—one dollar a week. Any other money he must earn “by doing jobs around the place” (it is a very large place, with much to do) and, of this, one half is banked for the future.
Alan McIlvain displays an aristocratic aloofness toward matters political. “Though I enjoy trying to analyze political strategy,” he says, “I would never seriously consider entering politics.” Looking ahead, he says, “Besides just inheriting the business, I want to improve and utilize it to its benefit. I hope to exploit [sic] new fields, and exercise the knowledge I will have spent so many years receiving. I would also like to have a happy social life by marrying and settling down in the Main Line.”