The Right Places

Fairfield County: Perilous Preserve

It is probably harder to maintain anonymity and privacy of wealth in the United States than in a country like Switzerland, which virtually has privacy written into its constitution. It is difficult to tuck an American fortune behind a protective alp, much as one might like to try.

Not long ago a young woman was walking her two dogs along a shaded road in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she and her husband had just built a new house, and an automobile drew up beside her and the driver opened his window and inquired, “Can you tell me where the Rich family lives?” After a puzzled moment, the young Greenwich matron replied, “Well, I think that adjective would really apply to every family here.” Obviously, the motorist was looking for a family named Rich. But the Greenwich lady’s reply was not inappropriate to Greenwich, nor to other parts of Connecticut’s Fairfield County. Here, according to the fond belief of many of the residents, in this roughly triangular piece of real estate in the southwestern corner of the state, is contained the greatest concentration of wealth—in many cases anonymous wealth—of any county in the United States. Here (again in Greenwich) was where a woman, when asked why she chose to live there, answered simply, “Because we’re so rich.”

Actually, by dollar-count, Fairfield is not the richest American county, but only the tenth richest. The richest, officially, is Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfield lags behind even Bergen County, New Jersey. But, loyal Fairfieldians point out, Fairfield County in addition to such luxurious towns as Greenwich, Darien, New Canaan, Westport, Weston, Fairfield, and Southport, also includes the sprawling city of Bridgeport. Bridgeport, with its air redolent of brassworks, may qualify as one of America’s least attractive cities, and is facing the problems—urban decay, racial disunion, poverty—of other industrial towns its size.

Fairfield County also includes such small industrial towns as Stamford, Danbury, and Norwalk, which have their share of similar woes. When one thinks, in Fairfield, of Fairfield County, one does one’s best not to think of these places; one edits them out of the mind, as it were. When Dorothy Rodgers, wife of the composer, first moved to Fairfield County she volunteered to do some Red Cross work in Bridgeport. She was told, gently but firmly, that it would “not be appropriate” for her to work in Bridgeport, a short drive from her house, but in Greenwich instead, which lay a fair distance down the pike. As for Danbury, most Fairfield people seem unaware that it is even in the county, and look startled when reminded that it is.

When one has subtracted these cities and their immediate environs from the rest of Fairfield County, what is left can be described as one of the most beautiful residential areas in the country. The southern rim of the county faces Long Island Sound, a jagged, rocky coastline with hundreds of tiny coves and harbors, secluded beaches, and gently rocking deep-blue water dotted with diminutive offshore islands and, on any summer weekend, clouds of sailboats. Inland (there are two kinds of people in Fairfield County, “water people” and “backcountry people”) the land rises in a series of wooded hills threaded by bright streams and narrow, winding roads. The terraced climbing of the hills means that it is possible, even from many miles inland, to catch, here and there, distant glimpses of the Sound. Across this whole terrain, behind rhododendron-shrouded gates, guardhouses, and even simple mailboxes on white posts, are spread some of the handsomest and best-cared-for houses to be found anywhere. “One wonders,” someone said not long ago, “as one drives along these roads, whether there really are any poor people any more.” On the Sound side of Fairfield County, the look of the place is more suburban. The Sound side is more built-up. The houses, though large and expensive-looking, stand closer together. This is because the prices for waterfront acreage have climbed to the stratosphere, and houses have been built on smaller lots. Back-country, the feeling is definitely rural. A number of people keep horses, and one passes jumping courses, paddocks, and handsome barns and stables. This is hunt country, much of it, and, as it does in Southern Pines, the sound of the hunting horn rings across autumn mornings. Wildlife here is in great variety—deer (a mixed blessing since they devour shrubs and flowers) and rabbits, raccoons, possums, squirrels, pheasant, partridge, and scores of other kinds of birds. Would it mar the pleasant picture of this place to remember that this is also a part of the country where one can encounter the particular problems which seem particularly to beset the affluent and ambitious—divorce, alcoholism, drug problems in the schools? Yes, but this is also part of Fairfield County, and residents shake their heads and ask, “But aren’t these problems everywhere in the country?” The Kiwanis Club of Westport operates a rehabilitation center for drug addicts. Psychiatrists do a good business here.

But it would not be fair to think of Fairfield County as an entity. There are actually several Fairfields, and each town and village has a stamp and character all its own.

Here’s to old Fairfield County,

Society’s uppermost shelf,

Where Greenwich speaks only to Southport,

And Southport just talks to itself.

So goes an old bit of local doggerel, and it sums up with a good deal of accuracy the status of the two towns. Of all the addresses in Fairfield County, Southport, from a social-money standpoint, is decidedly the best. Located on a hilly point of land overlooking the Sound, very near the easternmost limits of Fairfield County and among the towns farthest from New York City, Southport is a small, splendid town of hidden estates, private lanes, with many fine Colonial and Federal houses, and a few small, discreetly elegant shops. Greenwich, on the westernmost edge of the county, where Connecticut dips its geographic toe into New York State, has been called a “larger Southport.” Though Greenwich’s large houses and estates are not unlike Southport’s, there are more of them in Greenwich and, while Southport is a village, Greenwich is a city of over fifty thousand population, with apartment houses, a hotel, restaurants, shopping centers, and a congested downtown business section—and, if one looks behind the scenes, even a bona fide slum.

Southport has remained very WASP-ish in character, and Jews have been made to feel unwelcome there. Greenwich, on the other hand, has a black population—many of whom are employed as domestics—and, though this was not always true, Jews have been allowed to buy houses in the best neighborhoods. Joseph Hirschhorn, for example, the multimillionaire art collector, has a vast Norman house on the top of Round Hill surrounded by a spectacular sculpture garden which contains, among other things, over sixty works by Henry Moore. Round Hill is one of Greenwich’s most prestigious addresses, and the Hirschhorn estate stands opposite that of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Verner Reed, who have been called “the grandest people in Greenwich.” The Reed estate is a hundred acres, most of it untouched woodland. In an area where land has gone for as much as fifty thousand dollars an acre, some idea of the worth of the Reed holdings may be gained by a simple act of multiplication.

Mr. and Mrs. Reed were, incidentally, the developers of another exclusive enclave—Hobe Sound, Florida, an island restricted to 280 families. “In the nineteen-thirties, there was a need for a Hobe Sound,” says Mr. Reed, “a place where people of a certain affluence could go for vacations and to relax, without the tulle hat and seventeen-piece orchestra sort of thing that was going on in Palm Beach.” Apparently during the Depression not everyone was depressed. The Joseph Verner Reeds and the Joseph Hirschhorns are friendly, despite the anti-Semitic cast of Hobe Sound, and have entertained each other occasionally. This represents a great change, people say, from the old days when, if a Greenwich real estate man sold property to a Jew, he automatically lost his license. On the other hand, the Hirschhorns’ names do not adorn the membership list of the Round Hill Club or the Social Register, whereas the Reeds’ quite definitely do, in both places.

Just why restrictive policies against Jews have remained in Fairfield County’s best clubs is a question difficult to understand or answer, and the reasons for their existence are hard to pinpoint. No particular member , or group of members, of any club can be accused of overt anti-Semitism. It is almost as though these policies had a life of their own, were self-generative, and have remained not out of specific prejudice so much as out of the vague excuse that “this is the way it has always been.” Dorothy Rodgers recalls that when she and her husband first moved to Fairfield a friend suggested that the Rodgerses join the local beach club. “It was a perfectly simple little beach club, without any social pretensions at all,” she says. “It was not one of the fancy clubs. We simply thought joining it would be fun for the children.” A few days after suggesting it, the friend telephoned Mrs. Rodgers to say, “I’m just so embarrassed I don’t know what to say! I simply had no idea that they felt this way, but it seems they don’t accept Jewish members no matter who they are.” Mrs. Rodgers, a humorous and successful woman in her own right, as an author and designer, says, “Of course we’re entertained in Christian homes out here, but I always wonder if it isn’t mostly because of who Dick is. Would we be invited if he weren’t Richard Rodgers? And meanwhile, with the shortage of servants, a great deal of the entertaining out here takes place at the clubs. We have a very pleasant life in Fairfield, with friends here whom we treasure and others who come out for weekends from New York. We don’t golf, and we don’t play tennis. We do play mean croquet on our lawn all summer. So we don’t miss the club life at all.” Mrs. Rodgers also believes that restrictions in clubs are less the result of formal anti-Semitism than the expression of a kind of naïveté. “I sometimes think these clubs exclude Jews largely because they don’t know any Jews. They’d like to make Jewish friends, perhaps, but they simply don’t know how!”

Meanwhile, there is rather little social intercourse between towns like Greenwich and Southport and the other communities in the county. Bette Davis, who lives in Westport, explodes and says, “My God, I’d never be invited to a party in Southport—unless they wanted me there as some sort of curiosity, or freak. After all, I’m unmarried, a woman who works for a living, who makes her money in the entertainment industry, and who has the scarlet letter ‘A’ for Actress branded on her bosom! If I lived in Southport, I’d never be accepted. Here, of course, it’s quite different.”

Westport has always been a little different. Early in the nineteen-twenties , the town of Westport was discovered by a group of New York writers and artists who began coming to Westport for the summer. Soon they were buying and restoring old farmhouses and barns. New Yorker writers and cartoonists, a notably clubby lot, led the way, and people like Peter De Vries, Hamilton Basso, Jerome Weidman (who has since moved away) and Whitney Darrow, Jr., were among the early arrivals. They were joined by others from the theater and films such as June Havoc, Eileen Heckart, Ralph Alswang, and David Wayne. To this rich and bright brew were added infusions from the worlds of radio and, eventually, television, book publishing, and, to top it off, a large contribution to the population from the world of advertising.

Madison Avenue has, furthermore, contributed for the most part people who are from the so-called “creative” end of the business—copywriters and art directors. This has given the town of Westport the feeling of a bright, brash, assertive—somewhat raffish, middle-class-based, but still very well-heeled—artists’ colony. Downtown Westport abounds with what are called “fun” shops. There are fun dress shops, men’s shops, gourmet shops, gift shops, ice cream shops, cheese shops, delicatessens, bookshops, and grog shops. Collectively, the fun shops of Westport exude an aura of franticity, of desperation. The fun totters on the brink of hysteria, as though the shops were not at all sure how they were going to pay their bills for the fun merchandise on their shelves. One suspects the shops are as overextended as, indeed, many of their best customers doubtless are. All over Fairfield County, shopkeepers complain about slow bill-payers; some of the wealthiest, biggest-spending families pay bills only once a year. But one suspects that there are more shops in Westport than can be supported by even this high-living community. Compared with Westport’s, the shopping district of the more sedate and quiet town of Fairfield is a dreary affair. It consists largely of Mercurio’s Market, whose claim to fame is that it was here that the late Margaret Rudkin—who went on to make a fortune in Pepperidge Farm bakery products—brought her first few loaves of bread to sell.

Weston, in the backcountry, is sort of an extension, on a much more woodsy scale, of Westport. That is, the population of Weston also includes writers, artists, actresses, and actors. But Weston is much smaller, with only a handful of small stores at its center—stores which, on the tax rolls, are classified as residences because the town, officially, is zoned against businesses altogether. Westport has grown too large for it, but Weston is still small enough to operate on the old New England town-meeting system. To Weston residents, the town meetings are an important part of the town’s charm. Understandably, the most heated arguments at town meetings are over issues which threaten to increase taxes.

Sonny Fox, the television personality, who lives in Weston and is typically active in local affairs, is particularly interested in matters dealing with the local schools. “Whenever there’s a school bond issue that you think everybody’s behind,” he says, “you find at the town meetings, a lot of little old ladies in gray hair and sneakers who have crawled out of the hills somewhere to fight it. These little old ladies are always big taxpayers, and of course they don’t have children in the schools—at least not any more. I remember one woman who got up in town meeting and made a long speech saying, ‘Why are we spending all this money on schools? Why don’t we use it to spray the trees? The hell with the children! Let’s save our elms!’ Somebody in the back row said, ‘Great idea! Let’s just spray the children.’ Our town meetings really get pretty wild.”

Compared with towns like Weston, Westport, Southport, Fairfield, and Greenwich, other Fairfield County towns such as Darien and New Canaan seem more predictable—very pretty, very cozy, but essentially bedroom towns of successful businessmen-commuters who work five days a week in Manhattan.

One reason for the distinctive character of so many Fairfield communities involves zoning. If you don’t count school bonds and other tax issues, zoning is easily the number one topic of conversation in Fairfield County. If you want to get a heated conversation going at a Fairfield County dinner table, simply mention that inflammatory six-letter word. In a particularly excited state about zoning is Greenwich. One of the factors that has permitted Greenwich to retain its precious “rural character” has been the extensive amount—close to ten thousand acres—of privately held vacant land which has been left, as in the Joseph Verner Reed estate, to Nature’s green thumb. Slightly more than half this land, or about five thousand acres, lies in the backcountry, and for more than forty years, this land has been zoned to a minimum of four acres per family. An additional twenty-five hundred acres is zoned so as to require that each family occupy no less than two acres. These high-acre zoning laws apply to just about a quarter of Greenwich’s thirty thousand total acreage. Meanwhile, Greenwich has been caught in a press between an exploding population, an increased migration from city to suburb, and pressure from developers who have sought to persuade large landholders that there are fortunes to be made if their property can be down-zoned, broken up, and sold. Few property-owners are immune to the temptations of large sums of money, and few rich people seriously resist the chance to become richer. But so far the attempts to invade the historic four-acre zone have been met with public outcry and defeat.

The sociological argument for breaking up the larger landholdings has been the claim that the rich on the big plots of land must now, in the 1970s, make way for the billowing upper middle class, that enclaves of power and property no longer make sense in a society where any man who prospers deserves to live in as pleasant surroundings as he can find. In Greenwich, this argument has pitted Mr. Lewis S. Rosenstiel, the eighty-one-year-old chairman of Schenley Industries, against the conservatives and traditionalists of the town. For several years, Mr. Rosenstiel—a Greenwich summer resident for thirty-six years—has been making a determined effort to have eighty-three acres of land which his Rosenstiel Foundation owns—in the four-acre zone—reduced to half-acre lots which would then be sold at less than a thousand dollars a lot. Mr. Rosenstiel’s arguments are sociological, he insists, not economic. He has called Greenwich’s four-acre zoning laws “de facto economic discrimination,” and those who support his view point out that it is also de facto racial discrimination. Mr. Rosenstiel and his foundation would like to open part of Greenwich to middle-income families, some of whom would most certainly be black families. Not long ago, a hearing on this matter took up a total of thirty hours stretched over seven nights, and produced more than a thousand pages of testimony. Tempers ran high, and insults were shouted by, and at, some of America’s most prominent and—as a rule—quietest families. The matter, still unresolved, has divided Greenwich into two angry camps, while others, who agree with Mr. Rosenstiel’s point of view but who still like Greenwich the way it is—and don’t want to see it changed—find themselves ambivalent on the subject. Underneath it all, unspoken but still there, is the knowledge that Lewis Rosenstiel, the champion of integration (economic and racial), the foe of discrimination, is also an outsider—a Jew.

Similar zoning arguments go on in other Fairfield County communities, and committees are forever being formed to look into other uses to which vacant, high-zoned land can be put. As property taxes rise, and the larger landholders feel the squeeze, there is increased pressure on them to break up their estates, and there has been much talk of putting residential land to discreet commercial use. If, say, a company bought twenty-five wooded acres and built a well-designed research center in the middle of the tract, no one would know it was there. A number of two-to-four-acre-zoned lots would go off the market, and the town would gain a rich taxpayer. Weston has talked of attracting this sort of business, but one man who lives there says wryly, “What they want is a company that will build a factory in the middle of the woods where no one will see it. When you do see it, it should look like a beautiful house. The factory should produce something that doesn’t create any smoke or smells or noise, and deliveries should be made at night—preferably by Cadillac limousines. It would be better if this factory could be run by computers, because computers don’t have kids that have to go to school and add to the tax load. But if it has to have employees, they should all live far away, in another county. And the factory should not require any town services—police, fire department, or garbage pickup. Not surprisingly, this sort of ideal company and factory has been a little bit hard to find.”

On the question of commercializing vacant property, Greenwich possesses a certain psychological advantage. It has been able to keep its city taxes comparatively low. Greenwich has done this by limiting city services, which, in turn, has helped the town preserve its treasured rural look. Though it has excellent police and fire departments, many miles of roads have neither streetlights or sidewalks. A large part of the town is without sewer service. (In these sections, septic tanks, sump pumps, and the rising water table—rising higher with the construction of so many swimming pools because pools impede natural drainage of ground water—are topics of conversation almost as popular as zoning.) Parts of the town must use private garbage collectors. Many roads are unpaved, which means that they are inexpensive to maintain, and that they also discourage sightseers and others who don’t belong. The public schools are excellent, but the rich of Greenwich send their children to private schools—to Greenwich Academy or Greenwich Country Day—so the schools have not been under undue pressures. Greenwich has a population ceiling of 86,820 people, which it expects to reach by 1985—unless, of course, the zoning laws are changed.

The second great force that has shaped the character of Fairfield’s towns, perhaps even equal in importance to zoning, lies in the towns’ means of access. Three major arteries of transport thread their way east and west, running roughly parallel to each other, across the breadth of Fairfield County, from the New York line to Fairfield’s outer limits: the Merritt Parkway, the Connecticut Turnpike and the New Haven Railroad. The Parkway, with a beautifully landscaped center mall, winds gracefully through the backyards of largely invisible estates; it is the traditional dividing line between shore-country and backcountry real estate, with everything to the north of the Parkway being back-country. In the spring, the Parkway’s length is aglow with flowering dogwood. For all its beauty, there were eyebrows raised in the 1930s when it was built. Why, for example, did the Merritt thread its way so artfully around the Rockefeller estate (the Greenwich Rockefellers, that is, first cousins of the Tarrytown ones) when a more logical route would have been straight through it? Perhaps, if you are a Rockefeller, you can detour a parkway. The newer Connecticut Turnpike, which runs along the shore, is largely a truck route (trucks are not permitted on the higher-class Merritt). The oldest route, and the most important in terms of the social makeup of Fairfield towns, is the New Haven branch of the Penn Central Railroad.

Greenwich is the first of the fashionable Fairfield stops as the railroad makes its uncertain way from Grand Central Station in Manhattan. The oneway trip takes about an hour, and for years, Greenwich has attracted a certain kind of commuter—the man who, for all his success and affluence, nonetheless needs to maintain a regular schedule at a place of business in New York City. Thus you find living in Greenwich men like G. Keith Funston, former president of the New York Stock Exchange; James A. Linen, of Time, Inc.; and IBM’s Thomas J. Watson, Jr. The towns of Southport and Fairfield, on the opposite side of the county and farthest from New York, have attracted quite a different sort of resident. They are beyond the commuting range, except to the most indefatigable commuter, and they are also suburbs of Bridgeport. Many wealthy Bridgeport manufacturers have built houses here. These towns have also drawn well-heeled retirees and others whose needs to go to New York are infrequent. In Southport, you find people like the industrialist Charles Sherwood Munson; Standard Oil heiress Ruth Bedford, and retired advertising tycoon Chester J. La Roche. The area is also popular with people who use it primarily for weekend visits and summer vacations, such as Mr. and Mrs. Rodgers and the Leonard Bernsteins. Westport, which is just about the longest practical commuter distance from New York, has attracted those whose commuting hours are irregular—the actors and painters and writers—as well as those businessmen who are so secure in their positions that they need not arrive at their desks before ten-thirty or so, the Madison Avenue men.

Commuting in and out of Fairfield County has developed into something very close to an art form, and each train has a character, and conveys a status, that is all its own. The 7:37 A.M. out of Westport, for example—or, even more so, the one before it, the 6:59—is the sort of train for the bright, aggressive, ambitious young man on his way up, doing well and bucking for a promotion he will very likely soon get. He rushes to the front of the train each morning—in order to be the first one to get off—busies himself with briefcase work at his seat, and will be at his desk by eight-thirty. The mood on these early trains is tense, absorbed, unsociable. A little later on, on the 9:13, the passengers are quite a different lot. Here are the bankers, the lawyers, the heads of companies whose first engagements of importance on any given day occur not much before lunchtime. These men will stroll into their offices around ten or a little after, and secretaries and staff will have coped with their day until then. On this train, populated with decision-makers, the atmosphere is more relaxed, serene. In the smoker, bridge-players quietly play for gentlemanly stakes. There is another class of man on this train, though, who tries very hard to seem relaxed—the man who is for the moment unemployed, and who is on his way into town for an interview.

Still another commuter type is the man who belongs to a private car association. He sits grandly in the last car on the train, window shades lowered to screen him from the gaze of common mortals, served by a white-coated steward. The grandest of the private cars is the Southport Car, which also picks up a few select passengers in Westport and Darien. Though it costs only about two hundred dollars a year plus commutation to belong to a private car club, it is said that “someone has to die” before you can join one, and even then rigorous tests must be passed. One Southport man, for example, moved away not long ago in disgrace when he was blackballed by the Southport Car. A similar car, and association, serves Greenwich and Rye (just over the New York state line in Westchester County), while another serves New Canaan.

Wednesday is ladies’ day on the New Haven branch of the Penn Central, and by eleven in the morning the coaches are bright with female chatter—women bound into town for lunch, a bit of shopping, and a matinee. By three o’clock in the afternoon the trains fill up with commuting schoolchildren armed with transistor radios. And of course the most déclassé trains of all are those departing for New York around five in the afternoon. These are filled with cleaning ladies and handymen returning home to Harlem and the Bronx.

Returning home to a Fairfield County town presents its own set of problems—in particular, how to get out of the commuter parking lot as fast as possible, ahead of all the other commuters. Wives wait tensely at the wheels of cars, motors racing, while their menfolk sprint across the tarmac to meet them. In Westport, a shortcut to the parking lot has been discovered which involves scaling a fence. To those who don’t understand commuting, its rules and rituals and handicaps, the sight of well-dressed men in Brooks Brothers suits, with Gucci attaché cases, scrambling over a fence to get to their cars is a bewildering one. There are other commuting techniques. One type of commuter has his wife meet him at, say, the train arriving at 7:51 P.M. The man himself will then take the train which arrives at 6:02, and will spend the intervening time at the station tavern.

A new arrival in Fairfield County not long ago was surprised by what he took to be the rudeness of his fellow passengers on the train. “I’d meet guys socially, at parties on weekends,” he says, “and then I’d run into them again on the train, and they’d look right through me as though they’d never met me.” Eventually, he learned that rudeness was not the cause of this behavior. “I discovered that each man has his own commuting pattern,” he says. “He reads his paper, does some work, takes a nap, or has a drink in the club car—but the important thing is that it’s his pattern. He’s used to it, and he isn’t going to change it. He tries to sit in the same seat in the same car of the same train every day. He either wants conversation or not—usually not. In order to cope with the commuting, you have to defend your personal pattern. So if you see someone you know, who might want to talk to you or sit with you, or who threatens to break the pattern, you have to ignore him. Everybody ends up doing this.”

The good life in Fairfield County—the good schools, the pleasant clubs, the green grass, the lakes, the wooded hills—has its drawbacks as well as its rewards. Many parents feel that the celebrated “rural character,” so carefully preserved, does not make for a particularly good place to raise children. It has been said, albeit facetiously, that if all the students in Westport’s luxurious Staples High School who are using marijuana and other drugs were expelled, there would be no school to run. In towns like Weston, where specific businesses are zoned out, there are no movie theaters, no bowling alleys, no pizza parlors or other traditional places of teenage enjoyment. All these must be sought elsewhere. On the streets of Westport in the afternoon, after school, a group very much resembling Greenwich Village hippies hangs out, looking bored, listless and disaffected. There have been incidents of vandalism and breaking and entering—all laid to teenage idleness and boredom. Being a teenager in Fairfield County can also be lonely. With two- and four-acre zoning, one’s best friends frequently live far away. After school, the kids monopolize the telephone, calling up each other. The easiest solution is to give the children their own telephone line. There are no buses or other public transportation through the best neighborhoods. If the children are to visit friends, someone must supply a ride. A solution, when they’re old enough: get them their own car. Until then, if Mother and Father are too busy to do the driving, kids are given charge accounts with taxi companies. Taxi charge accounts are also required by Fairfield County maids.

Out of boredom, kids do stupid things. They steal things they don’t need, or that their parents would probably buy for them if they asked, from local shops, and when this happens, the parents themselves are no help at all. A Westport shopowner says, “I saw a sixteen-year-old girl take a twenty-dollar cocktail ring from a counter and drop it in her bag. I knew the girl, and I called her mother. Her mother began screaming at me, saying, ‘My daughter would never do a thing like that! You’re a liar, and I’ll never set foot inside your store again.’” Shop-owners are reluctant to call in the police on matters like these, for fear of offending and losing customers. And the police are faced with a special problem. Darien, not long ago, got its name unpleasantly spread across newspaper headlines in connection with a matter that involved teenage drug-taking and drinking. A Darien girl was killed in a car driven by a drunken boy. This gave Darien a bad name which it has not yet lived down, and it is said that local real estate values were damaged. Nobody in Fairfield County wants what happened in Darien to happen in their town, certainly not the property-owners or the public servants or the police. To avoid the publicity and scandal of “another Darien,” the police departments of other villages admit that they play down, and hush up as quickly as possible, matters of youthful delinquency. Alas, the youth know all this and behave accordingly.

There are other difficulties involved in being a parent in an affluent community. Sonny Fox, who describes himself as “a kid from Brooklyn,” moved to Fairfield County partly so that his children could have some of the much-touted “advantages” which he himself never had. But sometimes he feels that the youth of Fairfield are overprivileged. He was startled when his son asked for a motorcycle and explained, “All the other kids have them.” On another occasion, he excitedly told his children that they had been invited to swim in a friend’s pool. One of his children asked, “Is it heated?” The Fox house is situated by a pretty stream. The children complain that the water is nearly always too chilly for swimming.

But for all its shortcomings, Fairfield County is, to those who love it, a very special sort of place. They regard it with a special affection very close to love. Bette Davis, who has been coming to Westport for over twenty years, has now made the town her permanent home. She lives in a comfortable Colonial house on the banks of a lively river, a house with large airy rooms done in bright colors—splashes of purple, yellow, and pink. Nearby, in Weston, her daughter lives with her husband and their child. Not long ago Miss Davis was having a drink and smoking in her emphatic way, and said, “I’m a Yankee. I was born in New England. Oh, I know a Connecticut Yankee is supposed not to be a real Yankee—not the kind of Yankee who comes from Maine and talks about his farm ‘down East.’ But there’s still a Yankee thing here, and it rubs off, some of it, on everybody who comes here. The Yankee doesn’t care what you are. It’s who you are, as a person, that he cares about. All kinds of people have moved here, and they’ve learned that lesson. If you want to be left alone they’ll leave you alone. If you want friends they’ll be friendly. They’ll give you anything you want. Also, I admit I’m a conservative. I like Fairfield County exactly as it is. I don’t want to see it change a smidgeon—ever!”

Others are more realistic, more accommodating. They see that Fair-field County cannot be kept under a bell jar, not even by zoning laws, as a preserve for rich and private people. They see not only the new rich changing the face of Fairfield, but the old rich changing their ways too, willing to make way for changing times and faces, creating an inevitable blending of the social classes—creating a place, perhaps, where white and black, Jew and Christian, wealthy and not-so-wealthy, can live and enjoy the beauty of Fairfield’s hills and streams and beaches. One woman who appreciates Fairfield’s changing role, and who intends to make the best of it, is Barbara W. Tuchman, the historian, who lives most of each year in Greenwich. Barbara and Lester Tuchman also have a large antique-filled Park Avenue apartment, but living on a lavish scale is not Barbara Tuchman’s style—though it was her father’s style, and very much so. Her father, Maurice Wertheim, was a super-millionaire investment banker who headed Wertheim & Company on Wall Street. His Greenwich estate originally consisted of a hundred and twenty acres with a huge main house, stables, a jumping course, and a great many outbuildings. The place was tended by French maids, German governesses, stable boys, and a staff of gardeners.

Now the estate has been broken up—the Tuchmans have forty of the original acres, and Barbara Tuchman’s sister has the remaining eighty—and the Tuchmans’ Greenwich house is simplicity itself. Low and rambling, all on one floor, it makes use of a lot of glass and consists, really, of one large living-dining room, a small kitchen, and, beyond an open breezeway, three bedrooms. Barbara Tuchman does her own cooking. Her car, one of the lower-priced three, is used to pick up her commuter husband, a New York physician, at the Greenwich station. It is not that the Tuchmans are poor—far from it. Barbara Tuchman inherited a sizable fortune from her father. It is just that their scale of living has been reduced to something more in keeping with the times.

“I do my writing in a little one-room house I built on top of the hill up there,” Mrs. Tuchman says. “It has no telephone, and up there I’m completely alone, cut off. When I’m ready to join my family, I come down out of my tiny little ivory tower, back to this house. Do you notice something architecturally a little odd about this house? It’s really a double house, you see, two buildings joined by the breezeway—and I’m someday going to close that breezeway in, so I won’t have to put on a coat to walk to bed on chilly nights. But the fact is that these two buildings, on my father’s estate, were the henhouse and the potting shed. As you can see, in my father’s day even the hens lived very well, and there must have been a lot of potting done because it was a lot of shed. I love to remind myself of what these buildings used to be. Nobody, of course, can live the way my parents and my grandparents lived—in that great, grand, vast manner. I think that if my father, or my grandfather—who was a Morgenthau, and the Morgenthaus were even grander than the Wertheims—knew that I am now living in the old henhouse and the potting shed, thrown together, why, I’m sure they’d be spinning in their graves.”