The Right Places

“Come and Join Our Exclusive Club … Please?”

When novelist John O’Hara was gathered to his ancestors, literary and otherwise, not long ago, it was noted in the press that few authors have written more, or more accurately, about the intricacies and subtleties of that peculiarly American institution, the country club. Remember the country club? It was that cozy old place where all the best people in town, along with those who wanted to be, met for locker-room gossip before Sunday golf games, sat down for endless creamed-chicken lunches, and showed up for boozy Saturday night dances where sweet-smelling girls in pretty dresses could sometimes be coaxed out onto moonlit fairways and no one minded because it was all “people we know.”

The critics also pointed out that O’Hara’s was an oddly truncated vision, that his focus had remained rooted on the kind of country-club world that had existed before 1930. What seemed overlooked was the fact that O’Hara’s view was a nostalgic one of a world that ceased to exist long ago, and that, as a result of a variety of social, economic, and political factors, has changed utterly in the years since—and is bound to change even more. Not even twenty years ago, for example, when Donald Ruggoff, a film distributor who operates a chain of New York movie houses, was about to marry his non-Jewish wife, his future father-in-law warned the couple, “You’ll never be able to join the Worcester Country Club, you know!” In the 1950s, these were words to be taken seriously. Today, they would be greeted with a hoot of laughter.

It is significant of the predicament in which private clubs find themselves that one of several dark little clouds which Judge G. Harrold Carswell found hanging over his nomination to the Supreme Court was his involvement with, of all things, a country club in Tallahassee, Florida. It seemed that Carswell had assisted with the club’s transfer from a municipal to a private, segregated, status. Here, a matter that would have been ignored twenty years ago had become one of pressing seriousness. It helped lose Carswell his approval by the Senate.

But there is more plaguing private clubs these days than the conflict between civil rights and the social “right of private association.” In Westchester County, one golf club is wondering how it is to pay for the winter potholes that have appeared along its miles of private roads, and another closed its beach facility because it had received an offer for the property that was too lucrative to resist. In Dallas, a club is worried about spiraling costs of labor, maintenance, and taxes—and about the reluctance of its wealthy membership to agree to higher dues. In San Francisco, a club in which literally “someone had to die,” up until a few years ago, before a new member could be taken in, there is now an energetic drive to recruit new members to fill its sagging rosters. In the cases of “certain especially desirable new members,” the once-mandatory five-thousand-dollar initiation fee is being waived. In New York, the cutoff age for junior membership was recently and discreetly raised from forty to forty-five in the hopes that an influx of the less well-heeled will fill the cavity left by the departing rich. Other clubs have taken to using such devices as offering “house memberships” which, for a reduced fee, give members only partial club privileges—everything but golf, for instance. New York’s American Yacht Club used to insist on the distinction that it was a sailing club, and motor vessels were sneeringly referred to as “stinkpots.” Today, the American seems delighted with its fairly lengthy list of stinkpot-owning members, as well as with a number of new members who have no interest in yachting—motorized or nonmotorized—whatever, and who are happy just to sit on the terraces, watch the races, and eat the meals which are being advertised as “very much improved.”

The same sort of thing is happening in clubs all across the country—at Boston’s Somerset Club, Philadelphia’s Racquet Club, Washington’s Metropolitan, and San Francisco’s Pacific Union. “We have decided for a variety of reasons,” commenced a letter from one of these august clubs to its members not long ago, “to accept a certain number of new members in the Club. Such new members, of course, should be of a calibre compatible to the present membership.” And not long ago, a visiting Englishman was lunching at New York’s Knickerbocker Club, and could not help but notice how many luncheon tables for two were occupied by one elderly and pink-scalped gentleman, and one pink-cheeked and longish-haired youth. Had upper-class Americans, he inquired, adopted the somewhat sophisticated European convention of “le petit ami”? Gruffly he was told that there was nothing at all unnatural going on between these luncheon couples. It was simply the Knickerbocker’s drive to attract new members.

In other words, there is today a new and poignant meaning to Groucho Marx’s famous comment, “Any club that would take in me as a member I wouldn’t want to join.” Now, any club that will take you in as a member will also take in any number of friends you want to bring along.

To the would-be clubman, this is very much a buyer’s market, and newcomers—particularly to the suburbs of the larger cities, where there are many clubs to choose from—are well advised to shop around. Not long ago, when applying to a supposedly “exclusive” club on Boston’s North Shore, a man was asked to supply his “Mother’s Maiden Name.” He couldn’t recall it, and left the space blank. He got in anyway, which—as the old-timers shake their heads and say—would never have happened in the days John O’Hara knew so well. And faced with a sea of problems in a sea of change, the owners and managers of American social and recreational clubs have banded together to form the National Club Association, with headquarters in Washington, and the Association has been holding agonized meetings about the current state of what is accurately called the “club industry”; the main question seems to be whither-are-we-drifting.

One of the problems with clubs in America may be that they are suffering from growing pains—that they have proliferated so rapidly that there are suddenly more clubs than we need. As an institution, the country club is not really very old, and its growth has almost exactly paralleled the growth in popularity of golf. Golf first made its appearance in the United States as early as 1779, when an advertisement appeared in Rivington’s Royal Gazette which read:

To the Golf Players! The season for this pleasant and healthy exercise now advancing. Gentlemen may be furnished with excellent CLUBS and the veritable Caledonian BALLS, by enquiring at the Printers.

But it was not until more than a century later that golf received any sort of national attention, and this happened in 1887 when a Yonkers man named Robert Lockhart returned from a trip to Scotland with a set of clubs and a supply of balls. Lockhart interested his friend John Reid in the game, and the two men laid out a crude course over several acres of Westchester pastureland. It was Reid’s suggestion that a club be formed, and thus the St. Andrews Golf Club—the first in America—came into existence, and it continues to exist in Ardsley-on-Hudson, New York.

Up to then, all the best clubs in America had been the men’s city clubs, where the men of society retreated elaborately from their wives and families. The most venerable of these include New York’s Union Club and Knickerbocker Club, Philadelphia’s Philadelphia Club and Fish House and Rabbit Club, and Boston’s Somerset Club and Tavern Club. It was not until 1903 that New York got its all-lady Colony Club—founded by such as Mrs. John Jacob Astor III—and clubs which admitted children as well as women would have been considered downright un-American. But golf got the club idea out of the city into the countryside, and, once there, women proved a hard species to keep out. In the beginning, country clubs sprouted across the face of the land—before the sexual barriers were broken down. Next came the age barriers. Today, a few clubs have firm rules about when women and youngsters are permitted on the golf course, but these are always under attack, and in most places, the country club—with its kiddies’ wading pool, its swings and teeter-totters, its hairdressing salon, baby-sitter service, snack bar, ladies’ sauna and ladies’ card room—is very much a family preoccupation.

Women have certainly helped diminish the importance of the once-powerful men’s clubs. In the dining room of New York’s Union Club not long ago, a woman glanced icily across the room and commented to the headwaiter, “I see you now also admit the mistresses, as well as the wives, of members.” The headwaiter replied, “Only if they are also the wives of other members, madam.” And meanwhile, the same sort of thing is going on across the street, as it were—at the once-exclusive women’s clubs such as New York’s Colony and Cosmopolitan, Boston’s Chilton Club, Philadelphia’s Acorn, and San Francisco’s Franciscan Club. These clubs now admit men. They are also, in as ladylike a way as possible, going after new members. Because they also are languishing.

Part of the trouble has been the steady decline in the quality of service the social clubs have been able to offer. It is increasingly difficult to staff a club with bowing and scraping waiters and superb chefs, and to surround a member with the cozy sensation of belonging to some place decidedly privileged and special. Not long ago Colonel and Mrs. Charles A. Lindbergh arrived for dinner at the Cosmopolitan Club in New York, where Mrs. Lindbergh has maintained a membership for years. The Lindberghs of course had a reservation, but when the headwaitress approached them she inquired rather crossly, “Name, please?” “Charles Lindbergh,” replied the Colonel politely; and of the man who, for a while at least, was the most famous figure in the world, the headwaitress asked, “How do you spell it?” And at New York’s august Union Club a member was startled when a young waiter approached him and asked to borrow money. “Just till payday,” the waiter said.

Meanwhile, back in the country, golf has achieved such an enormous popularity that what had started out as a polite sport for the propertied gentleman is now taken up not only by women but by men who actually work for a living. Today, golf is enjoyed by the milkman as well as the millionaire and has been taken over by those the sociologists group as the “upwardly mobile middle class.” Today, accordingly, there are country clubs designed to suit almost every social and economic bracket. Starting times at local golf courses are announced over local radio stations. Big companies, which for a number of years have been paying the initiation fees of their executives to help them get into the best clubs in an area—on the theory that membership in the best club enhances the reputation of the company—have started building country club-like facilities for their lesser employees. So have labor unions, for their members. Then, since World War II, there has been a rash of municipal clubs, with memberships open to all residents of a certain town or city. Often these municipal clubs have come about as, for taxes, a community has bought up the languishing facilities of a private club. Then, of course, there are always the public golf courses.

All this golf-playing by the so-called silent majority has had a profound effect upon the old-line country clubs—the clubs á la John O’Hara’s novels—which were built for the so-called effete snobs. Much of the effect is economic. Costs have risen, as have taxes, and members have taken to asking, “Why should I pay five hundred a year to belong to the country club when I can play golf for a pittance a week on the public course?” To make ends meet, private clubs have been forced to go into something very closely resembling the hotel business. They have taken to catering outside parties and offering to sell their facilities for weddings, debuts, and bar mitzvahs. They have even gone after convention business, offering “outings”—days when the club will be closed to regular members and turned over to a corporation for meetings, followed by golf. But at this sort of thing a club must be careful. Tax laws specify that if a club earns more than fifty per cent of its revenue from outside sources it can lose its special club status. The club industry, understandably, complains that it is being “persecuted” by the Internal Revenue Service.

It may well be that the IRS is exerting indirect pressure in hopes of breaking down the traditional social structure in the traditional club. Built into the whole club concept, right from the beginning, was the principle of “exclusivity,” and there is no question that those who practice exclusivity are more concerned with keeping people out than with letting them in. Apologists for the concept argue that humans have an essential right to privacy, and to mingle and associate only with others of their own choice; that a group of friends may choose whatever criteria it wishes for admission to the group. This notion, of course, has come under attack in recent years as flying in the face of the broader, more urgent cause of civil rights, and the clubmen have had a hard time trying to defend the special tax status of clubs which are known to discriminate, as well as the fact that members of these clubs have been allowed to treat their dues as standard business income-tax deductions.

But right from the beginning in 1887, racism and anti-Semitism were part of the whole private-club idea. This, the post–Civil War era, was when racial and religious hate first became apparent as facts of life in America; they existed before, of course, but no one noticed them. The earliest country clubs were structured along racial and religious lines. To counteract anti-Semitic clubs, Jews developed clubs of their own which were intended to be equally exclusive. In Westchester County, for example, the Century Country Club was intended as the specifically Jewish “answer” to the exclusive, non-Jewish Apawamis Club. The Century, furthermore, was designed as a German Jewish Club and, as one member put it, “mostly Wall Street, though we have a couple of token Gimbels.” Other Jews—Russians and Poles, for example—were consigned to the Old Oaks Country Club, where they were said to be “waiting to get into Century.” This is less true today, as even the Century has had to look elsewhere than in the German elite for its membership.

In New York City, meanwhile, old Spanish and Portuguese Jewish families—fixtures of New York life since before the Revolution—had been taken into the city’s best clubs indiscriminately for generations. These people looked askance, however, at the upstart Germans, who had then to organize a club of their own, the Harmonie.

Discrimination in clubs has been attacked for longer than most people realize. After his defeat by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, the late Wendell Willkie went to Hobe Sound, Florida, for a rest, where he found that Hobe’s Jupiter Island Club accepted no Jews. He immediately and vociferously objected, threatening never to come back, and the club hurriedly announced a shift in policy. More recently, Kennedy in-law Stephen Smith was criticized by New York broadcasting head R. Peter Straus for taking his family to the Lake Placid Club, a club “that is known openly to discriminate against Jews,” according to Straus. Senator Robert F. Kennedy stalked out of Washington’s Metropolitan Club soon after that, announcing that he had discovered the club was not taking in diplomats from the new African nations. New York’s University Club—though it boasts the Yale insignia, in Hebrew, on its McKim façade—has for years been notoriously anti-Semitic and under attack from Jewish groups since in most cities the University Club is open to any college graduate. Recently, the University Club announced a softening of this hard line.

The late Ward McAllister, who invented the phrase “the Four Hundred” for Mrs. Astor’s parties, once wrote: “Men whose personality is not remarkably brilliant and who, standing by themselves, would not be apt to arouse a great deal of enthusiasm among their associates on account of their intellectual capacity, very frequently counteract these drawbacks by joining a well-known club. Thus it will be seen that a club often lends a generous hand to persons who, without this assistance, might ever remain in obscurity.” Today, the exact opposite seems to be the case, and it is the clubs, not their members, which are becoming obscure. Has, for example, the celebrity of David Ogilvy, the advertising man, been enhanced in any way at all by his membership in the “exclusive” Brook Club? Roy Chapin, Joseph Alsop, Gardner Cowles, David K. E. Bruce, Roger M. Blough, Winthrop Aldrich, C. Douglas Dillon, and Henry Ford are all members in good standing of the Links. And yet their famous faces are, nowadays, only rarely seen within the clubhouse. His memberships in the Knickerbocker, the Century, and the University Club did not help lift Nelson Rockefeller from obscurity, nor did the Tuxedo, the Union, and Washington’s Metropolitan Club offer a “generous hand” to Averell Harriman.

The classic clubman—overstuffed, with his after-lunch cigar, dozing in his huge leather chair—is becoming a dying breed. A generation ago, nothing added more spice and relish to the dinner-table conversation than tales of this or that rich man who tried, but didn’t “make” the club—how the elder J. P. Morgan, enraged that he could not get a friend of his into the Union Club, built himself a whole new club, the Metropolitan. Today, all this sort of thing has begun to seem hopelessly old-fashioned. And when, not long ago, at a membership meeting of the Knickerbocker Club, a candidate’s name was proposed, someone said, a little tentatively, “Of course you know he’s Jewish …” the immediate reaction to the speaker was: “What do you mean? Do you mean you want to keep the man out?”

At the same time, the traditions and the rules which the social clubs imposed upon their members have begun to seem not only antiquated but ridiculous. A sign—NO LADIES ALLOWED ON THE THIRD FLOOR FOR ANY PURPOSE WHATEVER—which for years hung in the Metropolitan Club in Washington finally became the object of so much derision that it was removed. Equally the object of fun is the notice posted on a door in Boston’s Somerset Club which reads: THIS WATER CLOSET FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY; OTHER WATER CLOSETS AVAILABLE ON THE SECOND FLOOR. At one New York club, it has long been a firm rule that no business could be discussed over the club luncheon tables; also, because everyone was supposed to know everyone else in the club, there was a rule that no introductions could be performed. In recent years, members have found these rules increasingly silly and restrictive, and several resignations from the club resulted. Today, these rules have been relaxed, and prospective new members are eagerly urged to pay the old rules no heed.

Perhaps the trend that members of the National Club Association fear the most, however, is that today’s young people seem to be turning their backs on the whole idea of private social clubs. It is very like what is happening on campuses, where the young are rejecting fraternity and sorority memberships on the grounds (the phrase of the moment) that they are “not relevant,” preferring instead to join activist and political groups trying to end pollution and the Vietnam War. Such staid New York organizations as the Links Club—often considered the most exclusive club in America—are worried about being rejected by youth. The Links, chartered in 1916 “to promote and conserve throughout the United States the best interest and true spirit of the game of golf in its ancient and honorable traditions,” includes so many giants among its members that it has been said that “walking through the Links locker room is like walking through a nude Industrial Hall of Fame.” But the sons of the giants are heading, it would seem, in another direction altogether. Who will be in the Links thirty years from now?

There is still another social fact at work here. Not only the young, but the oldest guard of society have been gradually placing less emphasis on club memberships. A random glance at a couple of issues of the New York Social Register tells a curious story. Take the case of Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Dow Gibson (she is the former Helen Whitney). In 1950, the Gibsons belonged to a total of fifteen clubs—the Links, the Piping Rock, the Metropolitan, the Meadow Brook, and River, the National Golf Links, the Creek, the Union League, the University, the New York Yacht, the Turf & Field, the Westminster Kennel, the Racquet & Tennis, the Colony, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. By 1967, the Gibsons had cut their club memberships by exactly two-thirds, to a mere five—River, Creek, Piping Rock, Colony, and DAR. The same sort of thing is true of the Winthrop W. Aldriches, who, in 1950, belonged to eighteen clubs. Seventeen years later, they had trimmed their list to a mere eleven. Is it possible that as clubs have become the target and the province of the middle class, they have been falling out of favor with the upper?

Meanwhile, the National Club Association is busy. It has, after all, an industry involving hundreds of thousands of people, who do everything from manicure golf greens to manicure fingernails, to support. The NCA recently announced a new and successful club called the Mill River, in Upper Brookville, Long Island. Its charter stipulates a membership equally divided between Jews and gentiles, and is intended to reverse the trend of other Long Island clubs “to go one way or the other.”

In New York City, a new men’s social club has been announced, to be called the New Yorker Club. It will be “private, distinguished, but unexclusive in the usual sense. It will be devoted to interracial friendship.” The New Yorker Club will restrict itself to one thousand members, the only qualification being that members either work or reside in the New York metropolitan area. Behind the club are Richard V. Clarke, a Negro who heads a minority-group consulting firm; Holmes Brown, chairman of the New York Board of Trade; Herbert J. Farber, a prominent public relations man; Senator Jacob K. Javits and Senator Charles E. Goodell; Charles Luce, chairman of Consolidated Edison; Arthur Goldberg, former delegate to the United Nations; Theodore W. Kheel, labor consultant; Orin Lehman, chairman of the New School for Social Research; and advertising man David Ogilvy. Initiation fees for corporate membership will be twenty-five hundred dollars and “must include either the chairman or president of a company.”

Perhaps the New Yorker Club is the private club of the future. One can only speculate, and agree that it is a new departure. Meanwhile, for those who long for the days when the band, in raspberry tuxedos, played sweet songs on Saturday nights for sweet-smelling and compliant girls, perhaps you had better go back to Mr. O’Hara’s novels.

In London, meanwhile, the great social clubs—White’s, Boodle’s, St. James’s, the Saville—upon which American social clubs were originally modeled, are still flourishing. In fact, there are some who feel that socially it is more important today for a young London businessman to ally himself with the right club that it ever was before, that the helping hand and lift from obscurity are still provided by clubs on that side of the Atlantic. A recent item from The Times of London would seem to confirm this. The item reported that a certain London gentleman—not named in the story—had applied for membership in a certain club so often, and had been turned down with such gonglike regularity, that he had finally pleaded, “If you’ll just let me join this club, I promise I’ll never so much as set foot inside it.”

There are some tales that one longs to have be true, but that one suspects cannot really be. The above story is one of these. Can this actually have happened? Or was it a slow day at The Times reporter’s desk and, for his own amusement, did he tap out this little vignette for his newspaper—just to see if it would get past the copy editor’s desk, perhaps? It seems like something very close to sacrilege to doubt the authenticity of a news item from, of all places, The Times of London. But do you really believe that story? Do you?