I GRADUATED FROM Groton School in 1935 with twenty-eight other boys. Their future was not undistinguished. I became a recognized novelist and president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. William McCormick Blair, the number one aide of Adlai Stevenson, would be our ambassador to the Philippines. John Brooks was president of the Celanese Company; William P. Bundy was an assistant secretary of state and close adviser to President Johnson. Marshall Green became ambassador to Indonesia and Australia. James Higgins was president of the Mellon Bank, and Eben Pyne of City Bank. Stanley Resor was secretary of the army, and Robert Whitney would have almost surely become president of J. P. Morgan & Co. had he not been killed in an auto accident. Arthur Gardner also would probably have been heard from in his very untypical Groton career as a Jesuit priest had he not succumbed early to polio, released from his vows so that, dying, he could wed the wonderful nurse who attended to him.
Not a bad showing for a small class, but what was even more remarkable was that all the others, if less spectacular, had successful business or professional careers. There was not a failure in the crowd.
Although, as I have stated, my years at Groton coincided with the worst period of the Great Depression, there was no instance of radical or revolutionary political activity on the campus. Alfred Kazin, the great literary critic and my contemporary, told me once that in his West side Manhattan boyhood everyone he knew had been a communist. I replied that in my East side no one I knew had been.
It was a bitterly divided society but the repercussions were not felt at Groton except when our Scottish history teacher, George Rickey, married on a vacation a radical girl from Greenwich Village and brought her to the school. She soon made her contempt for the smug faculty wives and the "stuffy, spoiled little boys" so manifest that her connection with both them and her genius of a husband had to be severed, and he was left free for the splendid artistic career that soon opened before him.
I, however, remained true to the family conservatism. A few years later, when F.D.R.'s presidential campaign motorcade came through New Haven where I was a Yale freshman, I waved a huge sunflower, Alfred Landon's symbol, in front of it and got struck in the face by a policeman. It was not until Jack Kennedy that I voted for a Democratic president.
The families of most of the Groton boys had not only been Republicans but were bitterly anti-New Deal and anti-F.D.R., though the president was a graduate of the school himself and had sent his sons there. We boys were less impassioned than our parents and enjoyed the hustle and bustle and circling of motorcycles that accompanied the presidential visits to the school. They seemed to put us on the map, and I was even proud of a relationship to the great man.
Father used to claim that the fact that the president's father's first wife had been a Howland cousin did not make us blood kin, but he didn't realize that there had been three Roosevelt-Howland marriages and that he and F.D.R. were indubitably third cousins. New York, however, unlike the southern states, pays little attention to cousins more distant than first, and as there were dozens of people in town in the same relationship to the president, many of whom were not proud of it, it was not a matter of note in our family.
Overall, I was not especially concerned with things political. At Yale I continued acting with the dramatic society there until I appeared in a Goldoni comedy as a girl disguised as a boy, and my father did not think that this exhibition of confused sexual identity would enhance my image in the college. No doubt I took his criticism too seriously. Father and his Yale classmates were rather what we called too bulldog, but in my disgust I gave up the dramatic society altogether.
I continued to be stagestruck and went to New York frequently just to go to the theatre. I remember with a particular thrill John Gielgud in Hamlet and Nazimova in Ghosts and The Cherry Orchard. Indeed Nazimova's Mrs. Alving was a unique dramatic experience for me; I went three times to hear her tell her true life story to the incredulous pastor, and I was fascinated at a later time to read Tennessee Williams had given Nazimova in this role as a factor in his becoming a playwright. I like to think that we may have attended the same performance.
Later in life, I would write several plays, but such was never my thing. The only one that was ever produced was a one-act piece called The Club Bedroom with a cast of three women. A production required only a set with one portrait (an empty frame would do for an imaginative audience). It was done on Channel 13 and several times off-Broadway. I attended every performance, and later, when my wife, Adele, asked me why, I replied with a quip from the New Yorker: "Infatuation with the sound of one's own words department."
The theatre is indeed a dangerous Lorelei combing her golden hair with a golden comb over the vessels wrecked on the rocky shore below her, and it took a real effort for me to give her up. The trouble is that one always sees one's unproduced drama as it is splendidly enacted in one's imagination. The rejected novelist sees only a manuscript and a bad one.
The would-be playwright may also be misled by associates in the trade. The theatre world is a world to itself; to some in it nothing else is real. I remember a cocktail party given by Worthington Miner, the producer who was then planning to do a play of mine about which he later changed his mind. The guests were all theatre people, except one, Mrs. Miner's uncle, whom nobody recognized but me. In any other gathering he would have been the center of attention as James Byrne, governor, ambassador, secretary of state, and U.S Supreme Court justice. But here he was nobody.
As I have said, perhaps too often, given my firm hold on the notion, that at no time in my youth was I an athlete. Far from it, I confess. Nor did I have any interest in or admiration for such greats. My father was an excellent tennis player and once scored a hole-in-one on the Piping Rock Club golf course, but in accordance with the extreme generosity of his nature, he never dropped even a hint that he was disappointed that I hadn't inherited any of his facility or interest in this area.
Very different were the men of my mother's family, the Stantons, whom I favored in appearance, and who shared some of my athletic disability without any of my compensating indifference to it. My brother John, for example, slaved over his tennis, and later golf, as if his very life depended on them, without achieving more than a decent competence, and Bill Stanton, who had moved to Hong Kong where he could afford to devote his life to horses and polo, became only adequately adept in the latter game, despite numerous nasty falls.
I'm afraid that I viewed these two men's obsession, as I saw it, on the subject of sport with a faint contempt, as if they were worshipping a lesser god than mine of literature. It has often struck me that, at least in their case, there seemed to be a relationship between the care they took over their personal appearance and the pains with which they trained themselves for their favorite sport. I was on a motor trip with Uncle Bill in Europe when he suddenly realized he didn't have the right suit for the club in Singapore to which he was bound and he cabled his "number one boy" in Hong Kong to put one on the plane for him. I could have almost lived on what my brother expended on shirts and cufflinks. Neither man was possessed of the least ambition for getting ahead in the world, but they both cared strongly about how they looked and how people with whom they associated looked, and whether the latter's manners were good and how they behaved, and what sports they played.