A VANISHING BREED
“There just aren’t women around like Mother any more,” said Eva Stotesbury’s son, James H. R. Cromwell, in 1980. “There aren’t people who can talk about the duties and responsibilities that go with money. There aren’t people who can talk about uplifting the poor and the sick, about the need to bring culture to the masses, and still be taken seriously. Today, anyone who talked that way would be laughed at. But those women had integrity, they believed in what they were trying to do, believed it was important, believed it was almost a holy obligation that went with wealth. But they’re a vanishing breed. I suppose it was the social welfare programs that were started by President Roosevelt that began to put those women out of business. The government took over their jobs. I admit I was a big Roosevelt supporter, but I’ve since had a great many second thoughts. I worked hard for Ronald Reagan, and I’d love to live to see the day when individual charity will come back to replace all these social and welfare programs that the federal government has gotten itself locked into. But I doubt if I ever will. Even the word ‘charity’ has become a dirty word. To call someone a ‘patron of the arts’ today, which used to be considered a high and worthy calling, is to employ a term of derision.”
It is certainly true that, in the years since the beginning of the Roosevelt era, the federal government has slowly and steadily usurped the territory that once belonged to a few public-spirited philanthropists, and caring for the needy, the dispossessed, the mentally disoriented, the ill and the aged has become a public rather than a private responsibility. Whether unfortunate people in American society are any better off for it is a little hard to tell, but the revolution would appear to be complete.
Indirectly, too, through the strictures imposed by the Internal Revenue Service, the United States Government has discouraged grande dame–ship. To prevent their estates from being ravaged by taxes, the rich, like Miss Ima Hogg, have been forced to funnel their wealth into foundations, where decisions are no longer made by an individual legatee but by a board of trustees—the grand committee substituted for the grande dame. Today the country bristles with foundations, employing many people, all busily doing good works—the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, and so on—all created by lawyers and business advisers for tax purposes. (The giant Ford Foundation was not set up out of a burning desire to cure the world’s woes, but by canny Wall Street bankers who saw a way to save the heirs of Henry Ford from a staggering tax bill.) The IRS may also have dampened interest in collecting art and antiques—by making costs non-tax-deductible unless and until works are donated to museums.
But Big Government cannot assume all the blame for the fact that the torch that was once the grande dame’s has fallen into other, somewhat anonymous, hands. Big Business has also done its share and has, not always with the best intentions, assumed a certain proprietary concern for Culture. In Cincinnati, where Mary Emery gave so much time and money to support the symphony, the opera, and the art museum, these institutions receive much larger donations from Procter & Gamble, whose officers, as a matter of corporate policy, are expected to serve on their boards. (Annually, Procter & Gamble gives a Christmas turkey to each of its employees, much the way Eva Stotesbury used to deliver her Christmas parcels to the poor of Philadelphia.) In New York in 1981, the stockholders of the Kimberly-Clark Corporation voted to give $10,000 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was the kind of gift Eleanor Belmont routinely made a few years earlier. In accepting the money, William V. Macomber, the museum’s president, said, “It’s thrilling to see what corporate America does to improve the quality of life.” Thrilling, perhaps, but also a bit impersonal.
For over two hundred years Americans have boasted that the country has no aristocracy. Then how does one explain this “vanishing breed” of women, all of whom were born before the turn of the century, who stretched out their arms with great enthusiasm and grasped the burden of philanthropy and culture and gave these terms new meaning, who underwrote symphony orchestras, lent their prestige to social action, succored opera companies, and set styles in living? Painting, architecture, interior decoration, landscape design and horticulture, music, the theatre, literature, science and medicine, fashion, education, and politics all felt the impact of their presence. Sticking to the no-aristocracy rule, we fall back on French and call them grandes dames, which can be conveyed in somewhat depreciatory italics and loosely defined. Yet they combined to form our republic’s closest approach to an aristocracy—one not of family, but of taste, panache, and style.
These women had no common denominator of birth. Eva Stotesbury’s lawyer father was respectably prosperous but not rich. Edith Rosenwald’s father was almost poor, and became rich while she was growing up. Mary Parkman Peabody was a Boston Brahmin, that caste which Oliver Wendell Holmes called “the harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy.” (When she was jailed in Florida, her aplomb and poise so impressed her jailers that when a reporter tried to telephone her at the jail he was told, “I’m sorry, but Mrs. Peabody is resting and cannot be disturbed.”) Eleanor Belmont was a working actress. Arabella Huntington came from—well, who knows, really? What these women had in common was not birth but flair—a confident view of life and the vitality to express it and impress it on others whom they met. They also shared a profound toughness, an ability to scythe through the thick underbrush of lethargy and indifference without incurring a single scratch, to be invulnerable to criticism and jealousy—immune to it as some are to poison ivy.
Although some were brighter than others, these women also shared a naïve, almost childlike faith in their own infallibility, a belief that what they thought was right was right. In a sense, too, though they were often among the avant-garde in matters of taste or conscience, they were also old-fashioned women, or so they might seem to women of the 1980s. They all leaned on men for financial support and advice—with the possible exception of Miss Ima, though there was always the tall shadow of her father haunting the wings. They were none of them, in the current sense, feminists. But they were all, refreshingly, female. And, though being a grande dame was obviously nourishing to the ego—grandes dames were always very aware that they were grandes dames—it may have been nourishing to the physical self as well, as longevity is another common trait.
A dying breed. Throughout the 1970s we read, one by one, of the deaths of these members of America’s only aristocracy, and in each obituary we were reminded that “one of the last of America’s grandes dames” had departed. Marjorie Merriweather Post, nearly ninety, was “one of the last.” Alice Roosevelt Longworth, ninety-five when she died in 1980, was another—though Mrs. Longworth was more of a Washington party goer, wit, and mimic (her imitations of her relative Eleanor Roosevelt were famously side-splitting) than a social or cultural force. Her death was followed by that of Mrs. Robert Low Bacon, eighty-eight—hostess, stalwart of the Republican Party, trustee of Adelphi University and an Eisenhower appointee to the Advisory Committee on the Arts for the National Cultural Center.
All these ladies are gone, and they seem irreplaceable. With them, it sometimes seems, has died a certain exuberant spirit and élan that flashed across the American social scene for a couple of generations. And the dream of a Great American Renaissance—in art, architecture, music, design—which showed such promise when it first came into flower around 1875—seems to have died somewhere between two world wars.
To be sure, there are still younger women of consequence who grasp the social or cultural nettle—Brooke Astor, widow of Vincent, who recently donated the traditional Chinese garden known as the Astor Court to the Metropolitan Museum in New York; Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman of Chicago, who has promised her definitive Abstract Expressionist collection to the same museum; Mary Lasker, president of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation in New York, who supervises the expenditure of millions of Lasker dollars on medical research; and others. But would it be niggling or ungallant to suggest that none of them quite possesses the exuberance—the daring, the extravagance, the scale, the supremely self-confident high-handedness—that characterized some of their counterparts of an earlier era? Against that gaudy turn-of-the-century backdrop, some of today’s grandes dames appear a little wan, a little too eager to please. (The turn-of-the-century grande dame was too fiercely convinced of her own invincibility to care whether she pleased or not.)
Perhaps the feminist movement of the 1970s has somewhat daunted today’s rich women, and made them wonder whether they have merely become interesting anachronisms, whether the terms “philanthropist,” “patroness of the arts,” and “social leader” have become passé. Who today, for example, would have the temerity of Alida Chanler Emmet, who, when her friend Stanford White designed a house for her which she didn’t like, moved out of it and hired another architect, Charles Platt, to design and build a new one? “You can design my barns,” she told White. And he did. In any case, members of the Old Breed today are very few and, of course, getting on in years.
Nevertheless, there are still women who are trying to be grandes dames, and who seem to believe in the concept. Even more interesting is the fact that dedication to the special principles of American upper-class values—those values which must never be given voice, but must always be observed—has not died out. Not entirely. The American upper class still believes that a certain amount of time and money should be devoted to bettering the lot of the ill and needy; that an appreciation of painting and music and other beautiful things should be both shared with, and taught to, the general populace—that in art lies the power to uplift and purify the human tribe; that there is such a thing as noblesse oblige, and that the French usually had a better term for everything; that, when an occasion arises, one rises to it with the upper lip stiff; that gallantry and style will usually carry the day.
And so, as long as there are women around who subscribe to such notions, our very peculiar and particular brand of American aristocracy may survive, however long it may remain untitled. The nobility will oblige.