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CHAPTER 1
THE MAN
On a Saturday morning in early June 1922, a trim, eighty-four-year-old man stepped out onto the white-columned porch of Beaumaris, his sprawling waterfront cottage in the borough of Fenwick. Beaumaris, a mammoth structure of weathered timbers and shingles, sat forty yards west of Fenwick Avenue. On a clear day, its owners espied an unobstructed southern view across Long Island Sound to Orient Point. Beaumaris was more than just the largest cottage at Fenwick, and more than just the finest work of Hartford architect Willis E. Becker. Beaumaris was the home of the benevolent ruler of this wealthy summer barony by the sea — Senator Morgan Gardner Bulkeley.
Though it didn't appear so from the outside, Beaumaris buzzed with activity. The Bulkeleys employed a large staff of servants. When Bulkeley built Beaumaris in 1900, he installed indoor plumbing, eliminating the need for pots de chambre, but the place wasn't electrified until 1915, and the list of new-age labor-saving devices was a short one.
Their longtime cook, Julie Morhan, required her own staff to cut, peel, dice, filet, and churn. (In 1917, Bulkeley also purchased Arrowhead Farm — about three miles away — so that his family would have plenty of fresh fruits, vegetables, and dairy products.)
Two helpers waited tables, while two maids cleaned the house. At one time, a separate nursemaid doted on each of the Bulkeleys' three children — Morgan Jr., Elinor, and Houghton. However, by 1922, the young people were just visitors and had long since outgrown nannies.
A houseman-gardener and a chauffeur completed this cast of servants. The first maintained Beaumaris's lush lawns and colorful flowerbeds, and the latter, longtime employee Arthur Stone, drove and maintained the Bulkeleys' Pierce-Arrow limousine. Together, this swarm of servants kept the massive cottage running smoothly.
Beaumaris was the perfect retreat for a rare man. Beyond the dreams of most men — and for the greater part of his long life — he completely controlled his world. With courage and political savvy, Morgan Bulkeley hopscotched from great success in business and laudable accomplishments in community affairs to the realization of some rather robust political dreams. He rubbed shoulders with people of every station — from destitute immigrants in the Charter Oak City's river wards to presidents of the United States.
Morgan Bulkeley waged some legendary battles in his life as he gracefully negotiated the corridors of power — from councilman to alderman, Hartford mayor to Connecticut governor, and finally United States senator. All the while, as president of the Aetna Life Insurance Company, he increased the size of the firm's total assets eightfold.
Even at eighty-four, Bulkeley projected great physical grace. Standing at about five foot nine and weighing nearly 160 pounds, Bulkeley's erect bearing and aristocratic features made him seem much larger. Bulkeley dressed nattily even while spending time at Fenwick. He preferred a white shirt and bow tie to the increasingly more casual dress sweeping the land after the Great War.
Slow to anger and quick to warm to strangers, Bulkeley had the even temperament of a natural politician, instilling confidence in voters and fellow businessmen alike. His classic bearing was perfectly fitting for a patrician's son, striving as he always did for the grand gesture. When Bulkeley was on top of his game, few men had his élan.
Now, in 1922, Bulkeley hid a full head of white hair beneath the Boston-style baseball cap he preferred to wear around Fenwick. As he puffed on his trademark, big black cigar, his fingers brushed casually against his permanently nicotine-stained white mustache, a little wilder now than when he was in his political prime. He drank sparingly all his life, so cigars were more or less his only vice.
Standing there soaking up the warm sunlight, Bulkeley nonchalantly surveyed the cottages around him for signs of activity. His younger sister, Mary Brainard, who passed away the summer before, had lived right next door to him. Her husband, Leverett — arguably the most ambitious man ever to leave a rural Connecticut farm for a business career in Hartford — was sixteen years older than Mary and died right after the turn of the century. Mary and Leverett birthed ten children, but only five made it to adulthood. So said, Mary always wore black, claiming that the deaths in her family kept her in perpetual mourning. Now their bachelor son, Newton, owned the Brainard cottage, and later shared it with his widowed sister, Lucy. Their three siblings — Morgan B. Brainard, Edith Davis, and Ruth Cutler — maintained Fenwick cottages of their own.
Bulkeley owned more undeveloped building lots than anyone else at Fenwick, and he liked to think he could choose his neighbors. His brother, Billy, who passed away in 1902, had lived in a waterfront cottage just to the west of Beaumaris. As families go, the Bulkeleys were extremely close. In Hartford, they lived side by side at the northern end of Washington Street, near the state capitol, in what could almost be described as a family compound. Morgan's and Billy's homes were cheek by jowl on the east side of the street, while their sister Mary and her brood were just across the way. In the summertime, everyone migrated to Fenwick, where they spent the warm months packed together neatly at the water's edge.
Looking west, Bulkeley could see some of the Goodwins cleaning up the windblown branches left by the winter winds as they prepared their cottage for the season. Bulkeley had known Frankie Goodwin since they were children. Goodwin was two years younger than Bulkeley, but they had both attended the small Centre School on Market Street in Hartford, the finest of the Charter Oak City's eleven common schools. The feelings between the two men were, to be sure, mixed. They could get along when they needed to, but generally their sensibilities swung between cautious tolerance and unbridled contempt. They were both conservative Republicans, but any similarities between them ended there. As far as Bulkeley was concerned, if Frankie Goodwin's first cousin, J. P. Morgan, would chase a dollar to hell, the former wouldn't be far behind. The Morgans, but more particularly the Goodwins, were just too avaricious for Bulkeley's tastes. He wasn't against making money, but neither did he see it as an end in itself — an important distinction in his mind.
To the east, Bulkeley enjoyed an unobstructed view all the way to the inner lighthouse at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Barge and boat traffic constantly plied the waters around the silted bar at the river's delta, where the shifting sands made navigation difficult. In 1874, two parallel stone jetties were constructed at the mouth of the river, which encouraged a deep channel and eliminated the need for an annual dredge. A lighthouse sat on shore and another was erected at the end of the westernmost jetty.
About a quarter mile down the beach, Bulkeley spotted Dr. Tom Hepburn out in the yard with some of his children. He needed to present the forty-two-year-old surgeon with an unpleasant bill and planned to use the opportunity to get to know his new neighbor.
The bill in question represented carpentry repairs done on the three-foot-high wooden breakwaters protecting the waterfront cottages from the ravages of winter storms. Periodically, bad weather destroyed sections of these barriers, and with most of the cottages sitting only a few feet above sea level, the bulkheads had to be rebuilt regularly — and quickly. Typically, Morgan Bulkeley ordered the repairs as needed and settled finances later. Experience taught him that few people balked when presented with his bill. Bulkeley was one of the most powerful politicians Connecticut ever produced, and a refusal to accept his bill was to court trouble. In addition, Bulkeley, a likeable man, rarely encountered a person who did not want him for a friend.
Since now was as good a time as any, Bulkeley eased down the wooden stairs in front of Beaumaris, walked across the luxurious lawn and then down another small set of steps to Beach Road. As he walked along, he waved to friends and neighbors. Everyone knew Senator Bulkeley. For his part, he loved people. His whole life was people. In a life spanning eight and a half decades, it would be difficult to find Bulkeley alone, even for a few hours.
As he walked on the now-abandoned gravel road, Bulkeley no doubt chuckled to himself, for he was the one who had closed it down. This rutted lane, along with the 2,800-foot rickety, wooden bridge across South Cove served, until recently, as the main artery for all of the Old Saybrook traffic, skirting Fenwick on the south and traversing South Cove to Saybrook Point. When Beaumaris was first built, the occasional horse and wagon were welcome reminders of the rural nature of the beach community, and Bulkeley enjoyed the sight of the farmers hauling hay and produce along the shore road. When the automobile exploded onto the scene, the pleasant novelty of Beach Road ended abruptly. Oddly enough, it was one of Bulkeley's neighbors at Fenwick who had ruined the pleasant reverie.
A decade earlier, while Morgan Bulkeley sat quietly on the front porch of Beaumaris enjoying the scenery and a cigar, his neighbor, George Day — who manufactured the new gas-powered automobiles for Col. Albert Pope — blithely motored along Beach Road in the latest Pope-Hartford automobile. Unlike the previous electric models produced by Pope, this contraption made an ungodly racket and stunk up the whole neighborhood. Even as Bulkeley waved politely to George Day, he decided the time had arrived for traffic to find a new route to Saybrook Point. Soon thereafter, he hatched a plan to close down Beach Road.
In hindsight, his solution was simplicity itself, but only for someone with a wide circle of business and political allies. Bulkeley knew the principals of the Shore Line Railroad — J. P. Morgan & Co., as it turned out. He also knew they were unhappy with the spur across the causeway from Saybrook Point to Fenwick. It made sense back in the 1870s when it was first built, but as the wealthy families of Fenwick bought automobiles and stopped using the train, the spur — with its expensive causeway — became an irksome money loser.
He also knew that the shaky wooden bridge across the cove — a little farther east — was a source of endless friction between the people of Fenwick and the Town of Old Saybrook. Its maintenance costs were astronomical and out of all proportion to its worth.
With these two facts in mind, Bulkeley saw an opportunity. By getting the railroad to cede its spur across South Cove, the causeway could accommodate automobiles. In this way, traffic would be routed from the southern side of Fenwick to a northern route, leaving the small beach community pleasantly isolated from Old Saybrook. By 1918, all traffic abandoned Beach Road and Beaumaris once again bathed in blessed tranquility and salty breezes. Bulkeley loved these little puzzles and reveled in his ability to solve them with alacrity.
Bulkeley looked forward to meeting Dr. Hepburn. Much like his own father, Judge Eliphalet Bulkeley, Morgan possessed an uncanny ability to remember the family trees of an unlimited number of people as well as important events in each of their lives. Though Morgan Bulkeley was a rather mediocre student, and never much of a reader, he had an astounding ability to remember names and faces and was a veritable treasure trove of information.
Making his way eastward on Beach Road, Fenwick's little hummocks of progress registered in his mind like the hachures on a cartographer's map. Golfers dotted the little nine-hole golf course that snaked its way between the cottages, and tennis players rallied on the well-used courts.
Less than ten minutes later, Bulkeley was shaking hands with Tom Hepburn at the surgeon's cottage — the fourth from Fenwick Avenue. Bulkeley and the doctor exchanged the usual pleasantries, and rather than tendering the bill for rebuilding the wooden bulkheads right off, Bulkeley first took the opportunity to explain his plans for the small beach community.
Though he did not have a particularly mellifluous speaking voice or the fast-and-easy banter of an old-time ward politician, Bulkeley was a good conversationalist. His voluminous record of achievement coupled with his boyish charm made others pay heed to him, and with what might be considered the genetically inherited logic of his father, he could assemble the most compelling arguments to buttress his causes.
From his earliest days in politics, Morgan Bulkeley had learned the value of action. Typically when there was a job to do, he whistled up the men and materials needed to get it done with no mention of finances. The money could always be sorted out later. This one small preference won him plenty of hearts and minds over the years, and not without good reason. When people were in trouble, the last thing they needed was a committee to study the problem. In truth, Bulkeley could feather his own nest better than most men, but he was smart enough to keep his machinations out of the public eye.
Bulkeley liked Dr. Hepburn. The two men had much in common; moreover, they were both products of small-town America. Tom Hepburn was from Beaver Dam, Virginia, a dusty Scottish-American farming crossroads twenty miles north of Richmond. Bulkeley, with his deep Anglo-American roots, was originally from East Haddam — fifteen miles upriver.
Bulkeley and Hepburn were both ambitious, competitive men, who rose to positions of prominence in their chosen fields. The younger man fulfilled his residency requirements at Hartford Hospital and began his career as a general practitioner. He quickly advanced to surgeon, specializing in urology.
Beyond their professional achievements, both men were married to Houghton women. This last point could just as easily be described as a place where similarities ceased, for their wives were as different as buttons and bows. Bulkeley's wife, Fannie Briggs Houghton Bulkeley, distantly related to Hepburn's wife, was the doyenne of Fenwick — bright, charming and steadfastly loyal to her husband. She was born to one of the most prominent families in San Francisco, went to the finest finishing schools in the Bay Area, and was goddaughter to Governor Leland Stanford and Jane Lathrop Stanford, founders of Stanford University.
Conversely, Dr. Hepburn's wife, Katharine Houghton (Kit) — and her two sisters, Edith and Marion — had all the manners and breeding of Fannie Bulkeley but displayed willful, independent spirits that could really get under the skin of a dyed-in-the-wool conservative like Morgan Bulkeley. Kit Hepburn championed the entire spectrum of the cutting-edge feminist issues of her time, from family planning to women's suffrage.
Nevertheless, Bulkeley went out of his way to get along with her. Kit and her two sisters were born in the Buffalo area, where their engineer father, Alfred Houghton, worked in the family business — Corning Glass Works. When the girls were sixteen, fourteen, and twelve, respectively, Alfred committed suicide. Caroline, their mother, died two years later. Their rich and socially prominent uncle, Amory Bigelow Houghton, came to the rescue. With the help of Uncle Amery, Kit Houghton was able to attend Bryn Mawr and then earn an MA in art history from Radcliffe College. It was through her sister Edith that Kit met a likable — albeit cash-strapped — Johns Hopkins medical student, Tom Hepburn. They were married in 1904 — just after Dr. Hepburn started his internship at Hartford Hospital. In November 1906, their first child arrived, followed by five more, each given the middle name Houghton.
The cottage that the Hepburns bought in 1921 was not the property out by the lighthouse where a decade and a half later, Tom and Kit's daughter Katharine, the actress, sought privacy. The Hepburns had been renting cottages at Fenwick since 1912, but the first cottage they owned was a small affair sold to them by Donald and Edith Hooker (Kit's sister), who purchased the cottage in 1918 from Morgan Bulkeley's nephew, Morgan Brainard.
Tom and Kit had recently endured one of the worst years of their lives. The previous spring, their daughter Katharine discovered her older brother's body hanging behind a bedroom door.
Dr. Hepburn first told reporters that his son Tom's death may have been the result of a moment of "morbid depression," but later allowed that it could have been a stunt gone wrong. The boy had suffered earlier from Saint Vitus' dance (Sydenham's chorea), a streptococcal infection associated with rheumatic fever and causing unpredictable movements. While the details of the incident will never be completely known, the fact remained that Tom and Kit Hepburn's oldest child was gone. Just two days later, Dr. Hepburn's older brother, Sewell Hepburn, a forty-seven-year-old physician, died of a massive coronary.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Crowbar Governor"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Kevin Murphy.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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