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Overview
It’s no secret that the rich are different from the rest of us. But the rich, as author Stephen Birmingham so insightfully points out, are also different from the very rich. There’s Society, and then there’s Real Society, and it takes multiple generations for families of the former to become entrenched in the latter. Real Society is not about the money—or rather, it’s not only about the money—it is about history, breeding, tradition, and most of all, the name.
The Right People is an engrossing and illuminating journey through the customs and habits of the phenomenally wealthy, from the San Francisco elite to the upper crust of New York’s Westchester County. It is a marvelously anecdotal, intimately detailed overview of the lives of the American aristocracy: where they gather and dine; their games and sports, clubs and parties, friendships and feuds; their mating, marriage, and divorce rituals—a potpourri of priceless true stories featuring the Astors, Goulds, Vanderbilts, Vanderlips, Dukes, Biddles, and other lofty names from the pages of the Social Register.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504026277 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| Sales rank: | 253,119 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Right People
The Social Establishment in America
By Stephen Birmingham
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1968 Stephen BirminghamAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2627-7
CHAPTER 1
Who Are Who?
In America, there is Society. Then there is Real Society. Real Society is a part of Society — the upper part. Everybody who is in Society knows who the people in Real Society are. But the people in Real Society do not necessarily know who the other Society people are. The two groups seldom mix. Real Society is composed of older people. It is composed of older families. Older families are better people. Better people are nicer people. Newer people may be richer people than older people. That doesn't matter. Ordinary Society people may get to be Real Society people one day only if they work at it. It sounds confusing, but it is really very simple. Cream rises to the top.
Once, in my extreme youth, I had the difference between Society and Real Society demonstrated to me rather vividly. I was perhaps fifteen, and I was at a dinner party in New York in a very grand — or so it seemed to me — town house in the East Sixties. (The house seemed grand because it had one room, called "the music room," which contained no furniture whatever except a huge golden cello in a glass case.) The party was a children's party before one of the "junior dances," I forget which, and we were offered our choice (it seemed a grand choice, too) of sauterne or tomato juice. It was the first party to which I had worn a black tie. My clothes were new, my shave was new and I, too, was very new. I was so new that I made the mistake of offering to carry the plate of the young lady I was escorting, along with my own plate, back to the buffet table for seconds of creamed chicken in timbales and petits pois. And, in the process of carrying the two laden plates back to our seats, my cummerbund, newly acquired and only dimly understood, became undone. I was in the center of the room when I felt it begin to slip, and I clapped my elbows tight against my sides to stop it. But it continued to slide down about my hips. Lowering myself to a half-crouch, and jabbing my right elbow into my upper thigh, I became aware that the plate I held in my left hand had emptied itself of peas and chicken, and I felt this warm, moist mass flowing along my arm, inside the sleeve of my dinner jacket.
This was not a Real Society dinner party. I know because, a few days later, when I told this story in all its detail to a lady who was a member of Real Society, she said, "Do you mean they served Sauterne and not Dubonnet? How dreadful!" She might have added, too, that no young gentleman of Real Society would have found himself in such a predicament. He would not have carried a young lady's plate to the serving table. He would have let her take care of herself.
Real Society people, I once thought, do not listen to what other people are saying. But I was wrong. They listen, but their ears are attuned to different sounds; they respond to different cues. It is not that they miss ordinary conversations, but they pick up different drifts. It is as though most people were on AM and they were on FM. Once, at a Saltonstall wedding in the 1940's, one guest was overheard whispering to another, "Did you know that she was for Wallace?" There was a pause, and then the other guest said thoughtfully, "Really? Wallace Who?"
In Philadelphia recently, a matron was exclaiming to a visitor over the great supply of books and plays that have been written about the Philadelphia social scene — Kitty Foyle, The Philadelphia Story, and more recently, Richard Powell's The Philadelphian. The visitor commented that he, personally — as an outsider — had found parts of Mr. Powell's novel hard to credit. "Oh, really?" said the lady eagerly. "So did I. Tell me what it was that bothered you." The visitor cited the opening section of the book, which centers about a Philadelphia Society wedding. As readers of the novel will remember, when the fictional bride and groom have settled in their wedding-night rooms at the Bellevue-Stratford, the bride makes the belated discovery that her husband is impotent. In her distress, she runs out of the hotel into Broad Street where, walking in the opposite direction, she encounters a burly construction worker whom she has eyed admiringly in the past. He is drunk, and walking arm in arm with a prostitute. In the convenient darkness, the young bride pays off the prostitute and takes the arm of the construction worker, who does not notice the artful substitution. The bride and her new beau now proceed to a handy shed where their union is consummated. (And, in the best tradition of modern fiction, where one encounter guarantees a pregnancy, the young woman nine months later gives birth to the child who becomes the novel's hero.) Meanwhile, back at the Bellevue-Stratford, the young bridegroom is so distraught at his wife's discovery that he, too, races off into the night in a fast sports car and is killed in a hideous accident, thereby easing things considerably for his wife's future. All this, said the visitor, "I simply found impossible to believe." "I completely agree," said the Philadelphia lady quickly. "It's absurd. Nobody would ever spend their wedding night at the Bellevue-Stratford."
An Englishman, who has made a hobby of studying American Society, feels that Real Society people are indeed different from you and me. "You can spot them immediately," he says. "They have a special way of talking, a special way of thinking, and a special look. They even smell a special way. I love the way they smell."
Though I am still unable to identify Real Society people by their odor, his other points of difference seem perfectly valid. And these differences provide the most formidable obstacles to the social climber. Such is the nature of Society that a person can live his whole life, quite happily and quite successfully, without being aware of Society, or feeling its effect in any way. Only when he attempts to move into it does he discover that it was there all along, like a wall, stern and unscalable, a wall with a small grilled door in it — locked.
Perhaps a better image than a wall with a door in it would be a series of walls, arranged in a crazy-quilt pattern like a bit of New Hampshire farm country seen from the air. Social climbing is like a game. You play it by climbing the walls and crossing the little squares between, one after another. Progress is slow and arduous, and often you must rely on guesswork. Through it all, your goal is Real Society, and as you approach its fringes, the going becomes harder. You must learn to recognize, even though you may have not yet seen one, a Real Society person. Andone way to do this is to remember a few things a Real Society person is not.
People who go regularly to charity balls, who have been photographed dancing with the Duke of Windsor, who have played poker on the yacht of a Greek shipping magnate, are not necessarily all members of Real Society. Some may be, but most are the other kind. There are Real Society people who have never set foot on a yacht of any sort and who, if the Duke of Windsor walked into the room, would fail to identify him. Sheer splash has nothing to do with Real Society. There were few Real Society people in attendance, for instance, at the wedding of Luci Johnson. ("An August wedding in Washington?" people murmured.) Nor were there Real Society people at the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco. ("I hear that they met," said a Philadelphia Society woman at the time, "at the home of a mutual friend in Ocean City, New Jersey. But how can that be? No one has gone to Ocean City for years.") To this day, the best Philadelphia people make a point of explaining that they did not attend these nuptials; there are a number of princesses in Real Society, but Grace is not one of them. When a splash does occur at a Real Society function, it occurs by coincidence or by accident more often than by design. The wedding of Janet Jennings Auchincloss, a Real Society occasion, generated a good deal of inadvertent splash — and upset the bride so much that she burst into tears.
The Social Register is no longer — if it ever was — a reliable guide to who is Real Society and who is not. The little black and red "stud book" has always been published for profit, and has depended on its listees' willingness to be listed, as well as on their subscriptions. The Social Register grows thicker in times of economic boom, and shrinks when the economic pendulum falls the other way. The number of Social Register families may wax and wane, but the size of Real Society remains constant. Many Real Society families ridicule the Register now, and make the familiar comment, "It's just a telephone book." In New York, for instance, it is still smaller and more wieldy than the Manhattan directory. As often as not, however, when an entrant is "dropped" from the Register, he has simply neglected to — or chosen not to — fill out the necessary annual forms. Still, many Society people feel as the writer Louis Auchincloss does. "The Social Register has gotten so enormous," he says, "that it looks rather peculiar if you're not in it."
One can frequently recognize a woman of Real Society by the way she dresses. Real Society women's clothes have a way of staying in style longer than other people's because Real Society fashions do not change markedly from year to year. Neither the junior-cut mink coat nor the beaver jacket has gone through many transitions since the introduction of the designs, nor has the cut of the classic camel's hair topper. The short-sleeved, round-collared McMullen blouse is ageless, and the hemline of the Bermuda short has hardly been known to fluctuate. What is more classic than a double strand of good pearls? The poplin raincoat is as suited to suburban shopping today as it was to the Smith campus in 1953. It has been said that were it not for the tastes of the young Society woman, the great firm of Peck & Peck would soon go out of business, and all the knitwear on the second floor of Abercrombie & Fitch would quickly fall prey to the moth.
The look is easy, tweedy. Hair is a blond mixture, streaked from the sun, of middle length, and is often caught at the back of the neck in a little net bag. This style is as much at home on the back of a horse as it is with a full-length dinner dress; it has also been with us since the 1920's. Real Society women are often tanned the year round — from riding and playing golf and tennis wherever the sun shines — and perpetual tan may lead to a leathery look, with crinkled squint lines about the eyes. It is a look exemplified in both the Mrs. Nelson Rockefellers, who had identically impeccable Real Society origins. It is a look that is instantly recognizable but, because of its particular composition, quite difficult for the outsider to simulate.
Then there is the Society voice. Trying to duplicate the American Society accent has provided the greatest stumbling block for the parvenu. Some say you must be born with it to speak it properly and convincingly, but it is safe to say that graduates of such private schools as St. Paul's, Foxcroft, and Madeira, who may not have had the accent to begin with, can emerge with a reasonably close facsimile of it. It is a social accent that is virtually the same in all American cities, and it is actually a blend of several accents. There is much more to it than the well-known broad A. Its components are a certain New England flatness, a trace of a Southern drawl, and a surprising touch of the New York City accent that many people consider Brooklynese. Therefore, in the social voice, the word "shirt" comes out halfway between "shirt" and "shoit." Another key word is "pretty," which, in the social voice, emerges sounding something like "prutty." There is also the word "circle," the first syllable of which is almost whistled through pursed lips, whereas the greeting, "Hi," is nearly always heavily diphthonged as "Haoy." This speech has been nicknamed "the Massachusetts malocclusion," since much of it is accomplished with the lower jaw thrust forward and rigid, and in a number of upper-class private schools, children are taught to speak correctly by practicing with pencils clenched between their teeth.
Accent and appearance help Real Society people to recognize one another quickly, but other factors also weld them into a recognizable unit. The school, college, and clubs are just as important considerations as how much money one has to spend, or where one lives. Addresses have become of minor importance to members of Real Society. They may own estates on Long Island which they call places, palaces in Newport which they call cottages, duplexes on Fifth Avenue which they call houses. A number simply own houses which they call houses. Though, for the most part, Real Society lives on the better streets of America's larger cities, and in the more affluent of these cities' suburbs, Real Society can still be encountered on beachheads along the Carolina coast, in tiny hamlets in Vermont, or in the Mojave Desert.
Society has always had a matriarchal cast — particularly in the United States. But in Real Society the male reigns over his own preserve. Real Society wives have no need to be pushy. The male has his club, even though a number of the most exclusive clubs have been forced to admit ladies at the dinner hour. And, if the men's club has become less important than it used to be, this is not blamed upon women but on urban economics and, of course, newcomers. New money has been inexorably pushing the old money out of the leather club chair, and the result is that men of Real Society have retreated to their homes again. Here, their position is secure. Their wives would never think of accepting an invitation or planning a party without consulting them. And the man may even, provided he is able to afford it, be permitted to keep a mistress.
In Real Society it is less a matter of which club, which school, which street, and what clothes, than it is a matter of who. Who will always count more than how, or how much. One does not ask, "Where are you from?" or "Where did you go to school?" or "What do you do?" Such questions are considered as tactless as "How much did it cost?" If you have to ask such questions, you have no right to the answers. On the other hand, you may ask without fear of rebuke, "Who ...?" "Who is she?" as a question may mean, "What was her maiden name?" It may also mean what was her mother's maiden name, and what was her grandmother's maiden name, and so on. The members of the family are the family's most precious family jewels. Grandfather may have been Ambassador to The Hague or an alcoholic suicide; it doesn't matter, if he belongs. Family talk is a favorite cocktail-hour diversion wherever Real Society gathers. Each genealogical fact is brought out lovingly and tenderly, examined meticulously, then carefully put away. To talk family properly, you never need a reference book or printed family tree, or any other aid; the facts are at your fingertips with dates, with snippets of incidental history, with little anecdotes. Done well, family talk is a beautiful and bewildering thing to listen to — a concerto of whos. Done poorly — by the poseur or dissembler — it can be disastrous. A social climber can sometimes fake an ancestor, but he had better examine his company carefully before he tries it. "All we Van Rensselaers," says a Van Rensselaer significantly, "know our Van Rensselaers." And the parvenu had better be prepared to let family values dominate all other values. Not long ago in Philadelphia the talk turned to art and, parochially enough, to Philadelphia's two most prominent woman painters, Mary Cassatt, and Cecilia Beaux — both of whom were members of distinguished families. In the middle of a debate on their relative artistic merits, with Miss Cassatt seemingly favored, someone commented sharply, "But the Cassatts weren't anybody!"
People named Vanderbilt are not necessarily in Real Society, but people named Vanderlip are. In Real Society, the name Morris means somewhat more than Belmont. Rockefellers now are safely in Real Society, though they didn't use to be, and Astors, who used to be, are pretty much out. Roosevelts always were and always will be of Real Society, despite the political affiliations of one of the family's branches. Other impeccable Society names are, in New York: Aldrich, Auchincloss, Blagden, Burden, French, Stillman, Wickes, and Woodward; in Boston you are safe with Sedgwicks and Gardners and Fiskes, as well as with Adamses, Cabots, Lowells, and Saltonstalls. In Philadelphia, there are Drinkers and Ingersolls and Chews and Robertses. There are Biddies, but there are also other Biddies. There are Cadwaladers. It is said that a true Philadelphian can distinguish between single-l Cadwaladers, who are Real Society, and double-l Cadwalladers, who are not, simply by the way the name is pronounced.
There are, furthermore, in every American city, families who might be calledlocal Real Society. Thus the Fords, who are Real Society in Detroit, lose a bit of their Reality in Philadelphia or Boston. The Uihlein family and their beer may have made Milwaukee famous, but their name does not carry imposing social weight in New York. The phenomenon also works in reverse. The Kennedys, who are fromBoston, are closer to Real Society elsewhere than they were — or ever will be — on their native soil.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Right People by Stephen Birmingham. Copyright © 1968 Stephen Birmingham. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- Contents
- Part One: The Social Establishment: Growing Up “Upper”
- 1. Who Are Who?
- 2. Was It Ever What It Used to Be?
- 3. “How Shall We Tell the Children?”
- 4. The New “St. Grottlesex Set”
- 5. “We’re Coming Out Tonight”
- 6. Playing the Game
- 7. The Dirty Part
- 8. Lovely, Lovely Ladies
- 9. The Club Convention
- Part Two: How Money Lives: A Nosegay of the Best Addresses
- 10. The Riches of Westchester
- 11. By the Shores of Lake St. Clair
- 12. The Main Line Eternal
- 13. The Company Town: West Hartford, Conn. 06107
- 14. The Power Elite: Society in the Capital
- Part Three: How Money Plays: A Selection of Pleasures and Playgrounds
- 15. “Society’s Most Enduring Invention”
- 16. “July Was Always for the Shore”
- 17. “August Was Always for the Mountains”
- 18. The Palmy Beaches (And the “Other” Miami)
- 19. The Palmy Springs (All That Money Can Buy)
- Part Four: But Is It Really Dead?
- 20. “Obedience to the Unenforceable”
- Index
- About the Author
