The Golden Dream (21 page)

This
nil admirari
attitude often means that the Main Liner discovers something that he is very much against long after it is too late to do anything about it. It is characteristic of the Main Line that the huge shopping center in Wynnewood which contained, among other things, a large new branch of Wanamaker's was completed and open for business before a local group was organzied to oppose its construction. One woman, who resents the prevailing apathy to the continuing spoliation of the local landscape, says: “I swear that these old Main Line people don't even
see
what's going on around them. They think it's beneath their dignity to even notice such matters. One morning they'll wake up and see that it's happened—
that there just isn't any Main Line anymore. They live in their gilded ghettos, and if something ugly is going on next door, they simply draw their curtains, like ostriches burying their heads in the sand.”

The late Mrs. Katherine MacMullan, a social secretary and party-planner who, for years, ruled the social seas of Philadelphia from a modest flat in the Rittenhouse Tower, once said: “The old money here just hasn't
stood up against
the new money the way it should have done.” This is an interesting principle. Old money, in other words, should resist the invasion of new money—the kind of money that builds, and lives in, high-rises—as a principle of aristocratic rule. It is the incursion of “new money” into the Main Line, and the Old Guard's failure to fight back, that has brought down many of the old barriers of class versus mass. There ought to have been a law.

Other unwritten Philadelphia laws have fallen by the wayside. It used to be a law that you should “Never speak to a new neighbor until you have seen her wash hung out on the line. That way you can decide whether she is someone you want to know.” Still another was: “Never speak to fellow passengers on shipboard until you are four days out.” And another was: “It takes at least three generations before a family can be accepted here.” Now people say: “Look at the Liddon Pennocks: they're new, but they're accepted everywhere. And what's more, he's a florist—he's in trade.” It used to be that no Jews or blacks were welcome on the Main Line. But today, the Walter Annenbergs, who generously support the arts and who give splendid entertainments, are pretty much accepted everywhere, even though Mr. Annenberg's father spent a certain amount of time in a federal penitentiary. As one woman puts it: “Anyone who is worth ten million dollars or more ceases to be Jewish.” The same rule may eventually apply to wealthy blacks, but meanwhile any number of well-to-do black families have moved to the Main Line without incident.

Society here, as elsewhere, has been for years involved in the business of creating enduring
families
—families bound by blood and common interest—and in building with these families an enduring community of wealth. But a camel has staggered into the tent: the newcomers. They cannot be overlooked. (“I'm really very anxious to meet some of these new people,” said—anxiously—a mother of a debutante daughter, “but of course I want to meet
attractive
new people.”) At the same time, the Main Line was several years ago
presented with a shocking statistic: roughly 30 percent of its young people, according to a study made at Villanova University, are moving out of the Main Line and to other parts of the United States. There are deserters in Main Line society's ranks. Actually, the percentage of deserters is not statistically larger here than in any other prosperous American suburb, but that does not console the Main Line, which always supposed that it deserved
special
statistics. It is a bitter pill to be told that what is happening everywhere is now happening here, on the Main Line: the young are flying from their golden nests.

But the inner, Old Guard Main Line is not all that alarmed by what the future holds. As Mrs. John Wintersteen—
very
Old Guard, whose collection of Picassos alone would make her a millionairess—put it not long ago: “In one form or another, there will
always
be a Main Line.” And there are young people from her circle of friends who would seem to back her up. Not quite ten years ago, a nineteen-year-old youth named Alan McIlvain, Jr., was asked to write an essay which outlined his life's goals. McIlvain is an heir to a fortune which the J. Gibson McIlvain Company, one of the largest wholesale lumber companies on the East Coast and one of the oldest family-owned businesses in America, has been building for him and other McIlvains for nearly one hundred eighty years.

Young McIlvain's essay demonstrated that the Old Main Line Values were still alive and springing in at least some breasts. “I plan to enter the business in the tradition of my forefathers,” he wrote. He went on to list his favorite pastimes, which included all the proper sports of a proper Main Line gentleman: hunting, fishing, skin diving, soccer, tennis, squash, and swimming, “in their designated seasons.” (No football or baseball, mind you.) He also allowed that he was properly interested in young ladies in
their
designated seasons. He displayed a correct aloofness toward politics and politicians: “Though I enjoy trying to analyze political strategy, I would never seriously consider entering politics.” Looking again, he said: “Besides just inheriting the business, I want to improve and utilize it to its benefit. I hope to exploit [
sic
] new fields, and exercise the knowledge I will have spent so many years receiving. I would also like to have a happy social life by marrying and settling down in the Main Line.”

That was in 1968. And that is precisely how, and where, he has settled today.

*
In Westchester County, one can keep track of the station stops by memorizing: “When the pie was opened, the birds began to cry, ‘Larchmont, Mamaroneck, Harrison, and Rye.'”

16

Summer Camps

A suburbanite is probably lucky if he has a second home to go to in the summer, a “summer camp.” A certain distaste for one's regular surroundings is maybe a healthy thing. A second home is a handy vent for anger and impatience: It's good to get away, good to get back, as the cliché goes. Only a few Cincinnatians go away for the summer; they're too content where they are. No one to speak of in Hudson goes away in summer. New Yorkers, on the other hand, who distrust their city as much as they adore it, could not tolerate the summer without the Hamptons, Connecticut, or the Jersey shore. Boston suburbanites troop off to the Cape, or to Edgartown, Chilmark, and West Chop on Martha's Vineyard. Main Line families gather at Northeast Harbor, Maine. Certain resorts, in other words, become suburbs of the suburbs.

Watch Hill, Rhode Island, is one of these suburban suburbs, and it is also, by conicidence, a suburb of the neighboring town of Westerly. Mr. and Mrs. Paul Myers, furthermore, are an exception to the rule—a Cincinnati couple who own a large house in suburban Hyde Park, with a swimming pool and extensive gardens, and yet summer regularly at this pocket-size resort. The Myerses' two teenage children, in fact, represent the fifth generation of Mrs. Myers's family who have summered at Watch Hill.

When Suzie Myers, an attractive woman in her forties who keeps a year-round tan, was a girl, only one event, as far as she remembers, disrupted the tranquillity of the otherwise long, sunny,
and breeze-swept summer days. It occurred at the height of the Great Hurricane of 1938, when Mrs. Myers's Grandmother Anderson was visiting her friend Mrs. Shinkle and the ladies were having their customary afternoon of bridge. Presently Grandmother Anderson, consulting her watch, remarked that it was several minutes past the time she had instructed her chauffeur, Walter, to pick her up and take her home. While the storm raged on, and Walter still failed to appear, Mrs. Anderson became increasingly annoyed. There was a dinner party to dress for, and so forth. When Walter finally appeared, drenching wet and close to hysteria, he explained that not only the car but the entire garage containing it had been swept into the sea. “Nevertheless, Walter,” Mrs. Anderson said crisply, “you must learn to be more punctual.”

Watch Hill is that sort of place. Nothing much has disturbed its peace or ruffled its composure since the 1880s, when wealthy businessmen from Hartford, New York, and the Middle West began coming to Watch Hill for duck-shooting, and presently began building large, shingled summer homes for their families on this tiny promontory of land overlooking the ocean. (Watch Hill is the highest point of Atlantic coastline, they say, between North Carolina and Maine, and from it on a clear day there is a view of three states: Connecticut to the west, Fishers Island, New York, to the south, and of course Rhode Island.) Since then, little has changed.

The old-line Yankee names of the town fathers—names like Nash, Crandall, Vose, and Brewer—are still there, leading the year-round business community. So are the old-line moneyed-society names of the summer colony: the John S. Burkes (ex-B. Altman and Company), the Hunter S. Marstons (American Home Products), the Whitney Addingtons (Sears, Roebuck), the Hugh Chisolms, the Jack Heminways, the George Y. Wheelers, the Britton Browns, the Reginald Fullertons, the George Lauders, and Mrs. George M. Laughlin (Jones & Laughlin Steel). These are, as the Yankees say, “the swells,” who still live in the big, drafty, unheated houses their grandfathers or great-grandfathers built, houses with cavernous basement kitchens and dining rooms served by dumbwaiters. Not long ago, “some real estate people named Murphy” built a modern house, but as Watch Hill says, “We don't know them.” Other than that, Watch Hill, as a summer colony, has remained a pocket of Victoriana on the New England shore.

There are, all told, only 213 summer families in Watch Hill,
and they are carefully divided into three categories. Not long ago, at one of the long procession of parties that dot the Watch Hill season, identification badges were passed out, designating which of the three sorts each person was. The most prestigious declared: “I Am Watch Hill,” indicating that the wearer was
at least
a second-generation Watch Hill-ite. A second badge read: “I Married Watch Hill,” for people who had made their way into the tight little enclave by the marriage route—as Paul Myers did when he married Suzie. A third badge read: “I Found Watch Hill”—for the newcomers. Though the badges were distributed as a party joke, they were intended to be taken with a certain amount of seriousness.

When one marries Watch Hill, and passes through its rigidly required initiation rites (joining the Misquamicut Club, giving and attending the usual number of parties and little dinners), one enters a rather special world. Sylvia Drulie discovered this when she married a prominent New York lawyer named John W. Mazzola. Before her marriage, Miss Drulie had an exciting career in Broadway theater and television, helping to mount shows with the likes of Robert Whitehead and Stephen Sondheim. When she married Mr. Mazzola, and Watch Hill, she settled happily into a summer life as comfortable and casual as a freshly washed Lacoste dress. But she brought along a few mementos from her glamorous theater days. Among her close professional friends in New York, for example, is choreographer Alvin Ailey, leading spirit of the American Dance Theater. Mrs. Mazzola had a number of photographs of herself, of which she was rather proud, dancing at parties in the arms of Mr. Ailey—who, of course, is black. And when Mrs. Mazzola started to hang some of her framed photographs on the walls of her Watch Hill house, her husband studied them for a while and then said, “Honey, I understand how you feel. But I'm afraid I really think—well, not
here
.” The photographs were taken down.

Watch Hill's Victorian air is such that, at the Misquamicut Beach Club, one is not surprised to notice, as a silver-haired dowager rises from her luncheon table and disentangles herself from her chair, that under her dress she is wearing knee-length cotton bloomers. For this and other reasons, “Not here” was also the answer to the agelessly beautiful Rebekah Harkness, née Betty West, who for a number of years housed her Harkness Ballet troupe each summer in her huge Watch Hill mansion. Mrs. Harkness, the widow of millionaire William Hale Harkness, says: “Ballet started in palaces. Dancers deserve something equally good now. People in
the arts function better if their surroundings are inspiring.” But having what amounted to a hotel for dancers in the heart of their little principality was decidedly irksome for the rest of Watch Hill. Dancers, after all, are presumed to have unorthodox sexual tendencies, and there was much whispered talk of “orgies”
chez
Harkness. Besides, Rebekah Harkness once commented: “I don't really like rich people. They're bored—and boring.” This did not sit well with the rest of Watch Hill, who, for the most part, are rather rich, and for years, Mrs. Harkness was Watch Hill's most celebrated social pariah. Finally, as a result of much social pressure from the neighbors, she put her Watch Hill house up for sale—first offering it, according to a wholly groundless rumor, to Rhode Island's Mafia, in an attempt at revenge. Perhaps to avoid any such outcome, the house was purchased by a syndicate of perennial and proper Watch Hill summer residents, and now—after a fire that did considerable damage—it is in the process of being extensively renovated and restored to its original elegance.

Watch Hill does have one real hotel—of sorts—in the handsome old Ocean House, dating back to 1906. But the top-floor rooms cannot be rented because the big frame building with its wide, rocker-filled verandas is considered too much of a firetrap. Fire has always been a threat to the community, and the tiny settlement was very nearly destroyed entirely in 1916, when a fire broke out in the old Watch Hill House hotel and started to spread to nearby houses. The flames were fortunately put out by a sudden downpour of rain, leaving residents with the firm belief that God somehow takes a special interest in Watch Hill—although the local water pressure remains today, as it has always been, too low. To this day, Watch Hill has no fire department. It has no school district. It has no sewers, hardly any sidewalks, only a handful of street lights. And it has no political voice in nearby Westerly, upon which Watch Hill must rely for all its services.