America's Secret Aristocracy (23 page)

Hall was dapper and attractive, appeared to have some money, and claimed to be an Englishman. “He had an English
accent,” says Jack Leland, a reporter for the
Charleston News & Courier
at the time, “and in this town an English accent is all you need to have everybody fall over you.” Gordon Langley Hall called himself a writer and, indeed, had published a book of boys' fiction called
Peter Jumping Horse
about the adventures of an Indian youth. “He was also a great name-dropper,” says Jack Leland. “In New York, he claimed to be a good friend of the Whitneys, Isobel Whitney I think he said it was. That impressed folks here.” And so it was not long before Gordon Langley Hall was taken up by Charleston's literary set, and it was not long after that that the Pringles, in their gracious Charlestonian innocence, had a dinner party for him. His social future among the Charleston aristocracy seemed assured.

Hall also claimed to be “the adopted nephew” of Dame Margaret Rutherford, which managed to make him seem almost a titled personage. Typically of Charleston, none of these claims was checked. A man's word, after all, was his
word
, and it was unthinkable that a gentleman would lie. And so Gordon Langley Hall's social star continued to rise. He bought himself one of the “good” old Charleston houses on Society Street, entertained elegantly for the Pinckneys, Pringles, Manigaults, and others, and by 1953 he was perhaps the most popular young bachelor in Charleston.

To be sure, a few faintly disquieting facts had emerged. For one thing, it appeared that Mr. Hall might be the town's most popular bachelor, but he would not quite qualify as the town's most eligible one. He seemed to be a homosexual, with a particular fondness for young black boys. A local grocer had refused to send a delivery boy to Hall's house because of a certain incident. Still, Charleston aristocracy considered itself sophisticated enough and generous enough to overlook such a harmless peccadillo. What went on in Mr. Hall's bedroom behind closed doors was certainly of no concern to social Charleston people, who considered it unseemly to repeat such gossip, anyway.

Then, in 1953, a more serious incident occurred. In England, Princess Margaret had become romantically involved with Group Captain Peter Townsend, not only a man quite a few years her senior but also a man who had been divorced. News of the romance, and of the royal family's upset over it, had begun appearing in American newspapers. Gordon Langley Hall at this point presented himself to his friend and
next-door neighbor Peter Manigault, the president and publisher of the
News & Courier
, with a proposal. He was, Hall said, a close personal friend of both Princess Margaret and Captain Townsend, and he would be delighted to write a series of intimate articles on the pair who were rocking the foundations of the Crown as it had not been rocked since the days of Wallis Warfield Simpson. Manigault, sensing a scoop of sorts, eagerly agreed, and Hall was given the assignment. When Hall's stories began appearing, they naturally came to the attention of the news syndicates, and it was not long before the aristocratic Peter Manigault had a telephone call from a friend with United Press International. Not only did Hall's stories appear to be fiction, Mr. Manigault was told, but Buckingham Palace had been contacted and an equerry of the princess had replied that Princess Margaret had never met a person named Gordon Langley Hall and, in fact, had never heard of him. Peter Manigault canceled the series of articles and sat back to lick his wounds. The chivalric code had been seriously violated.

This episode prompted Jack Leland, at the newspaper, to check on the Dame Margaret Rutherford story. Dame Margaret replied that, yes, she had met Gordon Langley Hall once or twice, but that he was certainly not her nephew, adopted or otherwise. Once more, Charleston wondered about Gordon Langley Hall, but once again the doubts were dismissed. He seemed such a nice young man. Perhaps such vagaries should be forgiven and forgotten. After all, everyone occasionally makes mistakes.

Hall's next move was even more bizarre. This was to announce to his social Charleston friends that he was going to have a sex-change operation. It was almost as though Hall were trying to test this most tolerant and indulgent group of people to see how much outrageous behavior he could get away with and still be included within their charmed circle. The answer seemed to be that he could get away with quite a bit. Of course, some people were privately appalled. But Charlestonians shock in a quiet and tasteful way, and the final consensus seemed to be that this development, again, should be treated as a personal matter, and that it was not up to Charleston's leaders to be judgmental about it. The Charlestonian code dictated that, once a man had been accepted as their friend, he would always be treated as a friend, even after he had decided to become a lady. Hall departed for Johns Hopkins
University Hospital, where the operation or series of operations was performed, and when he returned to Charleston he was a she with a new name: Dawn Pepita Langley Hall. Social Charleston welcomed the new woman back into its fold with its customary hospitality.

In 1959, Dawn Langley Hall announced her engagement to one John Paul Simmons, described in the announcement as “a Charleston engineer.” This was not quite true. John Paul Simmons was a mechanic at a local service station. Also, John Paul Simmons was black.

At last, the newly created Miss Hall had gone too far. Once a year, in the spring, Charlestonians who own historic houses open their homes and gardens for “house tour,” in order that the general public and tourists can see how Charleston's gentry lives. It is deemed a great honor to have one's house placed on house tour. That year, the Hall house on Society Street was conspicuously absent from the list of houses to be toured. The curtain had finally fallen on Dawn/Gordon Langley Hall, and when the curtain falls in Charleston, it falls forever. With a collective sigh of relief, Charleston went about the business of trying to forget that such a person had ever existed.

Charleston's aristocracy does not go in much for vindictiveness. In fact, the worst punishment that social Charleston can mete out is so severe that, to anyone's knowledge, it has never been administered. This would be to be “dropped from St. Cecilia.” (Since Charleston has never had a
Social Register
, no one can be dropped from that.) Charleston's St. Cecilia Society and the annual ball it presents represent one of the most rigidly erected social bastions in America. Like the Philadelphia Assembly and the Baltimore Cotillon—aristocratically spelled with but a single
i
—the St. Cecilia Ball is also one of the country's oldest social institutions. The society was first organized in 1737 as an amateur concert society and, little by little, became more interested in putting on balls than in presenting concerts until, in 1822, the concerts were given up altogether and the ball became the society's sole raison d'être.

Like the Philadelphia Assembly and the Baltimore Cotillon, the St. Cecilia Ball is important because it codifies the Charleston aristocracy. It carves, as it were, the names of who is who in Charleston in stone. One is either a member of St. Cecilia or one is not, leaving the society hopelessly
beyond the reach of social climbers. Charleston may welcome, and take in, outsiders like Gordon Langley Hall, but St. Cecilia membership is another thing altogether. As is the case in England, for a duke to entertain a viscount at dinner is hardly uncommon. But for a viscount to
become
a duke is next to impossible. As is peculiarly the case in America, on the other hand, the St. Cecilia Society is shrouded in secrecy. The list of its membership is neither carved in stone nor made public anywhere else, though the plaque in front of St. Philip's Church is embossed with the family names that would most likely qualify as members. Only a St. Cecilia member would be able to tell you who the other members were, and this no member would ever do.

More than eighty years ago, a Charleston aristocrat named Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel published a volume called
Charleston: The Place and the People
, an affectionate portrait of the city, in which she came closer than anyone else to revealing how the society works. Though Mrs. Ravenel has long ago been gathered to her Charleston ancestors, there are Charlestonians today who feel that she was a traitor to her class for telling as much as she did and that her book should have been suppressed for this reason alone. Of St. Cecilia's membership, Mrs. Ravenel wrote:

If a man's father or grandfather, or any of his immediate kindred, have belonged before him, there is little doubt that he will be chosen. Nevertheless blackballs (two suffice to exclude) have fallen, when the applicant was a notoriously unworthy scion of his family tree. If a new resident, or of a family recently brought into notice, there will be inquiry, perhaps hesitation, and a good backing will be desirable. But if he be of character and standing calculated to make his membership acceptable to the Society, he will be elected,—unless he has some adversary; then he may fail. The presenter of such a one will make careful examination into public feeling before subjecting his friend to mortification; and will withhold the letter if in doubt. When a man is elected, the names of the ladies of his household are at once put upon “the list” and remain there forever. Only death or removal from the city erases them,—change of fortune affects them not at all.

The St. Cecilia Society is a men's club in the sense that its board of governors is all male, but it is more than that. Its ball is also a coming-out party to the extent that certain of each season's debutantes are invited, but the majority of the female invitees are well beyond debutante years. What the ball is, most of all, is an exercise in nostalgia, a pleasant anachronism left over from antebellum times. It is an old-fashioned “card dance,” where the dance card of every lady in attendance is completely filled out well in advance. Only waltzes and slow fox trots are played, plus an occasional Charleston, and no Latin American music—and certainly no rock—has ever been heard at a St. Cecilia Ball. Other rules abound. Although champagne is served with supper, no other alcoholic beverages are served in the ballroom. Gentlemen may, and do, repair to a separate room and partake of a glass of wine—and hip flasks of more potent liquids have been known to appear in the gentlemen's washroom—but ladies are not permitted to drink, not even wine, anywhere on the premises.

No actors or actresses may attend the ball, even when they are out-of-town guests of members. Neither may a divorced woman, even if she was deemed the injured party in the action. A divorced man, on the other hand, may attend, provided he has not remarried. As for a young woman whose father is a member of the society, she may of course attend, provided she has not had the poor taste to marry a man who is a nonmember. In that case, she may attend, but neither her husband nor her children may do so. A young woman from “off” may be able to attend as an out-of-town guest of a member, provided she passes the careful “family background” check of the invitation committee. But if she has lived in Charleston for a year or longer, she is considered a resident, and no longer from off, and cannot attend. Young women have been known to spend eleven months a year in Charleston and the twelfth month elsewhere just to be able to qualify for the St. Cecilia Ball as out-of-town guests.

The dance is held in a historic, if somewhat run-down, hall in downtown Charleston, and no photographers from newspapers or magazines have ever been permitted to photograph it, though many have tried. Everyone in town knows when the ball is to take place, but no mention of the event is ever made in the local newspaper. “They wouldn't dare,” says one Charlestonian, but that isn't quite true. The Manigault family,
who own the
News & Courier
, have long been St. Cecilia members, and silence on the matter is part of the chivalric code. In fact, so touchy is the whole subject that some Charlestonians have been known to sit at home in darkened houses on the night of the ball, so that their neighbors will think they have gone to it. Others make elaborate arrangements to be out of town, in order to be able to say that they are “going to have to miss St. Cecilia.”

Meanwhile, the ball itself is a vivid reminder that money alone means nothing in Charleston. It is perfectly acceptable for a Charleston woman to own just one St. Cecilia ball gown, which she will wear to the party year after year and leave, for the remaining 364 days, packed away in tissue paper before passing it on to her daughter. And if a gentleman cannot afford white tie and tails, or even to rent a dinner jacket, a dark suit with a black bow tie is considered quite proper attire. For a gentleman to dress this way is even considered a part of the great chivalric tradition.

“‘To be dropped from the St. Cecilia,'” Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel wrote, “is an awful possibility sometimes hinted at, but which (as far as known) has never come to pass.” Those words were penned in 1906. Eighty-one years later, it still has never come to pass, and the membership of St. Cecilia remains as fixed as the earth's orbit around the sun. Even Mrs. Ravenel's bit of tattling on the society did not get her family dropped.

Charleston has other little jokes that it likes to tell visitors about itself. A local fertilizer factory emits a distant odor in one part of town, and when visitors comment on it, Charlestonians like to wink and say, “What you're smelling is just the odor of our decaying aristocracy.” But, just as it isn't quite true that the Ashley and Cooper rivers meet at Charleston to form the Atlantic Ocean, that quip isn't quite true, either. Charleston's aristocracy is not decaying. It's still going strong.

15

O Ancestors!

Of all the hundred-plus hereditary societies in the United States today—and which include such diverse organizations as the First Families of Ohio, the Piscataqua Pioneers, and the Swedish Colonial Society
*
—there are probably no two more prestigious, or more misunderstood, groups than the General Society of Mayflower Descendants and the Order of First Families of Virginia.