America's Secret Aristocracy (3 page)

A dozen or so years earlier, in 1924, Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer had addressed that question in
The Social Ladder
. “Prominent today in published accounts of New York social events,” Mrs. Van Rensselaer wrote, “are the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Morgans, the Davidsons, the Belmonts, the Vanderlips, the Villards, the Goulds.” And yet, she pointed out, only one of these families had “enjoyed social recognition as far back as Civil War times.” That single exception was the Astors, and Mrs. Van Rensselaer dismissed the Astors rather loftily, commenting that “the first John Jacob Astor, born in Walldorf, Germany, came to New York … as a piano merchant.” She added that not one of the above “socially prominent families” traced its lineage in America back to the Revolutionary era, much less to an era prior to that.

Today, a list of society's elite might include the Rockefellers, the Fords, the Mellons, even the Annenbergs and Estée Lauder. These names, of course, represent even newer money. But for all the Rockefellers' wealth, there are those today who can recall a time when Rockefellers were considered uncouth parvenus. Robert David Lion Gardiner remembers his grandmother forbidding him to play with the Rockefeller children. “No Gardiner will ever play,” she announced, “with the grandchildren of a gangster.” And the novelist Louis Auchincloss, whose own New York roots are deep, if not as deep as the Gardiners', once commented, “We put the Rockefellers in the same category as the Vanderbilts. It was hard to take them seriously. Now, of course, that I'm married to a Vanderbilt, we take the Vanderbilts somewhat
more
seriously.” (Mr. Auchincloss's wife's mother is a Vanderbilt cousin.)

Despite all this, it is clear that in order to claim membership in American society today there are essentially only two rather loose requirements: money, the more the better, and the ability to advertise oneself. And these requirements are linked, because publicity today has a price tag. It can be bought. In other words, society today has wandered almost as
far from the concept of aristocracy as it is possible to stray—because, from its beginnings, America's aristocracy has had almost nothing to do with money at all.

“Society,” needless to say, is a tricky concept that has taken on different meanings to different generations. In its American colonial beginnings, it meant, first of all,
family
. And the only demarcation lines within it were those of the prevailing churches. Indeed, members of the clergy—a profession in which one does not customarily grow rich—stood very close to the top of the social scale. Society was also a matter of
breeding
, which had less to do with ancestry than with integrity, probity, civic duty, respectability, kindness, and good manners, as well as of deportment, speech, and what is today called body language, through which members of society communicated with one another: the way one entered a room or rose from a chair or bowed or curtsied or blew a kiss. All these are components of that hard-to-define quality of any aristocracy known as
noblesse oblige
. Finally, society stood for
culture
and refinement, and an appreciation of art, music, and literature. In other words, America's earliest aristocracy, like England's, was based on family notions of self-worth and self-esteem.

The founders of society in America were nearly all members of families who predated the arrival of the British fleet that turned Nieuw Amsterdam into New York. In her book, Mrs. Van Rensselaer offered a sampling of their names. She cited the Morrises, the Kings, the Gerards, the Houghs, the Hoyts, the Iselins, the Millers, the Wickershams, the Wyatts, the Fishes, the Whites, and the Magees. Modestly, she omitted her own name from this list. To it, she might have added the Livingstons, the Bownes, the Lawrences, the Schieffelins, the Burrs, the Schuylers, the Jays, the Ingersolls of Philadelphia, the Adamses of Boston, the Randolphs of Virginia, the Carrolls of Carrollton, Maryland, and many more.

Certain old American families seem almost inextricably entwined with their cities of origin. The Adamses and Saltonstalls and Winthrops, for example, are both
from
and
of
Boston, while the Pinckneys are
from
and
of
Charleston, South Carolina. They belong to their cities just as persistently as, in their minds, their cities belong to them. Other families, by contrast, seem to transcend the places they originally came from, such as the intricately interrelated Livingston-Jay-Beekman-Astor family, who all descend from a common
ancestor, the first Robert Livingston, who settled in New York's Hudson River valley. Today, Livingstons are scattered across the face of the continent, from Florida to California. Others live in England, and some live as far away as Hong Kong. They are doctors, lawyers, bankers, congressmen (from states other than New York), diplomats, and interior designers. But wherever they are, and whatever they do, they are always, indelibly,
Livingstons
.

The old families have never believed that either money or publicity was the open sesame to social success or acceptance. Its members did not believe that then, nor do they now. For these founding families of America's aristocracy did not, as might be supposed, die out. Nor did they, through intermarriage with one another, become “watered down” to impotence and incompetence. In cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, and Savannah, their descendants still exist, leading quiet and for the most part productive lives, doing useful and often important work. Ten, twelve, or more generations later, they still cling to the cities that first nourished them, being none the worse Americans for the fact that they boast an ancient heritage and lineage, nor for the fact that their lives and activities are no longer considered spectacular enough to qualify for the society pages and the gossip columns. These families, in other words, are not like a breed of dinosaurs that enjoy one great era and then become extinct.

Nor do they sit in Brahmin-like seclusion in their quiet city houses on quiet city streets, contemplating their past or their family trees. The earliest Dutch and English settlers were people of stamina and grit who did not take easily to idleness or boredom; their descendants still do not. They are not, in the common sense, exclusive, nor do they form a fixed set that has erected impenetrable barriers behind which outsiders are never permitted to glimpse. On the contrary, they are for the most part open and friendly and perfectly willing to accept new acquaintances into their circle of friends, the only qualification being that the new friends should be willing to accept their standards of politeness and propriety, and behave as ladies and gentlemen.

Members of the American aristocracy have long distrusted lists. One's name on a list is an invasion of privacy, a threat to collective secrecy, an invitation to unwanted publicity or even notoriety. With their eyes on what the past has taught
them, they can recall that it was bad publicity—really nothing else—that destroyed the brilliant political career of the aristocratic Aaron Burr in the early 1800s. Besides, they do not need a scorecard to tell them who their players are. In 1921, Maury Paul, the “Cholly Knickerbocker” gossip columnist for the old
New York World
, playfully drew up a set of lists in which he tried to separate two elements of society: the Old Guard and Cafe Society. On his Old Guard list, he included the name of Mrs. C. Oliver Iselin. No one would really have questioned whether Mrs. Iselin's name belonged on that list. It did, but Mrs. Iselin was not amused. She wrote to the editor of the newspaper, whom she knew, and politely asked, “Please see to it that my name is removed from this list.”

Even more important, the members of America's aristocracy have an uncanny ability—through a kind of ESP or personal radar—to recognize each other. Antennae go out, and the signals are picked up. During the course of his military service in France, for instance, Goodhue Livingston found himself having lunch in the dining room ofthe L'Univers Hotel in Tours. During the course of it, he happened to notice another gentleman dining on the opposite side of the room. “I recognized the man as an American, of course,” he recalls today, “but I also knew I had never met him. And yet there was something very familiar about him, though it wasn't even a ‘family look.' After lunch, I stopped over to his table and introduced myself. ‘My name is Montgomery Livingston,' the fellow said.”

Even in such newly settled places as Texas, fledgling aristocracies are forming and developing secret signals by which they recognize each other. The Wynne family of Dallas now numbers more than 150 members and publishes its own private genealogical volume,
Who's Whose Wynne
. At age twenty-one, each Wynne family member is presented with a distinctive family ring consisting of a trio of intertwined gold serpents of the Nile. Once a year, over Memorial Day weekend, the entire Wynne clan gathers for three days of festivities. These include feasting, all-night poker games, a Sunday worship service, and—the highlight of the reunion—the induction of new in-laws into the family. In Wynne family terminology, in-laws are called Mongooses, while blood members are known as Snakes—an allusion to the family ring and to the fact that, in nature, only a mongoose is a match for a cobra.

But our story does not begin in Texas. It begins on the older-established East Coast and with the union of two linchpin American families, the Jays of Westchester County and the Livingstons of New York.

2

A Royal Wedding

If there had been any national media to ballyhoo it at the time, it might have been called the Wedding of the Century. But the century was the eighteenth, and news in the American colonies traveled slowly and erratically, so that the announcement of the wedding that took place on April 28, 1774, did not appear in the
New York Gazette
until May 9. The announcement was appropriately subdued, in genteel keeping with the times, and merely noted the marriage of Mr. John Jay, “an eminent barrister,” to “the beautiful Sarah Livingston” at her parents' country estate, Liberty Hall, in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. That was all.

In a more outspoken era, it might have been noted that John Jay was something of an upstart in New York society, whereas the Livingstons were by then
the
principal family in New York—if not the principal family in all America. It was not a case of a pauper marrying a princess, exactly, and the phrase “social climber” had not yet been invented, but a more lurid press might have made more of the difference in status between the Jays and the Livingstons and of the fact that on the day John and Sarah Jay exchanged marriage vows, the eminent barrister had allied himself with the richest and most powerful family in the New World. In an age more rapaciously concerned with gossip and spicy trivia, the discrepancy between the bride's and bridegroom's ages might also have drawn comment. John Jay was twenty-eight. His bride was barely seventeen.

Had there been a Suzy Knickerbocker or a Liz Smith around in those days, an edifying story might have been
written about how cleverly John Jay had insinuated himself into the perfumed, private circle of the Livingston family and how carefully he had orchestrated his courtship—over her father's initial objections—of the William Livingstons' youngest, prettiest, and favorite daughter. There was even a minor scandal, involving an incident during the bridegroom's college days (to say nothing of other scandals that lurked in the upper branches of the Livingston family tree), to be unearthed. But, as it was, in this more innocent and polite of times, when members of the upper classes were treated with deference and discretion as a matter of course, the Jay-Livingston nuptials were announced with the terse precision of an item in the London Court Circular.

It had all started at New York's King's College—the predecessor of Columbia University—where young John Jay made the acquaintance of a fellow undergraduate named Robert R. Livingston, Jr., a cousin of Sarah Livingston's father. Soon the young men were the best of friends. After graduation, both men studied law and, that done with, Jay proposed to Robert Livingston that they form a law partnership together. Livingston enthusiastically agreed to the idea.

The next step up the social ladder occurred when Jay was invited to join The Moot, an elite men's club of New York lawyers that met on the first Friday of every month to discuss, over glasses of Madeira, disputed—or moot—points of law. The Moot had been founded in 1770 by Sarah Livingston's father, himself a barrister of considerable eminence. The Moot's membership consisted of a number of men who would later distinguish themselves in various ways. These included, in addition to Jay's partner, Robert Livingston, Egbert Benson, who in due time would become judge of the New York Supreme Court; James Duane, married to a Livingston, the first mayor of New York after the Revolution; and William Smith, also married to a Livingston, who would become chief justice of Canada. The club's founder, William Livingston, would go on to become the first governor of the state of New Jersey.

John Jay was one of the club's youngest members, but soon he had made himself an expert on Madeira and was given the job of selecting the wine. Politics was a taboo subject at meetings of The Moot, and afterward the young men enjoyed lively bachelor evenings along Broadway. Thus
it was not long before Jay was invited to visit the William Livingstons at Liberty Hall, where he was introduced to the delicious Sarah, who was then not quite sixteen.

Their courtship was decorous and seemly, though much too brief to suit her father, who considered her too young to have a serious suitor. On Jay and Sarah's outings together, they were always carefully chaperoned by one of Sarah's older brothers. And, though the social life of the day had a decidedly countrified, outdoorsy quality, there was plenty of it. There were popcorn parties and taffy pulls, amateur theatricals, charades and dances. The Social Club assembled on Saturday evenings at the tavern belonging to Sam Fraunces or at the summer clubhouse across the East River at Kip's Bay. There were dancing assemblies and twice-weekly turtle roasts on the riverbank, where fat green sea turtles were caught and netted, and cooked over open fires. There were games of quoits and
roque
, an aristocratic form of croquet played on a hard-surfaced field. There were hunting parties and horseback outings and hayrides. Indoors, there were whist parties and backgammon games and games of
crokinole
, and piano and harpsichord recitals. In winter, there were sleigh rides and skating and tobogganing parties. More serious matters were left to the Debating Club, which met every Thursday evening at six.