America's Secret Aristocracy (45 page)

At age seventeen, for example, to help out a friend who worked for William Randolph Hearst's
Baltimore News
, she covered a local party and wrote it up for the society pages. Her editor, while pointing out that her story “contained enough scandal to bring on three libel suits,” was nonetheless impressed with her lively style and hired her as a general-assignment reporter.

So popular did Anne Kinsolving's stories become that the
News
told her she could write about anything she chose. Always interested in music, she then asked to be made the paper's music critic. Even after her marriage to John Nicholas Brown she continued to write occasional pieces of music criticism, but marriage to a rich man allowed her time to indulge in another enthusiasm: military history. She started her extraordinary collection of tin soldiers that is now in a Providence museum, where, it might be noted, custodial funds have been provided by Claus and Martha Crawford von Bülow. Mrs. Brown's interest in military history sparked her family's interest—particularly that of her son Carter—in art history. Anne Kinsolving Brown, for example, could look at a portrait of a Revolutionary general and say, “That portrait could not have been painted as early as 1770. He's wearing a medal for the Battle of Bennington, and that battle didn't take place until 1777.”

Today's most celebrated Brown is certainly John Nicholas
and Anne Kinsolving Brown's son Carter, who, in 1969, at age thirty-four, made headlines in the art world when he was appointed director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, becoming the youngest major museum director in the world. Since then, the still boyish-looking Carter Brown has mounted and toured exhibits that have broken attendance records all over the United States, including his “Treasures of Tutankhamen,” “The Search for Alexander,” and, most recently, the hugely popular “Treasure Houses of Britain: Five Hundred Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting.” At the time of Carter Brown's appointment to the National Gallery's top post, it was reported that, when he was twelve and first saw the National Gallery from the window of the family limousine, he announced, “Someday I'll be its director.” Not so, said his mother, always a stickler for dates. “It was a year earlier, when Carter was eleven, and used to go sailing with John Walker, who was the museum's director then, at Fishers Island where the family spent summers.” Carter Brown has a slightly different recollection. “I remember driving by the National Gallery, and admiring that beautiful pink stone building, and saying, ‘Someday I'd like to work in a place like that.'”

Whichever way it happened, others have commented that Carter Brown was especially suited to put together “The Treasure Houses of Britain” since he himself grew up in houses filled with treasures and must have felt completely at home with—and like an aristocratic peer among—the proprietors of England's stately homes whom he visited in order to assemble his memorable show. The Brown mansions along Benefit Street in the College Hill section of Providence, where Browns have lived for generations, and still live, are architectural showplaces and family treasure houses, as is Harbour Court (English spelling, of course), the sprawling Newport estate overlooking the harbor that Carter Brown's grandmother built for his father. But the sad fact is that, by 1986, Harbour Court was for sale. “There are eight grandchildren who own it,” Carter Brown explains, “along with spouses, and it's just too complicated trying to figure out who can use the house, and when, and for how long.” The asking price: $4.5 million.

As befits a nautical family of whalers, shipbuilders, and China traders (not to mention seventeenth-century canoe paddlers), a love of the sea and sailing seems to have been passed
along in the Browns' genes. The Browns are one of a very few American families—J. P. Morgan's was another—to have been granted a “private signal,” a yachting burgee assigned to Brown vessels alone. Under this flag, Carter Brown's father skippered such famous yachts as the
Saraband
, and the
Bolero
, the largest boat allowed in the Bermuda Race. Carter Brown is also a sailor, though on a smaller scale, in a Rhode Island-built dinghy. He is, on the other hand, commodore of what may be the most exclusive, and smallest, yacht club in the world: the Little River Yacht Club, named after his weekend retreat in Virginia. The only members of the Little River Yacht Club are the immediate male members of his family. Wives are permitted to be honorary members.

When Carter Brown's grandfather John Carter Brown died in 1900, John Nicholas Brown was only three months old. His uncle, Harold Brown, was in London at the time, and he and Aunt Georgette immediately booked passage home to Providence for the funeral. But no sooner had the Harold Browns arrived than tragedy struck the family again. Harold Brown contracted typhoid fever and was dead within weeks of his brother. This was how the infant John Nicholas Brown, who inherited from both his father and his uncle, came to be labeled by the press “The World's Richest Baby,” which was certainly an exaggeration, though not by much.

The distribution of the Brown fortune was decidedly unequal, but luckily this fact did not create the deep rift of jealousy and ill feeling among the Browns that similar situations have done among other moneyed families. One of Carter Brown's cousins—a first cousin once removed, in fact—is Mrs. John Jermain Slocum of Newport, a great-granddaughter of the first John Carter Brown. “The English system is by far the best,” says Eileen Slocum emphatically. “Leave everything to the oldest son. That way, properties don't have to be broken up, and broken up again every time someone dies. John Nicholas Brown got ninety percent of the money. But Granny got the houses, the jewels, the portraits, the china, the silver, and so on. If you'll go to Harbour Court, you'll notice there are hardly any portraits. Whereas here”—and she gestures about her Newport mansion, whose walls are covered with portraits and punctuated by carved busts of Browns, along with cousins named Drexel and Sherman and Wilmerding, Peabody and Wetmore.

Since Anne Kinsolving Brown's death, Eileen Slocum, the wife of a retired foreign service officer, has become Newport's reigning
grande dame
. She is also a force in Rhode Island state politics as cochairman of the state's Republican party and a four-time delegate to the Republican National Convention. Known locally as a woman of extraordinary spunk and spirit, she once lay in wait in her darkened house in order to accost a burglar who had entered her property. When the burglar slipped inside through a French window, Mrs. Slocum cried, “Halt!”—and the burglar fled. Since that episode, she has acquired a brace of revolvers and has taken shooting lessons from her friend James Van Alen. “Jimmy taught me that the best way to shoot a man is to lie flat on your stomach,” she says. “That way, if the man is armed, you present less of a target.”

Mrs. Slocum, whose husband's diplomatic missions have taken the couple to posts in Moscow, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq, as well as Washington, is presently active in a Providence organization called Justice Assistance and in the movement for victims' rights. In this capacity, she became somewhat at odds with her cousin-in-law Anne Brown in that she supported the von Auersperg children in their grievances against their stepfather, Mr. von Bülow—a case that split Newport down the middle anyway. “All I said was that just before the first so-called Christmas coma, Sunny and Claus von Bülow came to my house for dinner, and Sunny seemed a happy, healthy, normal, charming girl,” she says. “There were no signs of alcoholism, no sign of drugs. I have no idea why Anne decided to testify for him at the second trial, but if you ask me, that trial was
rigged!

“Yes,” says Eileen Slocum with her customary emphasis, “there is definitely such a thing as an aristocracy in America. It is based on breeding and behavior—
superior
behavior—and a willingness to work and to do what needs to be done. The word ‘lady' and the word ‘gentleman' meant a great deal to Mummy and Daddy. We were gentlefolk, and people who weren't were—well, you could tell who they were. Anyone who would strike a child, for example, or would strike an animal, would
not
be gentlefolk.”

Among Eileen Slocum's other projects and enthusiasms is one that is more difficult to define—“keeping the putty in the stones of the family,” as she puts it. This putty was perhaps most severely tested in the 1960s when the Slocums' daughter
, Beryl, announced her engagement to Adam Clayton Powell III. Not only was Powell black—the son of the Harlem congressman and the nightclub entertainer Hazel Scott—but he was a Democrat, and his father had been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of income tax evasion.

“We were opposed to it—vehemently,” says Eileen Slocum forthrightly. “We did everything in our power to try to persuade Beryl not to do this thing. But when Beryl was at Radcliffe, she began associating with a number of very radical, left-wing types. Beryl and I don't see eye to eye on anything, and yet we're very much alike—stubborn, I suppose. To me, she's out of focus on what is important. I believe in achievement through work. Beryl's goals are different—that's all I really can say about it. She and Adam are separated now. And yet it's interesting—her son, Sherman Powell, my grandson, is now even more conservative than John and myself!”

If Eileen Slocum was keeping a stiff upper lip at the time of the marriage, it did not show. The Slocums gave their daughter and Powell a large and social wedding in Washington, as would befit a Brown heiress, and the parents of the bride were photographed wreathed in smiles. Was that difficult to do? “One does what has to be done,” Eileen Slocum says. She and her daughter, and her daughter's dark-skinned children, are still close. “They're all coming for dinner at the house tonight,” she says.

“We've always been a very united family,” says Mrs. Slocum. “Our relationships are very close. Never for a moment is the dialogue broken. There must be continuity in a family, and when there is continuity in the things it treasures it is even better. I've said to my children, this house is your ancestral home. It is full of memories and it is full of meaning. After I'm gone, you must do everything in your power to keep this house in the family. This house is part of your family's heritage. If need be, I said to my daughter Marguerite the other day, sell off the front of the property, on Bellevue Avenue—that way the house wouldn't be taxed as Bellevue Avenue real estate—and use the side street for the entrance. But keep the house. Margie practically burst into tears, and said, ‘But Mother, that would mean taking down all these beautiful trees!' I said to her, ‘Perhaps you won't have to do it. But one does what has to be done.'”

The Era of the Great Splurge passed through and around families like the Browns of Rhode Island, leaving them untouched. Members of America's secret aristocracy are generally unaffected by social fads and phases. The flurry of pretentious château building that began in Newport in the 1880s and ended in 1929 came and went, and families like the Browns went on doing pretty much what they had always done. The face of Newport changed dramatically. (“When new people come, a place always changes,” says Mrs. Slocum.) Large and comfortable beach houses built in the traditional New England shingle style were replaced with Florentine palazzi and Palladian castles, but behind these cosmetic changes the Browns remained secure in the secret that the real soul of Newport would always belong to them. After all, when one's family has lived in a place for ten or twelve generations, one gets accustomed to changes in the weather. It's the climate inside that counts.

The Browns were a part of the new milieu, of course. They went to the parties and the balls. But at the same time they were not a part of it. The competitiveness and social and fiscal Indian wrestling that characterized the era were of little concern to them. To them, it didn't matter which Mrs. Vanderbilt built the bigger mansion, which Mrs. Astor was entitled to be called
the
Mrs. Astor, or how Mrs. August Belmont, Jr., got along with her mother-in-law (badly). Let those people, families like the Browns seemed to say, get all the publicity, all the notoriety. We are a more private people, and we have our own concerns. We will be here long after they are gone.

And they are.

There is an easy, gentle style of life that old, aristocratic American families fall into that is special: formal and at the same time laissez-faire. Mrs. John Jermain Slocum, for example, smiles faintly when her butler refers to her husband's dinner jacket as his “tux coat.” But she lets it pass. Her big stone house is on the “wrong,” or inland, side of Bellevue Avenue and is all but invisible from the street (those trees). Across the street, on the side facing Rhode Island Sound, the bigger, newer, showier mansions seem to be fairly jostling each other for attention and to be saying, “Get a load of me!”

Breakfast at the Slocums', where the house guests are the Dillon Ripleys from Washington, along with a friend who has
dropped by for coffee, is served in the small dining room rather than in the large dining room next door where twenty-four can be seated at one long table. The walls of the small dining room are lined, from floor to ceiling, with glass-enclosed cabinets containing what appear to be thousands of pieces of Lowestoft. But breakfast coffee is served in a chipped cup. In the center of the round table is a kind of lazy Susan, on which breakfast accompaniments are set out: several boxes of dry cereal, their tops sliced off at a diagonal for easy pouring; an opened two-quart carton of milk; a jar of honey; a jar of peanut butter; a jar of catsup. There are paper napkins. An electric coffee maker bubbles on an antique sideboard. A chest containing everyday silver—the good stuff is locked away—sits atop an antique German music box, a priceless family heirloom. In one corner of the room, an aluminum-and-plastic high chair sits waiting for a visiting grandchild. The morning papers—the
Providence Journal
and the
New York Times
—lie about while the Ripleys work the
Times
crossword in a unique way, taking turns. Mr. Ripley fills in one definition in blue ink, then hands it to his wife, who fills in the next in red. A maid in the kitchen answers the telephone, which rings constantly for Eileen Slocum in connection with one or another of her projects; this time it is a fund-raiser for Senator Bob Dole. “Tell them I'm in conference with my lawyer,” she instructs the maid, adding, “That usually scares 'em off for a while.” The butler, in shirtsleeves, pads in and out.