Honorable Men (2 page)

Frustrated, I turned that summer to boys. There were plenty of them in Bar Harbor. I necked in the bushes at the Swimming Club dances, smoked cigarettes in a long jade holder and jumped at midnight from the high diving board in an evening dress that blew out like a parachute. But my precocity disillusioned me before my debutante year. I fell in and out of love with prep school boys and college freshmen; I found them too raw and puppyish. I decided that I was reserved for something much more passionate or perhaps not for passion at all. Why should I not be an Emily Dickinson and hide away from the vulgar world behind closed doors in a white gown and write deathless verse? But I could never seem to “taste a liquor never brewed” or “feel a funeral in my brain,” no matter how late I stayed up after parties to make up rhymes.

I see now that it might have been better had I rebelled and become a communist, as did so many young people in the nineteen thirties—even in society. But politics was left out of my make-up; perhaps my ego was too strong. The agony of the Spanish Civil War did not move me; the rise of Hitler left me cold. I decided that I might be saved by a novel, and I wrote a dozen chapters about a Newport debutante who falls in love with a bootlegger.

It was not perhaps quite as bad as that sounds, but it was pretty bad. I showed it to Gus Leighton, a friend of my parents, but also of mine who had established himself as a kind of father confessor. He disliked the book and told me so, but he told me something else that changed my life. Let me introduce him.

He was a bachelor, in his middle thirties, who, had he ever had any great ambitions, seemed now to have successfully squashed them. Rumor had it that he had taken a master's degree in English Lit at Columbia in order to teach at a boys' school, but then had abandoned the idea when neither Saint Luke's nor Groton, the only two he deemed worthy of him, had seen fit to hire him. There was even a legend that he had been violently in love with a beautiful heiress and had turned his back on romance forever when she had refused him. For about fifteen years now he had lived at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan and summered at the Malvern Hotel in Bar Harbor, dining out nightly and supplementing a modest income by a small but highly select public relations business. No one knew just who his clients were or exactly what he did for them, but his particular field was almost certainly social advancement: how and when the newcomers should entertain, what were the most useful charities for them to support, what clubs and summer colonies they should try for. To do him justice, I believe he took a dignified view of his shabby trade, persuading himself that he was coaching the new rich how to be ladies and gentlemen in the best sense of those hackneyed terms.

He was a large man, inclined to be stout, with thick, long, rather greasy black hair, a white doughy skin, a round puffy face and large, dark, commanding, often angry eyes. He dressed in black suits in winter and loud blazers and white flannels in summer. He knew a great deal about a great many subjects, but I never saw him presume to know more than he did. He was a force, at least in the small society in which he had chosen to live.

As I have said, Gus was not impressed by my novel. He was particularly disgusted by my bootlegger's “gun moll,” who had gold fingernails.

“It is not, heaven forbid,” he counseled me, “that I have any truck with the inane rule that a writer should write only of what he knows. What under that restriction would happen to
Paradise Lost
and most of Shakespeare? But where there are no facts, there must be imagination, and your gun moll, my dear, is not imagined—she is fantasized. You may be one of those unfortunates endowed with the artistic spirit yet not furnished with an outlet. I know something about that. The answer must be found in making your life a work of art. In making use of the materials you have to hand.”

“And what do those amount to?”

“A good deal more than you think. You have a sharp eye for the second-rate in your parents' world. But you do not see it as others do. Cholly Knickerbocker speaks of your mother as a
grande dame
of Gotham.”

“But that's all tommyrot.”

“Is it?” Gus frowned, as if he were dealing with weighty matters. “Who is to decide? That a considerable body of even ignorant persons believe something to be a fact may be important. To you, anyway. Even supposing your world is rotten and doomed, even assuming it is about to be swept away by a red tide, it is still here and now and part of truth. Maybe a bigger part than you think. Doesn't Marie-Antoinette take up as many pages in the history books as Robespierre? Is Augustus Caesar more remembered than Cleopatra?”

“Must I get my head chopped off? Or take an asp to my bosom?”

“It doesn't matter how you die. It's how you
live.
Let me give you two examples. First, Theodore Roosevelt. He conceived of himself, dramatically, as a leader of men, and his image of himself gained world acceptance. Now move to our own day. Take Mrs. Neily.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. T.R. started with many disadvantages—asthma for one—which he overcame. Grace Vanderbilt was older than her husband and despised by his family, who disinherited him on their marriage. But she conceived of herself as a great hostess, spent whatever she could lay her hands on, and more that she couldn't, and made the world—or enough of it—see her as she saw herself!”

“But surely you can't compare a great President with an addled old party-giver!”

“Why can't I? I value the hand one is dealt and the bid one calls. What do I care whether it's for the White House or for social supremacy in Newport?”

“You mean they're equally vulgar?”

He shrugged. “Or equally valid.”

“Very well, then. What bid shall I call?”

“Why don't you become the most famous debutante in America? You have the pale slinky looks that are coming into fashion. You're a New Yorker, which is essential. And your family can be made to look as grand as we choose.”

“And what do we do for money?”

“It'll take less than you think. You'll need a party, of course, but I think Grandma Struthers will come through.”

“Grandma? You're dreaming, Gus!”

“Leave her to me.”

“And suppose it worked. What would I get out of it?”

“Fun! You'll see. I promise.”

And that was how my fantastic debutante year began.

F
OR SOME WEEKS
I could not believe that Gus was really serious, but he obliged me in the end, with an almost legalistic formality, to accept or decline his proffered service. Of course I accepted. Even if it was only a game, why should I have denied myself the fun of it? He and I agreed to lunch together every Monday at his favorite restaurant, the Chenonceaux, review what had happened during the past week and make plans for the ensuing one. Our business was largely with the press.

The first and great commandment, Gus taught me, was never to pretend to a reporter that I was not earnestly seeking publicity. Obviously, they knew I was, or I wouldn't be talking to them, and they had only contempt for the hypocrisy of socialites who affected to have been surprised or tricked into obviously intentional indiscretions.

“Put your cards on the table,” he told me, “and you'll find, on the whole, that you're treated fairly. Not always, of course, for the society reporter is likely to be someone who's failed to make it on the other pages. A man who's a sorehead or a woman who feels she's been discriminated against. Sometimes they're out to get their revenge on the silly asses whose inane parties they have to cover. But don't worry. The basic quality of this type of journalist is laziness. And on that laziness hangs my deepest purpose.”

Gus paused to look inscrutable until I obligingly responded to my cue. “Which is?”

“Which is precisely to save him his labor. What I propose to get across to the evening press and to the fashion magazines is that if they all agree to cover one debutante, and make her the news of the day, they will save themselves the trouble of covering fifty. And you and I, my dear, have chosen that debutante!”

The funny thing was that his crazy scheme worked. It all started with a few modest social notes, slipped by Gus into news and gossip columns in the form of discreet releases. “Miss Alida Struthers is far from the usual type of debutante; she has written a novel, hopes to do a screenplay and prefers the public sands and buffeting breakers of Jones Beach to the exclusive waters of the Creek Club Pool.” Or: “Everyone was at Newport last Saturday for the Frazer debut, except Alida Struthers, who was simply unable to forgo a morning sail to Block Island. ‘It was the one perfect day we've had all June!' she cried.” Or: “It is
not
true that Miss Struthers smokes hashish; she inhales a rare and harmless form of...” Or: “Alida Struthers keeps a pet macaw in her bedroom.”

Accompanying these handouts were beautiful photographs, including one by Gus's friend Cecil Beaton. It did not take long for my publicity to accelerate until by Christmas it had become a minor avalanche. I was already on all the debutante invitation lists, but now I received bids from every socially ambitious mother in the Greater New York Area. Gus scrutinized these carefully and selected some surprising ones for me to accept.

“We can't stay just with the Knickerbocker families. We have to branch out. I'm picking the people whose parties will make news. No matter how sensational!”

I soon found that I was getting boxes of lovely things from fashionable stores and free tickets to popular shows, and I even, rather daringly for those days, endorsed a cold cream in an advertisement that was widely distributed. I was, of course, well paid for it. When I suggested to Gus that this sort of thing was bound in time to depreciate my social value, he cheerfully agreed.

“But by then you'll have got what you want.”

“And what is that?”

“Anything!” he exclaimed, throwing up his arms. “It'll be time enough to choose when we get there.”

He thought it desirable that I should have a team to back me up, and I selected two classmates from Miss Herron's Classes, Amanda Bayne and Dolly Hotchkiss, to whom I confided my project. Both were delighted to go along, hanging, so to speak, on my coattails. Amanda had dowdy old parents with very little money who were afraid of their beautiful daughter and gave her no trouble. Dolly, on the other hand, had a conservative banker-father who objected vociferously and who had to be (and usually was) got around, with the help of a mother who lived vicariously in Dolly. And we soon formed a squadron of some half-dozen college men who were intrigued at the idea of becoming nationally known and would cut any class at Yale, Princeton or Harvard to attend a dance or house party when I commanded. One of these was Chessy Bogart, an Eli who became a kind of protégé of Gus. Gus described him as one of the few members of the younger generation who had penetrated the falseness of every “ism” of our era, from the farthest right to the most extreme left. In time I was to realize that Chessy was just as bright as Gus perceived, if not brighter. But in those days I tended to regard him as a clown, my court jester.

How did my parents take it all? Very complacently indeed. Mother attributed the old guard's dislike of publicity entirely to its jealousy of new and more colorful arrivals, and as she had always pored over the social columns, she liked them the more for making a feature of her daughter. After all, a good deal of the glory redounded on herself. People were constantly telling her what they had read about me, and she almost purred. Daddy's reaction was less enthusiastic but still accepting. The male company that he so largely kept did not read the social columns, and my new fame was not so frequently flung in his face, but when his attention was called to a news item about me, his complete literalness and lack of imagination made him champion me against the shrieks of Granny Struthers and her old maid daughter, Aunt Fanny. For if I was described as “brilliant” or “beautiful” in print, Daddy assumed I must be. He tended to see the world in the same colors as did such reporters. Besides, he was delighted that it all
cost
him so little.

The one expense that could not be avoided was a coming-out party. I did not have to have a big one, but I had to have one, and my parents were far too broke even to think of it. Grandma Struthers was the only hope, and Gus had pledged himself to bring her round.

Granny and Aunt Fanny occupied a brownstone on East Thirty-third Street stuffed to bursting with the eclectic collection of the crooked judge, who had had a rather florid taste for huge German porcelains, academic historical scenes and Turkish bazaars, hung one over the other on dark walls. Yet if one looked carefully one could spot a fine medieval reliquary glinting in a Turkish corner, or a “right” Corot above the door, or even a Roman scene by Alma-Tadema. Had we only waited until now before selling the collection, we would have made a fortune. But, alas, Daddy let it all go for a song when Granny died in 1940.

She belonged to a generation that did nothing to resist age or hide the double chin and gnarled neck. She wore a pince-nez that made her look severe, a black choker and large yellow diamonds. She said “poyel” for pearl and “goyel” for girl, in the manner of old Manhattan, and would ask young people who had been to a ball if they had seen many attractive “toilets,” so that ignorant people thought her vulgar. She affected to be spunky about her ailments and afflictions, but she was in fact an utterly self-centered valetudinarian. Aunt Fanny, endowed with a decayed, sexless prettiness, fluttered about her, fussed over her, asked people constantly whether they did not agree that she was “marvelous” and hated her. When Granny died, she left Aunt Fanny almost penniless.

But we didn't realize then that Granny was romping through her capital. We assumed that she was still rich and had to be cultivated for favors. Gus, however, did know it—how he discovered such things I never knew—and he used this useful piece of intelligence to crowbar the cost of my coming-out party out of her. It helped a good deal that he had known her since his childhood, his mother having been a flower girl at her wedding.