The Golden Dream (10 page)

Grosse Pointe started—as did Westchester County and the Philadelphia Main Line—as a resort, and the old first-cabin families built summer and weekend homes there. There was a logic to it. Detroit's rich used to live in large city mansions along Jefferson Avenue, and the Jefferson Avenue trolley line ended at the Grosse Pointe line. Beyond that was country, and Lake St. Clair was still clear and sweet, as the name implied. Immigrant French farmers, who gave the fat point of land its name, had small, rectangular farms in the area, and as these were bought up, one by one, by the rich, roads were built along the farms' borders, which accounts for the strict grid pattern of Grosse Pointe streets today. The French influence lingers in strange ways. A street with the odd name Kercheval is presumed to descend from the French
cours de cheval
—“horse path.” The old rich built along the lakeshore places that were sprawling, comfortable, countrified, but not particularly grandiose. Life in Grosse Pointe was unhurried and informal. “It was lovely in the old days,” says Countess Cyril Tolstoi, kin of the McMillans and the widow of one of Count Leo's nephews. The countess, whose house is now on a typically crowded Grosse Pointe street, says: “This place is all that's left of my grandfather's farm. His property ran all the way down to the lake, which is now I don't know how many blocks away. It was a long walk through the woods to the nearest neighbor's house. Now Grosse Pointe is so big and crowded that when I go to parties I hardly know anybody. I'm introduced to people I've never even
heard
of.” The countess's butler pours a martini from a silver shaker and, as if to emphasize her remarks, the tinkle of a bell from a Good Humor truck can be heard outside her heavily curtained windows. And Mrs. Raymond Dykema, another old-timer, says: “There was a feeling of
importance
, growing up in Grosse Pointe in those days. As a girl, I would sit on our veranda and watch the ships go by and know that my father
built
them. They were
our
ships. It made one feel as though one were a part of the city and what the city was building and creating and contributing. That feeling is all gone now.”

Then came Henry Ford, Sr., bringing with him the dawn of the Automobile Age. Quickly, in his wake, came the great automobile fortunes, and Grosse Pointe was in for a huge spate of castle-building—French châteaux, Norman keeps, Tudor castles, ducal palaces designed to outdo Blenheim. Gothic arches, gargoyles, crenelated rooftops, and flying buttresses abounded. During the first decade of the twentieth century it was estimated that the servant
population of Grosse Pointe was thirty times that of the new gentry. Automobile money was big money, and it required a big show.

Today, most of the castles have fallen to the wrecker's ball. The few that remained along Lake Shore Road gave it the nickname “Widows' Row,” since nearly all were owned by elderly widows who refused to bow to the winds of change. One of the last holdouts was the late Mrs. Joseph Schlotman (a salt Ford), whose house, a copy of a Tudor manor house, was complete with indoor fountains, greenhouses, and a ballroom with a private elevator. Mrs. Schlotman used to like to reminisce about the old days when she and her husband kept a huge yacht parked at the foot of the extensive lawn. “We used to have five miles of private fishing grounds on the Cascapedia River,” she once said. Did she actually
own
five miles of fishing grounds? a visitor asked. “No, darn it, we didn't. You can't buy a river. You have to rent it,” was her reply.

One of the last big places on Lake Shore Road which has managed to stand, undivided, in much the same state as it was originally conceived is the red brick Georgian mansion built by Roy Chapin, who was the head of Hudson Motors. It owes its life to the fact that it was bought several years ago by Henry Ford II.

“The automobile money took over, and then the automobile business brought more people,” sighs one old-line resident. “They all wanted to live in Grosse Pointe because it was
the
place to live. They crowded in until now Grosse Pointe is simply bursting at the seams.” A few Grosse Pointers have defected and moved northwest to the suburbs of Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills—where there is more space and air and, actually, hills. But Bloomfield Hills today means automobile money too—General Motors money, in large part. In the suburbs of Detroit, automobile money cannot be escaped. Only Detroit can be escaped. And the automobile-rich families enjoy pointing out that even first-cabin families such as the Joys have succumbed to automobile money. In the early 1900s, Mrs. Joy's husband, her brother, Truman Newberry, and a number of other local businessmen quietly bought controlling interest in the Packard Automobile Company and moved it from Warren, Ohio, to Detroit. “So much for your ‘pre-gasoline' snobs,” says one Grosse Pointer.

But Mrs. Joy held on to her electric.

*
Mr. Joy was an early ham radio enthusiast whose specialty was picking up disasters from airwaves. From Treasure Hill, the Watch Hill estate, he was the first American to learn of the sinking of the
Titanic
.

*
At a population density of one person per 300 square feet.

SOUTH

8

The Country Club Set

“Jews and blacks are accepted everywhere here,” says a Main Line woman, adding, with almost a touch of pride, “except, of course, the clubs.”

The local clubs are five in number—the Philadelphia Country Club, the Merion Cricket Club, the Merion Golf Club, the Gulph Mills Golf Club, and the Radnor Hunt Club—and are strung out along the length of the Main Line. As they march westward from the Philadelphia Country Club (the least fashionable of the five), they are rated as increasingly exclusive and choosy, until one reaches the Gulph Mills Golf Club, where, they say, “someone has to die” before a proposed member can move off the waiting list; and “the dear old cozy” Radnor Hunt, which, as its name implies, is a paddock for wealthy members of the horsy set.

For years, America's suburban clubs have managed to lead an almost charmed existence. They were there, they catered to their members' athletic whims and fancies, they were restricted. The membership policies of the Gulph Mills Golf Club were no different from those of the Los Angeles Country Club—except that the Los Angeles Country Club restricts against Jews
and
movie people, on the assumption that they are one and the same breed. All over America, people who couldn't join the clubs accepted the situation matter-of-factly, while those who could, whose backgrounds and pedigrees were up to club acceptability standards, waited patiently to be invited. Whether one could—or wanted to—join a club remained
a strictly personal and private affair. Clubs' policies went largely unquestioned. Freedom of assembly, after all, could be interpreted as freedom
from
assembly, and freedom of association as freedom
from
association. The feeling was: let people club as they choose.

Then, early in 1977, President-elect Carter announced that he “hoped” those in his administration would voluntarily withdraw from private clubs which had discriminatory membership policies, though he would not require that they do so. It was certainly an unprecedented statement in the history of American Presidents and Presidents-elect. All at once, membership in exclusive clubs became an intense public and political issue—private no longer. And it started with Griffin Bell, the man whom Carter had appointed as his attorney general, the highest-ranking legal official in the country. Mr. Bell belonged to two restricted Atlanta clubs—the Piedmont Driving Club and the Capital City Club—and after lamely complaining that he would lose something in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars if he quit these clubs, Mr. Bell eventually did as he had been asked and resigned from both. Suddenly, a can of worms was opened in clubs all over the country, where, it turned out, the can had been lying about for a long time—particularly in Atlanta.

In the mid-1950s, for example, a group of German students had been brought to Atlanta as part of a student exchange program and, as a matter of course, was invited by the German consul general to the Capital City Club. During the visit, one student happened to ask, “Are there any Jewish members of this club?” No, he was assured—perhaps on the assumption that this was what he wanted to hear. An extraordinary scene followed. One student burst into tears, and sobbed that the reason the club excluded Jews was the same reason six million had died. What started as a polite occasion turned into a rout, with students and club members shouting ugly accusations at each other. At the time, Atlantans who heard about the episode were shocked. But Atlanta, a city that considers itself the queen city of the South and prides itself on its hospitality, up-to-dateness, and efficiency, soon pushed the incident into the bottom drawer of its memory chest, and went about business as usual.

Now, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, the city is in an uproar again, calling itself unpleasant names. In addition to Mr. Bell, Carter's ex-budget director, Bert Lance, turned out to have
been a member of both the Capital City Club and the Piedmont Driving Club. He, too, elected to resign from both—again leaving the implication that membership in them ran contrary to the public interest. Did that mean, Atlanta wanted to know, that there was something
wrong
with its clubs? Suddenly Atlanta's Capital City Club began to seem the quintessential city club, and the Piedmont Driving Club, on the outskirts of town, the quintessential country club, encapsulating all the problems of the American breed.

The immediate reaction to the dispute in Atlanta was not breast-beating or agonized soul-searching, but—as in the case of the German students—almost total confusion. Was there, for example, an actual policy against Jews or blacks or both at either of the two clubs? No one, it suddenly seemed, was entirely sure. Both the Capital City and the Driving Club quickly produced copies of their rules and bylaws, proudly pointing out that nowhere, in the sections pertaining to membership, was specific mention made of race or religion. On the other hand, both clubs conceded that there “probably” were no Jews and certainly were no blacks in either club—but on the question of Jews there seemed to be some doubt. “I'm sure we have some Jews in the Driving Club,” said Pegram Harrison, an Atlanta lawyer and Coca-Cola heir, “but I couldn't tell you who they are. Frankly, I've never thought much about it until now.” Mr. James D. Custance, the Driving Club's manager, did not clear things up when he said: “Any member who would invite a Jew or a black into his living room could invite a Jew or black to the club.” One wonders how many members of the club are the sort who would have Jews or blacks in their houses. Nor did the club's president, Frank Carter, a prominent Atlanta real estate man, help matters much by asserting: “The Driving Club only takes in members of fine old families.”

In the confusion, all sorts of odd stories began to emerge. There was the case of Michael Peter Rich, the young scion of the Rich's department store fortune, and the great-grandson of the store's founder, Morris Rich. Michael Rich's father was Richard Rich, one of the city's great philanthropists. During the Depression, when the city of Atlanta was close to bankruptcy and was forced to pay its employees with scrip instead of cash, only Rich's of Atlanta stepped forward to say that it would cash the scrip. Depending on whom one talks to, Michael Rich has tried to get into the Driving Club one, two, or as many as a dozen times—all without success. The reasons given for his rejection vary. “He was a member of Sigma Alpha
Epsilon, which is a Christian fraternity,” says one Driving Club member, “but we heard that some of his fraternity brothers didn't like him.”

Both Morris Rich and Richard Rich were practicing Jews, but Michael Rich converted to Christianity a number of years ago and is a baptized Presbyterian. He married, furthermore, a Christian girl, the daughter of William S. Woods, who is nothing less than an honorary life member of the Piedmont Driving Club. For years, Rich and his wife used the facilities of the club, signing his father-in-law's name and settling accounts with Mr. Woods at the end of each year. “I was at the club so often, I'm sure a lot of people thought I was a member,” Rich says. Then, in 1972, by his own account, Michael Peter Rich was asked to join the Driving Club for the first and only time. (One is
asked
—one does not ask—to join such a club.) His name, with a proposer, a second, and a third, went up on the bulletin board beside the front desk. Some weeks later, Rich was informed, regretfully, that his membership had been turned down. “They told me at the time that it was because I'd supported Andrew Young for Congress,” Michael Rich says, “and I thought, well, that's as good an excuse as any. Of course I knew the real reason—my Jewish heritage.”

In 1976, Rich and his wife were divorced. This means that as an “unmarried daughter of a member,” Rich's former wife can enjoy full privileges of the Piedmont Driving Club, and so can her children. Rich himself, on the other hand, can enter the club only at the invitation of a member. “And I don't go there often,” he says. “Ever since 1972, I've felt distinctly uncomfortable there, to say the least.” When the Rich children, part Jewish, reach age twenty-one and become eligible for membership, will they be asked to join? No one knows for sure.

Michael Rich wryly remembers when, a number of years ago, his father was invited to join the Driving Club. “Are you changing your policy, or making an exception?” the senior Mr. Rich wanted to know. “We're making an exception,” he was told. “Then I don't care to join,” Mr. Rich replied.

More recently, there was the curious case of Rule 18 of the Driving Club's bylaws. Rule 18 covers “Persons Granted Club Privileges” who, though not members, are given full benefits of membership, and over the years, the Persons have included prominent local judges (though no Jewish judges), clergymen (though no rabbis), and, by tradition, the mayor of Atlanta. In 1970, however,
Rule 18 was revised to read: “No new Persons will be granted Club privileges as presently allowed under Rule 18 after April 1, 1970.” What caused the raising of the drawbridge against new Privileged Persons in 1970? It seems to many Atlantans more than just a coincidence that this was the year Atlanta elected its first Jewish mayor, Sam Massell. And had Rule 18 not been revised to exclude Mr. Massell, it most certainly would have been when Maynard Jackson came to office a few years later.