The Golden Dream (22 page)

It has only one restaurant of any quality, the Olympia Tea Room—locally known as “The Greek's”—famous for bay scallops, lobster, high prices, and not having a bar. Why would anyone want to summer in a resort that has no fire department, no sewers, and one restaurant which has no bar? The answer is simply that Watch Hill has never had any of these things, and sees no reason why it ever should. What makes Watch Hill special, its residents feel, is that it has steadfastly refused to pretend that it is anything it isn't. It is, they say, a wonderful place for kids because there is absolutely
no place for them to go, and no way they can get into trouble. Entertainment for Watch Hill youth is confined to planned activities at the club, and as a result, Watch Hill children tend to be every bit as proper as their parents.

What Watch Hill has also is a strong sense of continuity and family tradition. In Watch Hill, one is not permitted to speak of one's “family house” unless the house has been in the family for at least three generations. Watch Hill is proud of the fact that Misquamicut is the third-oldest golf club in the United States. “Downtown,” at the end of Bay Street, Watch Hill's one shopping street, with its cluster of small, expensive shops, is a little merry-go-round said to be the oldest operating carrousel in America. For diversions, Watch Hill prefers cozy, family-oriented, old-timey things—like kite-flying contests, for example, with prizes awarded for “Distance” and “Endurance.” There is an annual tug-of-war contest “for those over sixteen,” and there are sand-castle-building contests, and contests for sand art, “using only what's found on the beach.” There are clam-digging contests, with a prize going to the person who can dig up the biggest clam. Also, each year Watch Hill awards a prize to “The Most Harmonious Family.”

In keeping with its prevailing mood, Watch Hill is perhaps proudest of its little Victorian chapel, with its natural wood interior and trussed ceiling, which has changed very little since its dedication in 1877. To be a member of the Watch Hill Chapel Society is a great honor. Near the altar of the chapel, above the organ pipes, mottoes in blue and gold read:
ONE LORD
—
ONE FAITH
, and
THE CHURCH IS MANY
—
AS THE WAVES
—
BUT ONE AS THE SEA
. In accordance with this, the chapel's eleven-o'clock service is Protestant (with Episcopal and Presbyterian clergymen presiding on roughly alternate Sundays), and two Roman Catholic masses are offered earlier on Sunday mornings. Since the chapel was dedicated to the performance of Christian rites, no rabbi has ever addressed a Watch Hill congregation. But this is no problem, since there are virtually no Jews in Watch Hill. When Watch Hill is labeled “restricted,” however, residents take quick exception and point out that for many years Albert Einstein kept a summer home in Watch Hill and was treated fondly by the community. He loved to sail, but was a terrible sailor, and whenever he took his sailboat out, he regularly managed to run it up on the same rock, from which he regularly had to be rescued. Dr. Einstein, of course, was a famous physicist, and so may have been tolerated as a celebrated oddity.

Throughout the summer season, a series of visiting clergymen are invited to conduct the Protestant services at the Watch Hill Chapel, and these men are chosen for the social standing of their home parishes as much as for anything else. The late Reverend Arthur Lee Kinsolving, for example, retired rector of New York's elegant St. James's Episcopal Church—a man said to keep only two books on his desk: the Holy Bible and the New York
Social Register
—was a frequent visitor, and was scheduled to appear in the pulpit during the summer of 1977. When he died earlier in the year, a Watch Hill mourner at his memorial service in New York complained, “He had no right to do this without consulting us.”

Other visiting clergymen are Reverend Ernest Gordon, chaplain of Princeton University, and Reverend Samuel Lindsay of the Royal Poinciana Chapel in Palm Beach. Not long ago, the visiting minister was Right Reverend John M. Krumm, D.D., bishop of the Diocese of Southern Ohio, who had such a fine time at the party tossed in his behalf the night before that he lost the notes for his Sunday sermon. He improvised, however, with a sermon titled “The Church of Your Choice.” In his remarks, the bishop illustrated “choice” by pointing out that we all choose things. We choose husbands, wives, and so on. We are offered a wide choice of things to buy in television commercials. “We are urged to choose this make of car, this brand of toothpaste, this kind of mattress,” said the bishop. At the word “mattress,” there was an audible rustle in the congregation, and an outsider might have inferred from this that the bishop had used a dirty, or at least suggestive, word. After the service, the stir was explained when the bishop was approached by Mr. Claude Douthit, Jr. (a trustee and former president of the Chapel Society, and fourth-generation Watch Hill), who asked him, “I hope that remark about mattresses was not intended for me personally.” Mr. Douthit's wife, the former Nancy Simmons, is an heiress to a mattress fortune.

Watch Hill takes its wealth casually, and even makes little jokes about it. When Paul Myers stated, in his wife's hearing, “I'd never marry a rich woman unless I really loved her,” his wife said, “Why, darling, that's the sweetest thing you've ever said about me!”

Watch Hill is often spoken of in the same breath as nearby Newport, and nothing could annoy Watch Hill people more. Watch Hill, they point out, is simply
not
Newport, nor do the two summer colonies have anything at all in common—except, of course, wealth, and the fact that they exist in the same state.
“Watch Hill is
much
older than Newport,” one Watch Hill woman says, and it is—a little. Newport reached its glittering heyday in the Gay Nineties and the Mauve Decade which followed, and when one thinks of Newport one thinks of liveried footmen, gold dinner services, old Mrs. Astor in her black wig and ropes of diamonds, pompous Ward McAllister and his lists, bitchy Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, and effeminate Harry Lehr. Watch Hill never went in for any such nonsense, and regards Newport as a collection of gauche, pretentious, New York
arrivistes
. The gilded and marble palaces that are Newport's “cottages” bear no resemblance to the weathered, gabled, and shingled style of Watch Hill. It is almost bad form to mention Newport in Watch Hill, and most of the regular summer residents have never set foot in the place, though it is only a few miles away. Newport today is dismissed as “touristy,” while the average tourist would find little to attract him to Watch Hill. There is only one road leading into town, and when there, the tourist would find himself in a cul-de-sac. “Watch Hill is to Newport what East Hampton is to Southampton,” one member of the colony explains, meaning that Watch Hill's wealth is decidedly more old-shoe and unshowy. Unlike both Newport and Southampton women, Watch Hill party-goers do not show up in designer dresses and bedecked with jewels. In Newport and Southampton, divorces, lawsuits, alimony, and custody battles are the staples of dinner-party conversation. Watch Hill frowns on divorces, and prefers “harmonious” families. It disapproves of extramarital love affairs. By contrast, a Southampton woman says: “By the end of the summer, everybody's ready to go home. By then, all the feuds have broken out and all the love affairs have gone stale. There's nothing more to talk about.”

(A summer resort that
is
close to Watch Hill in feeling is Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, Maine, the suburb away from the suburbs that is most favored by Philadelphians. Rockefellers may hold sway over Seal Harbor, but Northeast, down the road, belongs to Philadelphia, and represents a coalition of Philadelphia's religious, educational, and social lives. For years, the rectors of Philadelphia's favorite schools, Groton and St. Paul's—Dr. Endicott Peabody and Dr. Samuel S. Drury—maintained summer homes there, along with most of the prominent Episcopal bishops of the East. When one marries Northeast Harbor, it is like marrying Watch Hill: it lasts. In 1899, for example, the late George Wharton Pepper spent the summer there with his fiancée and his
parents-in-law to be. “Thereafter,” he wrote in his autobiography, “there have been only three summers in fifty-four years when we have failed to visit our beloved Mt. Desert.” And when Mrs. J. Madison Taylor of Philadelphia died in 1952, it was noted in her obituary that she was preparing for her seventy-fifth consecutive summer at Northeast Harbor.)

Watch Hill has two rules, or Rules: Never try to outdress your hostess, and never try to flirt with her husband. As for dress, Watch Hill has one or two black-tie dinners per summer, but otherwise the evening garb for men is sports jackets and shirts with open collars, along with trousers by Lilly Pulitzer. (In Newport and in Southampton, it is possible to go to black-tie parties every night all summer long.) At the Misquamicut Club, the only daytime rule of dress is “No bare feet in the clubhouse,” and this, the club's president points out, is more a matter of safety than of etiquette. As the late Mrs. John Heminway once remarked: “Here, it's so chic to be unchic that it's almost chi-chi.”

This is not to say that Watch Hill isn't “social” in the party sense. Watch Hill loves its parties, and during the summer season, there is usually a party every night, and sometimes several. With all the parties to go to, there is a commensurate amount of drinking. A typical Watch Hill social day begins with pre-luncheon cocktails at the Beach Club, followed by lunch, followed by a nap in order to rest up for the pre-dinner cocktail parties and, later, the after-dinner drinking parties. Watch Hill has also established the tradition of the “dressing drink,” or “d.d.,” which is the drink you have while dressing for the cocktail party.

But otherwise Watch Hill contents itself with its tennis, its golf, its beaching and swimming, and its sailing. As in most resorts, a discernible social gulf exists between the golfers, who belong to Misquamicut, and the sailors, who belong to the Yacht Club. There is thus a “golfing group” and a “sailing group,” and the two groups don't mix all that much. In between, there are always bits of insular gossip going around—such as the tale about the wedding of the daughter of a prominent member of the colony. The bride was visibly pregnant, and Peter Duchin, who was playing for the reception, led off the dancing with “Just in Time.”

“Watch Hill is such a
relaxed place
,” says one woman. “There's no
striving
here, no social climbing or competitiveness. There's never been such a thing as a ‘social leader' here, nor does anybody want or aspire to be one—unless you want to think of us all as social
leaders, each in his or her own way. There have never been any serious social feuds here, the way there always seem to be in Newport. If I'm not invited to a certain party, I don't feel I'm being slighted. After all, you can't ask everybody to every party. No one has to prove who he or she is, because we all know who we are, and many of our parents knew each other too. Of course, some people find it a little boring and inbred—after all, it
is
the same faces, pretty much, summer after summer. And some people, who want a more glamorous sort of thing, desert us for the Hamptons. But the rest of us wouldn't dream of spending summers anywhere else.”

It is the relaxed air of unshakable imperturbability, they say, that has attracted so many nice people to Watch Hill. Even the transient guests at the Ocean House tend to be gently bred little old ladies who have been coming there for years and make no more noise than the clicking of knitting needles. It is Watch Hill's
niceness
, its sense of nineteenth-century gentility and
politesse
, that caused Mrs. Walbridge Taft (kin of the Ohio Tafts) to do what she did. When Mrs. Taft built a new garage next to her Watch Hill house, she became concerned that it blocked her neighbors' view of the bay. So she hired an artist, who painted a view of the bay on the side of her garage, complete with scudding clouds and a sailboat. Everyone loved Elizabeth Taft for that.

There are a few things that Watch Hill might like to see changed, but not many. Some people wish the resort had a good motel, since even the biggest homes overflow with houseguests. And a good restaurant that had a bar might be nice. Otherwise, most people would prefer to keep Watch Hill as it is for all time to come. But what of the youngest Watch Hill generation: will they want to carry on the long tradition, and continue to live a summer life out of another era? Apparently so. The Paul Myerses' two teenage children have been summering at Watch Hill with their parents for as long as they can remember, in the house, built in 1886, that has always been in the family and was handed down to Mrs. Myers from her great-grandfather William P. Anderson, the first president of the Misquamicut Club. The house stands on a large acreage of lawns and gardens overlooking a salt pond, a tall stand of beach grass, and the Atlantic Ocean. There is a guest cottage, and the pond teems with snapping turtles, which, like the Myerses, appear to have made this their home for generations and refuse to give it up. The main house, with its wide covered porches and its enormous basement kitchen, presided over by Goldie, the family cook,
has become one of the popular gathering places for Watch Hill youngsters, who sit around most evenings, talking and drinking a bit of beer and wine. “This house is a kind of magnet for kids!” says young Jamie Myers.

Mrs. Myers says: “Believe it or not, one of the things my kids talk about and argue about is which one of them is going to inherit the house. They couldn't care less about the house in Cincinnati. All they care about is Edgmere, and who's going to get it. I'm not altogether happy that they're already making plans for what's going to happen when I'm gathered to my Maker, but I suppose it's nice to know they feel that way about the house.”