The Right Places
Authors: Stephen; Birmingham
The Right Places
(for the Right People)
Stephen Birmingham
For
Carol and Pavy
Contents
2. Kansas City: Seville on the Missouri
3. California's Central Valley: “Water, Wealth, Contentment, Health”
4. Fort Lauderdale: “How Big Is Your Boat?”
5. West Virginia: “In These Hills and Hollows”
PART TWO:
Where the Money Is Quiet
6. The North Carolina Pines: “Sand in Our Shoes”
7. The Alpine Set: “You Can Live Forever Here”
8. Fairfield County: Perilous Preserve
PART THREE:
The Simple Playgrounds
9. Sun Valley: “Mr. Harriman's Private Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More”
10. Mexico: In Search of What Acapulco Used to Be
11. New York, N.Y. 10022: Indestructible P.J.'s
12. New York, N.Y. 10019: What Are They Doing to Bergdorf Goodman?
14. U.S.A.: The Dwindling Pleasures of the Rich
15. London: His Excellency, the Ambassador
PART FIVE:
So the Rich Are Like You and Me
16. Yachting: Everybody's Doing It
17. “Come and Join Our Exclusive Club ⦠Please?”
18. Where to Get Young and Beautiful
19. The Dying Art of Social Climbing
Illustrations
Southampton, New York, July 1920
Kansas City's Country Club Plaza at Christmas
Livestock grazing in the San Joaquin Valley
Pier 66 Hotel, Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Jay Rockefeller with Danny Pauley in West Virginia
Mr. and Mrs. Albert W. Moss with their daughter Valerie
Bernie Cornfeld's chateau near Geneva, Switzerland
Commuters at New Canaan, Connecticut station
Rocky Cooper, Jack Hemingway, Ingrid Bergman, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable in Sun Valley, Idaho
Andrew Goodman with model at Bergdorf Goodman
Ambassador and Mrs. Annenberg with Mrs. Annenberg's daughter Mrs. Wallis Weingarten
Golfing in Yonkers, New York, winter, 1888
Symposium areaâBette's in Dallas, an extension of the Erno Laszlo Institute
Part One
“WHO NEEDS PARIS?”
United Press International Photo
High jinks at Southamptonâthen and now
Photo by Elliott Erwitt, Magnum
1
The Money Nobody Knows
I Think it started when Frank, the fresh-faced young man who delivers milk to our house on alternate days (I have never, alas, troubled to learn Frank's last name), announced that we would be having a substitute milkman for the next three weeks. He was taking his family on a skiing holiday to Val d'Isère. “Oh,” I said. “That sounds very nice.” I had never been to Val d'Isère.
Or possibly, from the other end of the scale, the incident that triggered my slow response was reading about a woman in Palm Beach named Mrs. William Wakeman who had shot her husband in the back because he had dared her to. He had, after all, just yanked her earrings out of her pierced ears. When she learned that he would be paralyzed from the waist down as a result, she cried, “Now what am I going to do for sex?” He later died.
Or perhaps it was when, also in Palm Beach, queen of winter resorts, I learned of a hostess who, for no particular reason, received her party guests reclining in an oversize baby carriage, sucking a pacifier.
Palm Beach seemed to be losing its grip on itself. Not long after that there had been, in the social columns of the Palm Beach
News
, a lengthy report of a “poodle wedding.” The item noted: “The bride was attired in a dual-length ivory satin gown, short in front and long in back, trimmed with Alençon lace. Her long veil of French illusion fell to her turquoise-tinted toenails from the crown of seed pearls attached
to her topknot.” Who was having a better time, I wonderedâthose people in Palm Beach, or Frank in the Alps?
Nor was what was happening, or appeared to be happening, restricted to choice acreage of Florida real estate. In Southampton, New York, a queen, reportedly, of northeastern resorts, a man said: “It's fun here for a while, at the beginning of the season, when everyone is opening up their houses, and you see all the people you haven't seen for a while. People all work on their tans, and the parties are fun. But after a few weeks it gets kind of boring. You see the same people again and again, and by the end of the season this is a hateful place. All the love affairs that were fresh and fun at the start of the season have gone stale, husbands and wives are at each others' throats, there's nothing new to talk about, and everybody literally despises everybody else. By September, nobody can wait to get away.”
What it is, of course, is that things are not as they once were. Society, or the idea of societyâin the sense of a group of attractive and well-heeled people enjoying each other in certain attractive and generally expensive placesâis not dead, exactly. But it has spread to include a great many other people who would never before have been considered a part of society and who, furthermore, would never have wanted to be considered as such. It is not that no one has the wherewithal (what with taxes and all) to enjoy the good life. On the contrary, it has got so that almost anyone beyond the level of poverty can enjoy it, or at least some of it. In the process, the old notion of “exclusivity” has almost completely disappeared. The resorts and the clubs and the suburbs and the compounds of the wealthy and wellborn have lost their old meanings and, in the process, their power to impress. The barriersâof money, character, class, or breedingâhave vanished, if they ever really existed, and those who had tried so hard to establish and confirm their existence are now left stranded and adrift, left with nothing to do but finger revolvers and munch on pacifiersâanything to provide distraction from the tedium at hand. The old idea of society in America was based on keeping the others out, the wrong people, as it were. But it is futile to erect a barricade when no one wants to get in. It is pointless to be exclusive when there is no one to exclude. Abandoned in places like Palm Beach and Southampton, the men and women who once thought of themselves as America's
social leaders are now looking at each other somewhat dazedly and wondering where it all went, how it all happened so fast, what became of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the days when the very rich were different from you and me. And, in the meantime, the people who have money to enjoy are, for the most part, people nobody knows from places where nobody goes.
At the same time, the
right
places are really in the mind, aren't they? Aren't they
where you are?
They are in Kansas City, for example, or in Bakersfield, or on a deserted beach in Mexico. Nobody is going to tell Fresno that it is
wrong
and get away with it. The right place may still be the top of the money and social heap, but today almost anybody anywhere can find the top of that heap without too many directions. Today, when a once-fashionable specialty store such as Bergdorf Goodman has opened a shop for the hippie trade, when a once-disreputable Third Avenue saloon is now one of the most popular spots in town, and when yachting is a sport of corporations, isn't it silly to talk about “nobodies” from “nowhere”? So let's stop all that, now that everybody's in the act. And let's look at some of the lovely deltas and oases, mental and otherwise, where the good life is flourishing at full strength.
As a writer, I've looked at some of these places in the last year or so, and have jotted down some of my impressions and opinions of this new and still changing mood and style. You can even glimpse it in Colusa and in all the way stations of the lecture circuit. But wait.
In a blurred rush of feeling, the bemused priest in Fitzgerald's short story “Absolution” cries out: “When a whole lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering all the time.” One rather quickly guesses that this was also the author's belief, or fond hopeâthat when clean-limbed youths and slender girls of good name and decent expectations met under the stars, with an orchestra playing, at the country club dance, or strolled together on a green lawn beside a sparkling pool, life flickered, expanded, lifted to a kind of gauzy climax. These were the best people, the right people in the right places. These were people who not only knew but cared which St. Paul's was the right boys' school and which was not. These were people in John O'Hara's novels, always careful to wear shoes from Peel's and to carry Vuitton luggage. (Never Vuitton shoes and Peel's
luggage.) To these people, things mattered. And things went glimmeringâall the time.
There were, furthermore, a lot of people who subscribed to this pretty view, who felt it had solidity and substance. But it was like, to use an earthbound comparison, the great soybean scandal of a few years back. Huge fortunes were gambledâa whole Wall Street underwriting firm staked itselfâon huge storage tanks that were allegedly filled with valuable oil. In the excitement (dreams of riches, visions of power) no one thought to apply the simplest sort of testâto pick up a stick and bang the side of one of the tankers to see whether it was really filled with oil or not.
