The Right Places (11 page)

Jay's folksy manner, his friends insist, is
not
a put-on. He really
does
want to be liked for the guy he is, not for the money or the name. His friend Ray La Montaigne likes to tell the story of how, one day when Ray's father was visiting him from New Hampshire, Jay Rockefeller dropped by. Ray introduced Jay to his father, and then, after visiting for an hour or so, Jay announced that he had to be on his way. He started out the back door toward where the XK–E was parked. “Oh, Jay,” said Ray La Montaigne. “If you're going out that way, would you mind dropping that bag of garbage in the can as you go by?” “Sure,” Jay Rockefeller replied, scooped up the garbage, and was off.

“My father,” says Ray La Montaigne, “was born in French Canada, of poor parents, and became a self-made man in the restaurant business, in a little New Hampshire town. To him and to others like him of his generation, the great symbol of American success was John D. Rockefeller. For weeks after that day Jay came by, all my father could do was shake his head and say, ‘Can you
imagine?
John D. Rockefeller the Fourth takes out my son's garbage!' Now that's what
I
call beautiful people! If anybody can put West Virginia on the map, he can!”

Part Two

WHERE THE MONEY IS QUIET

Photo by Bud Lee

The Albert Mosses in horsey Southern Pines

6

The North Carolina Pines: “Sand in Our Shoes”

If there are people in Kansas City, Central California, and West Virginia who are longing to get their places and their accomplishments on the map, there are others in other places who wish devoutly that the mapmaker would forget that they are there, where there is money that almost nobody knows about, which is just what those who have the money would prefer. “Please don't come here,” these people say. “We have found what we want here, and there are enough of us already. We want what we have, and we want it to stay exactly as it is.” This is getting harder and harder to do.

For example, to the average Florida-bound motorist in winter, the stretch of U.S. Highway I that cuts across the center of North Carolina—past towns with such unprepossessing names as Gupton, Method, Vass, Stem, Mamers, and Wagram, and across rivers called, ridiculously, the Pee Dee and the Haw—is a journey merely to be endured. Woebegone farmhouses, none far from surrender to the wind, spatter the landscape, derelicts adrift in the grass. There is even a quality of thinness in the sunlight slanting against red earth that speaks eloquently of hard times. One longs for the softness of Spanish moss and palm trees that will be encountered farther south, and emerges from this countryside speaking piously of the poverty of North Carolina. It is hard for the uninitiated to believe that in the middle of all this, not far from the main north-south route, lie two tiny towns, Pinehurst and Southern Pines, with a combined permanent
population of a little more than six thousand (swelling considerably during the winter season) that are devoted to the quiet and gentle pleasures of the rich.

Here, for a few square miles, the mood is unhurried and peaceful. These are the Carolina sandhills, softly rolling country with tall stands of loblolly and long-leaf pine creating deep, uncluttered vistas that seem to stretch for miles, free of undergrowth except for scattered patches of scrub oak. The sandy earth, in dappled sunlight, is blanketed with needles and fallen cones, and the air is heady with the odor of the pines and bright with the scarlet wings of cardinals. There is an abundance of bird life. Thousands of the North's summer birds spend their winters here, and wild geese are protected on a huge preserve. Each tiny pond is dotted with ducks.

In the village of Pinehurst, narrow lanes without names twist in and around and back upon each other, in a plan calculated to befuddle the interloper, past all hedges and gates and drives that lead to large and sprawling houses shaded by magnolia and rhododendron, suffused with privacy. In early spring, the town's most beautiful moment, gardens explode with daffodils and tulips, and the little streets are aflower with azaleas and dogwood. Camellias blossom in midwinter. Farther out, in more countrified Southern Pines, the zigzag split-rail fences extend along unpaved roads for miles, past pastures and stables of elegantly bred horses, private paddocks and show rings and jumping and racecourses. “Here, for status, you don't build a swimming pool. You build a private racetrack,” says one Southern Pines woman. Through the pines, on an average winter morning, you can catch a glimpse of hunters in their pinks, riding to the hounds. Houses here are spaced far apart, across this open country.

Together, the two little towns would seem to compose a kind of island. “In the five months I spend here each winter, I don't think I travel more than a radius of five miles,” says one woman. At the same time, an invisible but quite tangible frontier separates Pinehurst from Southern Pines. “Officially,” says another winter resident, “Southern Pines has nothing to do with Pinehurst, and Pinehurst has nothing to do with Southern Pines. At least that's the theory. Of course, in actual practice it doesn't work out that way, and there's a certain amount of mixing back and forth. But not too much. In Southern
Pines, we speak of being over
here
, and talk of Pinehurst as being over
there
. We talk of
we
, as opposed to
they
. We complain about having to go
all the way
to Pinehurst, and they grouse about coming
all the way
to Southern Pines.” The two towns are scarcely more than four miles apart.

Such disparity, furthermore, within what would seem to be an enclave of general privilege, has nothing to do with nuances of social position—not outwardly, at least. It is not a question of one town being
better
than another—not exactly. It is a difference based on the divergence of two athletic pastimes. Pinehurst is devoted to golf, and Southern Pines is dedicated to horses. It is ironic, perhaps, that right next door to each other should exist a capital of a sport—golf—that in the last fifty years has truly become a game for the masses, and the capital of another sport—fox-hunting—that hardly anybody understands, much less indulges in, any more.

But of course golf and horses beget two entirely different life styles. When a horse person speaks of “walking around hitting golf balls,” and a golfer speaks of “galloping around on horseback,” it is clear that the two will never see eye to eye on anything. They are much further apart here in the pines than Democrats and Republicans, even blacks and whites. The charm of horseflesh eludes Pinehurst competely, and Southern Pines considers golf a thoroughly frivolous preoccupation, even a middle-class one (even though, originally, golf was a game played by the aristocracy). Golf has become democratized; foxhunting has not, and is suffering for it as the older devotees pass on and leave few interested youngsters to replace them. Horse people
do
think of themselves as socially superior to golfers. When a golfer was declaiming enthusiastically about the delights of his sport to a horse person not long ago, the visitor listened patiently for a while and then said, “Well, perhaps—but golf isn't exactly what you'd call a
gentleman's
game.” And there is the nub of the matter. Horses are owned and bred and ridden and hunted and shown by ladies and gentlemen. Golf is something played by cloddish conventioneers who come each year to Pinehurst's big, many-verandaed hotel, the Carolina.

Pinehurst takes its golf so seriously that in order to get so much as a starting time on one of the Pinehurst Country Club's five courses one must actually
live
in Pinehurst. In Southern Pines, the horse is worshipped
even after death. The garden of Miss Betty Dumaine, an ardent horsewoman, encompasses the massive grave of Grey Fox, a great hunter in his day, and his resting place is marked with a huge flat stone monument, engraved with his name, dates, and lineage, set in the grass and surrounded by a planting of shrubbery and flowers. The stone is as large as most terraces, and is frequently used as such—set up with tables and garden chairs—and is a popular gathering-place for cocktails when Miss Dumaine entertains. Many a solemn toast has been raised to the memory of her noble animal.

Southern Pines, furthermore, concentrates its affection on one sort of horse only: the hunter. “There are a few trotting people over in Pinehurst, but they never come here, you never see them,” says a Southern Pines man. As for racehorses, “Well, several people here have one or two—but we don't concentrate on them. We don't want to be like Lexington, Kentucky, which is the horse-
racing
capital. We don't want to attract the sort of people that go with horse racing—
jockeys
, you know, and that sort of crowd.” At the same time, Southern Pines insists that it has “all the best hunters and show horses, the ones that will be shown at Madison Square Garden and all the best shows, all across the country.” The horsey heart of Southern Pines is the Moore County Hunt, founded a number of years ago by the late James Boyd, who loved horses and wrote period novels, including
Drums
(1925) and
Marching On
(1927). Boyd's widow still lives in Southern Pines and, according to one resident, “still considers herself the grandest woman here.” After Mr. Boyd's death, another man, Mr. W. Ozell Moss—and the Mosses are easily the grandest
couple
in Southern Pines—took over the Hunt and developed it until it has become by far the most exclusive club in the area, and one of the great hunts in the United States.

The Mosses themselves own the Hunt's pack of hounds, considered the “best-mannered”—in hunting parlance—of any pack anywhere. Three mornings a week—Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday—during a season that extends from Thanksgiving to the end of March, the Moore County Hunt assembles, and fifty to a hundred hunters take off through the trees, across the fields, and over the fences of Southern Pines in pursuit of the fox.

Fox-hunting is heavily surrounded by rules and rituals. Earning your
“hunt buttons,” or the right to wear pinks, is as difficult and as important as earning one's “H” at Harvard used to be, back in the days when all such things were taken seriously. If not entitled to wear pink, one must wear black. An elaborate set of regulations determines which style of hat one must wear. Visitors from other hunts must wear their identifying colors, but otherwise one is not supposed to be “conspicuous” in dress. Southern Pines was highly critical, not long ago, when Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was photographed at a hunt in New Jersey wearing wrap-around sunglasses (not only bad form, but dangerous in case of a fall), without her hair tied back in a little net bag or snood (as good form dictates), and wearing entirely the wrong kind of hat—guilty on three counts of being a parvenue. The strict traditionalism of fox-hunting takes in such lofty dicta as (from a manual on the sport): “There is no class of person who gets the Hunt into disrepute more than
grooms
[italics the manual's]. These, as a rule, are thoughtless and often leave gates open, causing damage by allowing livestock to wander. Strictest orders should be given to them by their masters, not once, but several times, during a season.” In other words, surviving in a tiny pocket of affluence in one of the poorest parts of the country is an anachronistic stronghold of the Edwardian age.

Fox-hunting is supposed to be all
pour le sport
, and obviously there is no wagering involved as there is in, say, golf. But there is a certain amount of competitiveness and, when the hounds “speak” and it's off at top speed over the fields and fences, there's more than a little jockeying for position—not to win, exactly, but to “ride up front” near Mr. Thomas Morton, the Master of the Field. Men and women who have been chatting cordially a few minutes earlier quickly become the bitterest antagonists, struggling for this position and this honor which carries a mysterious but distinct cachet. Less serious hunters—along with older people who are just out for a brisk morning's ride—are content to ride behind at an easier pace until the fox, if he's a gray one, runs up a tree, or, if he's a red fox, “goes to earth,” or into a hole. Though there is supposed to be no shortage of foxes in Southern Pines, the fox population is discreetly “encouraged” by food left out for the vixens during the summer months.

The undulating sandhills of North Carolina are perfect for foxhunting because the soft, sandy soil is the perfect surface for horses'
feet. There are few holes, and no rocks, no steep climbs, no hazardous descents. The roads of Southern Pines are kept largely unpaved out of consideration for the horse population. This same sort of terrain is also perfect for golf courses, which helps explain why these two strange-bedfellow sports have collided here in North Carolina. The sandy soil was what Mr. James W. Tufts, a millionaire real estate man from Boston, first noticed when he came here in 1895. (Tufts was from the same Boston family that gave the land on which Tufts University now stands.) At that time, golf was a sport just beginning to be popular in America. It had been imported from Scotland; and, looking at the sandhills of Pinehurst (which were then known as the Barrens), Mr. Tufts envisioned a vast golf course, bigger than any that then existed in the world. From the Page family, local gentry—and Pages are still prominent in Pinehurst today—Mr. Tufts purchased some five thousand acres of land for a dollar an acre. Everybody thought he was crazy, and that the Pages had easily got the better of the deal.