The Right Places

(for the Right People)

Stephen Birmingham

• Publisher: Open Road Distribution
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781504041089
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The Right Places is Stephen Birmingham's witty 1973 exploration of where the other half lives—the other half being the elite, of course. The legendary chronicler of the rich shows that the wealthy reside well beyond the tony New York suburbs: the tide of money has reached such far-flung places as Sun Valley, Idaho, and Kansas City, Missouri.

Part One

“WHO NEEDS PARIS?”

United Press International Photo

High jinks at Southampton—then 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 wondered—those 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 society—in the sense of a group of attractive and well-heeled people enjoying each other in certain attractive and generally expensive places—is 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 barriers—of money, character, class, or breeding—have 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 pacifiers—anything 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 hope—that 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 glimmering—all 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 gambled—a whole Wall Street underwriting firm staked itself—on 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 test—to pick up a stick and bang the side of one of the tankers to see whether it was really filled with oil or not.

Some time ago, testing the worth and value of what had been touted as society, someone banged the side of the barrel with a stick and heard it echo, hollowly: empty. News of this discovery has been passed around. Whatever may once have been there has drained away. It doesn’t matter any more, and there’s nothing to fear. The market for swimming pools, where Fitzgerald characters once lounged so charmingly, is now the homeowner in the ten-thousand-dollar-and-up income bracket, according to the president of the Lebow Advertising Company, and that’s not so very rich. The rich are you and me.

And, what’s more, they can go just about anywhere they want. The right places are the places where they have the best times. These are the places that “count” now. They’re going to count even more. Watch.

Courtesy of the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce

Christmas spectacular at Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza

2

Kansas City: Seville on the Missouri

There are at least two kinds of anonymous (or at least unpublicized) wealth—the kind that is perfectly happy with its anonymity, and the kind that isn’t, that would do anything to see itself better advertised. There is a lot of the latter variety in Kansas City.

First, Kansas City tells you, you must go to the bluff. Beyond the bluff, the land rises and falls in a series of hills and valleys which, by their ordinariness, give the bluff emphasis. Great importance is attached to this bluff. If, it is argued, the Missouri River had not encountered the bluff at this particular point in its course, the river would doubtless have continued southward, along a more or less straight path into the Gulf of Mexico. But the river met the bluff and was diverted by it and bent eastward. Its eastward thrust continues for some two hundred miles until the Missouri joins the Mississippi at St. Louis. This, if one continues to pursue this hypothesis, may have had a profound effect upon the course of American history. If the river had continued straight south and into the Gulf, if it had not been turned in a new direction by the sturdy bluff that leaps out of the plains, the North American continent might easily have remained a land divided into three parts by two great rivers, and under three flags—the British, the French, and the Spanish. This rationale might sound farfetched to some. But it does not to the citizens of Kansas City, which rises, straight and tall and proud, from the summit of this bluff. Parents take their children for Sunday picnics on the bluff where there is a sweeping view of unparalleled splendor. The river does seem to hesitate, irked to find this mighty obstacle thwarting it; then, resigned, it turns and presses on another way. The view from the bluff offers a kind of reassurance that Kansas City stands and has always stood—and firmly—at a point pivotal to the course of men’s affairs. As one man puts it, “We may not be fashionable, but goddamn it, we’re meaningful!”

The ideal, if impractical, way to approach Kansas City is on foot. A visitor who misses the experience of encountering the city in this fashion runs the risk of missing the point. To those willing to come as pedestrians across the apparently limitless miles of dusty plains that border the city on all sides, the city presents itself gradually, climbing out of the level horizon as a cluster of slender towers that cling together and pierce the sky like exclamation points, a strangely developing mirage of power and promise in the middle of the desert. The size and the strength and, at the same time, the elegance of Kansas City’s splendid skyline offer one of the city’s first surprises. To the arriving motorist, this is simply a more rapidly emerging phenomenon, and quite enough to pull the motorist’s eyes off the road. Newcomers have arrived here breathtaken. The view of Kansas City from across the plains has been compared, without tongue in cheek, to that of the spires of Chartres Cathedral as they lift from the flat farmlands of central France. And yet, how can Kansas City bear such a romantic comparison? After all, this is Kansas City, Missouri, symbol of the homely and the cornball, unfashionable in the extreme. Its founding fathers wanted to name it Possum Trot, and very nearly did. Kansas City is, isn’t it, the original cow town, home of the square, the lummox, the nasal-voiced booster and Babbitt, the graft-rich politician, the stockyard and the slaughterhouse? New York magazine once ran an advertisement asserting that readers would enjoy the publication “even if you live in Kansas City.” It was supposed to be a joke. Kansas City is a joke city, and all the Kansas City jokes are tired ones. No one, it is commonly assumed, would go to Kansas City unless he had to. And yet some surprisingly fresh breezes blow across the bluff.

“People are always so terribly surprised to find that Kansas City is a beautiful city, and that we have bright and attractive people here who have beautiful things,” says Mrs. Kenneth Spencer, a Kansas City grande dame, the widow of one of its leading industrialists (the Spencer Chemical Company, among other interests) and one of the leading supporters of local philanthropies, art, and culture. Mrs. Spencer is herself the possessor of quite a few of the beautiful things in Kansas City, including a vast duplex apartment filled with a museum-quality collection of eighteenth-century French and English antique furniture, Oriental rugs, Chinese porcelains, and a cabochon-cut emerald very nearly as big as the Ritz. “People from other places act as though they feel sorry for me, as though I had to live in Kansas City,” Mrs. Spencer says. “Obviously I don’t have to live in Kansas City. I live here because I simply love it!” Kansas City, so much maligned, evokes this kind of passionate love from among its citizens who defend their city—and defend it, and remind all who will listen, again and again, that Kansas City simply is not what it is so often made out to be. “Don’t you think my house is pretty?” asks Mrs. Spencer. “Don’t you think my view is pretty?” Her view is of a green and leafy park. “Why should I live in Paris when I have all this?”

The reasons why Kansas City is so often maligned and misunderstood are subtle and complicated, but one of them is simple: the rival city of St. Louis to the east. “The typical image of a Kansas City man is a guy chewing on a corncob pipe,” says one Kansas City man. “In St. Louis, they’re pictured riding to the hounds. Damn it, we ride to the hounds here too.” Another Kansas Citian asked at a Chamber of Commerce meeting not long ago, “How does St. Louis get away with calling itself ‘The Gateway to the West’? St. Louis is not the Gateway to the West. Kansas City is the Gateway to the West. We were always the most important junction in the western movement, and St. Louis never was. We were where the covered wagons provisioned for their journeys, and then we became a great rail center. Now, with TWA based here, we’re the great air center. St. Louis has just arbitrarily put up that Gateway Arch, just to have itself a tourist attraction. And it’s just as arbitrarily decided to call itself ‘The Gateway to the West.’ Gentlemen, we have got to do something to fight back.”

St. Louis and Kansas City see eye to eye on almost nothing. St. Louis, the older of the two cities (“but only slightly older,” one is immediately reminded when this touchy point comes up, since there is a mere thirty-year difference between the dates of the two cities’ charters) has, partly from being on the easterly side of the state, managed to convey a more East Coast impression of seemliness, cultivation, and tone. There is also a touch of Old South charm radiated by “old St. Louis,” and St. Louis society is frequently included among the perfumed upper circles of such social capitals as Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. An edition of the Social Register is published for St. Louis. None is for Kansas City. There is even something distinctly different in the sound of the names of the two cities—St. Louis, soft and sibilant; Kansas City, rawboned, rough-and-tumble.

At the same time, Kansas City’s special character, and its special character problems, have much to do with several dynamic and strong-willed men who have successively left their personal stamps upon the city over the years. One of these was William Rockhill Nelson, the owner and publisher of the Kansas City Star. Mr. Nelson was something of a despot, with decidedly paternalistic notions, and, among other innovations, installed his Star employees in neat, old-English-style stone houses hard by his own mansion so that everyone on the paper could live “as one big happy family.” It worked, at least for a while, and though the houses have passed out of the Star’s control, they still stand and are highly regarded as residences. Nelson had grandiose ideas for Kansas City, and it was under his aegis that a German engineer and city planner named George Kessler was imported to create a master design for the city before it was too late. It was Kessler who saw a way to make brilliant use of the many natural valleys that ribboned the city; they would contain parks and broad tree-lined boulevards, and residential areas would be placed on the hills above, overlooking greenery. Thanks to Kessler’s planning genius, and the staunch backing of William Rockhill Nelson, Kansas Citians now enjoy more than fifty parks and over a hundred miles of inner-city boulevards and parkways. André Maurois once wrote, “Who in Europe, or in America for that matter, knows Kansas City is one of the loveliest cities on earth?” The man to thank for this is Mr. Nelson. When he died, he left a substantial trust for the establishment of the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, which has become the city’s major art museum with a smallish but important permanent collection. Rather typically, Nelson left no funds for the maintenance of his gift, on the theory that if Kansas City citizens wanted a worthwhile museum they had better work for it. Today, fund-raising parties and benefits for the ever-needy Nelson Gallery have provided Kansas City social climbers with their most rewarding avenue.

Kansas City was supposed to expand to the northeast. Instead, it has done just the opposite, and the costliest and most fashionable districts are now on the southwest side of the city—many of them, including the high-priced Mission Hills area, across the state line in Johnson County, Kansas. This situation, with many of the choicest taxpayers living in another state, has created a knotty problem for the Missouri-based city government, and was the doing of another high-powered and individualistic man, Mr. J. C. Nichols. Nichols came to Kansas City in the early nineteen-hundreds and bought the first few of what were to become thousands of Nichols-owned areas, most of them on the southwest side of town. It was he who developed the Mission Hills and Country Club districts where, today, all the richest people live in big sprawling houses, along twisting roads and lanes laid out by Nichols interests. In his developments, Nichols was fond of using fountains, statues, huge stone planters and ornamental sculpture. And the profusion of these Mediterranean touches in Kansas City is another of this Middle Western city’s great surprises.

But Nichols’s masterwork was the creation of Country Club Plaza, and it did indeed represent a totally new concept in American architecture and commerce. It was nothing other than the first suburban shopping center in the world and, begun in 1920, it was foresightedly designed for the automobile age. Extensive parking space was planned for rooftops and within and beneath buildings. Today, the Country Club Plaza sprawls across forty southwestern acres and contains branches of all the best shops and restaurants, as well as professional offices. Because Mr. Nichols admired the Moorish style of southern Spain, he designed...