The Right Places (33 page)

But it was not until more than a century later that golf received any sort of national attention, and this happened in 1887 when a Yonkers man named Robert Lockhart returned from a trip to Scotland with a set of clubs and a supply of balls. Lockhart interested his friend John Reid in the game, and the two men laid out a crude course over several acres of Westchester pastureland. It was Reid's suggestion that a club be formed, and thus the St. Andrews Golf Club—the first in America—came into existence, and it continues to exist in Ardsley-on-Hudson, New York.

Up to then, all the best clubs in America had been the men's city clubs, where the men of society retreated elaborately from their wives and families. The most venerable of these include New York's Union Club and Knickerbocker Club, Philadelphia's Philadelphia Club and Fish House and Rabbit Club, and Boston's Somerset Club and Tavern Club. It was not until 1903 that New York got its all-lady Colony Club—founded by such as Mrs. John Jacob Astor III—and clubs which admitted children as well as women would have been considered downright un-American. But golf got the club idea out of the city into the countryside, and, once there, women proved a hard species to keep out. In the beginning, country clubs sprouted across the face of the land—before the sexual barriers were broken down. Next came the age barriers. Today, a few clubs have firm rules about when women and youngsters are permitted on the golf course, but these are always under attack, and in most places, the country club—with its kiddies' wading pool, its swings and teeter-totters, its hairdressing salon, baby-sitter service, snack bar, ladies' sauna and ladies' card room—is very much a family preoccupation.

Women have certainly helped diminish the importance of the once-powerful men's clubs. In the dining room of New York's Union Club
not long ago, a woman glanced icily across the room and commented to the headwaiter, “I see you now also admit the mistresses, as well as the wives, of members.” The headwaiter replied, “Only if they are also the wives of other members, madam.” And meanwhile, the same sort of thing is going on across the street, as it were—at the once-exclusive women's clubs such as New York's Colony and Cosmopolitan, Boston's Chilton Club, Philadelphia's Acorn, and San Francisco's Franciscan Club. These clubs now admit men. They are also, in as ladylike a way as possible, going after new members. Because they also are languishing.

Part of the trouble has been the steady decline in the quality of service the social clubs have been able to offer. It is increasingly difficult to staff a club with bowing and scraping waiters and superb chefs, and to surround a member with the cozy sensation of belonging to some place decidedly privileged and special. Not long ago Colonel and Mrs. Charles A. Lindbergh arrived for dinner at the Cosmopolitan Club in New York, where Mrs. Lindbergh has maintained a membership for years. The Lindberghs of course had a reservation, but when the headwaitress approached them she inquired rather crossly, “Name, please?” “Charles Lindbergh,” replied the Colonel politely; and of the man who, for a while at least, was the most famous figure in the world, the headwaitress asked, “How do you spell it?” And at New York's august Union Club a member was startled when a young waiter approached him and asked to borrow money. “Just till payday,” the waiter said.

Meanwhile, back in the country, golf has achieved such an enormous popularity that what had started out as a polite sport for the propertied gentleman is now taken up not only by women but by men who actually work for a living. Today, golf is enjoyed by the milkman as well as the millionaire and has been taken over by those the sociologists group as the “upwardly mobile middle class.” Today, accordingly, there are country clubs designed to suit almost every social and economic bracket. Starting times at local golf courses are announced over local radio stations. Big companies, which for a number of years have been paying the initiation fees of their executives to help them get into the best clubs in an area—on the theory that membership in the best club enhances the reputation of the company—have started
building country club-like facilities for their lesser employees. So have labor unions, for their members. Then, since World War II, there has been a rash of municipal clubs, with memberships open to all residents of a certain town or city. Often these municipal clubs have come about as, for taxes, a community has bought up the languishing facilities of a private club. Then, of course, there are always the public golf courses.

All this golf-playing by the so-called silent majority has had a profound effect upon the old-line country clubs—the clubs á la John O'Hara's novels—which were built for the so-called effete snobs. Much of the effect is economic. Costs have risen, as have taxes, and members have taken to asking, “Why should I pay five hundred a year to belong to the country club when I can play golf for a pittance a week on the public course?” To make ends meet, private clubs have been forced to go into something very closely resembling the hotel business. They have taken to catering outside parties and offering to sell their facilities for weddings, debuts, and bar mitzvahs. They have even gone after convention business, offering “outings”—days when the club will be closed to regular members and turned over to a corporation for meetings, followed by golf. But at this sort of thing a club must be careful. Tax laws specify that if a club earns more than fifty per cent of its revenue from outside sources it can lose its special club status. The club industry, understandably, complains that it is being “persecuted” by the Internal Revenue Service.

It may well be that the IRS is exerting indirect pressure in hopes of breaking down the traditional social structure in the traditional club. Built into the whole club concept, right from the beginning, was the principle of “exclusivity,” and there is no question that those who practice exclusivity are more concerned with keeping people out than with letting them in. Apologists for the concept argue that humans have an essential right to privacy, and to mingle and associate only with others of their own choice; that a group of friends may choose whatever criteria it wishes for admission to the group. This notion, of course, has come under attack in recent years as flying in the face of the broader, more urgent cause of civil rights, and the clubmen have had a hard time trying to defend the special tax status of clubs which are known to discriminate, as well as the fact that members of these
clubs have been allowed to treat their dues as standard business income-tax deductions.

But right from the beginning in 1887, racism and anti-Semitism were part of the whole private-club idea. This, the post–Civil War era, was when racial and religious hate first became apparent as facts of life in America; they existed before, of course, but no one noticed them. The earliest country clubs were structured along racial and religious lines. To counteract anti-Semitic clubs, Jews developed clubs of their own which were intended to be equally exclusive. In Westchester County, for example, the Century Country Club was intended as the specifically Jewish “answer” to the exclusive, non-Jewish Apawamis Club. The Century, furthermore, was designed as a
German
Jewish Club and, as one member put it, “mostly Wall Street, though we have a couple of token Gimbels.” Other Jews—Russians and Poles, for example—were consigned to the Old Oaks Country Club, where they were said to be “waiting to get into Century.” This is less true today, as even the Century has had to look elsewhere than in the German elite for its membership.

In New York City, meanwhile, old Spanish and Portuguese Jewish families—fixtures of New York life since before the Revolution—had been taken into the city's best clubs indiscriminately for generations. These people looked askance, however, at the upstart Germans, who had then to organize a club of their own, the Harmonie.

Discrimination in clubs has been attacked for longer than most people realize. After his defeat by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, the late Wendell Willkie went to Hobe Sound, Florida, for a rest, where he found that Hobe's Jupiter Island Club accepted no Jews. He immediately and vociferously objected, threatening never to come back, and the club hurriedly announced a shift in policy. More recently, Kennedy in-law Stephen Smith was criticized by New York broadcasting head R. Peter Straus for taking his family to the Lake Placid Club, a club “that is known openly to discriminate against Jews,” according to Straus. Senator Robert F. Kennedy stalked out of Washington's Metropolitan Club soon after that, announcing that he had discovered the club was not taking in diplomats from the new African nations. New York's University Club—though it boasts the Yale insignia, in Hebrew, on its McKim façade—has for years been notoriously
anti-Semitic and under attack from Jewish groups since in most cities the University Club is open to any college graduate. Recently, the University Club announced a softening of this hard line.

The late Ward McAllister, who invented the phrase “the Four Hundred” for Mrs. Astor's parties, once wrote: “Men whose personality is not remarkably brilliant and who, standing by themselves, would not be apt to arouse a great deal of enthusiasm among their associates on account of their intellectual capacity, very frequently counteract these drawbacks by joining a well-known club. Thus it will be seen that a club often lends a generous hand to persons who, without this assistance, might ever remain in obscurity.” Today, the exact opposite seems to be the case, and it is the clubs, not their members, which are becoming obscure. Has, for example, the celebrity of David Ogilvy, the advertising man, been enhanced in any way at all by his membership in the “exclusive” Brook Club? Roy Chapin, Joseph Alsop, Gardner Cowles, David K. E. Bruce, Roger M. Blough, Winthrop Aldrich, C. Douglas Dillon, and Henry Ford are all members in good standing of the Links. And yet their famous faces are, nowadays, only rarely seen within the clubhouse. His memberships in the Knickerbocker, the Century, and the University Club did not help lift Nelson Rockefeller from obscurity, nor did the Tuxedo, the Union, and Washington's Metropolitan Club offer a “generous hand” to Averell Harriman.

The classic clubman—overstuffed, with his after-lunch cigar, dozing in his huge leather chair—is becoming a dying breed. A generation ago, nothing added more spice and relish to the dinner-table conversation than tales of this or that rich man who tried, but didn't “make” the club—how the elder J. P. Morgan, enraged that he could not get a friend of his into the Union Club, built himself a whole new club, the Metropolitan. Today, all this sort of thing has begun to seem hopelessly old-fashioned. And when, not long ago, at a membership meeting of the Knickerbocker Club, a candidate's name was proposed, someone said, a little tentatively, “Of course you know he's Jewish …” the immediate reaction to the speaker was: “What do you mean? Do you mean you want to keep the man
out?
”

At the same time, the traditions and the rules which the social clubs imposed upon their members have begun to seem not only
antiquated but ridiculous. A sign—
NO LADIES ALLOWED ON THE THIRD FLOOR FOR ANY PURPOSE WHATEVER
—which for years hung in the Metropolitan Club in Washington finally became the object of so much derision that it was removed. Equally the object of fun is the notice posted on a door in Boston's Somerset Club which reads:
THIS WATER CLOSET FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY; OTHER WATER CLOSETS AVAILABLE ON THE SECOND FLOOR
. At one New York club, it has long been a firm rule that no business could be discussed over the club luncheon tables; also, because everyone was supposed to know everyone else in the club, there was a rule that no introductions could be performed. In recent years, members have found these rules increasingly silly and restrictive, and several resignations from the club resulted. Today, these rules have been relaxed, and prospective new members are eagerly urged to pay the old rules no heed.

Perhaps the trend that members of the National Club Association fear the most, however, is that today's young people seem to be turning their backs on the whole idea of private social clubs. It is very like what is happening on campuses, where the young are rejecting fraternity and sorority memberships on the grounds (the phrase of the moment) that they are “not relevant,” preferring instead to join activist and political groups trying to end pollution and the Vietnam War. Such staid New York organizations as the Links Club—often considered the most exclusive club in America—are worried about being rejected by youth. The Links, chartered in 1916 “to promote and conserve throughout the United States the best interest and true spirit of the game of golf in its ancient and honorable traditions,” includes so many giants among its members that it has been said that “walking through the Links locker room is like walking through a nude Industrial Hall of Fame.” But the sons of the giants are heading, it would seem, in another direction altogether. Who will be in the Links thirty years from now?

There is still another social fact at work here. Not only the young, but the oldest guard of society have been gradually placing less emphasis on club memberships. A random glance at a couple of issues of the New York
Social Register
tells a curious story. Take the case of Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Dow Gibson (she is the former Helen Whitney). In 1950, the Gibsons belonged to a total of fifteen clubs—the
Links, the Piping Rock, the Metropolitan, the Meadow Brook, and River, the National Golf Links, the Creek, the Union League, the University, the New York Yacht, the Turf & Field, the Westminster Kennel, the Racquet & Tennis, the Colony, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. By 1967, the Gibsons had cut their club memberships by exactly two-thirds, to a mere five—River, Creek, Piping Rock, Colony, and DAR. The same sort of thing is true of the Winthrop W. Aldriches, who, in 1950, belonged to eighteen clubs. Seventeen years later, they had trimmed their list to a mere eleven. Is it possible that as clubs have become the target and the province of the middle class, they have been falling out of favor with the upper?