A Pair of White Gloves, by Inez Callaway Robb

It's news, hot off the griddle, when one of our leading society columnists takes down her back hair and tells all about her adventures in high society.

Photo at left of Inez Callaway Robb by Victor Keppler

A Pair of White Gloves
by
Inez Callaway Robb

Part 1

"I've been thrown out of better places than this" is a boastful bromide to cover the humiliation of many a citizen who's been given the heave-ho. But it's a plain statement of fact with me. During my first years as the sassy society editor of New York's largest daily newspaper, I got the brush-off from prominent persons as often as an income-tax inspector.

Even my endless supply of white gloves, which from the beginning proved a talisman - a veritable open sesame - failed me in a few stubborn cases. More than once I had only my sense of humor to keep me warm - that, and my small-town conviction that no one could snub an American born on the right side of the tracks.

There was, for instance, the late Mrs. Graham Fair Vanderbilt, daughter of California's Senator Fair, a rough-and-tumble forty-niner who was famous for his gold and his gaucheries. A decade ago, "Birdie" Vanderbilt kept me quarantined in the vestible of her home for a sulphurous thirty minutes because she "did not permit members of the press abovestairs."

However, I fared no better at the hands of the second Mrs. Marshall Field. British-born Audrey James Coats Field, now the Honorable Mrs. Peter Playdell-Bouverie of London, was a great favorite of the Duke of Windsor in his salad days as Prince of Wales. As the bride of the Chicago merchant princeling, she came to America surrounded by the glamour of her royal associations and her much-publicized beauty.

The Fields had taken an enormous suite in the most luxurious apartment house in town. When, on her invitation, I went to Mrs. Field's apartment to discuss a charity ball she was promoting, she had me shown into what was apparently the servants' sitting room. It would have been as useless to fall into a rage as to remain. So I did neither.

But as far as being chucked out is concerned, it was really John Jacob Astor III who administered the coup de grace. He requested me politely but firmly to leave his magnificently gloomy home on Bellevue Avenue, Newport.

My paper had permission to photograph his infant son William, but he asked me to leave before the picture was taken lest I frighten little Bill. As soon as I had gone, Jack Astor told the photographer that ever since his sensationally broken betrothal to Eileen Gillespie and his circus-like wedding to Ellen French, he had been scared to death of women reporters. I've racked my brains to determine which is the more unflattering: the suspicion that I frighten little children, or the implication that I scare grown men!

One of my chief despairs on my sudden and unexpected elevation to the society desk was my lack of even one socially well-placed friend who could lend me a helping hand. But despite setbacks, I did begin to make friends in the new job. One of my first conquests was a young man then heir presumptive to a Balkan throne. It began as a farce of mistaken identity.

In the winter of 1929, Prince Cyril, brother of King Boris of Bulgaria, came to America, chaperoned by Baron and Baroness Wilhelm von Einem of Vienna. When I called the Prince's hotel to arrange for an interview, I talked with the baron, who was polite but, owing to the vagaries of the English language, a little uncertain as to what I wanted of His Royal Highness. I repeated my name and the baron suddenly shouted "Callaway!" with the intonation of a shipwrecked mariner crying "Land!" From then on the phone conversation took on a sparkle of good-will-toward-Callaways that charmed out of mind a reporter accustomed to aristocratic rebuffs.

Would I come right over for tea? asked the baron. So, Promptly at five P.M., dressed in my best, I knocked on the door of the Prince's suite. The door was flung open; the baron bowed me in, and the Prince was there to kiss my hand.

I was seated in the Prince's drawing room and plied with tea, cakes, sherry and royal civility. No mention was made of interviews. But after the first fifteen minutes of Bulgarian hospitality, I felt I ought to get on with the business of the day, so I whipped out my notebook.

The royal party looked in amazement at the notebook and me. Something, obviously was wrong! But they were no more confused than I. Finally, explanations tumbled out. It developed that they had mistaken me for a lady!

To them, "Callaway" was a magic password. Since their arrival in New York, they had been handsomely entertained by Trowbridge Callaway, then, as now, prominent in some of the country's most important financial institutions. When I had talked on the phone with the baron, he had mistakenly identified me as one of the puissant Callaways who had made the visitors so welcome to the United States.

By the time the explanations were made, the visitors and I were firm friends. I developed into a constant source of amusement and amazement to them. They had read of that strange phenomenon, the American girl who earned her own living and yet, after office hours, came round to tea in white gloves and frivolous clothes; who had heard of Proust and could dance like mad.

It occured to me later that one reason the Prince and I got on so famously was that the Balkans, in a manner of speaking, are the Idaho of Europe. An Idaho girl, doubtless, came nearer being his style than a lot of the awesome Park Avenue and Wall Street bigwigs he met.

Another friend I achieved early in the new job was H. Edward Manville, the Asbestos King. My friendship with Mr. Manville grew out of his amusement over a story I had written in a fit of editorial contrariness.

I knew very little about the Manvilles when, early in August, 1928, there came to my desk a letter announcing the engagement of Mr. and Mrs. Manville's only daughter, Estelle, to Count Folke Bernadotte, nephew of the King of Sweden. Now, many an American heiress had achieved a far more important title than "countess" through matrimony, but only a rare handful had ever married into a royal family.

I had a well-founded hunch that the marjority of the press would subtly imply that Estelle was to be congratulated for pulling off so distinguished an international match (one which, by the way, has proved exceptionally happy). But the more I thought of it, the more it seemed to me that Bernadotte hadn't done so badly himself! So I sat down and wrote a story to that effect.

This reversal of the consensus delighted Mr. Manville, who naturally thought his daughter a fine catch for any young fellow, be he king's nephew or no. He called me on the phone to thank me for the story, an occurrence so rare in the life of any reporter as to constitute a red-letter day. Later on, the Manvilles sent me an invitation to the December nuptials, the first of many front-page weddings I was to cover.

Another beautiful friendship grew out of the funeral of the dowager Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, the little old matriarch of the clan who ruled her family with a whim of iron until her death in April, 1934. It seemed to me there was considerable drama in the burial of this aristocratic head of New York society's most widely known dynasty. She whose life had centered in the ultrafashionable purlieus of Fifth Avenue and Newport finally was ferried to middle-class Staten Island for burial in the family mausoleum at New Dorp. Eventually all Vanderbilts come to rest on Staten Island, whence came that rugged individualist, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, and they come via ferryboat, the humble instrument with which the Commodore laid the vast family fortune.

The day after this story appeared, I found on my desk an envelope engraved with the most famous social address in New York: 640 Fifth Avenue, the old brownstone house occupied by Brigadier General Cornelius Vanderbilt and Mrs. Vanderbilt, son and daughter-in-law of the late dowager.

"I like your similies, and your parallells (too many l's?) in today's story about the funeral. They were well put. I felt the same emotions - especially aboard the ferryboat en route to New Dorp. Will you please accept the congratulations of a fellow journalist.

Yours fraternally,
Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr."

Thus began a pleasant friendship with the problem child of the Vanderbilt family. It's Neil Vanderbilt's cup of sorrow that for twenty-five years he has seriously tried to rise above the blight of inherited wealth and social position and the handicap of his illustrious name. It is his tragedy that the world refuses to take him seriously when he tries so earnestly to be a valiant man and not a Vanderbilt mouse.

One of Neil's difficulties is an inborn romanticism which makes of him a battleground of royal prerogatives versus democratic practices. In the spring of 1937 we were both in London, representing our respective publications at the Coronation of King George VI. When Neil, equipped with a secretary and a deluxe trailer, arrived in London, he phoned me that the unfeeling bobbies refused to let him park the trailer in any public place.

"But I've found a suitable place," he said impressively. "I'm living in the trailer just two blocks from Buckingham Palace and three from the Abbey."

He gave me the exact address, together with an invitation to a cocktail party a few days later. I hung up, reverently aware that even a Vanderbilt outdid himself when he parked a trailer two blocks from Buckingham and three from Westminster. But I was mistaken in imagining that abbeys and palaces are surrounded by fairylands, and that Vanderbilts can't rough it, for Neil's address turned out to be an evil-smelling city garage in a neighborhood that can only be described as indifferent.

"I pay a shilling a day for parking privileges," he told me enthusiastically. Even so, the London police had refused to permit him to connect up the trailer's elaborate lighting and sanitary facilities with those of the city. But that hadn't discouraged the Vanderbilt heir. He told me proudly how he had made a dicker with the woman who owned the house next door. For a pound a week, Neil had the comforts of indoor plumbing.

I might add that on the day of the Coronation, Neil's democratic impulses demanded that he turn up in the press section of the Abbey in an old gray flannel suit and a navy-blue shirt. Such reportorial Beau Brummells as Webb Miller came in full morning dress, but the democratic royalty of America was making no concessions to the royal democracy of England!

It was my great good luck, I realize now, to be pushed into the society editorship at the very moment when Café Society was burgeoning into the showy cabbage rose it is today. If I had had to report society in the days when people really were determined on private lives privately arrived at, I should probably have slit my throat within six months.

Gay, spendthrift, uninhibited, the café crowd long since made its choice between that quaint commodity known as "refinement" and the great Hollywood discovery, Glamour. The glamour girl, glamour living, glamour parties and glamour clothes are Café Society's contribution to the twentieth century.

Glamour doesn't hide its light under a bushel. As a society editor, I have received countless invitations from persons whom I have never even seen, much less met. I was invited to the three major debutante parties of the 1938-39 season, yet I had never met any of the three girls or their parents.

Reporters were all but dragooned into attending the much-ballyhooed $50,000 ball which marked the official coming out of the season's most publicized deb. So widespread, so thorough and so Hollywood was the publicity this debutante received that there were fantastic rumors the parents had paid a $25,000 fee to one of the town's most astute publicity experts. Dozens of persons asked me if they actually did have a p.a. In truth, they did not. Their child was extremely photogenic, which made her the darling of cameramen, and she was heiress to a romantic fortune, which made her excellent copy.

Although I have never learned to love Newport, I've always admired it. Newport at least, has standards, and I admire any institution which defends its tenets, whether I like those tenets or not. Newport is the last stubborn stronghold of the Old Guard, those haughty, purse-proud Bourbons in direct opposition to Café Society. Such dowagers as Mrs. Watts Sherman, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Mrs. Hamilton McK. Twombly, Princess de Bragança and Mrs. James Laurens Van Alen still rule the Newport roost. Life, on the whole, is formal and a bit formidable. When Doris Duke Cromwell was a sub-deb, she much preferred the freer and easier life of Southampton, Long Island.

It was a Newport hothouse that brought home to me how fantastically great wealth can complicate and distort the simplest things around us. I was being shown through the greenhouses on one estate and we came at last to a hothouse in which nothing but cantaloupes were growing. Each cantaloupe was snuggled inside a coarse net and tied to a stake that held it six inches above the ground.

I was puzzled, "Why do you put hammocks on those cantaloupes and tie them so high above the ground?" I asked the gardener.

He looked at me in astonishment. "Well, miss," he replied with infinite superiority and logic, "if they was to grow on the ground, they'd get dirt on 'em."

If great wealth can force nature to do handsprings, it can also build ivory towers for the mind and separate the rich from contact with any but their own kind. When the political star of William H. Vanderbilt, Rhode Island's young governor, began to rise during the summer of 1936, I was in Newport and went to his office to interview him. A few days later, at the tennis matches at the Casino, he brought his pretty and extremely intelligent wife over for a chat.

It was the morning after Alfred Landon's acceptance speech, and I mentioned casually that I was for Roosevelt.

Anne Vanderbilt looked at me in amazement, then clapped her hands delightedly, "You're a New Dealer? How wonderful! That makes three I know. I know two others who live in Washington."

That November, some 27,000,000 citizens voted for Mr. Roosevelt, but an ivory tower had prevented able Mrs. Vanderbilt from knowing more than three personally.

At a Washington dinner party at Evalyn Walsh (Hope Diamond) McLean's about eighteen months ago, Mrs. Robert Low Bacon told me a story which confirmed what I had always heard about Washington social life: that before they become statesmen, most members of the Congress are accomplished knee pinchers!

Throughout her years in the capital, Mrs. Bacon has had a succession of dogs trained to do simple parlor tricks. "What do congressmen always do when they sit next pretty ladies at dinner?" is the signal for the dog to put one paw on the knee of the fair lady nearest him.

The trick so delighted the late Nicholas Longworth when he was Speaker of the House that Mrs. Bacon taught the current dog a variation. The next time Nick and Alice Roosevelt Longworth came to dinner, Mrs. Bacon asked the dog, "What does the Speaker of the House do when he sits next a pretty lady at dinner?" - and the dog quickly put both paws on the knee of the nearest woman.

Part 2

Society, strange to say, opens its magic doors if only you wear a pair of white gloves. So in slipped a real reporter who now gives a candid picture of just what goes on inside and what it means to record the day-by-day activities of those who dwell in the upper brackets and whose names make headlines.

Someday I shall sit down at the typewriter and pound out a magnum opus entitled "How to Speak to Mrs. Reginald van Drizzlepuss; or, Social Climbing Made Easier in Six Simple Leasons." This educational work will include no nonsense about nice girls not swearing, what to order besides chicken salad or how to tell Mrs. Astorbilt from the Apes. It will simply tell mama and the girls to lay in an endless supply of white gloves and never to appear without 'em.

Immaculate gloves, a cast-iron constitution and a sense of humor have seen me through ten tough years as a newspaper society editor.

A decade ago, when I was pushed - I didn't fall - into the society editorship, I couldn't have told a la carte from the Automat brand, and I'd never even heard of the cafe variety. I was just another aspiring young reporter, fresh from the provinces - by California out of Idaho. I had never seen a Vanderbilt or a Belmont except in print, and only a few months before I had mistaken a butler, the first such monumental creature I had ever seen in the flesh, for Hugh Walpole, (I was halfway through an interview on the state of the English novel before Jeeves could get a word in edgewise to inform me that Mr. Walpole was two flights up, in the library!)

"A lady can go anywhere if her gloves are clean and her shoes polished," my Grandmother Callaway never failed to say as she gave me a last-minute inspection before I nipped out of our house in Caldwell, Idaho, on my way to an ice-cream frolic or a dance at Odd Fellows' Hall. But that white gloves could form the basis of a well-paying career was something neither of us dreamed. The fetish for immaculate gloves was purely personal until, quite by accident, I discovered their magic social properties.

Shortly after I became a metropolitan society editor, Eleanor Langley married James H. Van Alen, a descendant of the original John Jacob Astor. The wedding, in the Church of the Advent in Westbury, Long Island, was to be a small but elegant affair. I felt that any reporter worth his salt, should be there in person. The invited guests were known personally to each and every usher, but somehow I must get into that church.

Dressed in my best and sporting fresh white gloves, I arrived a few moments before the ceremony. With knees knocking like a pair of maracas, I stepped into the vestibule. An usher came forward. Glory be, it was William H. Vanderbilt! I recognized him from his newspaper pictures.

But Mr. Vanderbilt didn't recognize me. He registerd bewilderment tinged with suspicion. And then I noticed that his gaze rested on my hands, in gloves as spotless as the driven snow in "Way Down East."

Mr. Vanderbilt smiled instantly. He offered me his arm. My glove made a pearly shadow on his dark sleeve as he escorted me down the aisle of the dimly lighted church. I sank into a pew.

Grandma Callaway had been right all the time. Even a Vanderbilt recognized flawless white gloves as the insignia of a lady. I had discovered something akin to Open Sesame.

Never since have I been without a supply of chase white gloves. They've done yeoman work in bowling me into socially sacrosanct places. Probably their greatest triumph was getting me into the foyer of Mr. J. P. Morgan's closely guarded mansion on Murray Hill. With his optics on my gloves, Physic, Mr. Morgan's Argus-eyed butler, opened the door to me. It's only fair to say that Physic opened the door twice; once to let me in, and once to let me out a minute later when, to his horror, he discovered that white gloves had led him into mistaking a reporter for a lady. (For many years I've wondered if a man of lesser dignity than Mr. Morgan could have survived a butler y-clept Physic. What do you think?)

Even with gloves as a talisman, the way of a fledging society editor was a hard one. My whole acquaintance with society with a capital S had been gained through some newspaper Sunday supplements that had come my way when I was in high school, through Edith Wharton's nostalgic novels of New York's old Four Hundred, and through the tall, mauve tales of international high life by Michael Arlen.

The very name of Michael Arlen can still cause me to break out in a cold perspiration over the most embarrassing incident in my life and times as a society editor. In 1932, the Grand Duke Dmitri, cousin of the late Czar Nicholas and brother of the Grand Duchess Marie, came to New York for the first time. With him was the beautiful woman who was then his wife. She was the American-born heiress, Audrey Emery, and was known by the courtesy title of Princess Anna Ilynski.

The arrival of Dmitri, alleged to have had a hand in disposing of the monk Rasputin, was a good newspaper story. I went down the bay to meet the royal party at quarantine. I thought the grand duke handsome and his princess one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. I rushed to the office and pounded out what seemed to me a minor masterpiece, saying among other things that the princess, who had lived for several years in Europe prior to her marriage, had been a great belle.

"It is rumored that she left a bad dent in Michael Arlen's heart," I wrote. But the following morning, after a perusal of my column in the subway on the way to work, I sneaked in the back door of the newspaper building in panic. Somewhere between my typewriter and the final edition, the a in the adjective "bad" had been changed to an e . . .

By 1934 I was pounding on grand ducal doors with what passed for nonchalance, and giving the cold eye to butlers as I skipped past into ancestral mansions. Today, I have reported two inaugurations; one coronation from a seat in Westminster Abbey; an indefinite number of fashionable night-club fisticuffs; Elsa Maxwell parties and champship heavyweight prize fights; hundreds of fashionable weddings, including that of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Warfield, and an equal number of hotsy-totsy debutante functions. I'm an old-timer in such resorts as Palm Bearch, Southampton, Bar Harbor and Sun Valley, though still an upstart in newport, where the first fifty years are the hardest.

When editorial lightning struck in 1928, it turned out that I had a few invaluable qualifications for the job. In the first place, I had what newspapermen call a nose for news. I started out to cover society as a reporter, not as the traditional society editor who tots up the day's quota of luncheons, dinners and dances into statistical columns of names. Cholly Knickerbocker of the Journal-American indicated a way with this sparkling, authoritative society page.

Fortunately for my morale during those early months when slammed doors and banged-up receivers were my lot, I am a small-town snob. I have yet to meet, either here or abroad, an arrogance to compare with that which is the birthright of every American citizen born on the right side of the tracks. Although the Social Register may ignore Caldwell, Idaho, the Callaways are society in that neck of the woods. We're among the state's P.P.I.'s who came via the Mayflower of the prairies, the covered wagon. I've never been prepared to take any nonsense from anyone, be the name de Peyster or Jukes.

However, at the time I was dragooned into the society editorship I was convinced that my addiction to bargain-basement hats would forever disqualify me from any real rapprochement with society. And I had never tasted champagne - a definite disqualification! In fact, the first champagne I ever tasted was purloined.

I had gone to Southampton, Long Island, then the most glittering summer resort in America. Florence Weicker, daughter of Theodore Weicker, head of E. R. Squibb and Sons, was making her debut at a supper dance and a story was clearly indicated.

I didn't know a soul in Southampton at that time and it was apparent that none of the socially elect was dying to know me. fortunately, I was acquainted with the jolly young florist who had the commission for decorating the Weicker house for the debutante dance.

"Come on out with me as one of my assistants while we put the finishing touches to the decorations," he suggested a few hours before the party. "You can pick up what information you want then."

What I actually picked up was not only a story but a quart of champagne. It was in the butler's pantry with its fellows in preparation for the evening's rout. Those were the good old days of bathtub gin for the socially underprivileged. My eyes and those of the florist took in our golden opportunity at the same time. The butler's back was turned. My florist winked at me. With the trepidation of the inexperienced, I grabbed a bottle and hurriedly buried it in a huge box filled with floral debris.

My accomplice and I carried the box to his car and whisked the few miles into Southampton. That evening as the Weicker guests were toasting the Weicker debutante in Weicker champagne, the florist and I had the grace to do likewise.

But I could have burst into tears of disappointment after the first sip of that lovely bubbling liquid. For years I had dreamed of it as nectar. And then to have it taste like diluted vinegar!

I came into the society job on the flying heels of an elegant young man who'd been summarily dismissed because he got fresh, editorially, with Mrs. Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte. During the ensuing years, I'd made a silent salaam whenever I've encountered titian-haired Blanche Pierce Strebeigh Bonaparte. Through no overt act on her part, since she had made no complaint about the article which proved offensive to the publisher, she jockeyed me into a position in which for years I have lived - by proxy - the life of a Park Avenue Riley.

New York society may once have been an Olympian and austere institution, but that was before my time. Today it is a mixed grill of forty thousand new-rich and new-poor, coupon cutters, rug cutters and cutter-uppers, scions and show-offs, English introverts and Hollywood extroverts, celebrities and celebrity seekers, dubious debutantes and dizzy dowagers, financiers and floozies, gigolos and great ladies, hangers-on of every description.

There's no more democratic institution in this country today than its society, particularly the Manhattan brand. Not aristocracy but money has always been its basis. Almost anyone can walk in the front door and be assured of a welcome if he has money and passable table manners. Certainly this accounts for the eminence of the most magic name in America's upper crust: Vanderbilt.

Even in times of depression there's always a steady flow of new gold in the United States, as witness the colossal chain-store fortunes. Any newly rich clan is lucky if it numbers only one social climber in its happy midst. This means the constant renewing, revivifying and enlargement of the social stream by the infiltration of a gallon of good red blood for every demitasse of blue. The masses are the eternal forcing ground of the classes in a democracy.

From shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations is a familiar American phenomenon, but equally familiar is our native ability to leap from overalls into tip hat with the speed of a quick-change artist. Walter P. Chrysler, Sr., who started in life as a railroad mechanic, now has the haughty benediction of a line o' type in the New York Social Register. His chic, attractive daughter, Mrs. Byron Foy, continues to crowd Mrs. Harrison Williams for first place as America's best-dressed woman, and to duplicate the beautiful Mona Williams' meteoric rise up the social ladder. But it is for Mr. Chrysler himself that I have an overwhelming admiration. He charms companions everywhere by never being anyone but himself; a big, bluff, good-natured guy who is more amused than impressed to find a master mechanic in the drawing room.

It was to the accompaniment of the American Legion's West Palm Beach Fife and Drum Corps that Mr. Chrysler made his debut in the grandest of Palm Beach society. Several years ago, Mr. Chrysler and the late Mrs. Chrysler were bidden to dine by Mrs. Edward T. Stotesbury, wife of the late senior partner of J. P. Morgan and Company, and for years the uncrowned queen of Palm Beach society.

The prospect of his coming out tended to depress rather than elate Mr. Chrysler. On the afternoon of the dinner party, he was wandering disconsolately about the streets of West Palm Beach, when he heard the hubbub of a fife-and-drum corps. He followed his ears to what turned out to be American Legion headquarters, where the corps was practicing. And then he succumbed to one of those flashes of genius which have marked his career.

"How much do you boys want to hire out for the evening?" he asked.
"Five dollars an hour." the leader said.
"You're hired," said Mr. Chrysler. "And now, have you got one of those uniforms that'll fit me?"

Mrs. Chrysler, who didn't feel that the fife-and-drum corps had been a happy thought, went to the Stotesbury dinner with friends. But Mr. Chrysler, in uniform and undaunted, arrived on the stroke of eight, supported by the entire corps pounding and puffing away.

El-Mirasol, Palm Beach home of Mr. & Mrs. Edward T. Stotesbury
location of the fife-and-drum party

In brief, Mr. Chrysler's entrance was sensational, his debut an overwhelming success. Unwittingly, he had done the one thing to win forever the Stotesbury friendship. Mr. Stotesbury was devoted to martial drums and throughout his long life performed on one at the drop of a hat. He had become a master of the drums during the Civil War when, as a boy too young to enlist, he played on street corners to attract the public to Union rallies.

With the arrival of Mr. Chrysler and the fife-and-drum corps, Mr. Stotesbury promptly got out his drum and joined the fun. What had started out as a staid dinner party ended in a riot, with host, hostess and guests having more fun than at any time since their first circus.

Society in cellophane, not red plush, is the current order. It adores front-page personalities and is always on a still hunt for court jesters. Its common denominator is an insatiable craving for a good time and a determination to have it. Society is the main is composed of Fun-loving Rovers. Particularly is this true of its most conspicuous segment, known as the cafe. This is a razzle-dazzle era in the Forty Thousand. Anything can happen in society, and frequently does.

My first visit to Palm Beach, in the opulent winter of 1929, was a revelation to a country girl reared to fear God and pay her bills on the second of every month. It was a land in which every prospect pleased and man could not possibly be vile because he was so rich. In fact, every prospect had to please. The orange trees in the exquisite Orange Garden of the Everglades Club were denuded of foliage that season by a Class B hurricane. When inconsiderate nature refused to provide a new crop of leaves, the house committee of this exclusive club telegraphed a wholesale millinery establishment in New York, ordered hundreds of gross of the best green leaves and then hired workmen to wire the phony foliage to the trees.

It was at the Everglades Club during this fantastic winter that the wife of a grocery baron gave a dinner party on Washington's Birthday and ordered one of the club's gifted chefs to carve in ice a life-sized statue of the First President. Her guests were greeted at the door by a hospitable as well as military General Washington, for, in compliance with the lady's orders, the Father of His Country held in his hand a bowl of caviar.

Such a literal interpretation of "caviar to the general" (Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2) was too much even for Palm Beach. It shook with laughter for weeks. Although the grocery baroness returns every winter, she has never been able to live down her faux pas.

I have a vivid recollection of the winter Congressman Hamilton Fish lectured in Palm Beach on the imminent Bolshevist menace. His dire predictions worked a certain multimillionaire into such a state that he called an urgent meeting of the Fourth Estate at his Palm Beach home.

When he entered the room, forty minutes late, the gentleman plunged at once into a denunciation of us as public enemies who created Communists by our newspaper accounts of Palm Beach gaieties. It hadn't occurred to him then, and I doubt if it has since, that the persons responsible for those gaieties could share responsibility for incipient Bolshevism.

If I had been anything but a confirmed capitalist, he would have made a convert for the opposite camp that day. I left the house with such a sense of outrage as a human being that I literally walked the floor for hours, trying to puzzle out what implications of power could induce a man to talk to other decent, intelligent persons as our host had talked to us.

It was my first experience with that overwhelming power complex Gargantuan new fortunes can produce.

~ This article was originally published in Cosmopolitan Magazine, Vol. CVI, Nos. 4 and 5, March and April 1939 issues.

~ Photo of El-Mirasol from the genealogy web site of Gerry M. Serianni, at:
http://www.serianni.com/

Inez Callaway Robb's family line of descent:
Joseph Callaway
William Callaway
Charles Callaway
James Richard Callaway
Abner Early Callaway
Abner Kenton Callaway
Inez Early Callaway Robb

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED - Copyright © 2004 Callaway Family Association