America's Secret Aristocracy (39 page)

23

The Bogus Versus the Real

In the early 1960s, the American public was introduced to a woman who was advertised as a true aristocrat and one who would become—for a while, at least—an American heroine. She was Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, and she was unusual because her aristocratic background, it was said, was French. Mrs. Kennedy's ancestors, it was widely reported, were almost without exception members of the French nobility: ducs and duchesses, comtes and comtesses, a prince here and a king there. Even the famously nit-picking
New Yorker
magazine, whose staff of fact-checkers utters wild cries of glee whenever a fact turns out, in fact, to be a fiction, was taken in by the deception and soberly printed Mrs. Kennedy's Bouvier “genealogy.”

The trouble was, it turned out, that none of it was true. It seemed that Mrs. Kennedy's Bouvier grandfather had made the whole thing up, created bogus ancestors out of thin air, and drawn up a Bouvier family tree that had no relation to fact whatsoever. He had then had the fictional family history privately printed as a small book titled
Our Forebears
, had distributed it to family members, and had presented copies to various libraries and historical and genealogical societies, which had dutifully filed it away. To make the whole thing “official,” Grandpa Bouvier had cleverly given a copy of
Our Forebears
to the Library of Congress, which will file any piece of printed matter it receives. None of Mr. Bouvier's family, including Mrs. Kennedy, ever thought to question the validity of the patriarch's researches, and all his descendants grew up believing that the blood of French nobles coursed in their veins.

Why had Grandpa Bouvier lied? Simply to enhance his family's, and his own, prestige in others' eyes, of course. A psychologist might suggest that he suffered from certain insecurities and feelings of inferiority and low self-esteem, unwilling to accept the truth, which was that the Bouviers were descended from peasant French carpenters and cabinetmakers.

Why do some families find it necessary to invent a grander heritage than that to which they are actually entitled? Grandpa Bouvier's is not an isolated case by any means. Hammersmith Farm, the Newport estate where Jacqueline Bouvier spent most of her growing-up summers and where she was married to John F. Kennedy, was the family seat of Hugh D. Auchincloss, who was Mrs. Kennedy's mother's second husband. After Hugh D. Auchincloss's death, Hammersmith Farm was sold, and today the estate is open to the public. Every day, busloads of tourists troop through the former Auchincloss house and are informed, in the tour guides' spiel, that Jacqueline Kennedy's mother, the former Janet Lee, is “one of the Lees of Virginia.” This is not true, either. She is, in fact, one of the nineteenth-century Irish immigrant Lees, whose grandmother never lost the brogue she was born with. But if the former Miss Lee, who still owns a smaller house on the property, is aware of the misinformation about her that is being given out, she has done nothing to correct it.

She is a woman, however, who has always made upwardly mobile marriages—first to the French “aristocrat” John V. Bouvier, second to the wealthy Mr. Auchincloss, and, most recently, to Mr. Bingham Morris, a descendant of Lewis Morris, one of the two Morris signers of the Declaration of Independence. In an age when it has been reported that women over thirty have scant chances of ever finding husbands, Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss Morris has proven that finding a well-placed husband is not impossible even in one's seventies.

And so that is the aristocratic background of Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, the daughter of a father and a mother who both had fancily fabricated family backgrounds. Yet she is a woman of obvious taste and refinement, displaying many of the characteristics normally associated with “good breeding.” That she is a woman capable of rising to great and terrible occasions with dignity and courage was demonstrated before millions of television viewers at the time of President Kennedy's murder in Dallas and during the state funeral that
followed. (To lesser occasions, to be sure, she has risen with less dignity; angered by a photographer who she claimed was pestering her, she became petty and vindictive.) One of the reasons John Kennedy—as well as Aristotle Onassis—married Jackie is that she seemed to both men the embodiment of “class.” She has become the most publicized woman in the world and yet has managed to conduct her private life with singular propriety and discretion. Where, then, did this exemplar of good breeding acquire it? From socially ambitious parents? From her understandably innocent belief in aristocratic bloodlines on both sides? From growing up in the mannered elegance that befitted an Auchincloss stepchild? Or from her education at Miss Porter's School?

The Auchinclosses, meanwhile, though not a particularly old American family, have managed to enter the American aristocracy through the familiar doorway of marriage. (Hugh D. Auchincloss's money came from his mother, the former Emma Jennings, whose father, Oliver B. Jennings, helped John D. Rockefeller found the Standard Oil Company.) The first Hugh Auchincloss arrived in America from Scotland in 1803, and the Auchinclosses became thread merchants—or, rather, they married thread merchants when they became maritally allied with the Coatses of the Coats Thread Company. Since then, Auchinclosses have married Colgates, Rockefellers, Sloans, Winthrops, Saltonstalls, Frelinghuysens, Van Rensselaers, Cuttings, Du Ponts, Grosvenors, Tiffanys, Burdens, Ingrahams, Vanderbilts, Adamses, and Burrs—to list just a few of their connections—and have become what is called the best-
connected
family in New York. And, since they have proven to be excellent at producing male heirs, Auchinclosses now have more listings in the
Social Register
than almost any other family in America, even nosing out the ancient Livingstons by a score of Auchincloss 21, Livingston 18. And yet, with the exception of the novelist Louis Auchincloss, there has never been a true Auchincloss of distinction.

The older families, more secure and sure of their position, have been less preoccupied with marrying upward in recent years, have become more honest about their forebears (the Livingston connection with the earls of Callendar, very remote to begin with, is today treated almost—but not quite—as a family joke) and even more tolerant of family black sheep as they have appeared.

Mabel Seymour Greer had always seemed the very model of a proper New York society matron. In old age, she had reminded many people of Queen Victoria. Since marrying Louis Morris Greer, she had devoted her life to charity work. Her late husband, a top executive with the Consolidated Edison Corporation, had been a rather stiff and formal gentleman who usually wore a tall silk hat and carried a walking stick. The two had met in the spring of 1908, it seemed, when Mr. Greer had gallantly come to the aid of a pretty young woman who was trying to cope with a broken carriage wheel. He had taken her for tea at Sherry's and married her the following fall. Of Mabel Greer's prior history, little was known. She spoke with an attractive English accent and claimed England as her birthplace. At the time of the marriage, Mabel Seymour Greer was known as the girl who had come out of nowhere and snapped up one of the town's most eligible bachelors. But the pair had embarked upon such eminently respectable lives together that they were quickly accepted everywhere, and the new Mrs. Greer's name entered the
Social Register
. The Greers established themselves properly in a mansion on Fifth Avenue and in a summer place on Long Island.

At the time of Mrs. Greer's death, her husband had been dead only a few months. The couple had been childless, and when Mrs. Greer's will was read, her entire fortune was bequeathed to Harvard College, her late husband's alma mater, which had also been a major beneficiary under Louis Greer's will. The trustees of Harvard rubbed their hands. From both Greers, Harvard stood to receive well over a million dollars.

There was, however, one small complication, which Mrs. Greer's lawyer and executors felt it their duty to reveal at the time her will was filed. Not long before her death, Mabel Greer had told her lawyer that, years before meeting Mr. Greer during her carriage accident, she had given birth to an illegitimate son by a young medical student named Willard B. Segur. She had given up the child to its father, who had adopted it. She was, she explained, “terribly young and innocent” at the time, had been seduced by Segur without knowing what might be the consequences, and had often wondered what might have become of her baby. No sooner had this titillating news reached the newspapers than one Harold A. Segur of Worcester, Massachusetts, the adopted
son of Dr. Willard B. Segur of Ware, Massachusetts, who had died in 1939, appeared to claim that he was Mabel Greer's long-lost son. Under law, a woman could not disinherit a living child by leaving more than half her estate to charity. Furthermore, since Mrs. Greer's last will was executed within months of her death, Harold Segur had been advised that he could argue that his mother had not been in full possession of her faculties at the time. Thus, if Harold Segur could prove that Mrs. Greer was indeed his mother, he stood to inherit at least half, and possibly all, of her estate.

During the lengthy court proceedings that followed, the question became not so much Who was Harold Segur? but, Who was Mabel Seymour Greer? For one thing, it turned out that in a series of legal documents, including her marriage license to Mr. Greer, Mabel had consistently lied about her age, making herself at least ten years younger than she actually was. That a woman should falsify her age in this fashion was not particularly astonishing, but it was important to the case. Harold Segur had been born in 1888. Mrs. Greer had always given the year of her birth as 1881, which would have made the “young and innocent” mother a child of not quite seven, an unlikely age for parenthood. Moreover, it appeared that Mrs. Greer had not been quite candid with her lawyers when she confessed the existence of an illegitimate son. Dr. Willard Segur had not been a young medical student when he adopted Harold but in fact had been in practice for several years.

New and untidy facts kept emerging about the woman who had introduced herself at curbside to Louis Greer as Mabel Seymour. She seemed to have operated under a variety of aliases, for one thing. Also, before settling into the life of a New York society lady, she had variously given her place of birth as England, Canada, Philadelphia, and Spain. As a Spanish woman, she used the name Mabel (and sometimes Mabelle) Arevalo. At the alleged time of her first encounter with Dr. Segur, she would hardly have been young and innocent, since it was discovered she had been working as a trained nurse, who should have known the facts of life.

To further complicate matters, a search of birth records in Massachusetts turned up a birth certificate in Boston recording the birth in 1894 of one Willard B. Segur, Jr. This child's father was listed as Willard Blossom, occupation physician,
and its mother as Mabel Arevalo, birthplace Spain. Adding to this mystery was the fact that after Mabel Arevalo's name had been added the name Seymour, in parentheses and in an obviously different handwriting, and after Willard Blossom's name had been added—in still a different hand—the name Segur. On top of everything else, the middle initial
B
in the baby's name had been scratched out on the certificate, and in yet another handwriting had been written the name Blossom.

Harold Segur of Worcester, meanwhile, claimed to be unaware that he had had a six-years-younger brother Willard, but at least the problem of Willard, Jr., coming forth to claim an inheritance from Mabel Greer was eliminated when other documents turned up to reveal the following facts about this second child: He had initially been placed in a private orphanage in Boston and then been retrieved two years later by his mother. There followed a bastardy suit initiated by Mabel Arevalo Seymour in which Dr. Willard Segur, Sr., denied the child's paternity. This case was settled out of court, and little Willard was returned to the orphanage. Over the years, employment records and the social security number of Willard B. Segur, Jr., showed him working at various odd jobs in the Boston area and, finally, his death in a Boston poorhouse. Meanwhile, the woman who appeared to have been his mother turned up in various guises as Mary Everett, Mary Ernest, and Mabel Arevalo until that fortuitous spring day in 1908 when, as Mabel Seymour, she met her wealthy future husband.

In the end, the courts decided that Harold Segur had been unable to prove that Mabel Greer had been his natural mother. Harvard got its money. But a couple of conclusions seemed more than likely from the evidence: Mabel's affair with Dr. Segur had been more than a one-night fling, had probably lasted for at least six years, and had resulted in the birth of at least two sons, both of whom she had abandoned. With all the principals now dead, the exact truth of the matter would probably never be known. Two questions, however, would nag at the minds of members of the Morris family: How much had Louis Morris Greer known of his wife's cluttered past when he married her, and what version of those years had she given him? One thing seemed quite certain. During her long career as a respectable society matron, patroness of the arts, and Lady Bountiful, Mabel Seymour Greer must have been one of the most frightened women in the city of New York.
At least she had not lived to see the details of her past come tumbling down upon her.

And at least the Morrises, though they may not always know who their in-laws are, will always know who
they
are.

24

Family Curses

Even in colonial times, the notions flourished—among the moneyed, at least—that prosperity was the reward for goodliness and godliness, that the success of the capitalist system was based on divine will, and that the rich became rich because they were better, more virtuous, people. Rogues and scoundrels would be punished on earth as they would be in the afterlife, while the virtuous would be repaid with cash and property, as was their due. The reverse tenet was also an article of faith. If the goodly and godly were rewarded with a high station in the scheme of things, those who were of high station were expected to be even goodlier and godlier as a result. If money were virtue's natural reward, then money's natural reward was further virtue. It was a dogma, simple enough to follow, on which an American aristocracy would be built.