America's Secret Aristocracy (46 page)

Harbour Court, long considered the principal Brown house in Newport, is a more formal affair at first glance, built in the Norman style around an entrance courtyard. “Hey, get on in here out of the rain!” cries the cheery maid answering the door. “Great weather for ducks, huh? Sit in any room you like. God knows where Mr. Brown is! He said he was going for a walk. In this weather? He's crazy!”

Harbour Court is on the “wrong” side of Newport and not even on Bellevue Avenue. As its name implies, the house overlooks the old town harbor, rather than the Sound. Still, it is very grand, and for years magazines such as
Architectural Digest
and
House & Garden
have wanted to photograph the place. But the Browns have been unwilling to have this done, feeling that—at least until it is sold—it is a private family summer place and not for public consumption. One does notice the absence of family portraits. But this is more than
compensated for by tables covered with family photographs in silver frames: Browns on horseback, Browns at the rudders of sailboats, Browns as children in sailor suits, Browns as brides and grooms, Browns in evening dress, and Browns in swim-suits at family picnics on the beach: continuity.

Outside, from the edge of a broad harbor-facing terrace, a famous stretch of manicured lawn drops at a precipitous forty-five-degree angle toward the water. One would be frightened to walk down this steep lawn, much less try to mow it. This is accomplished by gardeners who lash themselves and their machines together with ropes like mountain climbers to keep from plunging into Narragansett Bay.

The house is full of children—nieces, nephews, cousins. They come and go, in and out of the formal rooms, barefoot, in blue jeans and yellow slickers. Presently Carter Brown rushes in, all smiles and enthusiasm, wearing baggy trousers, a sport shirt, and worn-looking espadrilles. Though technically on vacation, he has spent much of the morning on transatlantic telephone calls between Newport and Athens, where he has been negotiating for a Byzantine exhibition at the National Gallery.

A teenage nephew, wandering through, smiles at his uncle's excitement but seems largely unimpressed. Here, after all, Carter Brown is only Uncle Carter, part of the family. There is a feeling, all at once, that while international success and celebrity may come along every generation or so and touch a member of the family, as it has done in the case of Carter Brown, this is all very nice—it is even to be expected—but it is not as important as continuity, family, and keeping the putty in the stones.

This is one of the secrets of our secret aristocracy: being able to live formally, without standing on formalities, to live pleasantly but not pompously, politely and not assertively, and never to bemoan the loss of an older, more rigid pecking order based on wealth alone.

Some families, whose wealth is newer, seem not yet to have learned this little trick. Stanley G. Mortimer, for example, is married to Kathleen Harriman, a granddaughter of E. H. Harriman, one of the great nineteenth-century robber barons who helped create the Great Splurge era. Several years ago, Mr. Mortimer was riding with his mother in her car in Tuxedo Park. They stopped at the drugstore in the village for something or other, and Mr. Mortimer stepped out of the car.
His mother started to follow him, whereupon, on the sidewalk, she encountered her former butler, whom she had just retired from service. “Good morning, Mrs. Mortimer,” said her ex-butler. Mrs. Mortimer sank back into the seat of her car in a state of shock. When her son returned to the car, he asked, “Mother, what happened? You seemed so shocked when Simpson said good morning.” She replied, “Stanley, did you notice the way he addressed me? He called me Mrs. Mortimer instead of Madam.”

As Heraclitus put it, there is nothing permanent except change.

*
He could also, quite properly, style himself John Carter Brown III.

26

The Family Place

On January 17, 1986, it was announced in the
New York Times
that the Jay collection of portraits, most of which had hung at Jay Farm in Bedford for two hundred years, would go under the hammer at Christie's, the New York auction house.

It wasn't that the Jay family needed the money, exactly, though more money is always a pleasant addition to any family. The problem, as with the Browns' Harbour Court, was multiple ownerships. Seven of the portraits—of Jay, Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and others—belonged collectively, but in varying degrees, to seventeen people. These were the children and grandchildren of the late William Jay Iselin, the last descendant of John Jay to occupy the farm. The portraits represented an important part of the children's inheritance.

There were other considerations. Since William Jay Iselin's death in 1951, Jay Farm—renamed the John Jay Homestead—has become a New York State Historic Site. The portraits, along with other Jay-related antiques, books, papers, costumes, and uniforms, had been left on loan to the homestead, and the homestead lacked the curatorial staff to keep the paintings in shape. Furthermore, there was the insurance burden that William Jay Iselin's heirs had had to bear since the family farm had been opened to the public.

Meanwhile, the directors of the Jay Homestead were not pleased with the news that their Gilbert Stuarts, John Trumbulls, and Ezra Ameses were about to be taken down from their walls and sold. The January 25 sale, on the other hand, more than satisfied the heirs of William Jay Iselin, and the
seven jointly owned portraits sold for a total of $1,600,000. The Stuart portrait of John Jay himself, commissioned while Jay was on his mission in London and which Christie's had estimated would sell for between $250,000 and $450,000, fetched double the highest estimate: $900,000. The Ames portrait of Thomas Jefferson was sold to investment banker Richard Jenrette. The Trumbull of John Adams was bought by the White House, which had lacked an Adams. The Stuart portrait of Stephen Van Rensselaer, who was lieutenant governor of New York when Jay was governor in 1795, was sold, appropriately, to a buyer from Albany.

One woman who certainly would not have approved of the sale of the portraits, and who the family was glad was no longer around to know about it, was William Jay Iselin's mother. As in the case of Eileen Slocum in the Brown family—and in so many other old families—the chores of keeping the putty firmly in the family stones and of reminding the family of its collective conscience fell upon the shoulders of a strong woman. In the Jay family, for many years, this was John Jay's great-great-granddaughter, Eleanor Jay Iselin. And Mrs. Iselin took up her tasks in her own distinctive fashion.

Eleanor Jay was the daughter of the Civil War colonel William Jay, and she was a woman whose life was devoted to preserving, and collecting, and enshrining, and never throwing away, anything that pertained to her Jay heritage. A family member who remembers her describes her as “the last of the great, aristocratic WASP
grandes dames
—every inch the cultivated lady, and yet every inch the sportswoman and outdoorswoman. She was elegant and dignified, but she was also a woman of the soil.” Eleanor Jay Iselin's soil, not surprisingly, was that of Jay Farm, where even Old Fred, the horse that carried her father through the war, was buried under an entablature in the backyard.

America was invented and developed by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, according to historian E. Digby Baltzell, “because they were outdoors people”—people happy on horseback, riding across open land, and on sailing vessels, plying their way across uncertain seas and up uncharted rivers. They were entrepreneurial adventurers who were attracted to the frontier, drawn to the wilderness, who could look into the virgin forests and see trees felled for lumber and houses, who could forge rivers and streams and see water harnessed for
power, and who could cross a lake by canoe and see it one day spanned by a bridge for commerce. They were uncommonly fearless and, like Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin, could comfortably pass the night in an Indian encampment with a group of war-painted braves. The WASPs who came to America, according to Baltzell, seemed temperamentally suited to becoming pioneers, unsuited to urban life, and quickly set off toward the unexplored sunset in the West, even if it was no farther than to a trading post called Albany. This may explain why today, though most large American cities are dominated by other ethnic groups, most of provincial and rural America is still governed by WASPs. From New York City and elsewhere, the old WASP families have fled to the country, where they continued to enjoy their out-of-doors. Eleanor Jay was descended from people like this in all directions—her father's sister had married a Schieffelin—and, just as many of her male relatives were gentleman farmers, Eleanor Jay was a gentle
woman
farmer.

“My grandmother was of a generation that believed that when you married you moved back into the house where you were born, and where your parents and grandparents were born,” says John Iselin. “I'm sure she would much rather have married someone named Jay—though the Iselins weren't
that
bad.” Indeed they weren't, and the only thing wrong with the Iselins was that they weren't Jays. But there were practical things to be considered when Eleanor Jay married Arthur Iselin. Maintaining Jay Farm the way it needed to be maintained was already becoming a costly proposition, and the Iselins were very rich, with textile mills in South Carolina, Georgia, and New England. It was the familiar, pragmatic trade-off—old blood for new money. Certainly Eleanor Iselin and her husband had little in common other than her wish to keep up the farm and his willingness and ability to indulge that wish by means of the Iselin bank accounts. The Iselin marriage was not much more than a working business agreement, and as such, it was a peaceful and happy union in which both partners were able to do what they wanted. Still, there was no question in Eleanor Jay Iselin's mind as to which was the finer family name. When her son, William Jay Iselin, reached years of discretion, she repeatedly tried to persuade him to change his name to William Iselin Jay. This he politely declined to do.

Meanwhile, Eleanor Jay Iselin lived on the farm. Her
husband lived at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Their paths crossed on occasional weekends. She was an avid and expert horsewoman. He was a yachtsman—his uncle, C. Oliver Iselin, had been four-time manager of the winning syndicates in the America's Cup races of 1893, 1895, 1899, and 1903—and kept his yacht at Larchmont, on Long Island Sound. Every now and then his wife and children would join Arthur Iselin for a Sunday sail and picnic. On these outings, the children couldn't help but notice that their father was often accompanied by a lady friend. But everything was very civil and polite. If the lady friend sat in the bow of the yacht, Mrs. Iselin would seat herself in the stern.

From time to time, Arthur Iselin would complain that maintaining his wife's family homestead was costing him a fortune, to which she would counter that she was doing her best to make the farm a paying proposition, or at least one that was not losing as much as it might. She had turned it into a working farm. On it, she raised and sold Thoroughbred horses. She also maintained a herd of dairy cattle and sold the milk. But there were obvious large expenses. The barns were filled with old coaches and carriages and hung with ancient tack, and all this gear required an extra farmhand just to keep it saddle-soaped and polished. Eleanor Iselin's own saddle horse was a snappy Thoroughbred whom she whimsically named Socony—short for Standard Oil Company of New York—as a way of pointing out that she could get about without the aid of an internal combustion engine. She did, however, have an automobile. These were always Buicks, and she always had the wheels of these vehicles painted yellow. When one of her grandsons asked her why, she replied, “So it will be recognizable.” The real reason, of course, was that the wheels of Jay horse-drawn carriages had always been painted yellow.
*

At the farm, her most significant expenditure was to build a massive west wing onto the main farmhouse. The west wing
contained what was called the ballroom, but it was never used for balls. (Unlike her cousin by marriage, Caroline Astor, Eleanor Iselin was not a ball-giving person.) Instead, it was designed as a room that could contain, and display, all the Jay family heirlooms and treasures. Here, in glass cases, were displayed John Jay's uniforms and the clothes he had worn when he was presented at the French court in Paris. More glass cases held medals, honors, decorations, ribbons, trophies, and citations won by various Jays. Still other cases displayed historic documents, presidential letters, old books, family records and Bibles, archives and family incunabula. And of course on the walls hung the portraits that had reduced John Jay Chapman to such feelings of inadequacy. To other Jay children and grandchildren who spent all or parts of their summers at the farm, the ballroom was an eerie and echoing space. One had to pass through it to get to the ping pong room. The children hurried through the room on tiptoes, speaking in whispers.

Eleanor Iselin had built the west wing to protect the family memorabilia from the possibility of fire. So it was built of solid stone, a family vault.

It had been hard enough on Eleanor Iselin to see the scale of Jay Farm gradually dwindle. Roughly a third of the farm's land had to be given up when New York City built its Cross River Reservoir on the property, and the new lake swallowed up the old family sawmill and gristmill. Other parcels were sold off to meet expenses. Still, by 1940, there were 370 acres left—a respectable piece. Jay Farm was still one of the largest working farms in Westchester County, and compared with the Rockefeller farm down the road in Pocantico Hills, which was a mere 200 acres, the Jay holdings were imposing. And they included something the Rockefellers would never have: all that family history that was collected in the ballroom. Those treasures were beyond monetary value, Eleanor Iselin used to say. They would enrich her family forever.