America's Secret Aristocracy (47 page)

Eleanor Jay Iselin—whom the grandchildren, for reasons they don't quite remember, always called Mopsey—must have turned, ever so slightly, in her grave when the auctioneer's hammer fell on the last of the family portraits.

In 1986, too, the Livingstons held a family reunion at Clermont, now known as Clermont State Historic Site, high above the Hudson River. It was the second such family event.
The first had been held five years earlier, but the latest gathering was intended as a somewhat special occasion. For it, family members from all over the United States had loaned whatever family portraits—mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—they happened to own, and the exhibition that resulted was an imposing pantheon of Livingstons. While some four hundred contemporary Livingstons wandered through Clermont's spacious rooms and out onto the manicured lawns and gardens, sipping drinks from caterers' plastic glasses, three-hundred-year-old Livingstons gazed down on the assemblage from Clermont's storied walls.

During the course of the July weekend, the nearby Beekman Arms Hotel, as well as surrounding motels and guest houses, were fully booked with Livingstons and Livingston in-laws who passed their free time trying to figure out how they were all related to one another—which cousins were double cousins, or triple cousins, or fifth cousins once removed, and from which Livingston line each cousin descended. Several of the guests had never met each other before, though most knew that the others existed. To help keep matters straight, name tags were provided. A number of the names reverberated with the drumroll of early American history: Astor, Aldrich, Ripley, Roosevelt, Beekman. Others were less resplendent, and, it had to be admitted, a few were downright disreputable. But in this exercise in family nostalgia, all sins and shortcomings were forgiven, since the Livingstons were there at the family seat not so much to celebrate their accomplishments as to rejoice in the fact that they were all Livingstons, and still around.

The impresario of the event, as well as of the one in 1981, was Henry H. Livingston of Oak Hill. Since he is one of the last Livingstons to own a large piece of property on what were originally more than a million acres of Livingston land-holdings, Henry Hopkins Livingston has been given the title of
present
lord of Livingston Manor. This honorific is treated as a little family joke. But in fact it is a joke at which no one is supposed to laugh. Henry Livingston admits that pulling off these quinquennial gatherings is no small task and requires months of planning and preparation. For the most part, though, the party came off without a hitch. The weekend got under way with a Saturday luncheon, climaxed with a formal dinner on Saturday night under a huge green-striped tent decked with pine boughs, and officially concluded with a Sunday luncheon
the next day, after which most of the guests began heading home. For the few who remained, Henry Livingston and his wife gave a small dinner party Sunday night at Oak Hill.

At the formal dinner, there were many toasts and a few speeches. Winthrop Aldrich put on a slide show, with commentary, on family homes and history, and Henry Livingston presented a series of awards to Livingstons who had helped assemble the portrait collection. In between the various festivities, a flotilla of chartered buses stood by to take the Livingstons on a tour through Livingston Country, visiting such Livingston family houses and estates as still remain. These, of course, are in varying states of repair—from the splendidly restored Clermont to the more down-at-the-heel Rokeby, which still bears some of the battle scars inflicted by the rambunctious Astor orphans.

Obviously, the weekend was not only a difficult one to orchestrate but also an expensive one to produce. As in 1981, the delicate matter of how it was to be paid for, and by whom, had to be addressed. While some Livingstons today are still quite rich, others are what can only be described as genteelly poor, and so no set attendance fee was charged. Instead, it was politely suggested that donations to offset costs would most certainly be appreciated, and each guest was asked to contribute according to his or her means.

A few weeks after it was over, Henry Livingston mailed out questionnaires to all who had attended. Should the Livingston party become a regular every-five-years event? Many responded enthusiastically that they were in favor of establishing it as a tradition. Others were less sanguine. Among these was Mrs. S. Dillon Ripley, the former Mary Livingston, of the Peter Robert Livingston line. “It seems to me,” says Mrs. Ripley a little snappishly, “that these old families would be better off if they spent less time glorifying their families' past, and more time thinking about what they could do to help America's future.”

There were a few other sour notes in the aftermath of the party. For one thing, several of the guests who showed up claiming to be Livingstons could not be found on the meticulously kept, and voluminous, Livingston genealogies that the family has labored to keep up to date for more than two centuries. New name tags had to be made for these people, and table-seating charts had to be hastily rearranged at the last
minute to accommodate them. Who
were
they? Were they bogus Livingstons, gate-crashers, hoping that some of the Livingston luster would rub off on them? But, if so, how had they gotten wind of the party? There had been no publicity, and the gathering had been designed as a private, by-invitation-only affair. The riddle of who these “extra” Livingstons might be was never solved, but in any event, the mystery guests were allowed to participate in the festivities unchallenged. They were behaving themselves, and they seemed to mean no harm.

Then there was the fact that no Jays attended the Livingston reunion, even though all American Jays descend from the memorable union of John Jay and Sarah Van Brugh Livingston in 1774. It is not that there is bad blood between the Jays and Livingstons, exactly, and it has nothing to do with the coolness and eventual political rivalry that developed between the onetime King's College classmates, friends, and former law partners John Jay and “Chancellor” Robert R. Livingston, and that culminated in Livingston's defeat by Jay in the race for New York's governorship in 1798. It is a little more complicated, and yet a little simpler, than that. Astonishing as it may seem, the fact is that, more than two hundred years later, the Livingstons continue to feel that John Jay elevated himself into the American aristocracy through his marriage, and that the Jays would have remained in relative obscurity if it hadn't been for their Livingston connections. In ways large and small, furthermore, the Livingstons have let the Jays know that they feel this way. For two hundred and
thirteen
years, to be precise.

“Yes, the Livingstons still take a rather superior attitude toward the Jays,” says John Jay Iselin with a little smile. Iselin, a small, compactly built man in his early fifties, who has managed
not
to inherit the prominent Jay nose, has had a distinguished career in both book publishing and television broadcasting. “They tend to take the attitude that the Jays were nobodies until they started marrying Livingstons. I don't think you can give John Jay's wife
all
the credit for everything he did, even though she had very good connections. Why, even the Jays who stayed in Europe have done well for themselves. Peter Jay, who is a cousin from the French line, was British ambassador to the United States.”

Does he, then, consider the Jays a more aristocratic family than the Livingstons? Iselin crinkles his nose slightly. “We
don't like to dine out on that ‘old family' business. In fact, one reason my father liked to pack us all off to Iselin relatives in South Carolina regularly was that he felt that entirely too much ancestor worship was going on at the farm. But we always knew we were from the top rung. It was a good-fellowship society—quite different from the swashbuckling, on-the-make Newport crowd. But I think you have to admit that the first John Jay was a remarkable man. Besides his more famous accomplishments, he also wrote the New York State Constitution, which was the model for the U.S. Constitution, and he was behind the Bill of Rights. The New York State Constitution set up the Board of Regents, an independent body appointed by the governor to supervise all forms of education. Even then he had the idea that a democracy had to be supported by a strong educational system. The New York State Board of Regents is now more than two hundred and ten years old, and still going strong! But I don't think you can say that one family is better than another.”

Eleanor Jay Iselin's daughter, another Eleanor Jay Iselin—who is now Mrs. C. Wanny Wade, and who is John Jay Iselin's aunt—has a somewhat different view. Eleanor Wade is an outdoorswoman like her mother and runs a ranch thirty miles from the nearest town, in southwestern Montana, where she raises racehorses. “The family has always pulled its weight,” she says. “We've pulled our weight, through good times and bad, and there were bad times for the family, too. My great-grandmother Jay had to drive a workhorse to church, but she drove it with head held high! We've always worked—worked like beavers—and we've always tried to make money for the family. My sister works in medicine, she's interested in genetics. My older brother Jay ran the family cotton mills. I work this ranch, my mother worked the farm, and after Mother died
I
worked the farm. Work is in the bloodline, just like the horses that I breed.

“My mother was an extraordinary person. She had no formal education whatsoever, and was raised entirely by governesses. But the family went regularly to Europe, and Mother learned everything about art—and history—and music—and language—from the
source
, on these travels. She knew more about European history than almost anyone I can think of, and of course she knew her American history inside and out. And literature—Edith Wharton was her close friend! And Harvard professors! I grew up surrounded by education and
culture because of my mother, who never had a diploma in anything! And of course she taught us all to ride. A love of horses was in our bloodline, too, and I've been horse-crazy since before I learned to walk. And Mother drove four-in-hand better than any woman in America. She could drive a coach and four—with spirited horses—at a full canter, and make a ninety-degree turn without a single wheel going up on the curb!”

How did Eleanor Wade feel about the sale of the Jay portrait collection? “It was a terrible wrench,” she says. “I'm just glad I was two thousand miles away when it happened. But it had to be done because of the multiple ownerships, as Johnny Jay tried to explain to the trustees of the homestead.” She repeatedly refers to her nephew as Johnny Jay and not Johnny Iselin. “Well, Jays are always Jays,” she says with a smile. “Mother was not all
that
fond of the Iselins. But my dad's business helped her keep the family place going. The family place … the family place. A great, huge part of my heart is still there. You know, it was very strange—a very strange feeling—to grow up there. Though no one talked about it very much, it was always clear that we were a part of American history. But it was as though we
belonged
to all that history. We didn't own the place—the place owned
us!
Going into the big room where the portraits hung, it seemed as though the past and the present positively
crashed together
. I swear there were voices in that room, even though the room was always absolutely still—whispers, whispers. Sometimes the feeling was absolutely overpowering—the feeling of the energy from the past flowing out from the walls of that room. We all felt it, the charge of energy, when we entered the ballroom. It was like—well, do you remember that moment in the movie
The Wizard of Oz
—when Dorothy arrives in Oz, and the movie suddenly goes from black-and-white to Technicolor? It was like that. Magical and wonderful, and awe-inspiring.”

She smiles again and removes her glasses from her nose. It is time to make her weekly trek, thirty miles in each direction in a pickup, to purchase fresh provisions for the ranch. It is April, but the roads are still snow-covered, and from the mountains to the west fresh snow is blowing. “Guts,” she says. “It takes guts to run a farm. But that's in the bloodline, too.”

She pauses, considering what she has just said. “It's funny,”
she says. “I don't usually talk this way, about bloodlines and that sort of thing. One isn't supposed to talk about things like that. My mother felt that sort of talk was ill bred. But we were all brought up to feel that, secretly, we were richly endowed. Secretly, we knew we were the aristocracy, and we knew how to recognize each other—in terms of bloodline, breeding, background, tradition, and family—and not
necessarily
money. But it's not snobbishness. Snobbishness means climbing, trying to meet ‘the right people,' and that sort of thing. We've never been that way—probably because we knew we didn't
have
to be! We knew that we were to use the same good manners whether we were talking to a duke or a doorman! I couldn't run a horse ranch, and deal with ranch hands and cowboys, if I were a snob. To them, I'm just a woman who works as hard as they do, and who can shovel manure out of a stable if it needs to be done—and believe me, I don't call it by such a polite word when I'm doing it! But still I have that feeling of what's bred in my bones, and I know others who have that feeling—who are members of these old American families. It's something you inherit, almost like a European title, and you can never really shake it off. The Livingstons have it too, I suppose, in their own way—that secret family pride, that feeling that if your name isn't Livingston you're not quite a
real
Livingston. You haven't inherited the proper title. But it's not snobbishness, and it's more like the opposite of snobbishness—though there's no real word for it.”

But is there a word for it? And do they really
matter
, these old families? Is there a reason that, nowadays, no one snaps to attention when a Livingston—or a Pringle, or an Ortega—enters the room (except another Livingston, Pringle, or Ortega)? Most of their accomplishments, after all, are in the past, encapsulated in time, and so is most of their power, social, political, and economic. True, they are the families who invented America, who tamed the wilderness, irrigated the deserts, dammed the rivers, built the factories and mills, grew and harvested the wheat and corn, founded the colleges, museums, and hospitals, fought the wars, and prayed to a Christian Lord on Sunday. But are their jobs done now, and is their usefulness past? Are they nothing more than quaint anachronisms now, in danger of extinction? Though their names still decorate some old law firms—Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft; Lord, Day & Lord—are they anything
more than that, a kind of polite bit of ornamentation?