The Right Places (14 page)

Peter Viertel, the sportsman-novelist and husband of Deborah Kerr, who was first attracted to Switzerland by the skiing, as his wife was by its offer of a shelter from British taxes, is somewhat less generous in his appraisal of Swiss life. Perhaps he is simply too active a man to settle happily into an atmosphere of perpetual relaxation and avoidance of care. Viertel says, “It's an easy country to live in. It gives you a feeling of safety. But the stimulation of the conversation here is nil. You read the newspapers, you listen to the radio, and you talk to your friends, but you're not a part of a going community where you discuss things with people who have views other than yours. You
have
to get out from time to time. Otherwise you get rock-happy—like living on a magic island. But there's one good thing about living in an isolated cell like this. When you go to Paris or London or wherever, you're like
the new boy coming to town. You get a bigger thrill when you see your friends again, and they're much happier to see you than if you'd been there all along.”

Life in a never-never land can become a
tiny
bit boring. But the Alpine Set is, after all, a notably mobile one. They do get out from time to time. The Viertels, for instance, also spend a certain amount of time sunning themselves at Marbella, on the coast of Spain. To the less well-heeled, it is a different story. Stuart Dalrymple, an American businessman who was stationed for ten years in Switzerland before returning to the United States, says, “Actually, we retreated. Our life in Geneva made Zelda and Scott's existence look like a Cub Scout picnic. At the end of a decade, with two girls unable to articulate in English, a more than slightly jaded patina on our not-so-rosy cheeks, and no roots whatever, we opted to come home.” The Dalrymples now find the good life in Massachusetts.

Imagine a movie starring David Niven, James Mason, Noel Coward, with the porcelain beauties of Deborah Kerr and Audrey Hepburn (who still keeps a chalet in the pines above Rolle), all set in a landscape where the real estate goes for about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars an acre. William Holden will play the handsome American. You can see what sort of gilded and mannered story would have to ensue. In a way, it is as though the members of the Alpine Set had written their own script, and were acting out their lives in a setting of their own devising. You can see why Elizabeth Taylor wouldn't stay. Switzerland is just not suited to her broad style. Neither was it to Van and Evie Johnson's, who hated it. “I suppose one can't expect people like that to come and sit by a lake and give little dinners,” says Noel Coward, whose recent little dinner was for a visiting Sir Laurence Olivier.

Members of the Alpine Set see a lot of each other—English-speaking souls cluster together—and the titled and celebrated from all over the world are always passing through Switzerland (to visit their doctors or their banks), but life is not without controversy. The Old Guard—the Chaplins, Noel Coward, et al.—tend to think of William Holden's Hollywood-type house as a bit too much. “You approach it by boat,” says Sir Noel with famous disdain, “through water that is absolutely
awash
with French letters. There's a walkie-talkie from the
pier to the house, but it doesn't always work, and so the boatman has to announce you by shouting at the top of his lungs: ‘Four people coming up for tea!'”

Then there is the somewhat mysterious presence of a young American named Bernard Cornfeld. Starting with brains,
chutzpah
, and very little else, Bernie Cornfeld built up a mutual-fund empire, Investors Overseas Services, Ltd., that at one point was estimated to be worth over two billion dollars. The Cornfeld empire has, of course, collapsed, dragging down all sorts of other people with it. But Cornfeld himself remains very much on the scene in Geneva where, it is assumed, he emerged from the tatters of his company with a sizable personal fortune.

He is a smallish man with a pixie face who wears his blond hair in a long and flowing style, and whose taste in clothes runs to belted silk jump suits with flaring lapels. A bachelor, he still lives in the vast stone castle he bought when he was at the height of his powers, and his house is still filled with miniskirted bunnies, tourists, and itinerant hippies whom he leads, Pied Piper fashion, on water-skiing parties by day and boisterous pub-crawling by night. His social behavior is outrageous. He shows up at formal dinner parties three hours late, often barefoot, with his colorful retinue in tow, and insists on sitting on the floor to eat. In the old days, when he was considered a financial force (it was once said he could buy all of Switzerland if he wished), this sort of behavior was tolerated, and when Bernie and his friends swung into such spots as Griffin's, a Geneva discotheque, the room would snap to attention. Now that he has fallen from financial grace, he is regarded as really nothing more than a semi-amusing curiosity.

Bernie Cornfeld doesn't seem to belong in such a quietly rich right place as Switzerland. He would seem a little out of place in our movie. But perhaps not. After all, Walt Disney often tossed a good-natured buffoon, a kind of village idiot, into the plot to addle the waters of his fantasy, pretty-pretty world. A little comedy relief is welcome, even in Munchkinland. And Switzerland, true to form, is allowing Bernie Cornfeld to settle slowly into the elegantly turned woodwork and perhaps, in a year or so, the slight blemish his presence creates will have disappeared, by hocus-pocus, altogether.

Photo by Slim Aarons

Fairfield County's contented commuters

8

Fairfield County: Perilous Preserve

It is probably harder to maintain anonymity and privacy of wealth in the United States than in a country like Switzerland, which virtually has privacy written into its constitution. It is difficult to tuck an American fortune behind a protective alp, much as one might like to try.

Not long ago a young woman was walking her two dogs along a shaded road in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she and her husband had just built a new house, and an automobile drew up beside her and the driver opened his window and inquired, “Can you tell me where the Rich family lives?” After a puzzled moment, the young Greenwich matron replied, “Well, I think that adjective would really apply to every family here.” Obviously, the motorist was looking for a family
named
Rich. But the Greenwich lady's reply was not inappropriate to Greenwich, nor to other parts of Connecticut's Fairfield County. Here, according to the fond belief of many of the residents, in this roughly triangular piece of real estate in the southwestern corner of the state, is contained the greatest concentration of wealth—in many cases anonymous wealth—of any county in the United States. Here (again in Greenwich) was where a woman, when asked why she chose to live there, answered simply, “Because we're so rich.”

Actually, by dollar-count, Fairfield is not the richest American county, but only the tenth richest. The richest, officially, is Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfield lags behind even Bergen
County, New Jersey. But, loyal Fairfieldians point out, Fairfield County in addition to such luxurious towns as Greenwich, Darien, New Canaan, Westport, Weston, Fairfield, and Southport, also includes the sprawling city of Bridgeport. Bridgeport, with its air redolent of brassworks, may qualify as one of America's least attractive cities, and is facing the problems—urban decay, racial disunion, poverty—of other industrial towns its size.

Fairfield County also includes such small industrial towns as Stamford, Danbury, and Norwalk, which have
their
share of similar woes. When one thinks, in Fairfield, of Fairfield County, one does one's best not to think of these places; one edits them out of the mind, as it were. When Dorothy Rodgers, wife of the composer, first moved to Fairfield County she volunteered to do some Red Cross work in Bridgeport. She was told, gently but firmly, that it would “not be appropriate” for her to work in Bridgeport, a short drive from her house, but in Greenwich instead, which lay a fair distance down the pike. As for Danbury, most Fairfield people seem unaware that it is even in the county, and look startled when reminded that it is.

When one has subtracted these cities and their immediate environs from the rest of Fairfield County, what is left can be described as one of the most beautiful residential areas in the country. The southern rim of the county faces Long Island Sound, a jagged, rocky coastline with hundreds of tiny coves and harbors, secluded beaches, and gently rocking deep-blue water dotted with diminutive offshore islands and, on any summer weekend, clouds of sailboats. Inland (there are two kinds of people in Fairfield County, “water people” and “backcountry people”) the land rises in a series of wooded hills threaded by bright streams and narrow, winding roads. The terraced climbing of the hills means that it is possible, even from many miles inland, to catch, here and there, distant glimpses of the Sound. Across this whole terrain, behind rhododendron-shrouded gates, guardhouses, and even simple mailboxes on white posts, are spread some of the handsomest and best-cared-for houses to be found anywhere. “One wonders,” someone said not long ago, “as one drives along these roads, whether there really
are
any poor people any more.” On the Sound side of Fairfield County, the look of the place is more suburban. The Sound side is more built-up. The houses, though large and expensive-looking, stand closer
together. This is because the prices for waterfront acreage have climbed to the stratosphere, and houses have been built on smaller lots. Back-country, the feeling is definitely rural. A number of people keep horses, and one passes jumping courses, paddocks, and handsome barns and stables. This is hunt country, much of it, and, as it does in Southern Pines, the sound of the hunting horn rings across autumn mornings. Wildlife here is in great variety—deer (a mixed blessing since they devour shrubs and flowers) and rabbits, raccoons, possums, squirrels, pheasant, partridge, and scores of other kinds of birds. Would it mar the pleasant picture of this place to remember that this is also a part of the country where one can encounter the particular problems which seem particularly to beset the affluent and ambitious—divorce, alcoholism, drug problems in the schools? Yes, but this is also part of Fairfield County, and residents shake their heads and ask, “But aren't these problems everywhere in the country?” The Kiwanis Club of Westport operates a rehabilitation center for drug addicts. Psychiatrists do a good business here.

But it would not be fair to think of Fairfield County as an entity. There are actually several Fairfields, and each town and village has a stamp and character all its own.

Here's to old Fairfield County
,

Society's uppermost shelf
,

Where Greenwich speaks only to Southport
,

And Southport just talks to itself
.

So goes an old bit of local doggerel, and it sums up with a good deal of accuracy the status of the two towns. Of all the addresses in Fairfield County, Southport, from a social-money standpoint, is decidedly the best. Located on a hilly point of land overlooking the Sound, very near the easternmost limits of Fairfield County and among the towns farthest from New York City, Southport is a small, splendid town of hidden estates, private lanes, with many fine Colonial and Federal houses, and a few small, discreetly elegant shops. Greenwich, on the westernmost edge of the county, where Connecticut dips its geographic toe into New York State, has been called a “larger Southport.” Though Greenwich's large houses and estates are not unlike Southport's, there
are more of them in Greenwich and, while Southport is a village, Greenwich is a city of over fifty thousand population, with apartment houses, a hotel, restaurants, shopping centers, and a congested downtown business section—and, if one looks behind the scenes, even a bona fide slum.

Southport has remained very WASP-ish in character, and Jews have been made to feel unwelcome there. Greenwich, on the other hand, has a black population—many of whom are employed as domestics—and, though this was not always true, Jews have been allowed to buy houses in the best neighborhoods. Joseph Hirschhorn, for example, the multimillionaire art collector, has a vast Norman house on the top of Round Hill surrounded by a spectacular sculpture garden which contains, among other things, over sixty works by Henry Moore. Round Hill is one of Greenwich's most prestigious addresses, and the Hirschhorn estate stands opposite that of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Verner Reed, who have been called “the grandest people in Greenwich.” The Reed estate is a hundred acres, most of it untouched woodland. In an area where land has gone for as much as fifty thousand dollars an acre, some idea of the worth of the Reed holdings may be gained by a simple act of multiplication.

Mr. and Mrs. Reed were, incidentally, the developers of another exclusive enclave—Hobe Sound, Florida, an island restricted to 280 families. “In the nineteen-thirties, there was a need for a Hobe Sound,” says Mr. Reed, “a place where people of a certain affluence could go for vacations and to relax, without the tulle hat and seventeen-piece orchestra sort of thing that was going on in Palm Beach.” Apparently during the Depression not everyone was depressed. The Joseph Verner Reeds and the Joseph Hirschhorns are friendly, despite the anti-Semitic cast of Hobe Sound, and have entertained each other occasionally. This represents a great change, people say, from the old days when, if a Greenwich real estate man sold property to a Jew, he automatically lost his license. On the other hand, the Hirschhorns' names do not adorn the membership list of the Round Hill Club or the
Social Register
, whereas the Reeds' quite definitely do, in both places.