The Right Places (2 page)

Some time ago, testing the worth and value of what had been touted as society, someone banged the side of the barrel with a stick and heard it echo, hollowly: empty. News of this discovery has been passed around. Whatever may once have been there has drained away. It doesn't matter any more, and there's nothing to fear. The market for swimming pools, where Fitzgerald characters once lounged so charmingly, is now the homeowner in the ten-thousand-dollar-and-up income bracket, according to the president of the Lebow Advertising Company, and that's not so very rich. The rich
are
you and me.

And, what's more, they can go just about anywhere they want. The right places are the places where they have the best times. These are the places that “count” now. They're going to count even more. Watch.

Courtesy of the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce

Christmas spectacular at Kansas City's Country Club Plaza

2

Kansas City: Seville on the Missouri

There are at least two kinds of anonymous (or at least unpublicized) wealth—the kind that is perfectly happy with its anonymity, and the kind that isn't, that would do anything to see itself better advertised. There is a lot of the latter variety in Kansas City.

First, Kansas City tells you, you must go to the bluff. Beyond the bluff, the land rises and falls in a series of hills and valleys which, by their ordinariness, give the bluff emphasis. Great importance is attached to this bluff. If, it is argued, the Missouri River had not encountered the bluff at this particular point in its course, the river would doubtless have continued southward, along a more or less straight path into the Gulf of Mexico. But the river met the bluff and was diverted by it and bent eastward. Its eastward thrust continues for some two hundred miles until the Missouri joins the Mississippi at St. Louis. This, if one continues to pursue this hypothesis, may have had a profound effect upon the course of American history. If the river had continued straight south and into the Gulf, if it had not been turned in a new direction by the sturdy bluff that leaps out of the plains, the North American continent might easily have remained a land divided into three parts by two great rivers, and under three flags—the British, the French, and the Spanish. This rationale might sound farfetched to some. But it does not to the citizens of Kansas City, which rises, straight and tall and proud, from the summit of this bluff. Parents take their children for Sunday picnics on the
bluff where there is a sweeping view of unparalleled splendor. The river does seem to hesitate, irked to find this mighty obstacle thwarting it; then, resigned, it turns and presses on another way. The view from the bluff offers a kind of reassurance that Kansas City stands and has always stood—and firmly—at a point pivotal to the course of men's affairs. As one man puts it, “We may not be fashionable, but goddamn it, we're
meaningful!
”

The ideal, if impractical, way to approach Kansas City is on foot. A visitor who misses the experience of encountering the city in this fashion runs the risk of missing the point. To those willing to come as pedestrians across the apparently limitless miles of dusty plains that border the city on all sides, the city presents itself gradually, climbing out of the level horizon as a cluster of slender towers that cling together and pierce the sky like exclamation points, a strangely developing mirage of power and promise in the middle of the desert. The size and the strength and, at the same time, the elegance of Kansas City's splendid skyline offer one of the city's first surprises. To the arriving motorist, this is simply a more rapidly emerging phenomenon, and quite enough to pull the motorist's eyes off the road. Newcomers have arrived here breathtaken. The view of Kansas City from across the plains has been compared, without tongue in cheek, to that of the spires of Chartres Cathedral as they lift from the flat farmlands of central France. And yet, how can Kansas City bear such a romantic comparison? After all, this is Kansas City, Missouri, symbol of the homely and the cornball, unfashionable in the extreme. Its founding fathers wanted to name it Possum Trot, and very nearly did. Kansas City is, isn't it, the original cow town, home of the square, the lummox, the nasal-voiced booster and Babbitt, the graft-rich politician, the stockyard and the slaughterhouse?
New York
magazine once ran an advertisement asserting that readers would enjoy the publication “even if you live in Kansas City.” It was supposed to be a joke. Kansas City is a joke city, and all the Kansas City jokes are tired ones. No one, it is commonly assumed, would go to Kansas City unless he had to. And yet some surprisingly fresh breezes blow across the bluff.

“People are always so terribly surprised to find that Kansas City is a beautiful city, and that we have bright and attractive people here who have beautiful things,” says Mrs. Kenneth Spencer, a Kansas City
grande dame
, the widow of one of its leading industrialists (the Spencer Chemical Company, among other interests) and one of the leading supporters of local philanthropies, art, and culture. Mrs. Spencer is herself the possessor of quite a few of the beautiful things in Kansas City, including a vast duplex apartment filled with a museum-quality collection of eighteenth-century French and English antique furniture, Oriental rugs, Chinese porcelains, and a cabochon-cut emerald very nearly as big as the Ritz. “People from other places act as though they feel sorry for me, as though I
had
to live in Kansas City,” Mrs. Spencer says. “Obviously I don't
have
to live in Kansas City. I live here because I simply love it!” Kansas City, so much maligned, evokes this kind of passionate love from among its citizens who defend their city—and defend it, and remind all who will listen, again and again, that Kansas City simply is not what it is so often made out to be. “Don't you think my house is pretty?” asks Mrs. Spencer. “Don't you think my view is pretty?” Her view is of a green and leafy park. “Why should I live in Paris when I have all this?”

The reasons why Kansas City is so often maligned and misunderstood are subtle and complicated, but one of them is simple: the rival city of St. Louis to the east. “The typical image of a Kansas City man is a guy chewing on a corncob pipe,” says one Kansas City man. “In St. Louis, they're pictured riding to the hounds. Damn it, we ride to the hounds here too.” Another Kansas Citian asked at a Chamber of Commerce meeting not long ago, “How does St. Louis get away with calling itself ‘The Gateway to the West'? St. Louis is
not
the Gateway to the West. Kansas City is the Gateway to the West. We were always the most important junction in the western movement, and St. Louis
never
was. We were where the covered wagons provisioned for their journeys, and then we became a great rail center. Now, with TWA based here, we're the great air center. St. Louis has just arbitrarily put up that Gateway Arch, just to have itself a tourist attraction. And it's just as arbitrarily decided to call itself ‘The Gateway to the West.' Gentlemen, we have got to do something to fight back.”

St. Louis and Kansas City see eye to eye on almost nothing. St. Louis, the older of the two cities (“but only
slightly
older,” one is immediately reminded when this touchy point comes up, since there is a mere thirty-year difference between the dates of the two cities' charters
) has, partly from being on the easterly side of the state, managed to convey a more East Coast impression of seemliness, cultivation, and tone. There is also a touch of Old South charm radiated by “old St. Louis,” and St. Louis society is frequently included among the perfumed upper circles of such social capitals as Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. An edition of the
Social Register
is published for St. Louis. None is for Kansas City. There is even something distinctly different in the
sound
of the names of the two cities—St. Louis, soft and sibilant; Kansas City, rawboned, rough-and-tumble.

At the same time, Kansas City's special character, and its special character problems, have much to do with several dynamic and strong-willed men who have successively left their personal stamps upon the city over the years. One of these was William Rockhill Nelson, the owner and publisher of the Kansas City
Star
. Mr. Nelson was something of a despot, with decidedly paternalistic notions, and, among other innovations, installed his
Star
employees in neat, old-English-style stone houses hard by his own mansion so that everyone on the paper could live “as one big happy family.” It worked, at least for a while, and though the houses have passed out of the
Star'
s control, they still stand and are highly regarded as residences. Nelson had grandiose ideas for Kansas City, and it was under his aegis that a German engineer and city planner named George Kessler was imported to create a master design for the city before it was too late. It was Kessler who saw a way to make brilliant use of the many natural valleys that ribboned the city; they would contain parks and broad tree-lined boulevards, and residential areas would be placed on the hills above, overlooking greenery. Thanks to Kessler's planning genius, and the staunch backing of William Rockhill Nelson, Kansas Citians now enjoy more than fifty parks and over a hundred miles of inner-city boulevards and parkways. André Maurois once wrote, “Who in Europe, or in America for that matter, knows Kansas City is one of the loveliest cities on earth?” The man to thank for this is Mr. Nelson. When he died, he left a substantial trust for the establishment of the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, which has become the city's major art museum with a smallish but important permanent collection. Rather typically, Nelson left no funds for the maintenance of his gift, on the theory that if Kansas City citizens wanted a worthwhile museum
they had better work for it. Today, fund-raising parties and benefits for the ever-needy Nelson Gallery have provided Kansas City social climbers with their most rewarding avenue.

Kansas City was supposed to expand to the northeast. Instead, it has done just the opposite, and the costliest and most fashionable districts are now on the southwest side of the city—many of them, including the high-priced Mission Hills area, across the state line in Johnson County, Kansas. This situation, with many of the choicest taxpayers living in another state, has created a knotty problem for the Missouri-based city government, and was the doing of another high-powered and individualistic man, Mr. J. C. Nichols. Nichols came to Kansas City in the early nineteen-hundreds and bought the first few of what were to become thousands of Nichols-owned areas, most of them on the southwest side of town. It was he who developed the Mission Hills and Country Club districts where, today, all the richest people live in big sprawling houses, along twisting roads and lanes laid out by Nichols interests. In his developments, Nichols was fond of using fountains, statues, huge stone planters and ornamental sculpture. And the profusion of these Mediterranean touches in Kansas City is another of this Middle Western city's great surprises.

But Nichols's masterwork was the creation of Country Club Plaza, and it did indeed represent a totally new concept in American architecture and commerce. It was nothing other than the first suburban shopping center in the world and, begun in 1920, it was foresightedly designed for the automobile age. Extensive parking space was planned for rooftops and within and beneath buildings. Today, the Country Club Plaza sprawls across forty southwestern acres and contains branches of all the best shops and restaurants, as well as professional offices. Because Mr. Nichols admired the Moorish style of southern Spain, he designed his shopping center with bell towers, minarets, courtyards, more fountains, more statuary, a scale replica of Seville's Giralda Tower, and one fountain that is an exact copy of the Seville Light. In the years since, as a result of all this, Seville has been adopted as Kansas City's “sister city,” a designation that technically doesn't mean much other than to give city-proud Kansas Citians still another reason to crow, “Who needs Paris? Who needs Europe?” At Christmastime, the Country Club Plaza is decorated with thousands upon thousands
of sparkling lights, and incoming planes on clear nights traditionally dip from side to side above the Plaza to let their passengers view the spectacle.

Not everyone in Kansas City admires the Country Club Plaza's style of architecture, and many people point out, with some justification, that the Spanish style is not really appropriate to a river city in the American Middle West. Missouri is not, after all, California, and though the state did have a brief Spanish regime this left no lasting impression on the place or people. Particularly disparaging of the Plaza are those connected with the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design, and those with the various museums. Craig Craven, a young member of the Nelson Gallery staff, describes the Country Club Plaza as “the capitol of
kitsch
.” When an outdoor art show was presented there, Craven denounced it as “open-air
kitsch
.” On the other hand, there is no question that the Country Club Plaza has become a successful real estate venture, and that it is continuing to become more so. Miller Nichols, J. C. Nichols's son who now heads the giant company, has announced that the Plaza will before long contain a three-hundred-and-fifty-room hotel. Without question, it will be built in a style that would look right at home in Andalusia.