Metropolitan Directors

The lordly upper classes With their gilded demi-tasses. God help the walking goil!

So chanted skeptical and disrespectful members of hoipolloi upon reading in the press last week that young Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney and young Marshall Field had been elected to the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera Company at a special stockholders' meeting. "Both," explained the stockholders, "are serious music lovers." It was this statement, more than the rather unusual honor, that irritated the chanting representatives of the vulgate. They themselves, in their innocent rhymes and naive ditties, displayed a fondnes for music which, they were keenly conscious, has never been recognized with a directorate in any company whatever. They definitely doubted that a pair of lounging millionaires were any more musicianly than they. It takes a considerable body of evidence to convince a cheap fellow that sons of wealth may also be men of parts.

Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, who recently succeeded Samuel W. Reyburn as a Director of the Guarantee Trust Company, is tall, muscular, pale-eyed, with a long neck and sloping shoulders which are the despair of tailors but which served him well at Yale (1922) where he pulled a good oar, dabbled in writing, discussed aesthetic topics with his instructors in a modest yet eager fashion. He has good taste in pictures, attends the opera regularly.

Marshall Field, a methodical young man (aged 32, Eton and Cambridge graduate), with a weak, attentive face, took charge, in 1920, of the $120,000,000 Field estate, of which he was the principal heir, is interested in arts, charities, sports, has been a liberal contributor to scientific explorations, notably that of William Beebe to the Sargasso Sea. Captain Roald Amundsen invited him to serve on an advisory committee when he was making plans for his recent polar flight.