400 Kaput

WHO KILLED SOCIETY? (599 pp.)--Cleveland Amory--Harper ($6.50).

The metamorphosis of the cads, or how the nouveaux riches become the Old Guard, is the central theme of Cleveland Amory's misleadingly titled Who Killed Society? The forms of Society die, but Society is indestructible. After every major upheaval--war, depression or graduated income tax--the cry arises that Society is not what it used to be, and Amory divertingly traces this plaint all the way back to the landing of the Mayflower. That sacred vessel, reports Amory. carried a nondescript list of lower-middle-class passengers, plus a sprinkling of servants; and not a man in the lot could sign himself "Gent."

Unfortunately, the Mayflower's pace as well as its passengers has a grip on Author Amory's latest book, and it is a poky chronicle compared with his The Proper Bostonians and The Last Resorts. He drops some 7,000 names. He delves into 27 tribal histories and relates them unsparingly, from the Adamses and Cabots to the Astors and Vanderbilts, not omitting the Byrds. For the rest, scandal vies with sociology, gossip with anecdote. The anecdotes, though frequently familiar, provide most of the fun, and in some of them Amory captures certain archetypal stances of social eliteism.

Polo, Everyone? There is the lofty insularity once betrayed by the Du Ponts when the company was approached with the idea of sponsoring a 3 o'clock Sunday afternoon radio program. The Du Pont people wanted none of it. "At 3 o'clock on Sunday afternoons," they said firmly, "everybody is playing polo.''

For sheer aplomb, the proper Bostonian can scarcely be bettered. When Mr. and Mrs. N. Penrose Hallowell were selling their home to Mr. Howard Johnson of eatery fame, Mrs. Hallowell expressed the hope that Mr. and Mrs. Johnson would have a happy future in the house. There was a perceptible silence. Then Master Johnson, age nine, piped up, "There isn't any Mrs. Johnson. One's dead and one's divorced," adding hopefully, "but Daddy's got a girl friend." As the silence turned glacial, Mr. Hallowell rose from his fireside, smote the roadside restaurateur smartly on the back, and speaking for the first time said, "Bully for you, Johnson."

Maritally, U.S. Society abandoned the "double standard" only to adopt the quadruple and sextuple standards. Gentleman Editor Frank (Vanity Fair) Crowninshield epigrammatized the situation: "Married men make very poor husbands." By their second or third generations, most U.S. moneyed clans are marked for either 1) distinction, 2) extinction. Those that survive with distinction, e.g., Lowells, Rockefellers. Guggenheims, treat their money as a public trust and adopt the ethic of responsibility laid down by an early Du Pont: "No privilege exists that is not inseparably bound to a duty." Other socialite families go the way so graphically described by the Philadelphia dowager who said, "Most of the Biddies and Cadwaladers are either in front of bars or behind bars."*

Dear Inequality. Who killed--or at least cooled--Society? The question finally becomes a kind of game as Author Amory half-playfully indicts Sherman Billingsley, Aristotle Onassis, Antony Armstrong-Jones and a slew of others. The authentic culprit, as the book also suggests, is democracy, which wars incessantly with the idea of any elite--social, intellectual or hereditary. Paradoxically, democracy also spawns elites by encouraging the individual to distinguish himself. As William Dean Howells once put it: "Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself."

* The bar reference could also refer to a great many Cadwaladers and Biddies who are distinguished lawyers.

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