Behind the Hedgerow

[Music] [Music] she'd be a good personality she said the thread is Green has been meaning money of course oh that scared that's terribly funny I really love Kathy if anyone who can think of a friend if OBC can only means by green is whether they can afford New Port Authority Travis a terribly expensive running the house is terribly expensive that is the hardest thing of everybody to do to justify the Menace views the expense of wonder law found if you didn't entertain attractively people just wouldn't go whenever to her why would they go because there's so many people who do entertain very well [Music] and not a pretty fire all the fires there like this people are often at dinners Emmaus a nice area you put some gasoline on it and I said gasoline why would I mean gasoline and they said I've never seen a fire go off and then so completely dry by the time we finish the interview there'll be nothing but the ashes load I was born in the at Harlem in New York City December 21 1915 I was my mother's fifth effort the first year she was married she had a miscarriage second year third year fourth year Muriel was born dead and I came the fifth year we went there on and how do you see two more daughters and we lost my youngest loss sister when she was six my father was a banker he was a vice president of the old equitable Trust Company 11 II stayed in our house is still standing some of the same street where the Guggenheim Museum is on the corner there was six floors above ground and two below in that house yes of course that's what a private house is mommy and daddy built it now they started building it when they were now introduced in 1910 and I think they moved in in 1912 [Music] favorite spot for house is daddy's and these are daddies and then John's and then these are part of Burmese those that do use them no not at all but I sit an enjoyable here's my little sister barrel the pistol barrel of dog when she was six years old I think that was a pale failed think it was so pretty with fellows it was the beauty of the family Paoli while she was such a good little girl she died in the end of meningitis redrew meningitis but she got pneumonia when she was having our appendix taken out mommy always thought the doctors had her window open in the old haba hospital where they operated just the saddest story I'm here daddy when he went to Harvard I'm his John and Maliki and Egypt and here his grandfather Minh and there is the only thing I have of my great grandmother on my father's side my Tennessee great-grandmother a lot of people think that our family founded Brown University and that's just not right from the earliest times after Roger Williams made the colony viable education was recognized as the key to the future and the first Rhode Island College based on Baptist principles was in Warren Rhode Island and then after a while people realized that Providence was where the action was and they moved it and Brown University became Brown University because Nicholas brown my direct ancestor who was instrumental in procuring the land and making an initial donation my grandmother grew up in a very rarefied environment she was very well educated for a woman of that era and the society that she grew up in she was very intelligent she was very beautiful she was a great tennis player she was very sporting she had a great sense of adventure but she was also very practical she participated in all the rites of passage as it were that a woman who grew up in New York and Newport would have at that time Jack Astor's mother was pregnant with Jack on the Titanic his father died when the ship sank he grew up with his mother in New York in his father's house in New York and a Newport he did inherit a fortune on his 21st birthday and he ran in the same circles as my grandmother vacationed here in Newport they saw each other in New York and I think for a glamorous young debutante he would have been considered a good catch it was really almost as though it had been a family plan as opposed to falling madly in love she had said he was terribly handsome and dashing but she never got to know him very well because they both had chaperones they would have dropped they had drivers chauffeurs wherever she went she went with her chauffeur she could never be on her own anyway and then when they met the chauffeurs would sort of stand you know in the background somewhere and they never really were alone together they were always chaperoned which was the way it was for her generation she had gone over to the Waldorf Astoria within days of the wedding all the presents were in and everything was planned it was in the afternoon and and she's gone up to the suite that he rented a great many of the bachelors in those days would rent hotel suites and she had gone in and there was no probably six or seven people there his friends and they loved they were great sportsmen and they loved playing games but this particular game was something that so shocked and offended her because they had ordered martinis and of course the Waldorf suites were beautifully decorated and they were throwing the martinis trying to make a if there was an imaginary ring around the room around the wall and they were trying to have their martini hit that line and then you know betting is to who did better because they were able to actually shoot the martini contents against this sort of ring on the wall and my mother having survived the you know depression and of course all the fat most of the families were terribly affected by the depression now they known the value of a dollar known having to cut down enormous Leon but the household budget she thought to herself how much is it going to cost to root you know to repair this wallpaper to recover these fabrics of these sofas this is terribly irresponsible how could a 21 year old man not have some understanding that you don't wilfully destroy property this way she went home and she said he's too immature there's no way I could marry someone who would play a game like that she broke it off within days of the wedding with the support of her family her grandmother took my great-grandparents and granny and her sister to Europe they skipped that Newport season just because they wanted to remove themselves from any talk that may have been continuing and then she came back and continued her life here but certainly for women of that era married perhaps a little bit later my grandparents were introduced by mutual acquaintances in New York in I would say the early part of 1939 and they had a very short engagement they were then married in December of 1940 family perhaps a few intimate friends but nothing no bridesmaids nothing not the sort of spectacle that you know her sister would have had Newport gave something special because it was by the sea in southern planters in 1820s 30s and 40s would come up here for the summer to get away from the very oppressive heat then of course the civil war came and nobody came anyplace and after the war there weren't any really any rich Southern planters left to come and instead it was the New Yorkers who came up [Music] Newport became the glitterati the peoplement were the famous of the day my ancestors my grandfather John Nicholas Brown came down here because it was nice in the summer and that's kind of what you did but the Sherman side my great aunt Augusta married William watch Sherman was much more of a new Porter and had a very substantial house and of course that's the line that goes back to Eileen the way I got this house was that the when onshore shipped out the house reverted to the to the family the whole family and John bought the house my John bought the house from John Nicholas brown who was mummys first cousin so it never went out of the family I mean it was never on the open market or anything I just don't know it depends what you count a room you count I just I really promise you I just don't know as a child it was it was an adventure almost showing up here in the in the house I in a lot of ways it felt like a museum a museum of our family history and and we were reminded everywhere we looked exactly as to where we fit into the bigger picture of things because there were so many ancestors whose portraits were up on the on the walls and and they were there were there were photographs in every room and and and it was just a very powerful reminder of the legacy of the people who preceded us going back many generations so my father is Adam Clayton Powell the third he is the son of the late congressman Adam Clayton Powell jr. who actually passed away about two months before I was born so I never met him he represented Harlem in the US Congress the House of Representatives for about 25 years give or take and he was a Democrat and he was a very influential and respected and powerful Democrat and that that that political orientation formed the basis of my father's side of the family my grandfather was married to Hazel Scott who was a jazz pianist and and and she was in her time very famous also and very well-known and very respected and and so there was a pretty powerful legacy that came down on that side of the family on my mother's side you might say almost that there was an equal and opposite orientation at least politically very very strongly on the Republican side being a product of these two families I was given the opportunity to choose from a very very wide range and in essentially no matter which way I turned out at least in my political beliefs and passions I was going to be in alignment with one wing or another or the family [Music] [Music] that's monkey oh she's not maybe she's the one don't have the father children and you see his Don Soffer on me yes mommy and a husband John Trevor there's Jerry at the point when he was divorced from wife number one those were started of course in the 50s they chronicled life in Germany the three years that the family spent there then I guess they returned to the United States to Washington and then they went overseas for about a year to Bauman and then returned and again to Washington and then overseas to Egypt during our stay in tuxedo I felt as though the clock had been turned back and it was perhaps 1947 or 1948 our dogwood and lilacs bloom the vases were filled with our peonies our lilies of the valley decorated the dining room table and barrel and mr. Slocum wandered in the woods picking blueberries we had our tea together daily between 4 and 5 o'clock in my bedroom and the children sailed on the lake play tennis and read books assigned to them by Groton and Miss Hewitt's our life in the safe development have been such a social one that we just continued the thing the way it was everywhere we went we we went out seven nights a week in Egypt we stepped in the all afternoon we kept very thought we would arrive at dinner in someone's garden after kind of o'clock at night don't get out leave for the embassy eight o'clock and he would come home and we have lunch now that family would get very very warm the shutters for the house would be so lovely be dark you see how it burns down though but really just want to break either feed I like to do my own dusting I like pictures to stand erect like soldiers I don't like though just show up and be put on in a stoppie way they all balance you see why 1 to 1 in a historical sense the Gilded Age is really from Lincoln's death until McKinley's death so it goes from the end of the Civil War to Theodore Roosevelt's presidency you need to have pedigree you need to have wealth you need to prove your status and your by showing it off and so moving from place to place filling up your time for people who don't have work becomes an occupation you know they give but they certainly are much more interested in displaying their wealth than they are in giving it away there's also a desire to emulate the Europeans to get European servants to take up a lifestyle that looks like European aristocracy wearing fashionable clothes going to the races sailing gambling going to all the hot spots and watering holes that the European aristocracy would have gone to Bally's beaches you know an exclusive Beach social club where you pretty much have to be born in to be a member you can't buy your way in you can't win it in a lottery they don't let big politicians in and that wasn't the kind of place it is it's not for someone who owns a corporate generally R jet but if you had the pedigree and you were born into a certain family a Newport you know the Slocum se or the Pels you could have lunch at Bailey's Beach whenever you want but what people in Newport always talked about was John Kennedy was president itíd States but of course he was Catholic and he wasn't born into this society so he would actually have to sign the tabs for is there at Bailey's Beach Club in the name of his father-in-law mr. Auchincloss well I came from Philadelphia and my name was Betty Brooke my mother and thought my mother and father always came to Newport all of our age group played on the beach and everything like that we got to know each other very well and had a wonderful time and so I've know I've known Eileen since we were three years old which is a long time because I'm 93 now and she was a but she was a with the same age my mother was on the Titanic my had half a brother and a half sister and they were both on the Titanic and that was mother's first marriage and she was married to moon of Carter and and and lived and they they they lived in all over the place you know and he was very very interested in horses so they had they had their horses on board of the Titanic and they had dogs and that they also had it had a car you saw the movie yeah with that car that's in the movie had been made specially for my mother because she got in the first one of the first lifeboats and he got in one of the first lifeboats and left her and then she had she had to look after the children it's a very long complicated story you know we came to Newport in the summer and then I got married the first time and I lived in London for three years and then I came got a divorce and came back and lived in New York and I never I never did move back to Philadelphia again I lived in New York and then I lived in the went to Palm Beach a little at a time and then and then it was during the war was about 1943 and my husband was running an airplane plant Jacques McClane was running an airplane plant down in Dallas Texas so we moved down there and and lived there during that the whole time of the war I've been made five times I haven't been married since 1972 oh yes Eileen used to call you upon kiss and say I'm giving a little party and then of course the little party was you know about 90 people she said I'm just having a few people for dinner and then of course then it was enormous parties you know nine even I mean I'd been there when they had 90 people for dinner you know and then a little party was probably you know 40 or 50 or something of that sort I did I tell my children that the art of good conversation is to bring up the subject that you know you think they would like and they don't know but it can put it better the way I tell the children but but you you discuss something or you start the conversation with whatever you you feel they don't know about but would like to know was the this the style of our entertaining it was clearly the style of the end of the xix in the the best part of the 20th century the table was set magnificently and the dining room was big enough to hold a lot of people it's the table is wide enough to have two if not three people across the narrow ends Newport is set up so that if you want to give a ritzy party all you do is dial a certain number and maids and butlers and whatever quantity needed appear and all very skilled in their profession we're in marble house on the terrorists and Eileen came in with sort of a grand entrance she had two or three other women with her and they were all dressed to the nines and she had these long gloves that came up above her elbows and there was quite astounding and I turned to Judy and I said judy eileen really is the grand Dom there was no one else in the entire marble house that had gloves of any sort on and she looked the part she performed the part she always performed the part and she did it naturally it was never superficial or phony she was a natural Grand Am she had all the stories she had all the contacts she had all the etiquette and and I think she enjoyed it very much our Newport House a veritable British castle attracts friends and acquaintances from near and far ministering to their wants plus those of my growing family in addition to operating the house that we have been occupying since March 1st 1967 would be a big job in anybody's language I have to get you away from home just to see something of you John explodes kissing me this I can't deny the orbit of my existence is the dimensions of the Newport house as I have come to believe in the end that our tangible property is our greatest source of social power the young man whom I was dating who was still at Harvard majoring in history said well next autumn I will be going to Columbia Law School and will stay at your apartment which was a studio apartment on West 74th Street and and I will go to law school and I thought this is not exactly what my mother had in mind and so I went with him to a cocktail party given by Rachel headus whose father was a distinguished professor of Greek and Latin at Columbia and I saw a tall handsome man across the room and it was and I went over and introduced myself and it was Adam Powell and I'm Clayton Powell the third well we had a lovely wedding and um my mother called people she was just a little concerned about the the fact that it was a little outside of her range of experience so and various people like a great and of mine in California would wrote her a letter saying you have my deepest sympathy for this tragic misalliance and so a lot of my mother's friends were reacting in kind of a you know we're criticizing and I myself received about 40 letters from the general public saying nasty things about intermarriage like um using the n-word and you know and they would just address them to Bariloche of Newport Rhode Island and just sort of racist kind of letters but my mother was a little apprehensive about the the fact that it hadn't happened ever in her social circles and so she called people and I remember the wife of the director of the Smithsonian Dylan Ripley's why wife said I think her name was Mary Ripley said well I don't know how you feel about your daughter walking down the aisle with a black but I would be heartbroken no I cannot come to the wedding at least Logan was interesting because she was one of the few of those people who got her hands dirty in local politics it's very rare for most of these folks to really be involved and she was involved as a Republican National Committee woman for years and years and years and I would see her at national conventions and at state conventions and she would do that and she would open her house for fundraisers to help local Republicans as well as national Republicans the last one that I remember covering was for Vice President Cheney was at her house to raise money for the bush/cheney campaign I believe in 2004 but she was also someone who was dedicated to helping the anti-abortion movement there were the great political events which of course all of us as children were just awed by mean obviously the event the party for President Ford and then there was a party for George Herbert Walker Bush and then there was a party for vice president Agnew and then there were all the coming-out parties which are sort of for all intents and purposes they're coming of age parties for the the granddaughters and well we have them when we grew up and then our children did and then there were the weddings and I have to tell you I think I think those were among the most joyous occasions from my mother because then all the family and all the friends would come together and we totally let my mother plant everything because she took so much joy I was sitting next to John of lunch one day and he looked down the table and I guess there was about 14 of 16 people you know big lunch and he said you know we said I don't know any single person at this table and I said well neither do I hi John so that makes us even I mean it was always like that they were politicians either people you know she was very involved in politics as you know and she was very very good she was a Republican a very staunch Republican she considered herself a typical local new porter and dad hope typical Rhode Islander I mean she wouldn't mind telling people if she was ready to to the Browns I think she even found a connection with Roger Williams Muricy she had the right lovely paintings in her house portraits the reject sills and the Browns and she was never a relation of mine but but she always claimed I was a member of the family as was my father and my stepmother and and even though she she's raised staunch Republican she was very pleased to have Jack Kennedy as a friend and as a guest she was a great Patriot I mean she and even though she served the Republican Party and she usually had people from I mean I know I know okay I went into a garden party of hers and in comes Jerry Ford right after Jerry Ford comes Buddy Cianci you know she picks and everybody else Eileen Slocum was the queen of the Republican Party and when I would come here to dinner there were always a group of Republican politicians included among the guests and after dinner Eileen would call on them to get up and say something about who's going to be the Republican candidate for governor or what are we going to do if we had a Republican governor is he going to raise taxes or is he gonna build this or whatever he's going to do but she'd save me for last and then after all these Republicans had talked she'd call on me and so to say all right Bruce you heard all those the Republicans what do you have to say now and I'd get up and try and cut the Republicans to ribbons and it was sort of fun I enjoyed it I think the Republicans did in her political travels out west she had come into a home in Kansas where she'd seen a book on a coffee table where there was a picture of John Carter Brown and she had said well what is this book why is this here and they had said oh well he supported he was the great supporter of the Underground Railroad and of course his uncle his great uncle Moses Brown was one of the first was famous abolitionists in this country and so my mother had always had a feeling of wanting to support heroic causes and she felt protecting unborn children to her was a cause that she could throw her weight behind and that she felt really was in the same category as the abolition and then later on she began to become particularly active within the party hoping to prevent Republican funds to be given to people who refused to sign the ban on partial-birth abortion my mother was in some respects very Chinese and that the Chinese worship their ancestors she felt the continuum and she also felt that that she was just for one of a better term a link in a chain that in other words she had been given certain things that it was her duty to pass on and that we ought to pass on and turn to our own children not only material things but values as well the nail is my and those none of those would be no fun but they'd nicely they're an elastic band anyway couldn't stand to be parted from them very sentimental about the people who sent them couldn't stand to be parted from the personal letters kept the letters and opened her mail in a very unusual way she wouldn't open it each day because she was usually quite busy and there was a great deal of mail that came in she felt she owed every single letter including what some people called junk mail she actually said that did not the words she'd not approve of that if some company spent the time to put an advertisement in an envelope and send it her she was jolly well gonna go through it and read it so sometimes mail would stack up that hadn't been opened that was old mail so so the with the save personal letters and then there was unopened mail which was very large stacks unfortunately I can't remember her ever buying any piece of furniture anywhere at any time in my life and I don't remember her buying many clothes she would inherit from various members of the family items including their clothing she wore my grandmother's clothes for a while she wore her sister Phyllis's clothes for a while most recently we had some cousins we were very close to whose clothes she wore and she was very comfortable in them and I remember her in the case of these cousins saying to me and now your cousin tom has this wonderful suit don't you want to wear it or he has a jacket that would look very good on you and I say mom I don't think it's gonna fight my size not quite right and I'd find some way of backing off about 10 years I can't believe that I didn't discover it moggy hey mister she found out right away but Jerry and Darrell they're always people living with me for 14 years as an adult she she adored Hector and every now and then I would find one of a set gone Jerry called me about 9 o'clock and he said this seems a strange hour to do this but our detective brendan doherty it's coming to the house because he has a warrant for the arrest and Hector I arrived here at this welcome residence 459 Bellevue Avenue at approximately 10:00 p.m. and I came to the into this room the butler brought me into this room and mrs. Slocombe was sitting at one end at this table and I was directed to the other end at the table and I it was a little different for me because she was the victim of the crime but I felt like she was testing my credibility in the information that I brought to her all I wanted her to do was identify some the China and precious artifacts that are brought in in a box really was incredible just a wide array of antiques and I was able to retrieve those the stolen coins that mr. Slocum had here in the home and was stolen by person later identified as Hector Horizonte who was a an employee and a longtime employee of the circum family when I moved to Newport in September of 85 with my son Sherman my second son and when my family in New York separated and I lived across the street in two of the cottages until May of 94 when I moved across the street here because my father had had several strokes and I moved across the street to help he was in very poor health and he couldn't swallow or stand and he had round-the-clock nurses for three years and at that point I had planned to move to Boston - which has a greater variety of jobs and but and my second son was just was at MIT at that point and my first son was getting a PhD at MIT so I thought I would move up to Boston but when he had the strokes it seemed to me that I would stay in Newport and help for as long as needed nice to the head neurologists at the Harvard Medical School I said he will live one day and he said at most three weeks as three weeks you must be joking I've seen them seen him down the beach their companions right next to mine and John was in a wheelchair and so he has a short conversation and a couple of days later running said well oh you see must come and see your friend Sean again he's resting he's up in bed and so I went to the house and we went upstairs the bedroom same bedroom but everybody know where I died and so I said hi John he does he looks look terrific you look much better than each other at the beach the other day so I want to shake his hand I realized him so cold he died nice I mean I'm afraid my friend John his leftist oh no no he's right there I said well yes but his his body as ever and so I think this Baptists it's obviously going up to heaven wasn't that nice it does what it should be that's where it is [Music] [Music] [Music] but what does happen over time is that this this style this lifestyle and the spreading of the wealth through the generations as our family as as you as in here as the wealth is inherited by larger numbers of people it gets watered down and people aren't into either are not interested in keeping up the lifestyle or they find it too expensive to do so but that other life which required large houses large staffs of servants you know that's long gone and then of course a lot of the houses just got either torn down or split up into apartments and so it's a whole new way of life and there are very few houses that still are intact and lived in I mean one of them of course is the Slocum's and the wonderful thing about the parties those days where they weren't charity parties in other words you were invited you didn't have to pay to go and some of the spectacular parties that were wonderful I mean really spectacular the Craig Mattey have lived to a pretty ripe old age I think their livers were all preserved in alcohol I think it's sad that it isn't continued but eventually you get partied out and as a result you don't really miss it we moved up here for a full year planning to settle here in Newport and we actually lived with granny and that was you know something that I really always wanted to do and we left Houston packed up sold our house and came we had a really wonderful year with her I feel like it was such a miracle because it was her last great year where she was totally mobile in charge still driving planning everything in control we were sitting at breakfast and she clearly had had the first of what was to be a several strokes or was really the beginning of sort of the end and we were talking and she couldn't move the entire right half of her body and she was doing this look at this can you believe and can you believe my look at this and I can't move my face and I was totally terrified saying granny something that's really not wrong something is terribly wrong you you need to go to the doctor but she was very stubborn and she didn't like doctors she probably could have gone on longer but she didn't really like the rehab either she didn't want to do the exercises she had never believed in exercise and she was you know very healthy up until that point it really just was in in one year from when I left her that morning of the rectus table - when we came back at Christmas she was you know really declining and then when we got back in the summer she was in terrible shape but she had learned to write with her left hand and so we were still able to communicate and we had some wonderful it's hard to say chats because of course she wasn't talking but she her little chicken scroll writing was you know she was really able to communicate but it was very painful it was hard to see it but I'm glad that we had that time together and that we were all here with her when she died I came to the house I came in and I expected to see a casket some well with the the deceased lying in it and I was told no no Eileen's upstairs the wake is upstairs she looked very beautiful lying in that bed made up dressed well it was a very pleasant experience to look at her most incredible thing about her dying and it was the support and the I mean the people who came number of people who came to the wake and to the funeral was unbelievable I mean I think at that moment probably more than ever in my life did I didn't realize that she didn't someone special she was for me a link to the Gilded Age yes I think she she seemed to have an ambiance that didn't care that the world was changing so rapidly I think in the last five years the world has changed at an exponential rate in respect to almost everything I never saw anything that looked like it was from this age near Eileen in any way her manner of speaking the things about her or any conversation the loss of Eileen for me really it was a bell tolling for her generation all together because of her age and because of her prominence in society in Newport and because Society and Newport like again so many other things as fast disappearing if not totally disappearing in the next couple of years and that that was a very sad loss I think for everybody who loves Newport calling Eileen the ground could ruffle the feathers of others who felt that they were as grande she was not the richest she was certainly at the end the most senior in terms of age nobody was more vivacious or outgoing than she she was enormous ly family-oriented and had a large family on which she could lavish her love and and attentions it was Eileen the end of an era yeah I'd have to say she was grand-am was she was much more than a grand um a Grand Am is just in a box a wonderful person she was in ultra ultra ultra grande um with a lot of savoir faire how do I say this I feel very strongly that Eileen was not really representative of any era she was a spike she was a spike in that she combined so many elements together the lavishness of her house the lavishness of her parties the deep commitment to political causes the ability to get along with and be admired by a wide range of people I think that is what made her unique you you've picked on up on a woman that's very an extraordinary woman Eileen you know and and and different from definite completely done for most women you know very very bright very ambitious I'd say they broke the mold you know there's no nobody they've never been anybody like Eileen the fire is burned down - it does but he's some kind of a wolf fed back to him I think always as I close my eyes safely through another day safety to me means escape from harm or injury to the eventual comfort of a little grave in our own plot in the new port cemetery with my spirit somehow linked interminably was out of my father grandmother and little sister who are waiting there to welcome the arrival of the next members of the family I cherish the knowledge that life is not for a moment to be taken for granted but a sublime gift that must be continually adored as a manifestation that we can know of our Heavenly Father besides the spirit that moves us you [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: David Bettencourt

Views: 1,542,631

Rating: 4.5947886 out of 5

Keywords: Behind, the, Hedgerow, behind the hedgerow, eileen slocum, slocum, Vanderbilt Family (Family), cornelius vanderbilt, newport society, newport rhode island, newport, new york society, society

Id: lulP2QeFwrE

Length: 53min 50sec (3230 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2013