Rebels in White Gloves (14 page)

At the insistence of her maternal grandmother, Alison was sent into “the thick air of social prominence” at Miss Porter’s School. Alison hated Miss Porter’s, with its endless policing of her grooming and manners and diction. Permitted to leave the campus just once a year, she felt like a prisoner and couldn’t wait to escape the mean-spirited competition among the vain girls. “When you’re locked up like that together, it doesn’t bring out the best in people. There was lots of cruelty.” She chose Wellesley after her interview with Radcliffe seemed to promise more of the same. “This bulldog lady, up above me on a platform, made
me sit on a rickety lawn chair to see how I would handle it. I didn’t think I should just lie back on it, so I perched there precariously on the edge. I found it all too tense.”

Like velvet curtains drawn at the carriage window, the extraordinary privilege of Alison’s youth rendered her deaf and blind to much of the world. “It was painful for me later, when I came to understand how much suffering there is in the world. I should have realized it sooner, but I’d been in a bubble, this rarefied atmosphere. I was both protected and confined.” Lovely, with pale, powdery skin and white-blond hair, sheathed in Lilly Pulitzer shifts of pink or sky blue, Alison was an ethereal presence at the skeet shoots and polo games at Piping Rock—Long Island’s most exclusive club. She had private lessons in piano, ballet, horseback riding, sailing, and golf; studied painting with Jacob Lawrence and drawing at the Sorbonne. On holidays, in a new ball gown, she made the rounds, in the family limousine, of the best parties in New York. But she always felt like an interloper. “That was not my home; these were not my people. I saw so many in the older generation who were terrible drunks, and that did not appeal to me. My own peers were also getting drunk, totaling their new Jaguars, getting pregnant. Boys were expected to be cads, you know: ‘Upper-class boys will be upper-class boys.’ Girls spent their time getting their hair done and buying expensive clothes, so they would fit in. My mother would drop me off at the club and want me to mingle, and I would hide in the locker room with a book.”

Alison’s breeding was nearly impeccable. Her maternal grandmother, Eunice Clapp Johnson, was old-line aristocracy. A Daughter of the American Revolution, with no fewer than three ancestors from the
Mayflower
, Eunice had danced with Rudolph Valentino and John Barrymore at her debutante ball. Her family’s ball-bearings fortune had secured for the family an immense estate with a farm and several houses staffed by live-in maids, butlers, chauffeurs, nannies, and governesses, though it was still not as fancy, Alison says, as the neighbors’ spreads. Alison’s mother, a fine-boned woman with a refined, sonorous voice, recalls “thinking we were poor, because when our chauffeur took us to school, we didn’t have detectives. This was shortly after the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, you see, and I was in the Green Vale School with terribly likely targets—Dina Merrill, then Nedenia Hutton, the daughter of Marjorie Merriweather Post and E. F. Hutton; a young Vanderbilt; the
daughter of Princess Xenia of Russia. Most of them had two or three bodyguards. The school had to set aside a special room for the men to play poker while we were in class.”

Alison’s mother considered her own household more modest still. She had married a working man, a doctor, who was not from Newport or Boston and whose money, while ample, was new. The only spanking Alison recalls was when she visited her paternal grandfather’s coal mine and disobeyed her parents’ prohibition against playing with the miners’ children. She was caught on a sagging front porch peering through a torn screen door, watching TV. “At home, we had maids come in,” says Alison, “but since my mother grew up with live-ins, that seemed to her a simpler life. And my coming out party had only two hundred guests, not six hundred like most of the other girls’.”

Still, until the day she died, Alison’s maternal grandmother ensured that proper appearances were preserved. For Alison’s sixteenth birthday, Grandmother Johnson sent her to Europe on the
Queen Elizabeth
, first class, with eight long gowns to dress for dinner each night, silk day dresses for visiting museums and cathedrals, and two elderly lady escorts. When
Glamour
magazine wanted to feature Alison as one of its debutantes of the year, Grandmother said no. “A lady is in the paper only when she is born, when she marries, and when she dies.” Alison was stunned the day she learned of Eunice Clapp Johnson’s death; the family had kept from her news of her beloved grandmother’s declining health. She had always dressed up to see Alison, even the very last time.

Though she sometimes bristled under her grandmother’s tutelage, Alison also deeply admired Mrs. Johnson. She had “the guts” to leave her scoundrel husband in the early 1900s and initiate a then-scandalous divorce. She’d then had the resourcefulness to go to work with society designer Elsie De Wolfe, pay off the rogue’s gambling debts, remarry, have four children in her thirties, and help found the local library and fire department in Oyster Bay.

Grandmothers were often an important influence on the women of ’69. Born in the first years of the century, they had themselves come of age with the first feminist wave. International lawyer Kaitlin Thomas, ’69, the granddaughter of a suffragist, modeled her life on “those women who lived early in the century who managed to have some influence culturally or politically while also embarking on great adventures.” Kris
Olson spent many afternoons over tea listening to her British grandmother tell of her travels around the empire and her life in Bombay and Africa and the logging camps of Canada. Alison’s paternal grandmother, Ruth Commack Campbell, was a concert pianist, athlete, and activist, who set out to clean up the local mental institutions and jails in West Virginia, where her family lived. “My grandmothers were ahead of their time, or at least more independent and self-determined than most of their peers. Both could have led self-absorbed lives of prominence and ease, playing bridge and ordering about lots of servants,” says Alison. “North-shore Long Island’s environment and that of Miss Porter’s School tacitly prepared me for a narrow range of life choices, as society wife, CEO’s wife, diplomat’s wife. I am fortunate to have had great women predecessors, who found their own way to make a difference, to make their lives more meaningful than society and the time allowed. They gave me the freedom to reject my class.”

If Alison’s life was set apart from the fifties norm by her extraordinary wealth, Johanna Branson’s was distinguished by her parents’ aversion to social ambition and their powerful civic conscience. Though she let her daughter choose her own college, Johanna’s mother, Jesse, hoped it would be the University of Kansas. Where other mothers saw Wellesley as a place for their daughters to climb the social ladder, Mrs. Branson worried that a school full of wealthy girls would change Johanna, today an art historian in Boston, mother of three daughters, and frequent baby-sitter over the years of Chelsea Clinton. “I wanted [Johanna] to keep that breadth of tolerance for people who aren’t just from the upper echelon,” said Jesse Branson. “I grew up on a farm in the Depression and drought. Johanna spent a lot of time there as a child, and I think she admired the character of Kansas farmers. I probably pressed on her some of my principles of tolerance. She had opportunities I never had, but I hoped she would understand those who were disadvantaged.”

Like so many of her contemporaries, as a girl Jesse had seen her aspirations dashed by parents who “clearly valued their son more highly” and reserved for him the widest scope of educational opportunities. Though she had shown promise as a pianist, they insisted Jesse be a nurse. “She was forced to be a doctor’s wife in the 1950s and had the goods to do anything she wanted and was miserably frustrated,” says Johanna.
“I remember a mom-sits-on-the-side-of-the-bed conversation, and she said, ‘I think I’m going to go crazy if I have to be a housewife anymore.’ I think my mother really wanted to be a mother but had way too much drive to do that and nothing else.”

Johanna’s only brother was brain-damaged at birth. “You can’t imagine the pain that puts in a family, especially in an era when everyone keeps it shrouded in secrecy. My mother became head of the Kansas Association for Retarded People, though she always felt she wasn’t taken seriously as a volunteer, and she was right. This was not the model repressed mom but the chomping-at-the-bit repressed mom, forced to be at home with a damaged son when nobody really understood what was the matter. She was considered the town eccentric. She didn’t toe the line, but flamed out about facilities for the retarded. She has a ferocious sense of right and wrong, and was determined to bring things out in the open. I’m just sorry she got treated the way she did, and grateful she lived long enough to see things change. At fifty-nine she was elected to the state legislature by 230 votes, going door to door in sneakers. It was a remarkable win, especially in Bob Dole country. We used to joke that we were related to all eleven Democrats in the state.”

Johanna was taught by her mother to take chances for what she believed. “She was goddamned if anyone was going to treat her daughters as if they were second-rate. She had this burning, fierce determination to protect me and my sisters, had large ambitions for us. There are downsides to that, but by and large I’m grateful.” Johanna’s father, Vern, a pediatrician who cares for low-income families, also encouraged his daughter, urging her to go to graduate school so she would never be dependent on a man. He gave Johanna every book she ever asked for, though he recalls that a few were “what you might call racy.” “ ‘We’ve raised you to be a responsible adult,’ ” Johanna recalls him saying as she packed to leave for school. “ ‘From now on, I’ll never give you advice unless you ask. But I’ll support you no matter what. You’re a good person.’ It made me take myself very seriously,” she says. “I couldn’t blame anything on them. I was responsible for myself.”

A small minority of the Wellesley class of ’69 had moms who worked for pay. Jan Krigbaum Piercy, a classmate who has remained a Friend of Hillary and is now the U.S. executive director of the World Bank, was raised by a single mom who worked for the Cook County Welfare Department.
Jan found in her mother a model of both female economic self-sufficiency and commitment to service. Dr. Nancy Eyler’s physician father told her she’d go to medical school over his dead body, that a woman should stay home and care for her family. But Nancy’s mother was herself a doctor, sought out by the women of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to treat their children. She called herself Mrs. rather than Dr. Eyler, to preserve the appearance that her husband was boss. But she also explained the function of kidneys to her daughter at the kitchen table and gave Nancy lots of freedom. “Without somebody always breathing down my neck, I was left to entertain myself with a book, or to go pick berries in the woods to bake a pie.”

Among the nonwhite girls, working mothers were the norm. Catherine Shen’s mother, a hematologist trained at Tulane University and already forty-one years old when her only child was born, taught her daughter that she’d better learn to take care of herself, because nobody else would. “It never occurred to me,” says Catherine, “that anybody else would ensure my economic well-being.” Bent on her daughter’s assimilation—a desire that for the black and immigrant mothers frequently overwhelmed any impulse to dampen their daughters’ aspirations—Mrs. Shen pushed her only child to go to an Ivy League school. She refused to teach her Chinese or to talk about her own past. Only when Catherine stumbled upon her mother’s uniform in an attic trunk did she learn of her service in the Chinese Nationalist Army. Catherine’s high school in Belmont, Massachusetts, was almost entirely white. “I ended up pretty deracinated, as my mother had hoped I would. When I got called
chink
on the street, it was discombobulating. I had an Asian body but a WASP cultural lens.”

Though political dissent was anathema to most of the parents of Wellesley ’69, a few girls learned the art of resistance at their parents’ knee. Growing up on a farm in Wisconsin, Cherry Watts learned from her parents that faith in God compelled a strong sense of public responsibility. Cherry’s father was a Christian Scientist and an outspoken man. The day after he was quoted in the
Milwaukee Journal
criticizing Wisconsin’s popular senator Joseph McCarthy, a third of the accounts at his family’s business were canceled. When he joined the NAACP and hired blacks into front-office positions, he lost most of the rest.

Until she graduated from high school, Janet McDonald lived in a New
Orleans segregated in its own fashion, with white people on the city’s wide and shady boulevards and black people out of sight but close by, on the narrow side streets and in the alleys. Close as she was to her white neighbors, Janet didn’t know a single one. She walked past them without speaking to take her place in the back of the bus, drank from a different water fountain in the park, and went for a soda through a separate entrance at the snowball shop. Her friends made a sport of “passing” as white and sneaking into segregated facilities. Most were Creoles, including Janet, whose paternal grandfather was white. “Many of my friends were very fair, with white features and French surnames. They would come to school and say, ‘I passed last night and went to Sanger Theater.’ They would speak a French patois at the ticket window and see a movie that would not come to black theaters for several weeks. They considered it a notch on their belts to be able to pass as white.” Janet did not join in. “It was too dangerous,” she says, “and it would have been like stealing, because it was against the law.” Now the co-owner of a D.C.-based management consulting firm, Janet makes a point of going to the famous New Orleans restaurants that she could have entered as a girl only through the back door, and then only to wash the linen tablecloths and scrub the linoleum floors.

Janet’s father, like many of his generation, had left the South to seek work in Chicago after finishing high school in the 1920s. He came home again two decades later, after picking up a black newspaper, seeing a picture of the Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal School’s homecoming queen, and falling in love. He immediately went to Arkansas to introduce himself to the young woman, sixteen years his junior, who had just completed her master’s in music. They soon married and moved back to New Orleans, into the house Mr. McDonald’s family had owned since before he was born. Together they launched a business making dentures and crowns, and three years later, Janet was born. Every day after school, Janet would come to the lab, which was attached to the house, to do her homework while her parents worked. After supper, when she was in bed, her mother would go back to work, often putting in eighteen-hour days. Fifty-one years later, Janet’s mother still runs her denture business; her own mother had shown her the way, practicing nursing in Arkansas for fifty years.