Edie by Jean Stein Read Free Book Online

wore dark gray or brown tweed suits with a waistcoat, and he always had a hat on and carried a walking stick. I’d see the gardeners tipping their hats to him.
    GEORGE PLIMPTON  When I was a boy I used to see the de Forest estate across Cold Spring Harbor from the Beach Club. There was a boathouse with a dock on the water, and the big white house up the hill, with lawns and formal gardens.
    I used to wonder what went on up there—very grand doings, I always supposed. One thing I knew about them was that they once had a private railway car. The old man must have cut quite a figure—he came from a distinguished New York family. He was a director of the Southern Pacific Railway, which put him at the right hand of E. H. Harriman, the railroad tycoon, who was one of the most powerful men around. So the de Forests in their heyday could have lived like princes, but apparently they never did.
    In a way, the community is characterized by the Cold Spring Harbor Beach Club. it’s quite an institution. To begin with, it has no beach. The clubhouse is a simple, shacklike structure. No liquor is served. My father told me that it used to have a rule that if you were a man, you had to wear a top to your bathing suit, which was due largely to Colonel Henry L. Stimson, the onetime Secretary of War and one of the great figures of Cold Spring Harbor, who had a slightly hairy chest which he didn’t want to display. A number of distinguished figures turned up there—John Foster Dulles, Marshall Field, Allan Dulles (I can remember him playing tennis invariably under a wide-brimmed straw hat), Arthur Ballantine, and, of course, the de Forests. My father used to say that the general ambience of Cold Spring Harbor was one of a restrained Presbyterianism marked by austerity, virtually no excesses of any sort, with nobody throwing his weight around, a very simple community which attracted the best because it made a point of not being at all flamboyant or like a Gold Coast.
    SAUCIE SEDGWICE  My grandfather de Forest must have been a man of strong opinions, but I heard of them only through my grandmother. She told me once that she and Grandpa had voted for Franklin Roosevelt because “Grandpa said that any child of Sarah and Jimmy’s was bound to be a good governor.” But then, she said, “Franklin was very impolite to your grandfather. There was an anti-trust hearing, and not only was Franklin on the other side, but he didn’t even take off his hat to your grandfather when he came into court I Grandpa never voted for him again.”
    My grandfather didn’t marry until he was forty-two. Then he chose a young woman from St. Paul, Minnesota, named Julia Gilman Noyes. She was staying near Cold Spring Harbor, visiting her friend May Tiffany, the daughter of Louis Tiffany, whose family lived in Laurel Hollow next to the de Forests. My grandmother was twenty-three then, and while she belonged to what she would have called a “respectable” Connecticut family, I think she felt at a disadvantage coming from St. Paul. Her father had moved there for reasons of health in the 1860s, and I suppose he prospered, because Grandma was told as a young girl that she could afford a cook even if she married a clergyman—she would have a dowry of a quarter of a million dollars. So perhaps when she landed Henry de Forest she may have been a bit provincial. But she soon learned. She loved expensive clothes; she loved respectability, but mainly she must have loved being grand. She told me once that her bare feet never touched the floor because her French maid always left a pair of slippers at her bedside.

    Henry de Forest (Edie’s maternal grandfather)
     

    Julia Noyes, Edie’s maternal grandmother, with her mother
     
    No question, my grandmother became a great lady in everybody’s eyes. You cannot imagine the stately progression of her day: interviewing the cook in the bedroom in the morning, reading the mail at her desk before lunch, followed by sherry,