Read Online Life at the Dakota by Stephen; Birmingham - Free Book Online Page B

considered a tasteless, unsuitable concern. One of the delights of the Dakota from the beginning was that it appeared to be run more as a charitable, luxurious rest home than as a business. When something went wrong, one simply rang downstairs and someone immediately appeared to fix it. If one got a bit behind in one’s rent, no angry landlord appeared at the door; it was simply assumed that, in time, the arrearage would be paid. No one seemed to remember that the senior Mr. Clark had put up the building to make money or to care that, despite its popularity, it didn’t really show much of a profit. Had the elder Mr. Clark lived, he certainlywouldn’t have tolerated such a situation. He would either have raised the rents, dispensed with some of the building’s costly little extra services or disposed of the property altogether.
    In its earliest days, meanwhile, the clientele of the Dakota was pretty much of the sort the senior Mr. Clark had expected—prosperous New York businessmen and their wives, solid folk who cared more about their pleasant, busy lives than about striving to be in society. They tended also to be older people, either childless or couples whose children had grown and moved away, and this gave the building a reputation it didn’t deserve—that children were unwelcome at the Dakota. The fact was that the Dakota, at first, was not convenient to the city’s better schools, though a number of excellent ones—Ethical Culture, Collegiate and Trinity among them—would soon come to the West Side.
    From the beginning, the Dakota’s clientele conveyed a vaguely intellectual and artistic tone. Socially, this set the early Dakotans immediately apart from the members of Mrs. Astor’s inner circle, where anything that smacked of intelligence and wit was actually frowned upon. In Mrs. Astor’s world, conversation was almost studiedly irrelevant, and its topics were restricted, as Lloyd Morris puts it, to “thoughtful discussions of food, wines, horses, yachts, cotillions, marriages, villas at Newport and the solecisms of ineligibles.” Anything that might remotely be considered an idea was eschewed at the Astor dinner table. During the day Mrs. Astor’s set had the dinners of the previous evenings to discuss. Actors, opera singers, composers and people connected with the theater in any way were considered socially disreputable. Writers, painters and sculptors were not deemed worth discussing—or buying—until they had been suitably dead for a number of years. Politicians were vulgar, nor were educators or even clergymen regarded as fit for inclusion in fashionable society. The only “working” people to whom the Four Hundred gave the nod were high-ranking members of the military, and the Astor-McAllister list included at least five generals and two colonels and their respective ladies. Needless to say, an imported titled Britisher, such as Sir Roderick Cameron, went sailing onto the sacred list. Mrs. Astor and her friends’ one concession to the arts was to attend the opera at the Academy of Music on Monday and Friday nights during the winter season, but the dictates of fashion precluded any real appreciation of music. Comme il faut required that one not enter one’s box until the end of the first act. Then, during the second interval, one socialized with one’s friends in the neighboring boxes. Then, before the third-act curtain lifted, one went home.
    At Mrs. Astor’s Fifth Avenue house, entertainments were equally ritualized. Dinner was at seven, and an invitation to dine with the Astors meant arriving at seven, not a moment later. If too early, one waited in one’s carriage outside the door and alit to ring the bell at clockstroke. The gentlemen wore white tie and tails, and the ladies long gowns and their best jewels. The ladies took their wraps to a downstairs cloakroom, and the gentlemen took theirs upstairs. In the