Little Women of the World
I
THE American debutante is, like the corset, an old institution. She has been through many metamorphoses, some of them as uncomfortable as Mainbocher’s wasp-waist, resurrected last autumn after having been decently buried for nearly forty years. Our debs in that same forty years have become little women of the world. Today they circulate as they never did when Grandma was a girl and chaperons a necessity. Now the vestigial duenna, when in attendance at all, is a chaperon in name only.
Within the last two decades the debutante has changed more drastically than during any other period in the history of the species. Before 1920 it would have been almost as unthinkable for a debutante to endorse a cigarette as to smoke one. She wouldn’t have been photographed drinking champagne in a night club with her ‘beau of the moment,’ because she wouldn’t have been allowed in a night club with her beau of the moment, unless Mother went too.
Why have our eighteen-year-olds lost; their girlish modesty, and forfeited the fun of growing up gradually? Why do they look and act like sophisticated women by the time they’ve been out one season? What’s wrong with our debuts? It’s true American women generally enjoy more freedom now than they did twenty years ago. It’s also true that apartments have replaced the old brownstone fronts, and that today’s metropolitan debs have little space for parties in their own homes. But neither emancipation nor real estate is responsible for the premature blooming of our so-called buds.
There is nothing revolutionary in debutantes’ appearing at well-chaperoned parties in hotels. Eighty years ago New York debutantes were attending subscription dances at Delmonico’s. In 1883 Ward McAllister inaugurated the Patriarchs, which were in a sense forerunners of today’s Junior Assemblies. Sponsored and attended by adult men as well as women, the Patriarch balls annually injected new life into their veins by admitting debutantes who could muster a suitable old oaken background. The nineteenth century had its dancing classes and cotillions too, though the actual presentation of a daughter to society usually took place at home.
Coming-out parties in the gaslight era were simple or lavish, depending on the taste and pocket book of the parents, but, no matter how costly the clothes and the food and the potted palms, no debut could have been mistaken for a Billy Rose production, as many a coming-out party might be today. No debutante was a professional Glamour Girl, with one eye on the stage and the other glued to the gossip columns for cozy mention of herself as Dot or Harrie or Sue or Madge. The Gibson Girl, even after she came out, did not ‘sit and sigh in the Iridium Room nightly,’ as Cholly Knickerbocker puts it. Nor did she have her picture taken, for publication and profit, trying out a new automobile in Central Park.
Perhaps my slant on our current debut system is too gloomy because I view its remains in New York City, where we habitually go to extremes. But since New York influences the fashions and customs of the country, other cities where caste still struggles for survival can do with a few storm warnings.
II
Debutantes and debuts were social rather than commercial before and for some time after the turn of the century. The purpose of a debut was clear. It was to introduce a young girl to society, and society included her parents’ contemporaries, as well as eligible young men. The debutante actually talked with everyone at her party, and many of those present became her friends. Today scores of the men guests at a large Manhattan debut are never again seen by the deb. A social secretary lines them up as she arranges the rest of the scenery, and Father pays her well for that undependable and thirsty stag line.
According to the rules of the game as it is now played in New York, there must be at least twice as many boys as girls, or the party cant be a success. Unfortunately there’s no guarantee that the boys, once there, will stay through the evening. They may wander off to other debuts run the same night by rival secretaries, whose stag lines arc largely duplicates. Young lords of creation, invited to several, may look in on two or three before settling down. What the debutante nets that evening or ultimately is a matter for speculation. But the hotels and the secretaries do well for themselves. Unquestionably they get a good deal more out of the parties than do the debs for whom they are given. The larger the debut, the bigger the profit.
Capitalizing on the fact that many mothers are unsophisticated, or inefficient, or lazy, or incapable of organizing a coming-out party, the secretaries have become promoters, and have turned the debut into Big Business. With the enthusiastic cooperation of the gossip columnists, the hotels, the tabloids, Hollywood, Time, Life, and other picture magazines, they have made a spectacle of the American debutante and her ingenuous, gullible, ambitious parents. Our national urge to have the biggest circuses, the highest buildings, the fastest trains, and the wildest headlines, has made us pushovers for the debut racket. And with the fashion for gaudy, extravagant debuts have come gaudy, extravagant debutantes, restless, strident, and brit tle as the sparkling balls on a Christmas tree. Dignity has no glitter, no publicity value. Quiet feminine charm is lost in the uproar.
While there are doubtless many sweet and unspoiled debutantes among the thousand who come out annually in this country, their flashier sisters, who may well be in the minority, are so conspicuous and so well publicized that they color the whole picture. The ballyhoo that attends their debuts distorts a custom that was once as genuine and attractive and unpretentious as the parties simpler parents are still giving in Three Rivers, Michigan, and Tiffin, Ohio, to celebrate their daughters’ graduation from high school or college.
It’s perfectly natural for mothers to want their children to meet nice people and marry well. But must they sacrifice delicacy and good taste in the struggle? It’s a good thing to put money in circulation, and there’s no reason why a rich father shouldn’t pay $5000 for his daughter’s debut if he can do so without vulgarity, and without ruining her sense of values and propriety. But it’s a risky business to advertise an eighteen-yearold girl, and then let her do as she pleases and go where she likes. Has she the innate good judgment to take care of herself in the merry-go-round of parties to which she will be invited? Will ostentatious clothes and entertainment turn her into a noisy little snob, with nothing in her head but lightweight cliches? Before the season’s over, will she talk and laugh and think exactly like a hundred other girls?
It might be well to adopt a touch of our grandmothers’ restraint. In their day it was possible for a debutante to be expensively feted and dressed, and still remain a sheltered flower. She was presented to adult society, rather than to the press. And while we may laugh at the picture she made, blushing demurely against a background of rubber plants and cut flowers, she had a charm which has disappeared along with Father’s double parlors, and sentimental stringed instruments operating under the ancestral stairs. Now she is photographed dancing at the Stork Club even before she comes out. How she can be considered in, when she appears in the tabloids and is described as ‘having wonderful time, dancing with her current favorite,’ is a baffling phenomenon. No longer is her social life restricted to the comparative seclusion of private parties. No longer can her mother shield her from the World, and tenderly teach her the facts of life. It’s the other way round. Daughter is the sophisticate.
III
Before the publicity-minded organizer-secretaries perfected their methods for making parents give bigger and fancier parties, that they might collect bigger and fancier fees and/or percentages from hotels, florists, orchestras, and stationers, busy mothers occasionally availed themselves of secretarial assistance. But secretaries acted as secretaries, and not combination promoters, oracles, dictators, and press agents. They helped address the invitations, but the list was Mother’s visiting list, augmented by solicitous relatives and friends. Secretaries did not sell lists by the yard, or rate the guests as they do now, in Grade A, B, C, and D lots. No society writer would have felt it necessary to warn debutantes as Cholly Knickerbocker did this season, when he included in his list of ‘Don’ts’ the supercilious ‘Don’t fail to keep the Grade C and D debutantes at a safe distance.’
True, many of our grandmothers’ debut customs were as absurd as those we tolerate today, but at least they kept the debutante in hand until she was old enough to know her way around. Rachel Buchanan’s A Debutante in Polite Society, published in 1888, gives us a pastel notion of what the incipient society girl thought and said and did half a century ago.
Florence, the heroine, in a letter to her aunt, expresses herself in this decorous fashion: ‘About the debut, of course I wore a beautiful white illusion costume. . , . Everybody congratulated mamma — papa refusing to come home from his office that afternoon “to witness the auction” as he drolly expressed it, thereby making me laugh and mamma sulk just a little. Everybody also said to me in some one of the many variations of the formula for such occasions, “You are a welcome and ornamental addition to our society,” and I replied exactly two hundred and ninety-seven times, “Thanks, you are very kind to say so,” To be exact, I only varied this answer four times.’ Not bad at that, I should say. It seems to me Florence showed a lively initiative under the circumstances. She goes on as follows: —
‘The reason why mamma would not let me be brought out on my eighteenth birthday as I wished, instead of one week previous to it, was because, as she said, people will remember just exactly how old I shall be ten years hence, which recollection is supposed to be disagreeable when it. happens, and I have been insured against such an exactness. It may be an advantage or comfort to me some time or other.’
Mamma was no fool. And Florence was a model of open-mindedness.
She did, however, have some misgivings. Says she: ‘I can not be brought to believe that it was my thoughtful tendencies that made my too closely laced corset bruise me so horribly, or brought a keen agony to my feet, which were tilted by Louis Quinze slippers, or made my bashful neck and shoulders so chilly. . . . When it was all over, and I announced how bored and hungry I had been, Kate said that I would be bored continuously hereafter, but that I was not likely to enjoy hunger any more, and that I would remember my present sensation among those luxuries that had been, but were not to be enjoyed again as long as I lived, unless I became engaged, and thus found leisure for such pleasure.’ Florence’s sister Kate was clearly a bit of a pessimist, but, after all, she had been out a year or two, and had faced a long siege of the 1888 equivalent of our ubiquitous early-morning, supper-dance scrambled eggs and sausages.
On January 2, 1897, Harper’s Bazar published an article entitled ‘A Debutante’s Reception,’ by Anna Wentworth Sears, which fairly fluttered with discreet advice. Laugh at it, if you like, but you’ll have to concede the girls of that decade must have been good little soldiers. Said the author: ‘In our day and generation we are certainly wise in some things, and one of the ways that we show our wisdom is in the training of our little maidens and young girls until the time they shall be ready, as women, to come out into social life and take their places among the people of the world. A girl’s education is a very serious matter, and the working-hours of the day for sixteen or eighteen years are all too short for what she has to learn to fit her to be a thoroughly developed, well-rounded woman. . . . When the years of study at home are over, there may be a year or two of travel and study in foreign lands, and after that our modern American girl is ready to emerge from the quiet seclusion of home life, and show herself among men and women, as a healthful, modest, and thoroughly cultured gentlewoman.’
So that’s what they were driving at in the gay nineties. Apparently it didn’t occur to the mothers of the day that modesty and culture weren’t photogenic, or, if it did, they preferred decorum to publicity.
‘And now that the time has come for this transition,’ continues Author Sears, ‘ the function which is to accomplish the important result for the young woman of perhaps nineteen years is a comparatively simple affair. . . . Saturday is now the day invariably chosen. Then men, who are of course a desirable adjunct to any such occasion, have leisure, and will for this particular event perhaps waive their prejudice to afternoon affairs in general.’ By men she meant men, and their marriageable sons. ‘So about two weeks before the day, all the friends and acquaintances on the visiting-list of the deb’s mother who live in the same place, and also those who live in the suburbs or near enough to be able to exchange calls with her, receive cards of invitation.’
To polish off the guide for a proper coming-out party, the author adds, ‘Having greeted the mother and daughter and extended their good wishes, the guests are now free to wander about the room and seek familiar faces, or enjoy the pretty scene before them. The parlors are charming with the many lights from gas, lamps, and candles reflected in the mirrors and ornaments. . . . There is plenty of standing-room, as all furniture has been removed or pushed against the wall. . . . Much laughter and merrymaking is heard. Then, refreshed, or possibly having refused to eat anything — but not until they have made at least a half-hour’s call — the guests take their departure. Then the deb can enjoy her own friends, for the day may end with a dinner for the young people, and possibly later a dance.’
Contrast that homey scene with our modern jamborees. Last October, in his ‘Don’ts for Debutantes,’ Cholly Knickerbocker found it necessary to advise, ‘Don’t try to economize on the music at the dances you give. The young people of today demand two orchestras for continuous dancing. Many debutante parties have been ruined by a mediocre band.’ Our young people demand, and their taste is moulded by such goings-on as prompt this further Knickerbocker tidbit: ‘Don’t fail to summon the police when the “we-boys” come around and attempt to obtain money to ensure pleasant “write-ups” for your daughter.’
IV
By the early 1900’s the era of extravagance was coming in, but the deb had not yet become a nationally advertised product. Even the costliest debuts did not approach the gilt-edged splendor of the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when Barbaras Hutton and Field, Joan Peabody and Annie May Henry, established the standing broad record for frenzied ostentation with parties costing more than $50,000. But the tempo was accelerating. Vogue, in its December 3 issue of 1908, told of the ‘continuous performance plan’ in which the deb was brought out at an afternoon reception, which was a ‘crush’ affair. ‘Other debs received with her, and after the guests of the day had left, there was a dinner for the receiving-party, augmented by a dozen or more young women, some buds of the previous season, and the proper complement of men.’ (Note ‘the proper complement of men.’ Not yet had the social secretaries built up the stag line to include hundreds of people who meant nothing to the deb or her parents, or her parents’ friends.) After the dinner the party went to a play, then had supper, followed by a dance in one of the fashionable restaurants, topped off by a supperbreakfast. ‘Visiting-lists,’ added Vogue, ‘are so long that one tea or reception does not suffice.’ Today the lists are even longer, but they have the intimate quality of the telephone book.
With the war, debuts began to be organized more as we know them now. The grooming of the girls, too, followed the pattern familiar to New Yorkers today. A socially ambitious mother places her daughter in a fashionable school when she is barely out of the nursery. At seven or eight, the little girl starts to dancing class, probably Miss Robinson’s at the Plaza, or the Benjamin Dancing Class. As she grows older, the friends she makes at school become more and more important. They may be the means of wangling invitations to the pre-subdeb subscription dances. The five important ones are the Junior Holidays, the Junior Cosmopolitans, the Junior Get-Togethers, the Friday Dinner Dances, and the Middle Holidays. Patronesses pass or refuse applications on the basis of rules evolved as needed, for the purpose of admitting or blackballing whom they please.
There are five big subdeb subscription dances too, among them the Metropolitan, Colony, and Holiday dances. If Daughter makes a total of five out of the pre-subdeb and subdeb purges, she is likely to be admitted to the Junior Assemblies her debut year. These consist of three more subscription dances, run by older society women, who admit about a hundred of the three or four hundred girls who come out each year in New York. The committee is conspicuously cold toward the genus Glamour Girl. While not a prerequisite to a successful debut, the Junior Assemblies are considered tops socially by the debutantes, who are likely to add irreverently that they are also tops in dullness. Each girl has tickets for two escorts, and if she doesn’t know a brace of college boys to invite she asks her brother or a school friend to run them to earth for her.
The socially ambitious who aren’t sufficiently rich or blue-blooded to be tapped for the Junior Assemblies can still come out, even though their mothers haven’t long visiting lists of their own. But Father must be willing to pay. School contacts help, but a social secretary, with her list of college ‘men’ and prep-school seniors, is the real answer to a climbing maiden’s prayer, if what she wants is a well-attended debut and plenty of invitations to other parties. How many permanent friends she makes through the commercial debut system is anybody’s guess. She rarely achieves a husband, because there is so little eligible material for her to work on. But a husband isn’t the only aim in life for a 1940 debutante. Perhaps she will turn out to be a Glamour Girl whose activities will be the concern of the nation for maybe six months. Perhaps she will even make Hollywood. No one can tell where the lightning will strike. But to get in the running costs money.
A dinner dance at the Ritz, for four hundred people, runs to more than $4000. By the time clothes and incidental expenses for the season are added to the cost of the party, a debutante represents a sizable investment. Champagne, Scotch, cigarettes, and evening dresses total a tidy sum, and though a few traditionalists with big names and small budgets can and do bring daughters out at small, inexpensive teas or dances without ballyhoo or frills, most debs come high.
One thousand eighteen-year-olds were presented to ‘society’ in the U.S.A. last year, at an estimated total cost of $8,000,000, according to Fortune. This means an average of $8000.
V
Lucky are the fathers who live in the South, where money is not quite as important as charm, and great-grandparents. In Baltimore an invitation to the Bachelors’ Cotillion gives a debutante social recognition no money can buy. Parents register a daughter before she cuts her second teeth, in the hope that she and her pedigree will pass muster. For those girls who make the grade, it means a real presentation to adult society. The name ‘Bachelors’ Cotillion’ is somewhat misleading, as these gatherings are largely attended by aristocrats who are already ancestors.
In Charleston, too, Background is Everything. Neither a bank account nor the lack of one is recommendation or drawback for attendance at the sacred St. Cecilia Ball. Only a debutante whose father or male guardian is a member of the Society, or who is an out-of-town guest of a member, is invited. No young man attends until he is twenty-one. The girls have cards on which their dances are filled ahead of time, and between dances the debs are expected to return to their chaperons, which most of them try to do. There is no stag line, no cutting in, no smoking in the ballroom; and no girl leaves the ballroom without a chaperon.
About three quarters of the debs have tea dances or supper dances given for them in the course of the season, but none of the parties approaches the splendor of a dance at the Ritz or St. Regis in New York. Often the parents of two girls give a dance for their young together, and split the bills. A successful Charleston debut, however, may be only a cocktail party at home, for ot her debutantes and their escorts. The whole affair, including the price of the deb’s dress, may come to less than $100. For around $500 a girl can have a dance, a tea, and better clothes, though they won’t guarantee her any more fun. For about $800 she can have a dance, a tea, and an extensive wardrobe. Not more than two debuts a year lop $1000 apiece. The traditional Charleston debut, which the average girl would like to have, includes good clothes, a dance for her young friends, and a tea party at which she is introduced to the friends of her parents and grandparents.
In the social prestige it accords a debutante, the Philadelphia Assembly resembles the St. Cecilia Ball in Charleston. Only the descendants of First Families are eligible, and a Philadelphia deb’s greatest triumph lies in being invited to this historic annual ball, inaugurated 191 years ago this winter. Of the one thousand bluebloods who attend, only about twenty are debutantes. Most of these come out at private dances, teas, or dinners, much less elaborate than the regulation Manhattan debut.
Texas, too, is more humane to Daddy. There the debutante balls are arranged by exclusive men’s clubs. Girls are nominated by their beaux, votes are polled, and invitations sent to the lucky girls elected. Each club presents its bevy of buds at a ball, as though they were show girls in George White’s ‘Scandals.’ Despite the fact that pomp and ceremony are less costly there than in the East, a $6000 party is not unusual. Compared to a New York debut, that’s a bargain, because it pays for anywhere from three to sixteen or twenty girls at one clip. Each deb gives a party later on to entertain the club members, but the return affair need not be elaborate. A deb’s main worry is whether she will have an escort for her own debut. If no club member asks for that honor, she won’t go at all, even though she was thrilled at being invited. A rich father may bring pressure to bear on some gallant stag, but a girl who is neither popular nor wealthy may suffer the peculiar fate of missing her own debut.
Those who accept and attend are ‘presented’ by the club president. Guests applaud, the band plays, and the girls appear one at a time, like prize cattle. They curtsy, their names are announced, and they are then rescued by their escorts. As the hosts are already business or professional men, making good financially, many of the debs find husbands without a prolonged wait. When they marry, the club men become honorary members, which keeps the masculine element at debuts in Fort Worth, Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston on a high level of eligibility.
While I wouldn’t suggest the Texas debut as a model superior in every respect to the Manhattan brand, it certainly has its points. Though florid too, it exploits impressionable girls in mass formation, which is probably less damaging. And the fact that each show is paid for by a number of men, rather than by one father, should make it less offensive to serious-minded citizens like Westbrook Pegler, who has expressed his views on debuts in no uncertain terms. Said he in a January 1937 issue of the World-Telegram: ‘Not only do these introductions run into money, but, more important, they tend to irritate the lower classes, who do not have the intelligence to reason things out calmly and perceive the nobility of such spending. There is no use arguing that this spending gives employment to waiters and florists and those peasant girls of France who tread the grapes, because the lower classes see only contrasts, and these make them sore. My way would be to call on Mussolini and Hitler for bombing planes to blast these $50,000 parties without mercy in the name of God, instead of waiting until the lower classes are driven to vulgar extremes, as in Spain.’
To Mr. Pegler I would say that the flamboyant debut, will attend to its own demise in due course, without bloodshed. Already we see fewer extravagant parties than we did three years ago, when he paged the bombers. Already many of the girls themselves are beginning to protest. The fashion for simple coming-out parties at country clubs, during September and October, has won approval among astute Boston, Baltimore, and Long Island debutantes, who find such functions more fun than the endless, tiring round of a winter under the auspices of professional secretaries. Careers and college arc looking more and more attractive to sober young women who question what it is they ‘come out’ into. Parents, too, are suspecting there must be some way of presenting a daughter to adult society without cheapening her or offending the public.