Читать книгу As It Was: A Memoir - Robert M. Pennoyer - Страница 13

By the 1860s my great-grandfather Pierpont Morgan and his father, Junius S. Morgan, had established the Morgan banks in London and New York. In the ensuing decades Pierpont gained the pinnacle of power, using his connections in London to arrange the vast flow of capital needed to finance America’s enormous economic growth through the last half of the nineteenth century. In the first decade of the twentieth century he turned his energy to collecting. He wanted the American people to fully experience Western culture, and made unprecedented contributions to the development of the art museum as an institution and to art awareness in this country. For decades he was one of the most acquisitive and discerning collectors in the world, pursuing priceless treasures throughout Europe.

He died in 1913, in Rome (“I’ve got to go up the hill!” were his last words), and his casket was brought back to New York on the liner S.S. France, so he could lie in state before the fireplace in the West Room of the Pierpont Morgan Library, near the chair in which he had so often sat, absorbed in his favorite game of solitaire. Instantly the weight of the world had descended on his son, my grandfather. People actually said things like “The king is dead, long live the king!”

Following Pierpont’s death, as a tribute to all he had done for the Metropolitan Museum of Art for more than forty years, the trustees commissioned a tablet incised in stone. It is about eight by four feet and has a center panel, surrounded by bas-relief carvings of classical Greek figures with the inscription: A GREAT CITIZEN [WHO] HELPED TO MAKE NEW YORK THE TRUE METROPOLIS OF AMERICA.

For fifty years this plaque hung in the Great Hall by the staircase. In the late ’60s, when the board adopted the master plan that over the next forty years would triple the museum’s exhibition space, the plaque, darkened with age, was moved into the shadows on a wall in the unlit vestibule just to the left of the main entrance, where not one in a million would even notice it. Pierpont would not have minded. He never sought recognition, but would have been enormously gratified by the museum’s continuing contribution to the education and entertainment of the public.

Although I never heard him mention his interest in the Pierpont Morgan Library and collecting, my grandfather made spectacular contributions of his own to the preservation of culture. When Pierpont died he left the McKim, Mead & White building on Thirty-sixth Street, built in 1906 to house his vast collection of autographed manuscripts, early printed books, and drawings (a collection second only to the Vatican’s), and its entire contents to my grandfather, who had watched the collection grow and had developed a deep love for the books and manuscripts. Over the next thirty years he made many noteworthy additions, not by acquiring whole collections, but by judiciously selecting books and manuscripts of unusual significance. In 1924 he gave the Pierpont Morgan Library to the public as a memorial to his father, to be administered by the board of trustees as an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the enlightenment of the American people. Unmindful of Benjamin Franklin’s advice that to honor descendants merely from the accident of biology was “not only groundless and absurd but often hurtful to that posterity,” he had his deed of gift provide that in the selection of trustees the male line of the Morgan name shall be favored. The board no longer follows this direction, and today more than half the contents have come from other donors whose extraordinary generosity has greatly enhanced both the collections and the endowment.

The famous Steichen portrait of Pierpont Morgan, circa 1906

In the 1970s the library offered me a rare opportunity. The Stavelot Triptych, dating back to about 1150, is a treasure of medieval art and one of the great objects in the collection. About a foot and a half high, it consists of three panels of gilded copper and enamel depicting biblical scenes. For some seven hundred years it was an object of veneration in the abbey in Stavelot, a town near Liege, Belgium, because it was believed to contain pieces of the original cross. In the early 1800s, when Napoleon’s troops ravaged Stavelot and destroyed the abbey, it was hidden in an attic in Germany. When discovered in the early 1900s it was snapped up by Pierpont who bequeathed it to my grandfather, who in turn bequeathed it to the library upon his death in 1943.

J.P. Morgan (portrait by Frank Salisbury, 1933)

In the late ’70s, when there was concern about the condition of the three panels, I watched with Charles Ryskamp, then director of the Pierpont Morgan Library, as the curator, William Voelke, opened the back of the center panel to reveal a cavity containing a small piece of wood, a small piece of cloth, and a piece of parchment with a Latin inscription attesting that these were pieces of the cross and of Mary’s vestment. These were objects that had not seen the light of day for nine hundred years. A process called carbon dating confirmed that the piece of wood went back only to the 400s. Apparently the good friars who made it were not above embellishing the truth to secure a greater hold on the flock. Voelke told me later that there were so many claims about small pieces of wood from the original cross that if you put all of this wood together you would have enough to build a ship.

At Pierpont’s death my grandfather became the senior partner of J. P. Morgan & Co., which continued as the preeminent bank in America. Twenty-three Wall Street (known as “the Corner,” in a nod to its location at the juncture of Wall and Broad Streets) remained the capital of capitalism through the Second World War and for some years after his death in 1943.

Pierpont’s success was built on trust and a commitment to absolute integrity. As far back as 1912, when asked if credit was based primarily upon money or property, he had countered, “The first thing is character. Before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it. A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom!”

In May of 1933 my grandfather was subpoenaed to appear before the Subcommittee of the United States Senate Committee on Banking and Currency as a witness in the inquiry into stock-exchange practices—the so-called Pecora Investigation (named for Ferdinand Pecora, the counsel to the committee). On the eve of his appearance on the witness stand, which was considered an event of national importance, he drafted and wrote out in his own hand a statement of his core beliefs. As the record of his conception of “the duties and uses of the private banker,” it should be made required reading in contemporary business quarters:

The private banker is a member of a profession which has been practiced since the Middle Ages. In the process of time there has grown up a code of professional ethics and customs, on the observance of which depend his reputation, his fortune and his usefulness to the community in which he works.

Some private bankers, as indeed is the case in some of the other professions, are not as observant of this code as they should be; but if, in the exercise of his profession, the private banker disregards this code, which could never be expressed in legislation, but has a force far greater than any law, he will sacrifice his credit. This credit is his most valuable possession; it is the result of years of fair and honourable dealing and, while it may be quickly lost, once lost cannot be restored for a long time, if ever. The banker must at all times so conduct himself as to justify the confidence of his clients in him and thus preserve it for his successors.

At all times the idea of doing only first class business, and that in a first class way, has been before our minds. We have never been satisfied with simply keeping within the law, but have constantly sought so to act that we might fully observe the professional code, and so maintain the credit and reputation which has been handed down to us from our predecessors in the firm. Since we have no more power of knowing the future than any other men, we have made many mistakes (who has not during the past five years?), but our mistakes have been errors of judgment and not of principle.

The private banker must be ready and willing at all times to give disinterested advice to his clients to the best of his ability. If he feels unable to give this advice without reference to his own interests he must frankly say so. The belief in the integrity of his advice is a great part of the credit of which I have spoken above, as being the best possession of any firm.

Another very important use of the private banker is to serve as a channel whereby industry may be provided with capital to meet its needs for expansion and development. To this end the private banker can serve well, since, as he has at stake not only his clients’ interests but his own reputation, he is likely to be specially careful. If he makes a public sale and puts his own name at the foot of the prospectus he has a continuing obligation of the strongest kind to see, so far as he can, that nothing is done which will interfere with the full carrying out by the obligator of the contract with the holder of the security.

To sum up, I state without hesitation that I consider the private banker a national asset and not a national danger. As to the theory that he may become too powerful, it must be remembered that any power which he has comes, not from the possession of large means, but from the confidence of people in his character and credit, and that that power, having no force to back it, would disappear at once if people thought that the character had changed or the credit had diminished—not financial credit, but that which comes from the respect and esteem of the community.

At a later point in the proceedings, my grandfather put his recipe for success a little more succinctly: “While I know full well that methods must change, the old and well-tried principles on which the business with which I am connected was started and carried on must be held to. They may be summed up in a few short phrases—do your work, be honest, keep your word, help when you can, be fair.”

That evening Junius, my uncle Beak, wrote my mother:

You will probably want some impression of the Wash[ington]… show, so here goes. We turned up there on Tues. a.m. before the Senate Com., and there was an epidemic of photography that I should call with all reverence just plain God-awful. However, some of the senators finally objected, & Father was called as the first witness. He had a statement of the duties and uses of private bankers all ready to read … so he was able to get it off right away—and it spoiled Pecora’s game right from the start. Without going into details, the statement stole the show.… The Hon[orable] Pa has been magnificent.… and has established himself on a friendly basis with almost all the senators. Their counsel, Pecora, has not been enjoying himself, but as he appears to all to be a S.O.B I can’t say that any of us are losing any sleep over that.

J. P. Morgan at the Pecora hearing in Washington in 1933, with his son Junius

My grandfather had strong religious convictions and a deep familiarity with the Bible, which he read for pleasure; there was a well-thumbed copy at his bedside in each of his houses. When someone at the Pecora hearings interjected, “Haven’t you forgotten, Mr. Morgan, that it has been said that money is the root of all evil?” he shot back without a second’s hesitation, “I think you have misquoted your reference. The correct quotation is ‘the love of money is the root of all evil.’”

He was prescient. Despite his aversion to publicity, in the early 1920s he had testified against the Versailles Treaty predicting that the harsh reparations imposed on Germany would inevitably lead to more conflict.

A Democratic senator from the South, fed up with the committee’s proceedings, charged that the only thing keeping it from being a circus was the scarcity of peanuts and lemonade. That night a press agent for a traveling circus read that remark in the paper, and it gave him an idea for a cheap stunt: the next day he produced a midget, complete with a bag of peanuts and a bottle of lemonade, and during the recess lifted her onto my grandfather’s knee. My grandfather, who was unfailingly courteous, did not protest; he even managed a little smile. Hundreds of flashbulbs went off, and the photograph was published in newspapers across the nation.

Press photo of the circus midget on J. P. Morgan’s lap at the Pecora hearing, published nationwide

Afterward, Grandpa Morgan confided to my mother that when the little girl had told him she was twenty he had said to her, “You certainly don’t look it.” Then he had asked her where she lived and she had replied, “In a tent, sir.” Meanwhile the press agent was pressing her to take off her little hat and she was demurring, and my grandfather, ever chivalrous, said, “You don’t have to do as he says—it is pretty.” The whole time, he told my mother, he knew he had been set up and was being made a perfect fool of.

I can add a bit from my own history. In law school you have something called moot court, where students take different sides of a case and argue them before a panel of three practicing lawyers or judges. The moot court I was assigned at Columbia included Pecora, who by then was a judge. At the end of the debate he ranked me as having given the best oral presentation. I wish I had told him that J. P. Morgan was my grandfather, but I was too shy. My regrets in life are the things I did not do, and that is one of them.

Grandpa Morgan devoted his life to carrying on the dynasty. He bore not only the name, but a striking resemblance to his father in the ruddiness of his complexion, the bushiness of his eyebrows, and in his overall bearing. His aversion to publicity knew no bounds, and he often complained to my mother that the press made him feel like a hunted animal. For years he was portrayed as an ogre, and his capitalist’s scalp was demanded from a thousand soap boxes from Union Square in New York to Hyde Park in London. The press had an ally that became the symbol of all that was wrong with capitalism: my grandfather’s yacht, the Corsair, which at 343 feet and six inches was the largest and, at a cost of almost $3 million, the most expensive ever constructed for a private owner up to that time. With its crew of roughly sixty, it amounted to a small ocean liner.

This was the fourth and most resplendent Corsair. Commissioned in 1930 from the Bath Iron Works in Maine she provided desperately needed work to the shipyard during the early years of the Depression. The Corsair I knew was a thing of beauty with her black hull, clipper-ship bow, and teak interior. Her great lounge sported a beamed ceiling and a big open fireplace. There were five guest staterooms, each with a bathroom, and two suites for Grandpa, one on the main deck and the other on the boat deck forward. Yet she wasn’t overly lavish, possessing none of the gaudy things like gold faucets and marble floors that had been reported in the press.

In 1937, during our first summer in the Tahoe house, my mother drove us to the nearest movie house, some twelve miles away, at the south end of the lake. In that era, every theater in the country showed a ten-minute clip called Movietone News before the main feature, an assortment of pictures of the week’s national and global events. When the lights went down the first “event” (taken through a telescopic lens) showed Grandpa and four of his grandsons (the oldest son of each of his four children: Jack Morgan, Henry Morgan, George Nichols, Jr., and my brother, Paul, each identified by name) climbing from the launch up the gangway to board the Corsair for the eight-day transatlantic crossing to Southampton. (For my part, in early June I had accompanied Grandpa and our family on his annual overnight cruise to New London, Connecticut, for the Harvard-Yale crew races.)

Corsair IV

On the first night of that crossing, my grandfather’s personal physician took my brother and our three cousins aside and cautioned them never to mention the name Roosevelt in his hearing because it could well cause him to suffer another heart attack. This prohibition evidently did not apply to the printed word. I recently came across these lines in a letter my grandfather wrote my mother in September 1938: “Roosevelt’s note to Hitler seems to me rather weak, but it may help public opinion at home a little toward a proper anti-German view. But FDR is not a leader, not a real one at least, and I don’t think he ever did anything from a simple motive—he always has his own political future in view, whatever he does or says!” A year later he was writing her about Roosevelt furiously:

Hope when FDR comes up for final judgment he will be condemned to walk forever up a descending escalator and have nothing to do but regret his foul past, and avoid the flames which would hurt him if he stopped climbing! Isn’t that a picturesque, even Dantesque idea? I wish G[ustave] Dore were alive to render it in his own special manner.

We all have our flaws. My grandfather lived in a cocoon like a feudal lord, enjoying his places, his friends, and his family. Blinded by hatred of FDR he could not acknowledge that the safety nets the president had put in place under the New Deal were essential to alleviate terrible suffering, or that the steps taken to regulate the banking system saved capitalism. Even when war came and Great Britain stood alone against the Nazi tyranny, he could not bring himself to credit FDR for helping the England he loved.

He surely could not have known that his older daughter, Janie, was an ardent Roosevelt admirer, writing my mother a week after FDR’s inauguration in 1933:

These are stirring and rather splendid times here, and we are all thrilled and rather breathless at what Roosevelt is accomplishing. No one expected him to show even great decision, and here he is asking and obtaining dictatorial powers, with Congress granting him anything he asks. Long may it last!

The grandsons were scheduled to return to New York on the Corsair, but Paul came down with pneumonia and my grandfather took him with him to Wall Hall to recuperate. And from there to Gannochy, the shooting lodge in the Grampian foothills of Scotland, whose roughly fifteen thousand acres of moors he had been leasing for years.

Paul later reported to me that Bingley, Grandpa’s Wall Hall butler, had presided magisterially over the gentlemen’s gentlemen who had accompanied their masters to the shooting party, that they all seemed to be fiercely proud to be in service, and that a rigid hierarchy had determined how they were seated at table in the servants’ hall. Grandpa wrote my mother that “Paulo made himself very acceptable, and I do think he enjoyed himself very much,” adding, “I’m in the rudest of health and have never felt better, though I still abjectly follow the doctor’s instructions and am as virtuous as a painted saint with a fresh gilded halo. I find myself able to do all I want to do—even so far as to fire 90 shots in twenty minutes in the most successful drive of the season. And the weather excellent throughout the whole time! Heaven could hardly be better.”

In 1938 Grandpa entertained the new King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Gannochy. He had been the only private citizen to receive a command to sit in the royal box in Westminster Abbey during the coronation the year before, just as he had been special ambassador, appointed by the president of the United States, at the coronation of the king’s grandfather, Edward VII, in 1902. (My mother, who was five at the time, remembered him all dressed up in black knee breeches and silk stockings and with a black-velvet peaked hat.)

In late August 1938 my grandfather wrote my mother:

Arrived at Gannochy to find the household all running smoothly under Bingley’s very competent control. Saturday morning I interviewed the Chief Constable of the county and found he had all the necessary arrangements made to protect the party from intrusion. Saturday noon word came that the Royal Standard must be displayed from a flag staff throughout the K’s visit; there was no flag staff on the house, and it was Saturday afternoon. However we got in touch with a man in Brechin who has worked for the house and he came over to see what the job was like. When he understood it was for the King he said, “It will not do to leave the whole work to Monday, I’ll have my men here tomorrow and will get everything ready to place the mast on Monday a.m.” This in Scotland—Sunday work! So by noon on Monday all was well and ready, and as a reward I asked him if he would stand by to hoist the flag as the King arrived—thus having a chance to see the King and Queen near to. He almost wept with joy at the suggestion. The visit was a triumphant success and everything went without a hitch. Both K & Q were just as happy and as pleasant as they were when they came before as Yorks, and the additional ceremonies were very slight and fell mostly on the ladies of the party. So I came off with no trouble at all and two of the most agreeable people I know were guests here for four days. It turns out there is a good supply of birds, and the weather was very well behaved so the King who loves shooting was much pleased; he also was shooting very well which pleased him much.

The next August in 1939 Grandpa was preparing once again to entertain the monarch:

The K and Q will arrive as they did last year about 6 or 6:30 and I’m much looking forward to the nice quiet week we shall have. If only the weather will turn kind! Today is the first day I’ve seen no rain since July 14. The sun is gorgeous and the barometer going up so I’m hopeful. Birds we don’t yet know about but the prospects are not at all good. However, we shall see what we have and do what we can. It’s such a joy to be up here again! It’s the one bit of the year for me which is quite perfect and “every prospect pleases, and man is not vile but at his very best.”

The English newspapers elaborated on the royal visit:

King George VI of England drove by automobile from his summer residence at Balmoral Castle through the picturesque highland scenery of the Devil’s Elbow district to be the guest of J. P. Morgan for several days of grouse shooting. The Queen came here from Glamis Castle, where she has been visiting her father. The young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, were left at the castle. The American banker made a personal preview this morning of the 15,000 acres he has under lease for shooting to bag a few brace of grouse for tonight’s dinner. Lady Elphinstone, the Queen’s eldest sister, is hostess at Gannochy during the royal stay. Her husband, their son, and the Queen’s younger brother, the Hon. David Bowes-Lyon, also are guests. Mr. Morgan last had tea with the royal couple, old friends, at the British embassy in Washington on June 8 during their Majesties’ North American tour. He will be invited to visit Balmoral later in the season. The King and the banker were out early in sparkling sunshine with their guns and their game beaters. The Queen joined them on the heathery slopes at noon. Servants spread a bountiful lunch from picnic hampers. The menu? That was a secret of the Morgan household. (The royal couple’s first picnic with an American was when President and Mrs. Roosevelt entertained them at Hyde Park and introduced them to “hot dogs,” an American staple separate and distinct from the sausage rolls of England.) Members of the Gannochy party reported “good average bags.” Shooting the Aughmill portion of the moor, the seven guns of the party brought down 80 brace of grouse, 160 birds.

But the shooting was to be interrupted by something more pressing than grouse: the winds of war were blowing England’s way, and Grandpa felt compelled to return at once to New York.

Ten years before I was born my grandfather’s coming to the aid of England had come close to costing him his life. In 1915 he narrowly missed being assassinated. When England had exhausted its funds, he had arranged a $3 billion loan that enabled it to buy munitions during the First World War. The Morgan Bank was appointed the official American purchasing agent for the Allies. Late in his career my grandfather stated that “the fact that the Allies found us useful and valued our assistance in their task is the fact that I am most proud of in all my business life.” His providing loans inflamed a pro-German faction of Americans who wanted this country either to remain neutral or to come into the war on the side of Germany.

On the morning of July 3, 1915, an unbalanced German national drove across the Matinecock causeway. which at the time had no gatehouse, and up the driveway to the front door and rang the bell. Physick, the butler who would be in attendance at 231 Madison Avenue on the day I was born a decade later, opened the door and asked, “What can I do for you, sir?” The man drew out two guns and demanded, “Where is Mr. Morgan?” Physick told him my grandfather was in the library, pointing to the far end of the long hall. When the man headed for the library Physick ran toward the dining room at the other end of the hall where my grandfather was having breakfast with the British ambassador, shouting, “Mr. Morgan, he has guns. Go quickly up the back stairs!” My grandfather led the ambassador to the second floor and told him to run to the attic. Physick meanwhile went down to enlist the help of some of the footmen. When the gunman could not find my grandfather in the library he began throwing open doors to look for him and, finding my eighteen-year-old mother and her young brother, Harry, in one room, ordered them to follow him as he climbed the stairs. The German rounded on my grandfather at the top landing, firing his two revolvers four times. Two cartridges misfired but the third and fourth hit him in the abdomen and thigh. My grandfather closed on the gunman and fell on top of him, trying to take his guns. Then Physick came with the footmen and held the gunman until the police arrived. A few days later the German killed himself in prison by climbing a twenty-foot wall and diving headfirst onto the cement floor.

It turned out that this attempt on my grandfather’s life was part of a much wider conspiracy directed by Berlin and the German ambassador in Washington to sabotage America’s effort to supply England and France with munitions. In the crazed mind of the gunman my grandfather became a target.

Since no vital organs were involved, my grandfather recovered in due course. When he returned to the bank sometime that August, a crowd cheered the progress of his car along Broad Street. But from then on Matinecock was guarded by ex-marines who patrolled the sea walls around the island, and manned the gatehouse constructed at the entrance to the causeway.

Years later my mother-in-law told me that the morning my grandfather was shot she happened to be staying with her uncle Percy Chubb—she was fifteen at the time—in his large house on the bluff overlooking Matinecock, a mere half mile from what she described as the “commotion.”

My grandfather may have outwitted death in 1915 but none of us can hold it at bay indefinitely. In the early ’40s, by then in his seventies, he was still heading the bank. From Matinecock he gave this written account of himself to my mother, who was traveling:

My job is to try to keep things together and I can’t see any way to get away from it all which would be fair to my partners. We are going through a time of wholly unprecedented difficulty and as I am alive and fairly well I’ve got to stick it out in the hope of saving, if possible, some of the results of 80 or more years of creditable endeavour! So we live along from day to day and do not try to see far ahead.

He died in March 1943 of a heart ailment at seventy-five, the same age as his father had been when he died. My mother, who had rushed to his bedside in Boca Grande, Florida, cabled my father, who was in Calcutta on his way to China: FATHER DIED PEACEFULLY LAST NIGHT MUCH LOVE BOWSER.

It was John F. Kennedy, of all people, who broke the news to my brother. They and eight or so other young officers were on the monthlong trip across the Pacific on a supply ship, Paul to join his torpedo bomber squadron on Guadalcanal, and Jack to take command of PT-109 in the Solomon Islands. As Paul recounts in his memoir, “One night we were on the boat deck looking over the rail and smoked my private-label JPM cigars (against blackout orders). We had been discussing the North African war front when Jack said, ‘I’m going to the radio shack to hear the news.’ He came back ten minutes later and said, ‘Your grandfather died today.’” (During the early years of the war, Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, then serving as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, had rented Wall Hall from Grandpa to use as a weekend retreat; Kennedy told Paul that he had visited there many times, and pronounced Bingley “a stuffed shirt.”)

The obituaries of J. P. Morgan took up entire pages of the newspapers. All the flags on Wall Street, and the curtains on the bank floor of the Corner, were lowered. Grandpa’s body was brought up from Boca Grande on a special train, and he lay, as his father had, before the fireplace in the West Room of the Pierpont Morgan Library. The service was held at St. George’s Protestant Episcopal Church on Stuyvesant Square, where four generations of Morgans had worshiped. My mother had contracted pneumonia on the trip north with her father’s body, and had been forbidden to leave her sickbed. I remember holding hands with Dina in the pew reserved for our family. There was a gigantic blanket of red roses covering the casket, and I overheard someone say, “That’s an extravagance that Jack would never have approved.” After the service my father surprised me when he turned to me and said, “Well, at least we won’t have any more of those Sunday dinners!”

A word about those dinners. Through the 1930s right up until his death, whenever Grandpa was at Matinecock, his four children and their children—the ones over twelve—were expected for Sunday dinner in their best clothes, which for the grownups meant black tie and evening dress. We entered at the front door past Physick and made for the drawing room where Grandpa would be standing, fingering his pocket watch. At exactly eight o’clock we were marched into the dining room where we would sit through a five-course meal with a dozen footmen standing behind our chairs. Before dessert he would rise and make the same sentimental toast, “To absent friends, to those we love and those who have departed,” and the women would choke up. It was more a ritual, a ceremony, than a convivial evening of lively conversation. Children could speak only if spoken to. Nothing worth remembering was ever said, because my grandfather forbade discussion of anything of interest in the presence of women.

By today’s standards my grandfather’s attitude toward women was outrageous. My mother’s sister, my aunt Janie (Jane Norton Nichols), recalled that when she was eighteen, “College was out of the question; Father considered that it unsexed a woman, and he did not want his women to be too independent, for he had seen Aunt Anne [his sister] fighting with Grandfather in order to be the emancipated and useful person she later became. They must have been terrific battles for Father never forgave her for rebelling.”

I once asked my mother what her reaction had been to the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Her grandfather had booked a berth on the doomed ship, only to cancel at the last minute. The family knew the Titanic’s captain well, having crossed on various other White Star liners of which he had been in command. She replied that she had not known a thing about it for several months, because her father “did not think we girls should read the newspapers.”

After dinner the ladies and gentlemen would separate, with the men repairing to the library for port and cigars. After one dinner my grandfather said, “Bobby, now that you are fifteen I am offering you a cigar. If you don’t take it, I am not going to offer you another until you come of age.” I took the cigar, but never took up smoking.

Grandpa presided, and expected to be obeyed. At the beginning of one Sunday dinner, he ordered my cousin Anne, Uncle Beak’s youngest child, out of the house when she took off her hat and he saw that she had cut her hair. Another Sunday, I walked into the drawing room with my mother and Dina, who was eighteen and wearing a trace of lipstick, Grandpa looked straight at Dina and sputtered, “Get away from me. I don’t approve of lipstick!” Yet in many of his fond letters to my mother he showed grandfatherly concern.