They said it wouldn`t happen. They swore it wouldn`t happen. It happened. ”You know something`s up when people start faxing genealogies around town and dusting off the family ancestors,” said one source who would know.
”They call you up at 11:30 at night to give you the correct spelling of their grandmother`s name,” said another who would know. ”As if-”
As if, of course, the caller`s name already had been engraved on the
”Must Mention” list of the September issue of Town & Country, that chronicle of the landed gentry that`s due to arrive any minute now at a newsstand near you. It`s a compendium of all that is colossal Chicago, claims the magazine in its first-time-in-12-years issue devoted to Our Kind of Town. (If you were among the T&C 500 at Tuesday night`s literacy bash at the Four Seasons Hotel, you probably sat upon a first-off issue when you pulled out your chair for dinner. With seats going for $200 apiece, that sneak peek came at no small price.)
In the works since Christmastime, shortly after the great minds at the Hearst Corporation in New York gave the go-ahead for an all-Chicago issue for September, this editorial effort has had the gilded shoreline and the polo fields north and west buzzing louder than this summer`s crop of 17-year cicadas. Who`s on the cover? Who`s in? Who`s out?
And what Chicago wouldn`t do to get in.
Buffing up the tombstones
Reports trickled in of eye tucks, tombstone polishing at Graceland Cemetery (the place to be buried with a pond-side monument, don`t you know?)
and reams of resumes dispatched to New York. Enough flowers for a boxwood garden were being dropped off all about town, wherever a T&C editor-or even a photographer`s assistant-was tucked away for the night.
To say nothing of the bad-mouthing that went on. ”Vicious untruths! It was surprising how much of that went on-almost more than in New York,” said one magazine source, who begged not to be named.
In this nasty category, there was the 14-page diatribe mailed off to magazine magnate Randolph Hearst by an incensed Gold Coast matron, ”naming names and slamming people who should not be included.” And there were other confirmed reports of attempted pooh-poohings on grounds that so-and-so shouldn`t be included because ”her grandmother, after all, was the maid” or ”she`s slept with 62 men” or, in one ugly instance, because ”her great, great grandfather was Jewish.”
The twist here is that Town & Country editors do not like cannibals. ”In most cases, it was the bearers of bad news who got eliminated,” said one insider. ”People who think they`re finally getting back at their archenemies are in for a surprise with this bunch. A very elegant corps, they sit there with their very elegant pad and Waterman pen, they nod politely, and then they might simply cross off the bearer of bad news.”
Thou shalt not back-stab
”If there was a list of do`s and don`t`s for how to get in Town & Country,” continued the insider, ”it would be something like this: Do be born with the right ancestors. Do live in a low-key but drop-dead domicile. Do have American masters inherited from your grandmother. Do know all the people from Sotheby`s by their first names. Be black, white, yellow, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Jewish or Catholic. But do not bad-mouth Mrs. So-and-so, because chances are that`s worth at least 10 minus points.”
All this social elbowing came despite early claims up and down that Chicago-unlike crass Orange County, Calif., where glossies were shoved under hotel doors and offers of cash allegedly were phoned in during T&C`s recent mapping of that nouveau terrain-was too, too polite and too, too Midwest to put up with such shenanigans.
”No frothing at the mouth-yet,” John Cantrell, the perfectly polite features editor who led the T&C troops through their Chicago mission, assured back in February when publisher Fred Jackson flew in for an intime announcement at the toney Casino, a hushed affair in which 100 or so socialites and shopkeepers nibbled water biscuits draped with tenderloin and sipped martinis served in proper stemware.
Even that night, though, there were hints that this would not be an altogether sit-sweet-and-wait situation. ”My curiosity is killing me as to who was invited,” gushed one gumball-pearled woman. ”I heard the invitations went out in rounds-sort of A, B and C lists-and some people were miffed because they didn`t get theirs until yesterday.”
How, pray tell, can one glossy little guide to good living inspire such obsession with social chutes and ladders-and, even more confounding, such willingness to play along?
The air-kiss factor
”Some people don`t feel they`ve arrived until they`re listed in Forbes or chronicled in Town & Country,” said contributing editor Sugar Rautbord, who pens an occasional piece from her parlor overlooking Oak Street Beach, though she often jets to Manhattan to check in with her editors. ”When people air-kiss in New York, they often say, `Oh, dear, I loved your picture in Town & Country,` or `I saw you moved two notches on the Forbes list.` ”
That might not be quite the case in this old onion patch, but the mere mention of a Chicago soiree in the slick`s Chronicles listing is enough to set charity ticket sellers cheering.
You would think, then, imbued with all this power, the T&C team must be a pompous lot. And that they sniffed about searching only for those manors in which a Rembrandt dangled in the powder room.
Wrong. First, ”unlike other editors, they write thank-you notes after interviews, they speak in hushed tones and they catch dangling participles,” said Rautbord.
Second, editor-in-chief Frank Zachary-”a man whose idea of a nightmare would be to attend one of these society functions,” said Rautbord-put out the command: ”I`m not interested in celebrities or catching shooting stars. I want the patrons and the patronesses.” That is, real money, real substance.
”They came to Chicago looking for real people, people who drive their own cars, pick up their own phones,” said Rautbord.
As much social sleuths as social arbiters, these scribes know all about fact-checking, pulling records of charitable contributions and inhaling mildew in Chicago Historical Society archives.
Doing their homework
Case in point: the way they came to Chicago.
Holed away on the 30th floor at 1700 Broadway in Manhattan, Zachary and his troops mapped out their Chicago drill in a series of five meetings in February. They paddled ideas like racquetballs. They penciled names onto lists, and erased them. Then penned story outlines and crumpled them into wads.
Cantrell, one of three features editors and Zachary`s point man for Chicago, put out the call for lists, lists and more lists from Lake Forest to Lake Shore Drive. He spelled out 20 categories on each form, and asked dozens of sources to pen in names of debutantes, grande dames, bachelors, etc. The lists would be cross-checked; high tallies meant a hit, someone or something to be looked into.
Cantrell said he relied heavily on two ”angels”; in fact, he said, the only two area-code 312 numbers he memorized were those of Rautbord and Winnie Chambers, publisher of the Chicago Date Book and former producer for CBS
(current claim to fame: the first boss of Paula ”CBS This Morning” Zahn).
Rautbord said the T&C team assigned her one simple task: ”Getting the tigers on their stools.”
That meant she had to get 36 civic big cats-from Nobel laureate Leon Lederman and White Sox legend Minnie Minoso to the Lyric Opera`s Ardis Krainik and everyone`s Shirley Ryan-to pose on the sands of the North Avenue Beach on a 40-degree April morning (Rautbord, armed with a megaphone, found goosebump refuge in a Chicago cop`s leather jacket). She also chaperoned the debutantes at the Rock `N` Roll McDonald`s, where the girls ”tossed french fries and ketchup, all in their $5,000 Carolina Herrera gowns.”
Acting as ringmaster
For her part, Chambers had to somehow convince Cardinal Joseph Bernardin to smile for the camera, and she was charged with rounding up the bachelors for their sunset portrait in Wrigley Field. The second half of this task entailed double-checking with the bachelors as press time neared, to make certain none had married. ”Not to my knowledge,” quipped one of the young, monied men. She also shepherded the grande dames for their portrait at the Casino (Eleanor Wood-Prince jetted in on the Concorde; octogenarian Linda Bensinger had to cut short her tennis date).
By late March, when Cantrell checked into the Four Seasons and set up camp behind a wall of paper that would drive the chambermaids batty, his leather-bound appointment book was packed. He lunched at Bice, Easter-brunched at the Saddle & Cycle Club, held court at Gordon, stopped for club soda at penthouses aplenty, dined at Ambria and sipped samovars of Earl Gray before the fireplace at the Four Seasons.
Near the end of his 3 1/2-week tour of duty, reinforcements landed from New York. James Villas, food and wine editor, arrived with empty stomach and gastronomically daunting agenda. Melissa Tardiff, art director, came with keen eye for sites that would shout Chicago when caught on film by Victor Skrebneski-”the John Singer Sargent of our day,” said Rautbord. Mary Louise Norton, fashion editor, concentrated on the compendium of 49 dynasties documented by former Wall Street Journal writer Dan Rottenberg.
Kathleen Quigley, a Syracuse writer who penned the ”At Home” piece, in which 11 rather nifty addresses were caught on film and paper, claimed the prize for longest stay: five weeks on these shores. And she feared she would waddle home with another trophy: at least 20 newfound pounds, what with the groaning boards that awaited her at every dining chamber.
The winnowing begins
By mid-June, the last of the notebooks flipped shut. The last roll of film was shipped to New York. ”If your phone hasn`t rung by now, and no one`s taken your picture, you might consider a late August departure,” sighed one social player.
Back in those 30th-floor conference rooms, editors professed a fascination with Chicago. ”We live in a city that`s horrible in so many ways,” said Cantrell, who lives on New York`s Upper East Side. ”We were all very impressed at such a feeling of so many people being behind a city. Most places couldn`t bear the weight of all that attention. Chicago is one of the few cities that could sustain it.”
In fact, said Cantrell, there was so much to say about Chicago that eight stories now lie on the cutting-room floor. Even Rautbord`s epistle on the Sky Sculptors, the architects and real estate moguls who cement Big Deals, was chopped to three paragraphs, she lamented.
And now, as the page-turning begins, there`s nothing to do but wax creative, said one hometown contributor. ”You should hear the stories. People swearing they were out of town. People saying they weren`t in because they didn`t want to be, they didn`t like the attention. Fact is, I don`t know a soul who turned `em down.”
Fact is, as Rautbord put it, ”it`s not the Yellow Pages.”
For 3 bucks at the corner kiosk, we`ll all see, Horoscopes to Weddings, whether those faxed genealogies, eye tucks and tombstone polishings made any difference back on Broadway.
WHO GOT T&C`S NOD
Who`s who in the September Town & Country:
Cover: Lisa Coolidge, 23, debutante, part-time model. Daughter of Mr. and Mrs. David Coolidge III. Mr. Coolidge is a partner at the financial concern of William Blair & Co. Investments.
”Grande Dames”: Mrs. B. Edward Bensinger, Mrs. Philip D. Block Jr., Mrs. Brooks McCormick, Mrs. Peter Wolkonsky, Mrs. William Wood-Prince.
”Bachelors”: Richard Reed Armstrong, William Taylor Bartholomay, Gavin Campbell, Philip Corboy Jr., John Fritchey IV, Thomas S. Hammond, Bruce Wirtz MacArthur, William B. McDonough, R. Bartley Moore, Thomas H. Morsch Jr., Fred J. O`Donnell, Tempel Smith Jr.
”Debutantes”: Ashley Prentice Anderson, Helen Bowen Blair, Isobel Diane Brooker, Louise Justine de Marigny Bross, Brooke Donnelley, Fiona McCormick Hunt, Phoebe Stair McMillan, Stephanie Notz.
”Chicago`s First Families”: There are 49 families in the main story. There are pictures of members of the following: Armour, Blair, Crown, Field, Johnson, Smith, Stepan, Stuart, Wood.
”At Home”: Mrs. David Hamilton, Mr. and Mrs. King Harris, Mr. and Mrs. Steven Johnson, Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Krehbiel, Mr. and Mrs. William Kunkler III, Mr. and Mrs. William J. McDonough, Ms. Lois Mills, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Pritzker, Ted Smith and Susan Shipper-Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Jan Wong, Mr. and Mrs. Ved Yadava.
”Men and Women Who Put the `Go` in Chicago”: William C. Bartholomay, Neil G. Bluhm, Bernard F. Brennan, Edward A. Brennan, Alger B. Chapman, Gertrude R. Crain, Mayor Richard M. Daley and Margaret C. Daley, Richard L. Duchossois, Roger Ebert, Dr. Lester E. Fisher, Von Freeman, John Geldermann, Bruce Gregga, Elbert O. Hand III, Philip E. Kelley, James S. Kemper Jr., Ardis Krainik, Irv Kupcinet, Michael J. Kutza, Leon M. Lederman, Andrew McNally IV, Minnie Minoso, Arthur C. Nielsen Jr., Camille Oliver-Hoffman, Paul W. Oliver- Hoffman, Clarence Page, Sugar Rautbord, Mrs. Patrick G. Ryan, Gene Siskel, Mrs. Edward Byron Smith Jr., William D. Smithburg, Studs Terkel, John D. Wilson, Oprah Winfrey, William W. Wirtz. –
