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Arts & Entertainment

When the Dreadnaughts Ruled

If you want to keep the lid on society, don't invite the artists in.

Tensions of the culture vs. counter-culture variety are not, we discover, a modern phenomenon.

They seem always to exist in one form or another — and Southampton at the turn of the last century was no exception. Back then the local press filled its social columns with news of the teas, musicales and high-minded gatherings that were the very serious business of socially prominent women.

This was official Southampton Society, under the iron rule of the so-called “Dreadnaughts,” whom John Corry in his book “Golden Clan” describes as a group of “elderly ladies of elegant breeding.” Foremost among them was the redoubtable Mrs. Goodhue Livingston, whose pedigree put her on a social pedestal — her mother was a van Rensselaer — even before her marriage to the architect who was one-half of the prestigious partnership Trowbridge and Livingston.

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Years later, interviewed for an oral history project, Foster Corwith of Southampton’s Corwith Pharmacy recalled that, indeed, there was a time in Southampton when “society was ruled by two or three people.” Foremost among them, he said, was Mrs. Goodhue Livingston, who “had a big house on the lake [the surviving ‘Old Trees’].” She was “the grande dame,” he added, “if you were invited to her house, you were in.” Having first summered in Southampton in 1887, Mrs. Livingston saw herself as the last of her kind in the '40s when she told social historian Cleveland Amory that the day she let all her footman go at the start of the Second World War marked the beginning of the end.

Sarah Redwood Parrish would seem to have been another battleship of a woman though her son Samuel, Southampton’s much-loved benefactor who was in her thrall for most of his life, wrote tenderly of the “combined strength, sweetness and beauty” of the young Sarah in his booklet titled “Early Reminiscences Associated with the Life and Family of My Mother.” She joined the social scene after moving into the McKim, Mead and White house (the surviving “White Fence”) built for her on First Neck Lane. Samuel lived there with her for a time, charmed their guests as she poured the tea, and did not find a woman to equal her in his eyes until more than three decades after her death. Then, at the age of 79, he married for the first time.

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For evidence of the subversive counter-currents that rippled beneath this rule-bound cultural life, there is no richer source than “Memoirs of a Poor Relation,” Marietta Minnigerode Andrews’ hilarious account of life as a student at William Merritt Chase’s Shinnecock Outdoor Art School (1891-1902), the village’s most famous foray into high culture.

Here is what the author had to say about those tedious teas: “The landowners entitled themselves ‘patrons,’ which sounded quite nifty, and they gave afternoon teas at which overfed old ladies bustling in silks and satins, and feeble pale old gentlemen with very good clothes on, and certain evidences of having had too gay a time in the dear dead days beyond recall, would stand graciously in line and ‘receive’ …”

Badly dressed and overfed, the women had “pin-cushiony hands, dimpled deep like tufted mattresses,” while the trembling hands of the wheezing geezers reminded Andrews of oysters.

One saving grace was the presence of the irrepressible Zella de Milhau, who made it her business to blast through the social torpor and make life “merry for others,” according to Andrews. Having arrived in Southampton to study art, she took on a second role as instigator of all things unconventional and organizer of “innocent orgies” at her Art Village cottage “Laffalot,” where she almost certainly didn’t serve tea.

Sources from the Archives of the : Excerpts from “Memoirs of a Poor Relation” by Marietta Minnigerode Andrews; “Golden Clan” by John Corry; “The Last Resorts” by Cleveland Amory; “Past Imperfect: A Museum Looks at Itself” by Donna De Salvo; Foster Corwith interview, Oral History Project. 

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