City Desk: Grandest of Them All

THE first quality of the grande dame is that she be grand herself-personally, physically. If she were a statue, she would have to be the one the Metropolitan Museum puts on a plinth in the center of a gallery, not folded into some recess along the wall. Beauty and ugliness are equally irrelevant to her presentation; whichever she is, the grande dame must be striking. Today she runs to thinness, as in the pages of Tom Wolfe. But Mrs. Manson Mingott, Edith Wharton’s friend, was strikingly fat. “The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump, active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon.” Her flesh helped make her the “high and mighty old lady” that Newland Archer knew her to be. Jewelry can put the copestone on a wall that is otherwise lacking; Mrs. Astor always wore her jewels, wherever she appeared, because she knew, as she herself put it, that people expected to see “Mrs. Astor’s jewels.” Arthur Miller hectored us, “Attention must be paid!” The grande dame knows attention will be paid.

She must play on a grand stage. Wealth is necessary for outfitting her performance space, but so is taste. Not the taste that makes an apartment cozy, or inviting. Presumably grandes dames raid the fridge, curl up with catalogues, and watch television, like the rest of us, but we don’t venture where they do it. What they have themselves, or command in others, is theatricality, the taste of set designers, window dressers, and the best rug merchants in the souk. The colors of their foyers and libraries, whether rich or bright, are bold and extreme. Black and white, in checkerboards or zebra stripes, can add an extra note, shrill but stirring, like the piccolo solo in “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Chairs must be ornamental, not easy-stubby legs? fine; a hard, straight back? no problem-for the point is not to relax. You can do that with a Bud at home. The public rooms of the grande dame are a luxury lounge in the hub airport of society. You pause there, en route, to enjoy yourself, and to be enjoyed by your hostess. The visual and tactile over-stimulation puts you on your mettle.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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THE first quality of the grande dame is that she be grand herself-personally, physically. If she were a statue, she would have to be the one the Metropolitan Museum puts on a plinth in the center of a gallery, not folded into some recess along the wall. Beauty and ugliness are equally irrelevant to her presentation; whichever she is, the grande dame must be striking. Today she runs to thinness, as in the pages of Tom Wolfe. But Mrs. Manson Mingott, Edith Wharton’s friend, was strikingly fat. “The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump, active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon.” Her flesh helped make her the “high and mighty old lady” that Newland Archer knew her to be. Jewelry can put the copestone on a wall that is otherwise lacking; Mrs. Astor always wore her jewels, wherever she appeared, because she knew, as she herself put it, that people expected to see “Mrs. Astor’s jewels.” Arthur Miller hectored us, “Attention must be paid!” The grande dame knows attention will be paid.

She must play on a grand stage. Wealth is necessary for outfitting her performance space, but so is taste. Not the taste that makes an apartment cozy, or inviting. Presumably grandes dames raid the fridge, curl up with catalogues, and watch television, like the rest of us, but we don’t venture where they do it. What they have themselves, or command in others, is theatricality, the taste of set designers, window dressers, and the best rug merchants in the souk. The colors of their foyers and libraries, whether rich or bright, are bold and extreme. Black and white, in checkerboards or zebra stripes, can add an extra note, shrill but stirring, like the piccolo solo in “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Chairs must be ornamental, not easy-stubby legs? fine; a hard, straight back? no problem-for the point is not to relax. You can do that with a Bud at home. The public rooms of the grande dame are a luxury lounge in the hub airport of society. You pause there, en route, to enjoy yourself, and to be enjoyed by your hostess. The visual and tactile over-stimulation puts you on your mettle.