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June 1974 | Volume 25, Issue 4
The Backstairs Contingent
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
None of that incessant entertaining, party giving, feasting, and feting would have been possible, of course, without a large and industrious servant corps. It’s a pity that the recorded history of Newport contains so little information on the backstage crew that supported the efforts of all the social stars on the brightly lighted stage. A scholarly monograph could be written on the suave butlers and major-domos, the long-schooled chefs who made many of the more dazzling social careers possible, the nannies who relieved society ladies of their maternal duties and responsibilities, the social secretaries who tactfully saved their employers from error, the real sailors who prevented the yachtsmen from going aground.
The backstairs world was as rigidly compartmented, as snobbishly systematized as the structure of the society it served. Between the butler and the most junior of the upstairs maids, between the chief cook and an apprentice gardener, there was a social and professional gulf as wide as that between the currently reigning hostess and the latest mining-camp hoyden coming to try her luck at crashing the Four Hundred. Each servant knew his place, each guarded the area of his responsibilities. No butler would think of soiling his gloves on emptying an ashtray, and no lady’s personal maid would consider making a bed.
One young Vanderbilt observed the pecking order of the servants’ hall with a knowing eye. Stanley Hudson had been the Cornelius Vanderbilts’ butler for more than twenty years, and next to Grace Wilson Vanderbilt herself was the most awesome personage in the household at Beaulieu. He changed his costume three times daily until at dinner only the fact that his vest was black rather than white distinguished his attire from Cornelius Vanderbilt’s own garb. “Our butler never opened the front door or answered the telephone, relegating such tasks to the footmen. However, he did greet guests in the foyer, always speaking in the third person, such as ‘If Madame will please be seated, I shall see if Madame is in.’ He supervised the six footmen, clad in maroon breeches, white stockings, and buckled shoes, who set the table for luncheon and dinner, served meals, poured wine, and later washed the dishes.…”
Keeping those great houses on Cliff Walk and Bellevue Avenue in operating condition called for the services of hundreds of well-drilled servitors. Preparing and serving dinner for a hundred guests, invited on the spur of the moment by a hostess incapable of boiling an egg, necessitated a heroic effort backstairs. But it was the lady of the house, of course, who took the bows and was credited with being a magnificent household manager while the servant corps remained a faceless underground known by their Christian names, unchronicled and largely unsung. Mostly they were also grossly underpaid, a circumstance noted by their employers only when they found that Herbert the butler and Maggie the cook were getting a rake-off from the provisioners or that