The Press: Nice People

The rusty-haired, broad-freckled son of a Manhattan banker spends many of his young days on his father’s commodious estate in the north woods. He is much with guides and backwoods farmers—Scotsmen, French-Canadians, half-breed Indians. He grows up a strong young adept at their life with ax, rod, gun, canoe. Their children are his playmates and he, after attending Princeton University, is not convinced that some dainty creature from Philadelphia or New York would make him as good a wife as Lena Wilson, the stocky daughter of his mother’s north-woods cook.

Lena carries no lipstick. Lena has not read much. But she is healthy and capable. She has the humor and hardihood of people to whom pleasure and pain are natural phenomena, not nervous problems. The young man is going to be a doctor, not a banker or poet, so after his junior year at Princeton he asks Lena Wilson and she accepts him.

His mother, Mrs. Anne (“Fifi”) Stillman, is a gypsyesque person. On the Grande Anse estate in Quebec she moves about with her short dark hair in a bandanna and her legs bare and browned above mannish socks. She is a sort of Empress to the “primitives” of the surrounding wilderness. They do her lightest bidding because they regard her, informal and feline, as their equal on their own ground, plus much mysterious charm and knowledge from an unimaginable outer world of limousines, libraries, lingerie and grand manners. Her wealth seems fabulous to them, inspiring not envy but institutional faith. They prefer her checks to regular currency and seldom cash them, bringing old ones in to be rewritten after perhaps two years of passing from hand to hand.

How will this “Madame,” or “Missus,” as they call her, whose character is definite almost to the point of eccentricity, receive her cook’s daughter as her son’s wife? Perhaps the fact that the son’s firmness matches the mother’s is responsible for her approval. Perhaps she is simply a realist. In any case, she takes Lena Wilson to Manhattan with her for a winter of theatres, shopping and “polish” in general. Lena goes to the Princetoncommencement and then the scene is set for a wedding at Grande Anse. . . .

Is this a story for the newspapers? Never was there a more perfect one. Stillman is a name that has already made reams of vivid “copy.” There was a double divorce action which began in 1922 and was not settled until 1924. That died down peacefully. Banker James A. Stillman and his gypsyesque wife are dignified friends though they live apart mostly. But they will be seen together at the wedding of their son and Lena Wilson. Having decided it is a possible thing, they will put the wedding through in the best of style, a thoroughbred affair. Will newspaper editors send representatives to cover such an affair? Certainly yes; as surely as a hungry trout will rise to a bright fly.

It might have seemed silly to Lena Wilson and James A. (“Bud”) Stillman Jr., but for days before their wedding took place last week, newspaperdom was on hand at Grande Anse with questions and cameras thrice as active as for any usual wedding in “high society.” The simplest way to handle the situation seemed to be to let newspaperdom have its own way and the bride and groom did just that. They wandered around amiably before the reporters; posed beside the four-foot wedding cake Chef Hunter of the Stillman yacht was making; said, yes, their children would be Roman null since Lena was one; said, yes, they would go abroad a while; yes, then settle in Cambridge, Mass., while he studied medicine; yes, he was giving her a million dollars, etc. etc.

Mrs. Stillman’s reactions to publicity were more complex. She had encountered publicity before, and publicity is so puzzling. You never give it a thought until it confronts you. Then, if you avoid it, you feel as though you were running away from something. But if you fall in with all its demands, you feel vulgar. The only decent way out seems to be to try to make the public view of your private affairs an accurate one. You examine your real feelings and come right out with them. Mrs. Stillman, while supervising the transformation of the colonial mansion into a “sylvan bower” for a pageant to include kilted bagpipers, ushers in lumbering shirts, and wines by the truckload, talked with frankness and concentration to the reporters. She discussed the Indian blood in Lena Wilson. “What of it?” she said. “There are good Indians. Bearing in one’s veins a strain of the blood of the natives of this gorgeous country is certainly nothing to deny or explain.”

She discussed a rumored maneuver by the Wilson family to make “a good thing” financially out of Lena’s marriage: “I saw that soon enough and when I did I stopped it. There will be none of that. I know my people of the river too well.”

She treated the reporters, and their myriad constituents, so much like intelligent beings that by and large the despatches from Grande Anse were quiet and sensible, with very little trash about the social “incongruity” between the bride and groom except where headline writers wrote: “WILDWOOD LENA,” “DAUGHTER OF FOREST,” “HUMBLE SCION.”

After the wedding, however, as the groom started to carve the wedding cake, eight late arrivals at Grande Anse pushed up even closer than they had dared trespass during the service itself. They were camera and cinema men with but one duty in the world, to photograph as far as they could go.

Mrs. Stillman, hearing the shutters click, thought publicity had reached its limit and passed beyond. She rushed forward crying: “This is for my friends, not for photographers.”

The shutters kept on clicking.

Smack! went Mrs. Stillman’s hand on the nearest photographer’s ear. He fell, soon followed by his fellow.

“Out you go; get out of here!”

But three cinema cranks ground steadily on, behind the refreshment table.

Mrs. Stillman’s lips went thin with fury. She picked up a plate and flung it at a tall crank-grinder in a fantastic sweater. It landed amid the punch glasses with dreadful effect. Another plate tinkled through a window. The cameras stopped clicking but Mrs. Stillman hurled more plates, glasses, round epithets. She managed to score at least two direct hits before the intruders hurdled the table and escaped.

The wedding guests laughed to see such sport. Grande Anse reveled long and late, the victorious flare-up of the hostess furnishing backwoodsmen and Manhattanites alike with a merry toast.

Next day, newspapers were seen in their true colors by their reporting of this climax to a story as curious as it had been colorful.

The New York Times took an amused and friendly view, calling the photographers’ retreat a “good-humored” one and the plate-throwing an imperious “bit of temperament.”

The Manhattan tabloids, knowing well the intrusiveness of their picture-takers, “played down” the incident, mentioning it only as though such things were in the usual run of weddings and publishing for the masses.

But the Tribune, in Chicago, where Mrs. Stillman was once the debutante “Fifi” Potter, and whither she seldom returns, put all the animus of constitutional vulgarity into its headline: “FIFl HURLS CUPS AND SALAD AT NEWSPAPER MEN.” The Tribune account, a copy of which had to be toned down for the Tribune’s New York offspring (Daily News), gloated over “the pottery barrage and the volley of language which accompanied it—language familiar to the gaudy-sashed lumberjacks but seldom heard at social functions.” There was a besmirching leer in the Tribune’s subhead: “Four Trucks of Booze.” And when the bride and groom retired to the top floor of the Hotel Shelton, Manhattan, a Tribune correspondent was alone in smirking: “There was no throwing of plates or potato salad—probably because Mrs. Fifi Potter Stillman . . . was not along. But in the late afternoon, while reporters grouped on the Forty-ninth Street side of the hostelry, a bucket of water was tossed from the top floor . . . and splashed significantly near the scriveners.”

People who compared the Tribune’s performance with the attitudes of other newspapers were reminded of a remark once credited to Mrs. Lena Wilson Stillman, which seemed to summarize the entire event: “Nice people are nice the whole world over.”