Society: The Marriage-Go-Round

If “ceremony’s a name for the rich horn/And custom for the spreading laurel tree,” as W. B. Yeats put it in a wedding poem,* this June the horn is richer than ever, and the laurels are spreading so thick that it is getting harder and harder to make one’s way to church. With 195,000 brides to be married this month, the booking problem is so acute in the nation’s churches that the Lady Chapel in Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral must be reserved nine months in advance; at the Little Church Around the Corner, weddings are run off at half-hour intervals.

Surest solution to the space squeeze has been found by Chicago’s Marcia Metzger, 19, a fashion model and Sarah Lawrence freshman, who next week will marry Princeton Senior John R. Cooper, 21. Daughter of a top executive in the Erwin Wasey, Ruthrauff & Ryan advertising agency, Marcia will be married in a singlesteeple, knotty-pine chapel built especially for her wedding on her family’s Woodstock, Ill., estate. Seating only 17 people, the chapel, which is a remodeled pump shed, has a built-in hi-fi system for organ music and a huge picture window opposite the altar so that guests sitting on the lawn will see the ceremony.

Rich Horn. Not all the special touches in June weddings are as unusual as Marcia Metzger’s private chapel. The trappings surrounding the celebration remain remarkably unchanged. But new trends, new customs do flow from the “rich horn” of American society.

Today’s brides have fewer engagement parties than in the past, are deluged instead by the 20th century equivalent of the dowry: showers of every variety, both practical and kooky, pour forth the loot. Karla Francisco, 21, a fourth-generation Californian who is marrying Thomas T. Hammond, 22, at her family’s luxurious hacienda, had a relatively conventional kitchen shower. But other brides have an appliance shower, a crystal shower, a china shower, a paper shower, a lingerie shower, a bathroom shower, and “vice” shower (liquor, brandy, wine). In Detroit’s suburban Bloomfield Hills, Patti Bugas, 21, daughter of Ford Vice President John Bugas, prepared for her wedding this week to Mark Dowie, 22, a fellow student at Denison University, with a round-the-clock linen shower. Guests were assigned an hour of the day: 7 o’clock, breakfast linen; 9 o’clock, bedspreads; 5 o’clock, cocktail napkins.

Because of the number of showers, the task of picking a wedding present is increasingly difficult. Used more widely and efficiently than ever before is the custom of the bride’s giving a department store a list of acceptable gifts; wedding guests may then call the store, buy their gifts. Like many another bridegroom, Washington’s Jonathan Roosevelt, 21, son of Kermit Roosevelt and great-grandson of T.R., gaped at the store-sized inventory of presents (“Look at all that stuff”) before his marriage this week to Jae Barlow, 20, a descendant of Edgar Allan Poe. Latest count of shower and wedding gifts for Barlow and Roosevelt: about 550 items.

License & Underwear. In at least one respect, weddings have become simpler: few brides today go to the expensive bother of having a seamstress or a dress designer whip up an original wedding gown. The ready-to-wear gown (prices for the most popular run between $300 and $350 at Manhattan’s Bergdorf Goodman) has definitely taken hold. Though most bridesmaids’ dresses are still pink or ice blue, more popular than ever before is the all-white wedding. But there are problems. Says one worldly young New Yorker: “So many people are marrying for the second or third time that I don’t seem to see many brides in white any more.” Dorothy (“Dede”) Lockwood, 20, who last week married Harvard Graduate and Marine Lieut. Stewart Forbes, 22, before 1,000 guests in Cold Spring Harbor, L.I., had planned to wear her mother’s lace sheath wedding dress, “but my grandmother took it away. She didn’t want me to wear it because my parents are divorced.” Instead, Dede went to Manhattan’s Henri Bendel, where she bought a “faced peau de soie that looks the same as a real peau de soie.”

Bridegrooms’ fashions have scarcely changed for half a century: cutaway, vest, striped trousers. But since a cutaway’s first function in a man’s wardrobe often seems only to feed the moths, today’s grooms almost invariably rent their wedding attire. Says a salesman for A. T. Harris, Manhattan’s top formal rental store: “We have everything, including shoes and socks. All the groom has to do is furnish the underwear and the license.”

Off in a Whirlybird. Averaging $1,000, the cost of a formal wedding zooms as far upward as the checkbook will permit. With more than 1,500,000 weddings to be held this year, marriage must be considered as at least a $1.5 billion-a-year business. One of the year’s medium-luxurious receptions (800 people, $5,000) is planned for the Wellesley, Mass., wedding of Sandra Shelvey, 21, daughter of Oil Millionaire Cyril Shelvey, and socially prominent Thomas Charles Sheffield Jr., 25, of Lake Forest, Ill. At the height of the Shelvey reception next week, a helicopter will land amid the 800 guests, pick up the bride and groom, whisk them off on the first leg of their European honeymoon.

Nowadays, receptions have become such elaborate productions that some mothers of the bride feel a special need for order. At several New Jersey weddings, programs that listed bridesmaids, ushers and music were handed to the guests at the church. On the other hand, new notes of informality have crept in. Scrawled on the bottom of the engraved invitations to a suburban New York wedding was a note that read: “Do bring a bathing suit in case you want a swim afterward.” In Los Angeles many brides blithely order chocolate wedding cakes instead of the traditional fruitcake.

More and more brides are trying to avoid the hordes of “wedding-industry” salesmen by placing all their arrangements in the hands of a “marriage coordinator,” such as Mrs. Gertrude Doran, 54, of Los Angeles. This year Mrs. Doran (“I can do as many as four weddings a day”) is pushing two new gimmicks for her clients: a layer of frozen wedding cake for presentation to the bride and groom as a first-wedding-anniversary present, and a tape-recorded You Are There commentary by a mellifluous announcer who describes the garb, step, and emotional tone of the whole wedding party. Mrs. Doran advises parents to keep the recording a secret until there are rumors of discord in the newlyweds’ happy home. “If the young couple have been squabbling,” she says, “you’d be surprised how quickly playing that record straightens them out.”

*See BOOKS.