The Secret Lives of Wasps

Hope Montgomery Scott and The Philadelphia Story

Pauline Pinard Bogaert, former society editor, Philadelphia Inquirer: The first time I met Hope Scott, I went to her house; she didn’t live at Ardrossan, she lived on Abraham’s Lane in a farmhouse on the estate’s grounds. I expected this big mansion, there was just this little house, nothing extravagant, a little worn here and there. I knock on the door and Edgar comes to the door, he has the top button of his Bermuda shorts unbuttoned and no shirt on. Edgar opens the door and yells, “Honey, there’s someone here to see you.” I expected a servant. It was just Hope. Hope was down-to-earth. She had that lockjaw thing [the classic upper-class Philadelphia accent]. But I would see her at the Acme; she would drive her Jeep with the dog in it and go shopping like anyone else. She was terrific.

Bob Scott: I adored my mother, but she was not easy, as my brother was quoted as saying: “Well, we couldn’t dance with her, so we might just as well go foxhunting.” She was wonderful in some ways, loved the family, loved tractors, loved horses, loved the cows, loved going to New York to parties.

Susan Gutfreund, socialite, interior designer and Ardrossan resident: “Hope made you feel like you’d known her forever. I remember coming from New York to dinner at Ardrossan with Bob Scott, each time I vividly remember walking out the door after dinner, looking at the trees and the quality of the air and the birds, thinking it was nothing short of a paradise and wishing that one day I didn’t have to leave. You feel at Ardrossan that people have had an awfully good time. There’s not a time I walk in there that I don’t feel the history. Rain, snow, I’ve been there when it was solid white with icicles, and it was magical. The mood is constant.

Bob Scott: The Philadelphia Story is said to have been modeled after my mother. I don’t think it’s true. I think it was definitely modeled after the Montgomerys, although Mrs. Lord [The Philadelphia Story matriarch] and my grandmother could not have been more different, and my grandfather wasn’t running away, although he might have wanted to at times. My godfather Philip Barry, the play and movie’s author, was influenced by their lifestyle, which was pretty grand. Katharine Hepburn’s character and my mother were not that similar. They were both privileged old Wasp families, but Katharine Hepburn was a Bryn Mawr bluestocking, and my mother went to school for a year and a half.

When Waspdom began to dim:

Thacher Longstreth, Main Line Wasp: “By the end of the mid-1930s, Gah’s day had clearly passed — and, come to think of it, so had the day of the Wasps throughout the Western world. Only Gah didn’t know it.”

Alfred Putnam Jr.: If you went to Prince-
ton in, say, the class of 1939, those guys came from exactly the same background, believed they were going to marry women who they probably knew when they were at Episcopal Academy, and that their children would do the exact same thing. The question is, when was that assumption blown up?

Nancy Grace: And then the Second World War came, and overnight, everything changed. I became an air raid warden; when a siren sounded, I leapt from bed into a station wagon and drove three miles on winding roads to Livingston Biddle’s Italianate mansion in Bryn Mawr. Passing under the enormous heads of gazelles and rhinoceroses that lined the paneled walls, one would descend into Mr. Biddle’s air-raid center, which was equipped with a billiard table, sandwiches and a bar.

Alfred Putnam Jr.: My aunt, Frances Randolph, was a Main Line matron, and then she and my uncle Evan moved to Society Hill. She had followed her own interests, and it was not at all the world she grew up in. At her funeral — she was 90-something — there were “art people.” But I would not mean to suggest that she was anything other than very Waspy.

William Baltzell: The Wasps used to control everything in this city. They used to have power, but they didn’t want it, so they lost it. The Irish wanted it, the Italians wanted it. It all changed, really, by the time of the Second World War.

Pauline Pinard Bogaert: The hardest thing for people to understand is how society changed after World War II. It started out as Mrs. Astor started the list of 400 in New York — that began the Social Register. I think Philadelphia was second to have a Social Register. And those were the people you socialized with, and who your children married. After the war, men came back and went on the G.I. Bill and got educated and got managerial jobs and were white-collar and started climbing the ladder. Today, it’s no longer an old family, old money thing — it was strictly Wasp, but now society includes everybody, as it should.