complained about the college atmosphere to his father the previous spring, Patrick had adjured him that “your environment is inevitable; you can’t change that—so it is philosophy to accept it.” But acceptance wasn’t Gerald’s style; transformation was. And when he returned to Yale in the fall he proceeded to make himself into a big man on campus by transforming his environment, devoting himself to what his class historian referred to as “the aesthetic side” of undergraduate life. He was one of the five members of the Sophomore German Committee, the organizers of the sophomore prom; he was chosen as manager of the Apollo Glee Club, an underclassmen’s chorus; he was elected to DKE (or Deke), the most exclusive junior fraternity on campus; and in the spring he became assistant manager of the Musical Club.
He was becoming known as someone with a talent for arranging things—people, events, objects. He was far from the wealthiest, or most patrician, of his contemporaries. His college mates included members of the horse-racing and polo-playing Tower and Clark families, and Leonard Hanna, nephew of the Midwest millionaire and presidential kingmaker Mark Hanna, who was one of the richest men in the United States. But he was tall, well groomed, and well dressed—as a scion of the house of Mark Cross he could hardly be anything else—and he had a reputation for wit and the kind of social gallantry that made any occasion, from a dance to a picnic, go more smoothly. And so he was popular as well as successful. Robert Gardner, who chaired the Junior Prom Committee, deferred to Gerald on all questions of protocol—“my social secretary,” he called him—and claimed that the New Yorker was “so metropolitan I naturally am rather afraid of him.” He was such a stickler for good manners and proper form that when a group of undergraduates summoned up the nerve to invite the alluring actress Elsie Janis to tea at the college, Gerald made Gardner rewrite the invitation to make it correct.
Inevitably, however, Gerald’s expanding social life took a toll on his studies: in late November the dean sent a form report to Patrick Murphy saying that Gerald’s work was unsatisfactory in philosophy, economics, geology, English, and rhetoric. (In fact, he was failing three courses and barely passing the other two.) At the bottom of the form, the dean had typed a personal note: “Please urge him to devote more time and greater effort to his studies.”
Patrick did so. “Come, brace up,” he wrote Gerald. “You can’t afford to let this thing go now. It means failure.” He signed his letter “Affectionately, Papa.” Gerald did manage to pull his marks up to passing that year, and he never received another probation notice, but it was clear that his real attention was elsewhere, with the “aesthetic side” of his campus existence. He left the envelope containing Patrick’s exhortation lying on his desk, where a friend used it as a message pad. “Dear Gerald,” ran the penciled note, “I very much want to see ‘Herod.’ Will you leave a ticket for a seat at the [box] office for me?”
Gerald’s circle of acquaintance at Yale was wide—his roommates Harold Carhart and Esmond O’Brien were varsity stars in hockey and (in Carhart’s case) in baseball—but two of his closest Yale friends were cut from somewhat different cloth than most boola-boola Old Blues: Edwin Montillion Woolley, called Monty, a stoutish homosexual actor and director of the Yale Dramatic Association who later earned fame portraying Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner; and a young man from Indiana named Cole Porter. Gerald met Porter in the fall of 1910 while vetting sophomore candidates for DKE . “I can still see [Porter’s] room,” Gerald recalled later: “there was a single electric light bulb in the ceiling, and a piano with a box of caramels on it, and wicker furniture, which was considered a bad sign at Yale. . . . And
He was becoming known as someone with a talent for arranging things—people, events, objects. He was far from the wealthiest, or most patrician, of his contemporaries. His college mates included members of the horse-racing and polo-playing Tower and Clark families, and Leonard Hanna, nephew of the Midwest millionaire and presidential kingmaker Mark Hanna, who was one of the richest men in the United States. But he was tall, well groomed, and well dressed—as a scion of the house of Mark Cross he could hardly be anything else—and he had a reputation for wit and the kind of social gallantry that made any occasion, from a dance to a picnic, go more smoothly. And so he was popular as well as successful. Robert Gardner, who chaired the Junior Prom Committee, deferred to Gerald on all questions of protocol—“my social secretary,” he called him—and claimed that the New Yorker was “so metropolitan I naturally am rather afraid of him.” He was such a stickler for good manners and proper form that when a group of undergraduates summoned up the nerve to invite the alluring actress Elsie Janis to tea at the college, Gerald made Gardner rewrite the invitation to make it correct.
Inevitably, however, Gerald’s expanding social life took a toll on his studies: in late November the dean sent a form report to Patrick Murphy saying that Gerald’s work was unsatisfactory in philosophy, economics, geology, English, and rhetoric. (In fact, he was failing three courses and barely passing the other two.) At the bottom of the form, the dean had typed a personal note: “Please urge him to devote more time and greater effort to his studies.”
Patrick did so. “Come, brace up,” he wrote Gerald. “You can’t afford to let this thing go now. It means failure.” He signed his letter “Affectionately, Papa.” Gerald did manage to pull his marks up to passing that year, and he never received another probation notice, but it was clear that his real attention was elsewhere, with the “aesthetic side” of his campus existence. He left the envelope containing Patrick’s exhortation lying on his desk, where a friend used it as a message pad. “Dear Gerald,” ran the penciled note, “I very much want to see ‘Herod.’ Will you leave a ticket for a seat at the [box] office for me?”
Gerald’s circle of acquaintance at Yale was wide—his roommates Harold Carhart and Esmond O’Brien were varsity stars in hockey and (in Carhart’s case) in baseball—but two of his closest Yale friends were cut from somewhat different cloth than most boola-boola Old Blues: Edwin Montillion Woolley, called Monty, a stoutish homosexual actor and director of the Yale Dramatic Association who later earned fame portraying Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner; and a young man from Indiana named Cole Porter. Gerald met Porter in the fall of 1910 while vetting sophomore candidates for DKE . “I can still see [Porter’s] room,” Gerald recalled later: “there was a single electric light bulb in the ceiling, and a piano with a box of caramels on it, and wicker furniture, which was considered a bad sign at Yale. . . . And
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