I recently met a woman via email who had the very good taste to compliment me rather lavishly on a column I wrote. She really, really liked it. Her name is Barbara Stanley, and I applaud her reading skills and of course her great mind.
But what interested me even more was her name. The minute I read it, a flood of old memories swept over me and for those of us of the geezer persuasion, ancient memories can bubble up at any time, particularly those that cause blushing.
But this memory didn’t cause me to blush. It brought back sweet memories of a remarkable woman from my childhood whose name was also Barbara Stanley. Actually “Mrs.” Stanley to me. I would never have presumed to speak her first name.
Mrs. Stanley was just simply obscenely wealthy and lived in a gigantic house with lots of pointed things on top — turrets, roofs, widow’s walks, more roofs, many chimneys, and all appeared like great jagged teeth sticking high above the tops of her old, imported trees. The house itself, a mansion — a manor — a huge sprawling, a palace — I could never decide — was built of cream colored stones obviously imported from some distant land of cream colored mountains and beaches, lots of white wood trim, gardens copied directly from Versailles, long meandering pale brick drives to various doorways, the largest of which was her front door, a huge, heavy oak with giant, heavy black hinges and a tire-sized cast-iron black door knocker that took two hands to lift and drop.
Next to Mrs. Stanley’s mansion was a long row of what used to be brick horse stables but now stabled several gleaming automobiles that had been designed and built in foreign countries and were driven by tight-lipped unpleasant chauffeurs who, when they were not driving Milady somewhere, polished these glorious vehicles endlessly with soft, golden chamois cloths, and woe unto anyone who put a single finger on these cars, anywhere. They even frowned in disapproval when Mrs. S. touched her own cars with an ungloved hand.
But what I remember most about Mrs. Stanley is that she gave enormous, sumptuous over-the-top Christmas parties every single year and being invited was like being included in Mrs. Astor’s 400. It’s quite possible that Mrs. Stanley, who was fairly long in the tooth when I knew her, hung around with the Astor progeny — at least she hinted at such and long, long rows of photographs peopled by clearly the very wealthy along with Barbara Stanley too, hung on her long walls, attesting to the fact that Ms. S. rarely rubbed elbows with the rank and file.
We’d all dress in our finest for Mrs. Stanley’s Christmas do, and would drive up the meandering driveway to be greeted by an old guy with chattering teeth wearing a too thin tuxedo who’d take our car keys and drive our family cars to some mysterious place behind the mansion we couldn’t see, and we would all march solemnly into Mrs. S’s home, the great oak door being pulled open by another old guy in well-worn white tie and tails wearing a pair of surprising thick grey felt slippers pulled over his regular, well-polished shoes. Ms. S. did not allow members of her enormous staff to wear regular shoes lest they mar her fabulous, highly polished, imported wood from Italy that made up the floors throughout her mansion.
But her guests didn’t have to wear those awful slippers, and she greeted us all graciously as if we were royalty, our coats and hats and gloves silently removed and taken away, probably to the secret place where our cars were taken, and we were invited in.
Mrs. S. spared nothing when it came to decorating every single inch of her big old house. There were magnificent Christmas trees in all of the main rooms, a string quartet played endless Christmas songs in the corner of “the conservatory” which housed gigantic tropical ferns, a huge, richly carved golden harp, a Steinway concert piano and a few other genteel musical instruments that included, oddly, a set of tall, vividly striped bongo drums.
We’d be invited to look under the “main” tree, a glittering, heavily decorated Ponderosa in the main parlor, and there buried in a huge pile of elaborately wrapped gifts, we’d find the ones with our names thereon. I liked to get a small box because it always contained a piece of real jewelry. None of that tacky costume jewelry came from the hands of Barbara Stanley. Oh no. These small gifts came in tiny turquoise boxes from a famous store in NYC. If the box was large, it usually contained a cashmere sweater which was OK too, but not nearly as sexy or exciting as a brooch or ring or necklace from that famous store, and I still have them, and the boxes, and my cashmere sweaters. Two.
Mrs. Stanley was short and tough, like a fire hydrant, with thick grey hair attended to daily by her “hair person” and was curled and coiffed with such sculptured intensity it never moved a fraction, even, I suspected, in a hurricane. She was always dressed as she unabashedly told everyone, as if she had “just stepped out of a bandbox” and while none of us younger folk had a clue what that meant, it apparently meant at least to Mrs. Stanley’s eyes, that she looked tres au courant. She was an enormously heavy smoker and there was a perpetual cloud of blue smoke floating about her head like a guardian genii, and her nicotine stained fingers, jewel encrusted hands always held a burning unfiltered Camel cigarette in a jeweled cigarette holder. I wish she hadn’t done that. Just think how long we’d have been able to enjoy her company had she not smoked like that. Poor dear died 3 days short of her 102nd birthday.
Mrs. Stanley was lovely to all of us and made Christmas more magical than I can possibly describe here. We had wonderful times there, scarfing up the food piled from corner to corner on her mammoth dining room table, foods many of us had never seen before and likely never would again. She encouraged us all the “chow down” on as much as we wanted and to take especially huge portions of caviar “flown in from that big red Commie country, doncha know! Hell, they gotta be good for something!” And once we kids understood that all the adults there had gotten fully sloshed on Mrs. S’s endlessly flowing champagne from one of those perpetual fountains, (one was all milk chocolate) we’d send a signal to each other and sneak way upstairs, get in line and board her long, long, curved heavy mahogany banister one at a time and slide rapidly down, shrieking with joy and tumbling happily off onto her thick Asian carpet at the end of that elegant, satiny banister. The swazzled adults tried to look stern but soon smiled and went back to foggily celebrating Jesus’s birthday. Mrs. Stanley would bellow with laughter.
Her voice was deep and rough and sounded as if she were speaking through a steel tunnel. She loved to sing the hymns in her beloved Episcopal church on Sundays, and her smoky, barroom voice roared above everyone else’s, and when she decided it was time for the service to end, Lady S. waved at the long suffering minister who was trying desperately to save the souls of his congregation, grabbed her cane and slammed her way out of the pew she owned, stomped to the door, tossed a fifty at an usher for him to put into the collection basket, got into one of her shiny made-from-away cars and left, her loyal liveried chauffeurs standing at attention ready to receive, knowing from past Sundays she’d never make it to the end of the service. There was none of this “blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth” crap for her, as she so often said. Barbara Stanley did not gently tolerate meek people and besides, as far as she was concerned, she already owned the earth.
There was a Mr. Stanley somewhere in the mix but he stayed clear of his lioness wife and just kept busy making more millions in oil so she could keep on spending it.
The Christmas parties let me get to know her staff, butlers butling, maids maiding, chefs cheffing, gardeners gardening, carpenters carpentering, and a partridge in a pear tree. All were there that day. They all had to wear thick heavy grey felt slippers she’d had made, to fit over their shoes so they’d never scratch richly polished wooden floors as they performed their daily stints. She forbade her staff (or “the children” as she called them) to have stains on their uniforms and so kept extra clean ones ready for them in case of une petite mesaventure.
The best fun at those big parties was sneaking off to the enormous kitchen, so huge and lavishly appointed it appeared to be able to prepare banquets for hotels. Those kindly, busy, sweet be-slippered people would sneak us choice items from the trays before they went out to the guests and it was there in Mrs. Stanley’s gigantic all white kitchen where we learned about the real people of the world.
What a classy lady. I miss her awfully. She really made Christmases and everything else connected to her, deeply memorable. They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore, alas. Thank you, Barbara Stanley. Were you still here, I know you’d bellow a Merry Christmas to all of us!
LC Van Savage is a Brunswick writer.
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