And the name Biddle, ring any bells? Sydney Biddle Barrow? A woman. The "Mayflower Madame" who ran an escort service in New York until busted in 1984. Sydney has social registry ancestry that puts her in a direct line from the passengers on the Mayflower. She thus earned the newspaper nickname, "Mayflower Madame." She was quoted as saying she was the "Martha Stewart of client experience." Oh boy, did Macy's know?
I once went to the library to see if the incoming CEO of the company was in the Social Register. I asked the reference librarian for the book, and told her I was just checking to see if my name was spelled correctly. The incoming CEO was not in the book, but I did find him in another registry.
You don't hear much of the Social Register, or the 400 Club. Anyone who takes a bit of guilty pleasure in reading the captions of the pictures taken at the latest function in New York City realizes all you really have to do to get your name in the paper is show some skin. The more the better.
I thought "Social Register" all throughout the recent obituary for Mrs. Duke, 92, who just passed away. The obituary written by the man whose name invariably appears when the subject is over 90, Robert D. McFadden, is as elegant as the deceased Mrs. Duke. We learn of her somewhat hardscrabble life after her lawyer father divorced her mother and she and her sister lived in New York with the mother who found work as "tea room cashier."
Modeling and journalism provided Robin with income, and connections. She was part of the early 'Today' show with Dave Garroway, working as an anchor and reporter. She covered the 1953 weeding of JFK to Jacqueline in Newport, Rhode Island. Her second marriage, to Angier Biddle Duke, his fourth, was the catapult to the real big time in social circles and affairs. One gets the impression she ate a good deal of catered food at charity functions and political dinners. She was on many boards and was in the papers well into her 80s.
Angier, a distant heir to the American Tobacco fortune, was JFK's chief of protocol, and worked in government with the rank of Ambassador. The world was his oyster, and Robin was part of it. The two pictures that accompany her obituary show a well-turned out woman, even when elderly, who you could easily imagine breezing, Loretta Young-like, through a ballroom full of tuxedoed gentlemen holding wine glasses and chatting away. They always chat.
As elegant and fluffy Mrs Duke's obituary is, there's a tidbit in it that to me attracted more attention: how her husband, Angier died. Without giving his age at the time of his demise, Mr. McFadden slips in the fact he died in 1995 while rollerblading in Southhampton, having been hit by a car.
An alert reader of these outpourings knows I've written about unusual forms of death. It relates back to the ICD-9 and 10 code books of diagnoses and mortality codes. "Whacked by trolley" has become my own umbrella under which I categorize these odd circumstances.
Being a NYT subscriber, I get access to their digital database. Look up Angier Biddle Duke's obit and we learn he had several arrests for drunk driving. His license was ultimately revoked in New York State.
So, hearing of a 79 year-old man who runs afoul of a motorized vehicle while rollerblading makes you wonder did Mr. Duke take up rollerblading as a means of getting around because he no longer had a driver's license?
I am reminded of the George Price cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker in a February 1968 issue that showed an inebriated fellow handcuffed to the officer who is on the call box phone, whose free hand is holding a rope to a sled. The caption reads: "Belly-whopping while under the influence, Sarge."
Now, whether Angier was under he influence of alcohol, or anything other than being 79 while rolllerblading, is not disclosed. You're going to have to get your hands on the coroner's report for that. But imagine, "whacked while under the influence while rollerblading." Is there a mortality code for that one?
And, because one thing with me leads to another, I remembered another odd cause of death happening to a socially prominent member of business and society. A Bingham.
The Bingham family is another whose name usually has the word "scion" associated with it when a member is being mentioned. And when Barry Bingham Jr., the Louisville Publisher passed away at 72 in 2006, Mr. McFadden also got the nod to tell us.
The Bingham family was big in ownership of Louisville newspapers, whose political influence was always felt. When Barry Jr. passed away we were treated to a story of a family dynasty that rivaled the Kennedys for generational influence, as well as tragedy.
Mr. McFadden narrates the tragic arc when he tells us Barry's younger brother Jonathan was electrocuted at 22 in a "freakish accident" and his older brother Worth, in 1966 was killed in "another freakish accident: a surfboard protruding from his car hit a parked vehicle, pivoted abruptly and snapped his neck." Worth was 34.
The accident was fully described in a New York magazine story:
"One summer morning, while vacationing with his family in Nantucket, he decided to drive to the beach to surf, placing his board horizontally across the backseat of his convertible. When one protruding end hit a parked car, the whole surfboard swung around and crushed his neck."
Talk about a snake-bitten clan. After I read of a death caused by a badly placed surfboard, I have forever been more than extremely careful when loading planks of wood into the SUV.
I wonder what the ICD-10 for that would be.
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