In history, it seems, for every gain there is a corresponding loss, and in this age of egalitarianism, equal opportunity, and diversity, we have consigned to oblivion a slice of our past: the golden era of once aristocratic New England boarding schools– and the aristocratic (or near aristocratic) headmasters who guided them and shaped generations of statesmen, titans of industry, and crack polo players.

     There was Frank Boyden (1879-1972) of Deerfield, the American Dr. Arnold, who was said to never have given up on a boy, and his counterpart at Hotchkiss, George Van Santvoord (1891-1975),  whose distinguished bearing earned him the nickname the Duke. Van Santvoord, and his predecessor who was known as the King, claimed that at Hotchkiss there was only one rule for students to follow: Be a gentleman. Unfortunately, the ingenuity of the adolescent mind made practical application of this dictum difficult, and the Duke established an Excuse Office under the guidance of a subaltern to deal with its interpretation, while he devoted himself to his favorite pastimes,  “re-reading Mr. Gibbon” and painting well-composed watercolors in the attic of his fourteen room house.

     They were a grand group in a grand age–an age of starched white collars and boys who dressed for dinner that was swept away by two world wars and the upheavals of social change.  Of all the elite, one stood out among the rest: Endicott Peabody (1857-1944) of Groton. Fair, athletic, pious, and-- more importantly–a Peabody of Massachusetts, he was descended from a Bay Colony governor and was  the son of an American born banker, S. Endicott Peabody, who became a partner of Junius Morgan in the latter’s London office. In fact, it was a distant relative named Peabody who had made a fortune in dry goods and had actually founded the bank that became the House of Morgan.

       The writer’s  parents “loved people and were popular.” Early on,  Louis was exposed “to the worlds of politics, arts and letters.” Among his family’s friends was Learned Hand, an erudite federal judge, whom Auchincloss later claimed was a model for Francis Prescott, the rector of the fictitious academy Justin Martyr, though most readers assumed the stern character was based on  Endicott Peabody.  The author’s disclaimer may have been to placate Peabody admirers, like the author’s own father, who objected to any depiction of the Rector as a mere mortal. (Even today, Groton’s Communications Director insists  that Francis Prescott was inspired by Judge Hand and  that “the school was, according to Auchincloss,  a composite of several early boarding schools.”)

        Another visitor to the Auchincloss home was John W. Davis of  Davis Polk where Auchincloss, Sr. was a partner.  It  was Davis who counseled  J.P. Morgan and Company in avoiding prosecution  during the Richard Whitney scandal that rocked Wall Street in the 1930s. A legendary trader and brother of a senior Morgan partner, Whitney was a charming rogue who embezzled money from his yacht club and consorted with bootleggers despite his Groton pedigree. When Whitney’s brother covered up for his crimes, the House of Morgan was brought to the brink of disaster.  Whitney pleaded guilty to avoid a scandalous trial and went to prison where he was dutifully visited by Rector Peabody.

       Auchincloss was to base The Embezzler on this tale of old school and family loyalty. The novel,  which “irritated” some members of his parent’s set,  was a  richly layered  study of old  New York with its snobbishness and aversion to outsiders. It was a world in which even  the Vanderbilts were considered new money.  “One cares who people are,” says a spoiled heiress in the novel, while her father keeps unsuitable suitors away by spiriting her off in the family’s steam yacht.

      At Groton which he entered at the age of twelve, Auchincloss learned the mores of the American aristocracy. In 1929, the school was a closed society. There were no Jewish students and only a few Catholics, though none from ethnic backgrounds. In A Writer’s Capital, the author  wrote of the Rector: “I believe that he thought one was more apt to find a “gentleman” in the best sense of that dangerous word  among upper middle-class Bostonians than any Irish or Italian immigrant, but he would have been unusual in his generation had he not.”

      His first  few months at school,  Auchincloss was exposed to the fierceness of clan loyalty. He and two other students were involved in a schoolboy prank, tossing stones at a passing train. When the engineer complained, the Rector inquired into the misdeed. Auchincloss quickly confessed and innocently implicated his cohorts. He was labeled a “snitch” and ostracized for months for his honesty.

      The  future novelist’s life  brightened  after he fell under the influence of an English teacher named Malcolm Strachan. Strachan was one of those remarkable individuals (like Armstrong of Kent, Torrey of Hotchkiss)  for whom teaching is a great adventure. He would mimeograph a poem but leave off the date and author’s name, so that class discussion of the work would be open and “free of other judgments.”

      Strachan “loved” the Rector and shared his deep faith. After Peabody retired, he continued to live in a house on the Groton campus; the younger man became his confident. Peabody told him that which he told nobody else, Auchincloss later wrote, about a world which had disillusioned him and his disappointment “that he had failed to persuade his boys to receive Christ.”

      After he graduated, Auchincloss kept in touch with his mentor. Over the years, Strachan would sometimes “discuss a novel that he was vaguely planning to write” about the Rector and the subtlety and complexity of his theology. But Strachan was not by nature a writer; he abandoned the idea before his premature death of a heart ailment. Auchincloss had told him that he would do the book himself, and “ultimately, I did, or my idea of it,” the author noted.