What Ho, Jeeves! Watch Who You’re Calling Jeeves, Buddy. : THE ART OF SERVICE AS GOOD FORM. A WAY OF BEING AND A SPIRITUAL ODYSSEY
Lesson one: Enter the room without so much as a hint of a footfall. Speak not a word unless spoken to. Lesson two: Wear no jewelry that might attract the eye. Dress only in black and white. No cologne or perfume to betray a presence. Leave not a crumb behind. Lesson three: whatever happens here--abuse, adultery, addiction--is neither seen nor heard, much less spoken of. And lesson four: No matter how many years shared under the same roof, do not hope to be part of the family, nor embrace their friends, nor mistake their possessions as your own.
“Remember,” cautions the headmaster, “you are not of the house, but in the house.” And so each night, like an apparition, you silently retreat into the room above the carriage house, satisfied that much was done and all unseen. A life ethereal.
*
Denver’s Starkey International Institute For Household Management claims to be the only school of its kind in the nation, and it may well be. After all, in a country that frowns on subservience, there’s only so much room for a school for butlers. Founded by Mary Starkey in 1989, the school observed a landmark this year. Defying all doubters, it celebrated the graduation of its 25th class. Its alums now number nearly 200. Wherever there is wealth they may be found--from a posh Manhattan penthouse to a Palm Springs estate. The school’s placement service caters to CEOs, surgeons, car dealers and celebrities. Even Bob Hope is attended by a Starkey grad.
Many students find their way here inadvertently, stumbling across the small but dignified ad tucked away in the back pages of Town & Country and Bon Appetit. Set against an onyx background, the Starkey ad features a stately mansion etched inside an oval frame. Above the picture is the Starkey credo: “Setting National Standards in Household Service.” Tiny diamonds accent each corner. Except for the 1-800 number, there is nothing common about the ad. It conjures up images of Jeeves in starched black-and-whites, sterling tray in hand, serving the afternoon’s Earl Grey and scones.
Coming upon a school for butlers in late 20th century America is like stumbling across a species long presumed extinct. But tell that to the steady procession of mostly middle-aged men and women who have trekked to Denver and paid $5,000 to spend eight weeks learning how to ease the burdens of those more fortunate than themselves. Hadn’t they seen “Remains of the Day?” What does one make of a curriculum that teaches how to distinguish Lenox from Limoges, how to present tea and savories, or what to say when covering for a philandering master?
*
Sunday evening, the night before the first class, eight students take their places around the dining table. The main course, buttery noodles and beef Bourgogne. Silver candlestick holders grace the table. Centerpieces overflow with yellow and pink roses. In sweeps Starkey, all 5-foot-4 of her, sporting a western vest and crisp white shirt.
“Welcome to the 25th class of the Starkey Institute,” she says. “If I said this was a butler school no one would come because no one wants to be a servant. You are not a servant, you are not a domestic, you are a professional.” Starkey has even coined a term for what they will become--a “Household Manager” or “HM.”
Many come expecting an empress dowager or stern doyenne of decorum, not some bubbly 46-year-old with a girlish face that is luminous and ageless. Starkey’s eyes are small and hazel, her nose finely sculpted, her auburn hair short as a schoolboy’s. One insouciant wisp falls across her forehead. Her smile is pearly and tugs slightly at her face, as if it were half a size too large.
As she speaks, one student, a 53-year-old grandmother named Mary Miller, stands rigidly off Starkey’s left shoulder, then edges forward to pour her coffee. “Just some cream, love,” Starkey says. Mary Miller nods, her round face dimpled with a nervous smile. She returns a moment later with a silver pitcher. “Thank you, love,” says Starkey. “Love.” The word sounds so alien to Mary Miller.
She has come a long way, from Carriere, Miss., a country crossroads with a Texaco station, a Quik Stop convenience store and not much else. Population, anybody’s guess. For years she ran a catering business out of her home, baking cakes from boxes of Duncan Hines and sewing gowns for the brides of Carriere. Later she would do alterations for a dry cleaner and work in a dress factory. Finally, in 1988, she went back to school, first to a community college and then to the University of Southern Mississippi, where she studied home economics. Last July, after 36 years of marriage, she was divorced. That’s when she remembered the Starkey ad she’d seen in Town & Country four years before while waiting to see the doctor. Now here she was, trying to hide her homesickness.
“I am looking for something in my life,” she says, having taken a seat at the far end of the table. “I’m not sure exactly what it is. The thing what I would like to do is raise the standard of living for someone.”
As the last of the red wine disappears from the long-stemmed glasses, Starkey talks of her students. She hints that each awaits an epiphany. She tells of a student who had been a butler for 15 years. He took a leave and paid for classes himself. “Three-quarters of the way through the course he said to me, ‘Ms. Starkey, had I only known!’ He was blown away. He understood he was of value and why he was of value.” By the time dessert arrives (deep-dish apple pie), she has spoke the word “service” a half-dozen times. She utters the word with ecclesiastic reverence, as if pressing the pedal of a church organ.
“The magic of this industry comes out in a formal dinner,” says Starkey, glancing around the table. “Just as there is a form to the Catholic Mass, so there is form to a formal dinner. There is magic because of the form.” But it’s not just spiritual rewards Starkey offers. Her graduates, she says, make $30,000, even $60,000. That doesn’t count the use of a car--a Rolls, perhaps, or Mercedes--and room and board. “The 30,000-square foot home, there are just so many of them in the United States today,” says Starkey. To listen to her one might think that half the world lives on an estate, and the other half lives to serve them.
A velvet darkness envelops the 95-year-old mansion. Candles sputter. Sconces cast a ghostly amber glow on the wall. Those who know have set their forks at the 4 o’clock position on their plates, tines up, a signal they have finished. Like its predecessors, this is an eclectic class, counting among its members an Irish-born concierge, a burly former Marine who worked as a bodyguard for Ivan Boesky and Henry Kissinger, and a woman who’d spent three years with the Peace Corps living in a mud hut in Mali.
Only at the end of dinner does Starkey sound her cautionary note: remember and honor the boundary that lies between the employer and you. Once this was called “knowing one’s place.” Starkey treads a fine line, repudiating servitude while turning out a cadre of professionals devoted to the well-to-do. It takes a special kind of soul to live in another’s home and own nothing but evenings and weekends. Who would not be tempted to use the pool, join in conversations and otherwise breach the covenant between servant and master?
Service, Starkey continues, is not humbling but ennobling. The students around the table nod in assent. “They say, ‘I feel like I’ve become a minister to whoever I’m taking care of,” Starkey says. “Some have said they feel like a shaman or a priest. So many have said it that I know I’m not crazy.” The students sit in rapt silence. “Service,” says Starkey, concluding the evening’s homily, “is a path, a way of becoming conscious in the mystical sense.” With that, each student rises and clears his or her own place.
*
At 9 a.m. a brass bell summons us to the basement. We file downstairs and glimpse a wall of wine bottles in an adjacent room--a dusty Chateau Lafite Rothchild 1967, a Bordeaux, awaits honored guests. We enter the classroom. To the right is a tiny wine rack with three bottles of Paul Masson Very Cold Duck, a tacky substitute for champagne, mercifully discontinued years ago. The room is filled with a dark oak table surrounded by high-backed, ornately carved chairs. Against the far wall is a polished copper hood over a massive red-brick fireplace, long unused. The room has the chill of a feudal castle.
Enter James Patrick Stanton, the 44-year-old headmaster and principal instructor. A compact 5-foot-6, he is a natty dresser whose tastes run to English suits, perfect Windsor knots and French cuffs that frame hands as fine as bone china. His belt and watchband match, his black oxfords have been buffed to a mirror sheen. In July, Stanton took the place of a Starkey legend, Headmaster Lee Whiteway. Stanton is a second-generation gentleman’s gentleman. His parents, Irish immigrants, waited on Philadelphia’s Mainline. His father once chauffeured Grace Kelly, and for years Stanton served prominent New York families.
He hands out the rules of the mansion: “ ‘The Lady of the House’ is Mrs. Starkey and ‘The Gentleman of the House’ is Mr. Oppenheim.” That’s “Mr. O,” a 53-year-old accountant from New York City, now the school’s chief financial officer. Stanton instructs the class on their morning preferences. Mrs. Starkey takes decaf, no sugar, with cream. She likes bread, but don’t tempt her. Mr. O prefers herbal tea, a peeled banana and English muffin, and the Wall Street Journal within easy reach. Everyone takes notes.
Students ignore Starkey’s preferences at their peril; she is, after all, the gateway to employers. Former students say she can be prickly. “My students call me Mary Poppins with a temper,” she says with a laugh. This is the perfect position then for a prima donna: Her demands are woven into the curriculum.
“You should never enter a room without a reason,” continues Stanton. He has students practice silent entries and exits. (It’s a trick every parent knows: turn the knob, keep latch depressed, slowly close door and release knob.) Later, rehearsing for a formal dinner, he advises that even if something goes awry, “Do not say, ‘Excuse me.’ Do not say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Do not enter into the conversation.”
Stanton is now scanning the institute’s sacred text, a monstrous three-ring notebook. By the end of week eight, after a blizzard of handouts and supplements--everything from recipes to how many centimeters from the table’s edge a dinner plate must be--it will have swollen to nearly a thousand pages and spilled over into a second binder. The students open their notebooks and follow along as Stanton, like an Old Testment psalmist, reads: “You should never enter a room . . . “
Now to the duties of the Household Manager. Clean shoes and boots, carry wood to the fireplaces, do all heavy lifting, polish brass and silver, make restaurant reservations, valet gentlemen, vacuum “cobwebs, dead moths behind curtains, and paper punch dots . . . .” About the only thing Stanton says the class will be spared is learning how to iron the newspaper--a custom of British butlers to save their masters from getting ink on their fingers. Each student will serve as Household Manager for a day. The Starkey HM is responsible for “Morning Graces,” which calls for opening the blinds at 6:30 a.m., turning on the lights, putting on the coffee, preparing Starkey’s breakfast, raising the U.S. flag (stage right), the Colorado flag (stage left), and a host of lesser tasks that bring the house to a state of wide-eyed readiness.
Three hours into the class, many of the students are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the material. “I feel like a kindergartener in a room full of astrophysicists,” Meg McCarthy announces to the class. Later, she elaborates. “I have no skills it seems. I’m pretty lost at sea.” Forty-five years old, twice-divorced, McCarthy has platinum hair swept to the side, wears little makeup or jewelry and speaks in a voice as soft as down. Until recently she was a pediatric nurse working 60-hour weeks tending to HIV-infected children. Now, she has decided, it is time to give some thought to taking care of herself. In this she knows she is not alone. “Around this table, there is a lot of need to be needed,” she says.
Even as Mary Starkey painted vivid pictures of penthouses and seaside estates, McCarthy’s fantasies took a different shape. “A Midwest farm couple would be fine by me,” she says. “I’m not going for the glitz.” Once she lived in a commune in the Rockies, back-packed and had only two pairs of pants. “I was happy like that,” she says. Now she hopes to simplify her life again. “I’ll be living in someone else’s home. None of this stuff will be mine.”
Later that evening she tells Starkey she is dropping out. In part, Starkey’s portraits of affluence have unnerved her. “I was terrified of ending up in the middle of ‘Bonfires of the Vanities,’ ” she says. But Starkey persuades her to give it another try. Such timidity is common among these students who face not just an avalanche of new material but the uncertainty of a career change. Counseling them is a part of the job Starkey relishes, and she offers a therapy that is rooted in common sense, pop psychology and [pure] motivation.
Starkey speaks as if those who come here are on a pilgrimage, stateless souls seeking a place for themselves. She says she dreams of Golda Meir. “She was someone who created a state for a people,” Starkey says. “I have been creating a structure for a group of people who serve to do it honorably. That’s why I think I always dreamed about her, because that’s what she did.”
*
To the students, Starkey appears to share the life of her high-society clients. She is invited to address the debutantes of Denver. She reminisces about her grandmother’s butler. She cruises in a sleek 1995 midnight-blue Mazda Millennium, shops in Neiman Marcus and sports a diamond solitaire on her left pinkie--her grandmother’s engagement ring. Weekly she indulges in a massage.
But the image she projects is like a hologram. She makes a down-to-earth $40,000 a year, less than many of her graduates. Starkey has nothing against money, but neither does she envy the well-to-do. “All families are dysfunctional,” she says. “The more money they have, the more dysfunctional. I saw people at this end of the spectrum going 90 miles per hour to chase the American dream, and the children literally get lost and the husbands and wives no longer talk.”
From Starkey’s vantage point, her butlers are on an errand of mercy, not indulgence, dispatched to relieve the gentry of crushing household burdens so that they might devote themselves to children and spouses, marginalized in the quest for wealth. It is not merely plates and dishes that her graduates clear away but the clutter of life that threatens to obscure, even smother, relationships. Those who arrive expecting a souffle-light course on how to pamper the rich instead face Jungian psychology and questions about self-worth. “What,” Starkey asks them, “are the things you feel late at night when it’s just you and God, the part you never show to anybody?”
Mary Starkey’s struggle began Aug. 3, 1951, in Aberdeen, S.D. On that day, age 2, she entered St. Luke’s Hospital for a routine operation to correct what was called a “lazy eye.” “I vividly remember my dad wrapping me up in a blanket and taking me down to the hospital,” Starkey says, “and telling me everything would be just fine.”
The doctor attempted to cauterize her left eye with a red-hot iron before the ether mask was removed from her face. The gas ignited in a ferocious flash, melting the mask and searing her flesh to the bone. “My first two months of life after that,” she says, “were in an iron lung with a fine spray over the burns because they didn’t know what to do with me. My lungs were singed from the fire. I inhaled it. I did not have a nose, I did not have an upper lip, and I was blind. From that day on, it changed me forever; I could never again be as I was.” It would be nearly three months before her sight returned.
Her family was prominent in Aberdeen. Her father ran the lucrative Coca-Cola franchise. They were also devout Catholics. Local clergy persuaded them not to sue the hospital, which was run by nuns. In the end, the Rohls sued only the doctor and accepted a paltry out-of-court settlement. It was not only church pressure that dissuaded them. “I just wasn’t going to display Mary in front of a jury,” her father says. “I just couldn’t do that.”
“My dad stopped looking at me, literally,” Starkey says, “and every time he did look at me, he winced.” At the hospital, the nuns offered up novenas for her recovery, promising to erect a statue in the children’s ward to St. Mother Cabrini if she regained her sight. Thereafter, each Nov. 13, the saint’s feast day, Mary and her mother, Carol, would quietly slip into the hospital and lay roses at the saint’s feet.
“As we would go down the street during those first three or four year,” her mother recalls, “comments were made--’That poor little girl! ‘What ever happened to her!’ ‘Oh, my God!’ or ‘Don’t stare so!’ As we walked by and something was said, I would say ‘Well, Mary, this is just for now and one day you’re going to be a raving beauty.’ ”
But “just for now” stretched across years. Starkey spent part of each summer, from ages 2 to 16, at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., having her face reconstructed. Instead of hiding from the world, she took up tap dance and piano and had a cluster of friends. Her sister, Barbara, remembers her as outgoing, strong-willed--even defiant--with a sense of drama and a need to be center stage.
“But the scars she carries on her face were very deep within her,” remembers Ruth Woodhead, who, along with her husband, would later become Starkey’s lifelong confidants. “She’s not the same person that she was. She has practically no self-esteem. She would almost disintegrate to where she was just like a little ball when something injured her--you’ve seen those mealy bugs that just curl up, that’s what she did.”
For years Starkey underwent analysis. “I needed to know,” she says, “why I looked at the world so differently.” She considered suicide, became estranged from much of her family, suffered a series of failed marriages and flunked out of college, although she returned to graduate at age 27. At Woodhead’s prompting, Starkey attended a Merle Norman studio and learned how to apply cosmetics to cover her scars. Still, she drifted from career to career--a couple of years with Goodwill of Denver, a stint as a gofer with a construction firm. Then, in 1981, divorced and with two young sons, she placed an ad in both Denver papers offering to clean, cook or organize closets for $10 an hour. For a year she scrubbed and swept and cleaned, but she also began to develop a placement service for domestics and nannies, taking a cut of their salaries as a fee. The first domestic she placed was the wife of a wealthy Denverite who was receiving no money from her husband. She disguised herself with a wig and parked her pink Cadillac a safe distance from the homes she cleaned.
Starkey soon realized that placing nannies and domestics was a financial dead end, so in 1985 she added butlers. A year later, after interviewing dozens of wealthy clients, she conceived the idea of a school for butlers. In January, 1990, after advertising in upscale magazines like Gourmet and Town & Country, she welcomed the first class to the Starkey Institute. A portrait of those four students hangs along the stairway of the mansion, the so-called “Wall of Fame,” above a brass plate engraved: “If you build it they will come.”
Much of the initial stake used to finance the school, about $30,000, came from the settlement her family received for the injuries she suffered at age 2. Nine months after starting the institute, Starkey was out of money. She had moved in with a girlfriend, paying her $50 a month rent for a bedroom; her gross income each of the next two years was a scant $18,000. And there were other travails.
Last year, the school was forced to vacate another mansion. Movers piled furnishings into two 48-foot trailers, where they remained for six weeks--until the present mansion was acquired. Today the school grosses about $600,000 a year. Some $250,000 of that comes from tuition, and $350,000 from a fee amounting to 25% of a butler’s first-year salary, which she charges clients with whom she places her graduates.
“I think I’m the lucky one,” says Starkey. “So many of us have lives that, for whatever reason, there isn’t anyone that believes in us. Nowhere have I seen this as acutely as in the service industry, because there isn’t any value given to the work of service in our culture.”
*
Those who come to the Starkey school to learn the art of service follow in a tradition that dates back a millennium. The first butlers took their name from the Old French, bouteillier, or bottle-bearer. It was they who brought wine to the king’s table. In succeeding centuries, the butler occupied a noble position. Only later did butler come to refer to a commoner who served the gentry.
In this country, Starkey’s sole competitor is a Englishman named Ivor Spencer, whose seminars she dismisses as mired in Old World ways. “He just hates me,” says Starkey, who delights in tweaking him from afar. Only her school, she insists, addresses the needs of the American family, more often than not headed by two overworked spouses overwhelmed by a welter of responsibilities.
On the second day of classes, Headmaster Stanton commences a tour of the mansion, starting in a dingy basement room. There he introduces the students to the arsenal of cleaning supplies--Arm & Hammer, Lysol, a yellowing box of “Johnson’s Powdered Dance Wax” for ballroom floors. The cardinal rule of cleaning is top to bottom, left to right, and back to front. Students are provided caddies: crude wooden trays stocked with feather dusters, sponges and a toothbrush for corners and crevices.
Those assigned to cleaning Zone One are responsible for the grounds and sidewalk outside the Georgian mansion. Built in 1901, it is still graced by a sandstone hitching post out front, though the metal hoop for the reins was stolen long ago. Once haughty, this home in the Capitol district is now humbled by bars on windows and a security system.
Cleaning Zone Two begins at the door. Just inside is a crimson carpet. On either side are two blue-and-white Ming vases (reproductions) filled with sage, heather and wheat. In the foyer stand two waist-high lacquer figures--butlers dressed in tuxes, striped pants and white gloves. In each upraised hand they offer visitors a brochure titled “The Art of Gracious Living.” Headmaster Stanton demonstrates how to clip the stamens of the lilies to keep them looking fresh.
Then it’s upstairs to Stanton’s bedroom. On the fireplace mantle a dozen ceramic penguins stand in a line, a gift from the last class. This is to be a demonstration of bed-making--not by Stanton, but by 26-year-old student Leland Dittmar Stone, a graduate of the Cornell School of Hotel Management. Slender with a chalky complexion and glasses, he peels back the top sheet to reveal the piece de resistance--not two sheets, but three, the top one elegantly encasing the blanket like a duvet. The class gasps in admiration. And why not? As an intern at Raffles, Singapore’s legendary hotel, Stone wrote a manual on how to make beds. “I like everything to be perfect,” says Stone. “The bedspread fringe should be one-eighth of an inch off the carpet.”
During the break that follows, students gravitate toward the kitchen. It is immaculate and frozen in time, circa 1965. The oven range shines with a surgical gleam, though its rogue temperatures blackened the crust of last night’s apple pie. Haviland serving dishes and baskets are artfully arranged on the walls. A sign on the refrigerator reads: “Pardon the mess--Our maid and butler quit.” There is no mess. On the center island’s blue Formica counter top, not a crumb is in sight. Even now student Michael Crane towel-dries its spotless surface.
This is a house where virtually nothing is out of place, no cowlick or wrinkle, not a shadow of tarnish nor a trace of dust. The pantry drawers are lined, each silver-plated spoon snugly stacked atop its own kind. A regiment of thumb tacks is arrayed in four parallel rows on the cork bulletin board. The fringe of the Persian rugs is combed out daily with a wide-toothed rake. In the living room, the pillows of sofas and easy chairs have been plumped to an uninviting perfection.
Class after class has scrubbed and scoured every inch of this manse until it is nearly sterile, hostage to a tyranny of cleanliness. Free of the smudges and clutter that make a house a home, it has the feel of a Hollywood sound set, possessed of only a transient identity. Porcelains and paintings, devoid of attachment or memories, are mere props to be dusted and tidied up by each succeeding class. This is not a home, but a halfway house for compulsives.
Only one tiny space in its 12,000 square feet has been declared off-limits to the barrage of cleaning solvents. That’s along the doorjamb entering the kitchen. There, scribbled on a wooden upright in faded blue ink, are the names of children and grandchildren who lived here when it was a home, when Colorado’s Speaker of the House, Allen Dines, carried the keys. Beside the names--Andre, Richie--are hash marks and dates recording their advancing heights. Mary Starkey gives the order that no one is to touch the graffiti. “One squeaky-clean guy forgot and I rang his neck,” she laughs. “Now I say, ‘If you touch my graffiti, you’re dead.’ ”
*
Scarcely a day goes by when someone at the school does not invoke the name and memory of Lee Whiteway, Starkey’s first headmaster. A figure of legendary grace, he stands as an exemplar of all that a butler might aspire to. But to the few who knew him well, he was also a casualty of the many hazards of the profession.
He lived a block away from the mansion, in a loft apartment over a carriage house. He had been butler to Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., President Gerald R. Ford and New York Mayor Ed Koch. He also served Jackie Onassis, Andy Warhol, Estee Lauder, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. He was poised, resourceful and a connoisseur of all things fine. He also led a double life. He ironed only the front placket of his white shirts--what the public saw. The rest was hopelessly rumpled. It was the perfect metaphor for a man whose profession demanded that he be a paragon of propriety, while his private life sometimes careened out of control.
“In the context of being the perfect butler and perfect teacher, I chose not to see that things were not perfect,” says Starkey. “He was a love in many ways, but he had a split down the middle of him. He showed one face to his public and another to a world I knew nothing about. It was only after he died that the other world came to the surface.”
His lover and companion, Rod DeFoe II, put it another way: “His life was a theatrical production.”
A man of slight build, Whiteway stood 5-foot-5 and had a great shock of blond hair, dyed to conceal that it had gone snowy white. He had it cut at a local trade school, where he paid $3. He sputtered around Denver in a beat-up and rusted-out orange Suburu, thick with trash. Often he would drive around with a roll of carpet in the back of his car. To avoid parking fees, he would pull into a loading zone, put on his flashers, pop up the back hatch and pull the carpet out halfway so that it appeared he was unloading. He would leave the car there for hours, as he took in a movie or opera. “I think he did it just to break the rules,” DeFoe says.
He adored opera, knew major arias by heart and arranged for an association of opera lovers to come to the mansion for upscale potluck dinners. Each time, the diners, many of them Denver’s bluebloods, would ask what became of the cakes they had brought. Lee had hidden them in the freezer. Weeks later he would serve them when someone at the school had a birthday.
On the refrigerator at the Starkey Institute, Whiteway posted an essay he had written in the second grade about a robin in spring. The teacher had drawn a red star at the top in praise. No one quite understood his attachment to the yellowing piece of paper. “I am Lee Whiteway,” it concluded. “I am 9 years old. I am in the second grade. This is April 11, 1958.” But his father had an inkling what it meant. Whiteway was dyslexic. He failed the second grade and was forced to repeat it. The red star was a child’s triumph.
His loft apartment was filled with the detritus of life. Around his harpsichord were sometimes strewn socks, shoes and unwashed dishes. “It was no wonder his house was a wreck, because he was never there except to rush in, change clothes and rush out to the next event,” friend Robin Leist says. “He was always late.” He led a frenetic life, serving on more than a dozen organizations, among them opera companies, the Junior Symphony League, Daughter of the British Empire and a local Sherlock Holmes society. He slept three hours a night.
In his final months, his dinner parties became ever more elaborate and exotic. Under the gaze of Ford, Nixon and Koch--their inscribed photos prominently positioned on tables--Whiteway hosted Denver’s highborn, seating them side by side with psychics and drag queens. These were six-course meals served by candlelight.
He tried to hide his taste for drink. One friend recalls how he would conceal gin-and-tonics in pop bottles in the school refrigerator, taking a nip when needed. His brother, Dean Whiteway, a Wisconsin doctor who treats alcoholics, had no idea Whiteway had a problem. “That is true not only of Lee but of many in the industry,” Starkey says. “Alcoholism was rampant among many of the Old Guard. They were isolated. One had never met another, and always one had to be ‘on’ as a person. There is a good deal of acting and of theater that got them through it. They were always playing a role.”
Whiteway’s performance came to an abrupt end in the early hours of June 18. Returning home from a dinner party, he lost control of his car on Route 36 between Boulder and Denver. The car flipped and crashed into a concrete median strip. Whiteway’s neck snapped. He was dead at 46. He had been drinking.
Whiteway had lived in Denver less than five years, but mourners filled the chapel of St. John’s Cathedral. The mix of people was as diverse as his dinner parties. But the butler who served a string of prominent multimillionaires, presidents and their families died without a will. His account was said to be overdrawn, his estate bankrupt. For a man who left so little behind, he left so much. “We were proud to call him our friend,” wrote Betty Ford. And at the service, among the eulogies was this: “Lee has dined, he has finished, and now, he can rest.”
Not long after his death, Starkey met a Denver socialite who had once hired Whiteway to cater a dinner. As was his wont, he had arrived with several students, then vanished, leaving the affair in the hands of his understudies. The socialite later confronted him, demanding to know where he had gone. “But madame,” Whiteway responded, “I was there, I was just being the perfect butler--I was invisible.”