Du Pont Winterthur Golf Club

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As it turns out, du Pont was not a total course hog. When he was away on an antiques hunt, his daughters, Ruth and Pauline Louise, took lessons from Vickers.

"I was bamboozled into it," Ruth told me recently. "I loathed golf." P.L., perhaps less so. In fact, she turned to golf for comfort during a family crisis.
   
It was the summer of 1937. The young Boston society swell to whom P.L. was about to become affianced arrived at her home one Saturday night in a state of advanced disrepair. Here it was, hours before the official announcement of their engagement in the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune.

Roomfuls of guests awaited the young couple at a formal party within the Winterthur walls. When the footman opened the door of the car, P.L.'s beau tumbled out, legs splayed, face planted in the asphalt between the two stone eagles at the entrance. The footman and a butler hoisted him up, dusted him off, and dragged him inside.

When P.L. was informed, she was mortified. Even more so later that night, when he called to break off the engagement.

The next morning Vickers, who had been walking the course with some party guests, sauntered into the golf room. There, he saw Pauline on the phone, talking to the cad, who had reconsidered. The worm was, to use the parlance of the day, crapulent.
   
Vickers said: "P.L., I'm sorry," and turned to leave. P.L. said, "Don't go away, Percy, I want to talk to you."

He waited outside and heard her say, "No! Pos-i-tively not."

Then she hung up.
   
Not long afterward, she came outside. She was weeping openly. Finally, she said, "Percy, will you do something for me?"

He said, "If I can."   
   
She said, "Take me out and play golf with me. I want to be away."  
   
He said, "Okay." And away Percy and P.L. quietly slipped. The golf pro drove the un-affianced young woman to the sixth tee. They played golf the rest of the morning, or at least until P.L. had regained her composure. "Thanks, Percy," she said. "You can take me home now."

So he drove her home and the following morning the announcement was made that the engagement had been called off. "Golf was therapeutic that day," Vickers later recalled.
   
In 1963—six years before his death—du Pont leased 141 acres of his course to a group of local businessmen, who converted the land into a private club. The members wanted to call their club Winterthur, but du Pont considered that confusing and suggested the name Bidermann after the builder of the estate.

Besides his indoor driving range on the top floor of the so-called Coach House, du Pont retained the eighth green and the first, ninth, and 10th fairways for himself—the better to protect his large display of Narcissi. "It's my golf course," he told Vickers, "and I'll do as I damn well please with it."

Golf is a sport most gloriously embodied in literature by the great P.G. Wodehouse, and of all the master's characters, du Pont perhaps most resembles Psmith—P-S-M-I-T-H, the P being silent. Psmith is a sophisticate whose delicately attuned nervous system can be shocked by loud colors, celluloid cuffs and the mere mention of an inadequately pressed trouser crease.

For its part, Winterthur suggests Blandings Castle, a place that comes, in the Wodehouse canon, to stand for the absolute ideal in country houses. Its serenity and beauty are enough to calm the most turbulent breast. It is an entire world unto itself.

To du Pont, golf was an exact science. Which is not to say that he, in his solitude, always achieved exactitude. "Damn it to hell!" was his expression of choice after swatting a short putt into the forsythia.

To borrow a phrase from Wodehouse, sometimes du Pont missed putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.

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