to have them hear how the best and the brightest had learned
to use cutlery at Schrafft’s?
The student body would be made up of the children of Saul
Bellow, Bob Fosse, Neil Simon, Robert Redford, Elia Kazan,
Richard Avedon, as well as Rockefellers, Whitneys, and heads
of television networks and Lincoln Center. The actors Wallace
Shawn, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Claire Danes attended too. So
did comedian Chevy Chase and author Frances Fitzgerald. In
1979, Woody Allen, whose son Moses Farrow was a student,
used the exterior of Dalton to film the scene from Manhattan
in which Isaac, played by the 42-year-old Allen, tries to seduce
the 17-year-old Tracy, played by Mariel Hemingway.
I
heard the name Donald Barr for the first time in
- New to New York, I worked as an assistant in
the story department of Paramount. My boss, an
ardent feminist, was a Dalton mother and sympa-
thetic to an effort by parents to force Barr out of his job. In 1971,
Ne w York magazine had run a story, “The Parents’ Revolt at
Dalton,” and it opened with an account of a Dalton PTA meet-
ing at which an insurance executive gets punched. An accom-
panying cartoon showed Barr using a large contraption to eject
unruly students. At issue was his high-handed tactics and the
school’s power struggles—against the backdrop of an America
imploding over the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement,
and the policies of Richard Nixon. Anyone caught smoking pot,
even off campus, was ousted. “He was one of the people stand-
ing in the way of a cultural tidal wave he did not understand,”
recalled a Dalton student from that era, Marc Edelman, now a
professor of anthropology at Hunter College.
The uproar was my first exposure to the hysteria that can
overcome private-school parents. It represented a new lan-
guage for me, having come from a public high school in San
Antonio where the rules were more or less the same as those
Barr was trying to impose. The language of the cave dwellers
intrigued me—the Horace Mann versus Dalton differences—
and seemed as remote as the caste brandings of the Brahmans
of Varanasi. The ability to say “I am a Dalton parent” had a spe-
cial cachet in the 1970s, implying that you were part of a strata
of “infinite varieties,” as Ne w York phrased it, a member of the
media elite and “Our Crowd” Jewish society, with a few Social
Register WASPs, downtown lefties, and Columbia intellectuals
thrown into the mix. These parents were determined to have a
major say in how their children’s school was run.
By accident, I had stumbled upon a rarefied war that had pit-
ted a headstrong headmaster against the parents and students
of Dalton, who were attempting to react to the cultural revolu-
tion that had upended the country. Barr’s dress codes, popinjay
snobberies, and Eisenhower-era dictates had the place up in
arms. “Blue jeans are for the working class,” he told a group of
students who wanted to wear them with their blazers. “We are
elites. And we do not train anyone here to be working class.”
At first, Barr had seemed an enlightened choice. The son of
an economist and psychologist, he had attended New York’s
progressive Lincoln School in the 1930s and, in the style of the
era, was a Marxist, then a fierce anti-Communist after World
War II. Lincoln was a Valhalla of intellect where John D. Rock-
efeller Jr. sent his own children to learn with the new John
Dewey principles, which were geared toward each child’s own
strengths. During the war, Barr joined the OSS—forerunner to
the CIA—and later taught English at Columbia, was an associ-
ate dean in the engineering school, and ran a weekend program
for gifted high school science students.
Barr, never shy about his accomplishments, would boast
that he had published reviews of “250 books, principally for The
New York Times Book Review.” When asked about his religion,
he said he was “an atheist” and insisted that he be addressed as
Dr. Barr, although, according to the Times, he had never complet-
ed his Ph.D. His wife, Mary, an observant Catholic, had a degree
from Yale, taught at Columbia, and was an editor at Redbook.
Barr was an innovator. “He believed that the best teach-
ers did not come out of teachers colleges and thought that the
Columbia education building should be blown up,” Semel
recalled. Another former student noted: “I mentioned to him
once that I wanted to learn Japanese. The next week, there
was a Japanese tutor.” The school, at one time, offered 14 lan-
guages. And despite being a disciplinarian, he generally wel-
comed a variety of perspectives. “My father was pretty strong
on [encouraging] opposing viewpoints,” William Barr would
later confide to a coworker, “as long as they were peacefully
expressed and not impinging on others.”
Donald Barr was a guest on the popular David Susskind Show
and was profiled in the New York Times Magazine. In the ’60s,
while New York private schools still had implicit Jewish quotas,
Dalton, largely Jewish, was decidedly inclusive. “There were
students of color and students with disabilities,” Semel said.
In the press, Barr crowed that Dalton students had “pizzazz.”
In short order, the headmaster managed to double Dalton’s
enrollment and, according to the Times, made it among the
most desirable schools in the city, rebranding an institution
that, despite its stellar history, had been fading in allure. For his
teaching staff, Barr brought in photographers, White Russian
aristocrats, anti-Castro Cuban grandees, and a group of gifted
college dropouts, including one Jeffrey Epstein. A charismatic
teacher who had skipped several years in high school, Epstein
often walked through school wearing a long fur coat.
One former Dalton School student who knew Epstein
remembered, “It was a time in New York—the ’70s—when
everyone was sleeping with everyone. Several of the teachers
were openly carrying on with students and they would go to
parties together. Jeffrey Epstein wasODD COUPLE
President Trump and his attorney general at a White
House news conference, in July.CONTINUED ON PAGE 117DECEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 85