To not get in is to die.
—Young woman on being refused admission to Area,
a New York discotheque
Whoever expects to walk peacefully in the world must be money’s guest.
—Norman O. Brown
Changing the coin of their innocence into the prices of real estate, Americans conceive of the world as being divided, unevenly but along only one axis, between a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor. The geopolitics of money transcend the boundaries of sovereign states. The frontiers run between the first- and third-class cabins on a Boeing 747, between private and public schools, between the right and wrong tables at Le Cirque. The Upper East Side of Manhattan belongs to the same polity as the Seventh Arrondissement in Paris; the yachts moored off Cannes or the Costa Brava sail under the flags of the same admiralty that posts squadrons off Newport and Palm Beach. The American plutocrat traveling between the Beau Rivage in Lausanne and the Connaught Hotel in London crosses not into another country but into another province within the hegemony of wealth. His credit furnishes him with a lingua franca translated as readily into Deutschemarks as into rials or yen or francs, buying more or less the same food in the same class of restaurants, the same services in the same class of hotels, the same amusements and same conversation, the same politicians, dinner companions, newspaper columnists and accordion music.
Despite the systems of modern communications (or possibly because of them), the hierarchies of international capitalism resemble the old feudal arrangements under which an Italian noble might swear fealty to the Holy Roman Empire and a Norman duke declare himself the vassal of an English king. The lords and barons of the modern corporation become liegemen to the larger fiefs and holding companies owing their allegiance not to Britain or the United States but to BP, IBM or Citibank. A corporation’s trademark, apparent nationality or address no longer offers a reliable indication as to the nature of its ownership. Even within the narrow confines of an industry as small as publishing, the names seldom mean what they say. Doubleday, arguably the most jingoistic of American publishers, belongs to the Bertelsmann Publishing Group, a West German media syndicate. Another German syndicate, Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, recently acquired Scientific American. Rupert Murdoch, the Australian press magnate, owns, through a combination of holding companies, several British and American newspapers (among them the London Times, the Boston Herald, New York magazine, and the New York Post), as well as Harper & Row and 50 percent interest in the Fox television network. More sophisticated arrangements, all of them feudal in character, govern the tables of corporate organization in oil, banking and retail.
In the American mind the amphictyony of wealth assumes the ecumenical place once occupied by the medieval church. Within this favored estate everybody obeys the same laws and pays homage to the same princes.
About the qualifications for admission the gatekeepers of the media attempt to be precise. In the spring and summer of 1982 Architectural Digest published a series of advertisements for itself characterizing the magazine’s 550,000 subscribers as residents of an exemplary suburb identified as “Affluence, America.” A drawing executed in the Art-Deco manner of the 1920s showed a handsome man and an attractive woman dressed in costumes reminiscent of a movie derived from The Great Gatsby. They stand against a background of horses and lawns, the accompanying text proclaiming them peers of a privileged realm and attributing to them characteristics presumably held in common by all the other happy citizens of Affluence, America:
Nor do the media mince words about the comforts found within the compounds of the precarious Eden. The real-estate offerings published in the nation’s better magazines and newspapers achieve a breathless tone of voice appropriate to a second-grade reader recounting the adventures of Dick and Jane. All of them sound alike, but the prospectus for apartments costing between $500,000 and $10 million at the Trump Tower in Manhattan sets the standard for the genre. Describing the property as “the world’s most prestigious address,” the realtor begins the sales pitch as follows:
Imagine a tall bronze tower of glass. Imagine life within such a tower. Elegant. Sophisticated. Strictly Beau Monde.
It’s been fifty years at least since people could actually live at this address. They were Astors. And the Whitneys lived just around the corner. And the Vanderbilts across the street.
You approach the residential entrance—an entrance totally inaccessible to the public—and your staff awaits your arrival. Your concierge gives you your messages. And you pass through the lobby.
Quickly, quietly, the elevator takes you to your floor, and your elevator man sees you home.
You turn the key and wait a moment before clicking on the light.
A quiet moment to take in the view—a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling New York at dusk. The sky is pink and gray. Thousands of tiny lights are snaking their way through Central Park. Bridges are becoming jeweled necklaces.
Your diamond in the sky. It seems a fantasy. And you are home.
Maid service, valet, stenographers, interpreters, multilingual secretaries, Telex and other communications equipment, hairdressers, masseuses, limousines, conference rooms—all at your service with a phone call to your concierge.
If you can think of any amenity, any extravagance or nicety of life, any service that we haven’t mentioned, then it probably hasn’t been invented yet.73
The prospectus mentions the principal points of interest deemed essential to the American dream of Eden. First and most importantly, the place is exclusive. Not just anybody gets past the concierge. Secondly, the place is secure—an enclave on a high floor, at the end of a long driveway, over a bridge, beyond a gatehouse, surrounded, if not by moats and battlements, at least by lawns, beach front, walls, golf courses and a privately owned regiment of police. Lastly and most interestingly, the place bears comparison to a child’s nursery, sustained by a system of services as satisfyingly complete as those provided to an infant in the womb.
The desire for exclusivity is as American as the sentiment in favor of democracy. Once having proclaimed our loyalty to the abstract idea that all men are created equal, we do everything in our power to prove ourselves unequal. Among the world’s peoples, none other belongs to so many clubs, associations, committees and secret societies. The obligation to invent ourselves prompts us to the ceaseless manufacture of class distinctions, as if the collections of our emblems, memberships, insignia, keys, passwords and club ties might somehow make the weight of an English title. Anybody who has had the misfortune to serve on an admissions committee for a reputedly exclusive club, or, even worse, to serve on the board of directors of a cooperative apartment building in New York, can testify to the national longing for what the Trump organization calls “an entrance totally inaccessible to the public.” The co-op committees insist on examining the balance sheets of prospective buyers and argue for hours about the possibility of a stain on the linen of the applicant’s social or commercial credit. In the more exclusive buildings the buyer not only must put up the entire price in cash (often as much as $5 million), but he must prove additional assets of a safely larger amount.
For the last fifty years Mrs. Joseph Reed has presided over the society gathered at Jupiter Island, Florida, possibly the most exclusive of the winter resorts frequented by the Protestant rich. Established in the 1930s on a narrow sandspit a few miles north of Palm Beach, the resort prides itself on its indifference to the gaudy spectacles of the nouveau riche. Unlike the residents of the Trump Tower, the owners of property on Jupiter Island have transcended the need to display their wealth. The men wear button-down shirts frayed at the collar, and the women seldom entertain in a manner that could be construed as opulent. The gentry prefer old, wooden station wagons (affectionately known as “woodies”) to the showiness of a Mercedes Benz, and the butlers, reflecting the customs of the household, incline to place journalists and celebrities in the same class of undesirables with IRS agents and terrorists.
It’s no good going to Jupiter Island unless one also owns a house and belongs to the Jupiter Island Club. Both these privileges remain firmly within the gift of Mrs. Reed. The prospective candidate for admission first must pass three probationary winters on the island, allowing Mrs. B. the opportunity to observe an applicant’s deportment. If at any time during those three winters Mrs. Reed finds anything amiss, she sends her butler to the candidate with the gift of a new cashmere sweater. The sweater is for the trip north.
Lest the reader think that such rituals occur only among the very rich, consider also the ordinance passed a few years ago by the township of River Edge, New Jersey, forbidding those of its residents who happened to be tradesmen (carpenters, house painters, television repairmen, etc.) to park their vans in the driveways of their own homes. The town council decided that the signs, licenses and commercial decals on the sides of the vans spoiled the illusion of suburban ease. Any strangers driving through the town might come to scornful conclusions about the kind of people occupying the real estate. The mayor was quoted as saying, “Trucks do depreciate property values,” and the town council advised owners of such vehicles to cover them with tarpaulins, to paint out the lettering on the doors or to exchange the vans for station wagons. The ordinance didn’t specify “woodies.”74
With regard to the security of their precarious Eden, the American equestrian classes stand willing to bear almost any inconvenience or expense. The heirs to even modest fortunes exist in a perpetual state of dread. Because they seldom know how to earn money, they come to think of it as a magical stone or idol in a bank vault. For reasons they never quite manage to understand, the money was provided by a djinn who happened to be crossing the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad on a warm afternoon in 1884. To different families the djinn appeared at different times in different disguises—as an old prospector who gave away his claim to the Comstock lode, as a mother who could dance or a father who hit it big in the movies, or as an immigrant engineer, kindly but shabbily dressed, who invented a process for smelting steel but then sold it for a pittance to the founder of the fortune. Under no matter what circumstances the title to wealth was conferred, the heirs know one thing for certain: the djinn has come and gone and won’t be coming back. Foolish heirs sometimes forget this great truth, and so they squander a few million in schemes advanced by promoters who persuade them that the djinn still lives, that he can be found in the depths of a real estate deal or on the sunny heights of a high-tech stock.
Prudent heirs shun the folly of such temptation. They have been taught to mistrust the illusions of the world, the flesh and the Devil, and they know that without money they are lost. The abyss looms on all sides—in the trees beyond the croquet lawn, in the tall grass behind the hedge, in the bar downstairs from the grand ballroom, across the street under the treacherous neon light. Their awareness of the abyss makes them fearful of shadows. Dependent upon a magic they don’t know how to replenish, they feel themselves threatened by enemies of infinite number: thieves, journalists, tax agents, blackmailers, debauched women, unscrupulous grocers, Third World dictators, terrorists, Communists and populist sentiment in Detroit. They remain certain that nobody would help them in their distress, that nowhere in the bleak waste of the universe could they find any human hand willing to stay their fall into ruin and disgrace. Thus they huddle together like alarmed cattle in the enclaves of Fifth Avenue or Palm Beach or Beverly Hills—“wherever it is,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase, “that people go and are rich together.” Fitzgerald missed the point of his own observation. What he thought was a matter of choice is a matter of necessity. Where else except among their own kind can the rich feel safe from what they feel is the justifiable envy and resentment of the less fortunate? No wonder they conceive of their money as an idol in the basement, from which, from time to time with trembling reluctance, they chip away a fragment of the living rock.75
Assessed in the scale of median family income, the two richest cities in California are Rolling Hills (population 2,076) and Hidden Hills (population 1,812), situated at opposite ends of Los Angeles County. Both of them are entirely enclosed by walls. Countless other communities across the United States crouch behind defensive perimeters patrolled by dogs. The owners of property in places like Greenwich, Connecticut, and Grosse Pointe, Michigan, rely on spiked hedges, weight sensors, electronic surveillance and saturation floodlights. In 1984 the nation’s equestrian classes spent $29 billion for various calibers of armed protection—private police, burglar alarms, bulletproof cars, bodyguards.76 During the same year the nation as a whole (i.e., via its federal, state and municipal governments) allocated only $15 billion to public law enforcement. All corporations of any size or pretension maintain security systems as elaborate as those deployed by the Pentagon, and it is as difficult to gain entrance to Newsweek or The New York Times as it is to pass through checkpoints into East Berlin.
As might be expected, the heaviest security defends the perimeters of money. In 1986, Richard Laermer, a writer for Manhattan, Inc., toured the nine-story building in which Shearson Lehman houses its computers and stores the records of its financial transactions. He noticed the usual sober-minded precautions:
. . . but the security system is what is most overwhelming. For my escorted tour, I come in through the front doors and go up an escalator leading to the mezzanine/lobby/security entrance, where overhead cameras gaze at me. A security person, one of a half dozen or so posted in the lobby, directs me to a “checkpoint” where I sign in and get the visitor’s card that must be attached to my lapel in order for me to be admitted through the turnstile by another security person. Employees, I am told, are issued cardkeys, bearing only their photographs, that allow them to pass through the turnstile. Cameras follow my progress to the elevator bank and when I get off upstairs. An employee would now have to pull out the card-key and insert it into a slot to enter what is referred to as a “people floor.” (Only specially coded cards can get one near the floors that house the data-processing machines and the emergency generators. Those areas have cameras and guards.) A door opens, then locks shut. When I ask why it locks, I am told, “So the next card can properly function.” Sure enough, I’m now trapped between two doors. To get through the next one, an employee has the choice of either putting the card in yet another slot or inserting it into a contraption that looks like a microwave oven with a coin changer. A sign instructs: Look into the mirror. If the facial features match the ID photo, one is allowed to pass. If not, an alarm goes off and a guard arrives on the scene.
American celebrities routinely employ armed escorts, and when invited to speak at a university or business convention Henry Kissinger insists that his expenses cover the cost of first-class travel and hotel accommodation for two bodyguards.77 Most Hollywood actresses go to some trouble to disguise themselves in shabby sweatshirts, old sneakers and dark glasses when appearing in the demilitarized zones otherwise known as the real world. They dress in their personae of film stars only when making well-photographed entrances into heavily fortified positions.
Raised to the power of public policy, the national obsession with security becomes the military budget (as said before, $370 billion a year). What is the theory and practice of American isolationism if not the wish to keep the nation safe within the walls of fortress America? The Pentagon appropriates vast sums in its mystical quest for the invincible shield of Achilles (a.k.a. “Star Wars”), and the Congress passes increasingly severe immigration laws. Just as the makers of locks and burglar alarms do a land-office business in every American city and suburb, so also the nation’s defense contractors sell the dream of hiding the country under a bubble of bulletproof glass. The White House has been reinforced with concrete revetments, and in 1986 Secretary of State Shultz asked Congress for $2.8 billion to fortify American embassies abroad.78 The Congress in 1987 armed the nation with more stringently protective tariffs, and the Justice Department under the nervous direction of Edwin Meese proposed a battery of laws to defend the American people against the impurities in their urine and their speech.79
Together with the promise of bodily ease and safety, admission to the precarious Eden behind the walls of money holds out the hope of the great American escape. It is the feeling of suspension in a world outside of time the American rich define as happiness. They wish to believe the season is always summer, the hour always six o’clock in the evening (i.e., the traditional “children’s hour” or the hour when the adults permit themselves their first drink), the instant always the instant just before the curtain goes up on the Christmas performance of The Nutcracker Suite. Imagining that time remains static and fixed within the enchanted gardens of money, the leisure classes see no reason to grow up, much less grow old. Nor can they imagine why everything shouldn’t remain precisely as it was in the sunlit memory of their first romance, their first million, their first toy.80
Both the Republican Risorgimento of the early 1980s and the countercultural insurrection of the middle 1960s proclaimed allegiance to the manifesto of Peter Pan. The manner of dress had changed, and so had the age of the malcontents, but the habits of mind were similar. Both revolutions excited the passions of the radical bourgeoisie—“revolutions from above,” instigated by rich people believing they were entitled to more than they already possessed. Like the admirers of Jane Fonda’s political attitudes, Ronald Reagan’s partisans cast themselves as rebels against “the system” and posed as romantic figures at odds with a world they never made, a world encumbered with the sins of death and time.
What else is the promise of the Republican Risorgimento if not the dream of American individualism regained, of capitalism unbound, of rescue from the vultures of federal regulation, of freedom to go plundering through a world in which the spoils properly belong to the rich, the strong and the well-connected? The promises aren’t so different from those of the open road traveled by Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan, except that El Dorado is now to be found on the temporal instead of the spiritual frontier.
The new movie required remarkably few revisions of the old script. During the Age of Aquarius it was impossible to trust anybody over thirty—unless the poor wretch held tenure at a university and was willing to wear a beard and sign petitions on behalf of Consciousness III. By 1981 it was impossible to trust anybody under the age of thirty—unless the stout fellow had already made his first million and owned a seat on the stock exchange. George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty replaced Charles Reich’s The Greening of America as the holy text of reaction. One troupe of arcadian Californians superseded another on the stage of the national political theater. Orange County displaced the Woodstock Nation as the railhead of crusade, and the locus of the earthly paradise moved from a commune in the White Mountains to a golf course in Palm Springs.
Declaring time to be circular, apologists for both revolutions announced the great truth that nothing ever changes in the land of perpetual summer. The counterculture found its converts among people who didn’t wish to grow up; the Republican Risorgimento recruited its congregation among people unwilling to grow old.
Innumerable teachers and school administrators have remarked on the loss of historical memory among the current generation of American students. A poll conducted during the bicentennial year showed that 20 percent of those asked couldn’t remember what had taken place in 1776; among an audience of college students at the University of Michigan in 1981, nobody in the classroom knew what was meant by the word “Nazi.”81 The effect is much amplified by television, which sustains the illusion that nothing takes time. The television screen presents a world of Platonic forms and metaphors, a world in which history is meaningless and memory irrelevant, where instant fame (reflected in the fleeting smile of a talk-show host) leads to instant eclipse, where politicians come and go in a matter of minutes and a woman’s life can be transformed between commercials.
The juxtaposition of images aspires to the simplicity of moral fable. The news footage is reliably grim—riots in the slums of Uganda or Mexico City, murder victims being loaded into police ambulances in Brooklyn. Scenes of poverty and human wretchedness alternate with the advertisements for vacations in sunny Florida, for $20,000 automobiles and unlimited credit, for skin cream and perfume and cleansing lotions, all guaranteed to restore the bloom of eternal youth.
The disorientation in time allows people to imagine themselves resident in a magical present. Because the viewing audience seldom can remember what it saw yesterday, the politician, like the actor or the advertising salesman, has no choice but to tell the crowd what it thinks it wants to hear at precisely that moment, counting on national amnesia to preserve him from the embarrassment of having to redeem his promises with acts.82
It is the desire to escape the indignities of time that gives to the settings of American wealth an oddly tropical character. Not that the weather is always warm, or the buildings invariably made of stucco, but somehow the atmosphere is suffused with the torpor of the tropics. Having served a fair amount of time within the gardens of the American Eden, I notice that the nominal geography doesn’t make much difference to the character of the place. Whether in Coconut Grove or Beverly Hills or Winnetka, or Bar Harbor or Locust Valley or Newport, the settings conform to the standardized images of the fashion and decorating magazines. I think of a summer sea and windmills behind topiary hedges; I hear the sound of tennis balls and dance music, and I can smell the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle and cut grass; I think of rooms with silk wallpaper in which the guests play ceaseless games of bridge or piquet or backgammon; of photographs in silver frames and flowers on a marble table in the hall; of music in twelve speakers and somebody famous standing under one of Andy Warhol’s soup cans; of a midnight supper served on a terrace and a young girl saying of a lost college roommate, “She lives down on the Lower East Side somewhere, with a lot of Negroes and things.”
The impressionist view of the sea doesn’t necessarily preclude the hope of consciousness; nor do the flowers from Marla or the wine that costs $275 the bottle. At least one of the people present owns something thought to be worth owning—a newspaper, a politician, a football team, an island in the Bahamas. Most of the guests have eaten dinner at Le Cirque or the Four Seasons, danced at Castel’s, stayed at Claridge’s and attended a party given by Swifty Lazar.
Why then is the furnishing of the resident mind as bare as the floor in the maid’s room? Why is the talk so relentlessly trivial—a soporific murmuring of platitudes as steady as the sound of water running through the filters in a pool?
The disparity between wealth and intellect troubled me until, reading carefully the advertisement for the Trump Tower, I understood what should have been the obvious analogy to the nursery. The rich, like well-brought-up children, are meant to be seen, not heard. Enameled figures embodying the abstractions of beauty and power, their status as precious objects forecloses any further hope of discovery. What could they possibly learn from one another? How could they afford the risk of evolving into somebody else? Too much has been invested in their clothes, or, if celebrities, in the expensive fabrication of their public personae. Like characters in an Arcadian fairy tale, the rich inhabit a realm of being rather than a world of becoming. They have no use for the ambiguities of existential development.
Money has so little competition in the American scheme of things that in social gatherings of the rich it is impossible to come across somebody who is not rich. The guests belong to one of only two dispensations—other people as wealthy as the hostess, or celebrities prominent enough to have become as collectible as the furniture. Maybe I exaggerate the point, or maybe my memory has become conveniently selective, but never once in my encounters with the troupe of brilliantly lit personalities in the New York repertory company do I remember meeting a writer who was not well known, a scientist unaffiliated with a well-endowed institution, a politician out of favor or a businessman who didn’t employ as many people as could be found on the Yucatán Peninsula.
On any given night at one of several addresses on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, I could expect to meet people renowned for their brilliance, whose photographs currently were decorating the pages of Newsweek or Time. They had seen everything at least once (in the manner of children sent to Europe and the opera), but lacked the capacity to combine the fragments of their observation into the structures of thought or meaning.83 They talked about hotels and the view of the Arno at sunset, about servants and games and their clothes. At least a few of the guests could turn these topics into charming little stories, but the bulk of their talk approached the exemplary norm set by President John F. Kennedy who, as portrayed by his nominal friend Ben Bradlee in Conversations with Kennedy, remained consistently petty, spiteful and vain.
Eventually I understood that the talk was irrelevant. The point of the evening’s entertainment had to do with determining one’s value in the social equivalent of a stock market. What was important was one’s appearance in the room. Everyone marked present could safely assume that his or her name and reputation continued to hold a decent price. All those marked absent could be sold short. A truly fashionable party ended the moment it began, once everybody had been seen or not seen. The rest of the evening was superfluous. The guests might as well be spun sugar blown into the shapes of Venetian glass and filled with lemon mousse.
The photographs of the party appearing in the next day’s paper, or the next week’s issue of W, belong to the iconography of wealth. The dinner guests might as well be standing in the foreground of a Renaissance religious painting. Like the Medicis disguised as angels or shepherds, they have paid for the space, and expect to be introduced to the best people in Heaven. With an anxiety born of the fear of oblivion, they stare into the cameras with the same strained expression of a fourteenth-century Florentine moneylender peering at the Madonna. Understood in its metaphysical dimensions, Oscar de la Renta’s drawing room exists within the same sphere of unrecorded time as a painted balcony in one of Sandro Botticelli’s altarpieces.84
Of the most famous people in the room, it was not only presumptuous but also naïve to expect any correlation between the inward and outward surfaces of their personae. They went to so many meetings, attended so many conferences or parties, gave so many interviews, that they no longer had time to study or think. Although well-briefed by assistants bearing portfolios of data, they seldom knew how to translate numbers into social or political reality. Occasionally they read books written by their friends or looked at newspapers in which they could see the comforting reflection of their own name. Any further effort imposed an all but intolerable burden on their function as ceremonial effigies. It was enough that they had consented to appear; they couldn’t also be expected to have something to say.
The emphasis on the trivial meets the specifications of White House protocol. Guests invited to small dinners for President Reagan received a telephone call on the afternoon prior to the event in which it was explained, by one of Reagan’s social advisers, that the president preferred the conversation “light” and preferably confined to three permissible topics—sports, gossip and movies. At the very best parties among the very richest people in New York City in the middle 1980s it had become fashionable to throw food. The diversion was thought to be frightfully amusing and eliminated the tiresome business of having to feign an interest in the conversation.
Within the houses of the rich, the better decorators strive for the ambience of a well-appointed nursery—the walls painted pastel, the sofas and chairs covered in chintz, the rooms filled with expensive toys and sporting equipment. The consultants employed to furnish suites of corporate offices (i.e., to provide a homelike motif to the abattoir in which the resident management goes about the business of cutting the hearts out of its competitors) say that the executives choose, almost without exception, paintings of horses, ducks and boats. The same topics of illustration adorn the walls of an expensive kindergarten and the cabins of company airplanes.
The larger American corporations grant their executives the privileges of infants. The company provides expense allowances, medical treatment, trips and entertainments, planes, picnics and outings, cars, club memberships and, above all else, a ferociously protective secretary, who, like a good English nanny, arranges the daily schedule, pays the bills, remembers to send flowers for anniversaries and birthdays, makes dinner reservations and invents excuses that the nice gentleman’s creditors or mistress might find plausible. The comforts and conveniences supposedly permit the executives to do a better job; in fact, they encourage the habits of infantilism prevalent at the higher altitudes of corporate privilege. Remarking on the condition to The New York Times in November 1982, a chief executive officer (name withheld on instruction of public relations counsel) said, “They sort of handle you like a precious egg.”
If I look back over a period of thirty years’ acquaintance with presidents of companies and directors of corporations, I see a succession of amiable gentlemen posed around the square of a card table, chatting pleasantly on a thirteenth green, rolling dice from a leather cup in a country club bar. They could talk intelligently enough about the specific instances of a specific deal (i.e., shop-talk narrowly defined); once the conversation ranged beyond the vicinity of their immediate financial interest, I can remember none of them making other than pleasantly vacant references to their comfort and their travel plans.85 The phrase, “I got it in Palm Beach,” could as easily refer to a new putter as to a suntan, an electronics company, a third wife or a venereal disease. If pressed by the need to sound important—to themselves if to nobody else—the more ponderous executives mentioned the current outrage in the newspapers and exchanged the tokens of received wisdom about the gold and credit markets, the loss of taste and standards, the untrustworthiness of politicians and the malevolence of the Soviet Union. In January 1986 the monthly magazine M (a journal wholeheartedly devoted to the adoration of wealth) published an article entitled “Those Privileged CEO’s and Their Princely Ways” in which the gentlemen in question were described as “the aristocrats of the age.” The article accurately and admiringly reflected the vacuity of the presiding sensibility, noting the favorite topics of conversation (cars, corporate jets, golf, exercise, one’s own salary and the wickedness of the press), the cherished aspirations (the perfect putt, a Cabinet post, a first-name relationship with Henry Kissinger, having an article published in the Harvard Business Review) and necessary luxuries (good-looking golf shoes, bodyguards, Mont Blanc pens, quiet wives and retinues of executive assistants). Elsewhere in the article it was explained that CEOs sometimes have trouble learning “to relate down” to the lesser folk in their employ and that families can be better understood as “executive support systems.”86
Although pointing out that corporate executives often take inordinate pride in their airplanes, the article neglected to mention the fits of possessiveness that sometimes seize the owners of these shiny and expensive toys. Some years ago on a rainy night at LaGuardia Airport in New York two gentlemen from Pittsburgh, each in his own plane, found themselves delayed on the same runway. Both belonged to proper families—Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to banking fortune, and the late Henry J. Heinz, heir to soup and ketchup fortune—and both were returning to Pittsburgh to attend the same charity ball. Heinz’s plane, three or four planes behind Scaife’s, developed mechanical trouble. Heinz climbed down into the rain and hurried forward to beg a ride home. Scaife appeared in the door and looked at Heinz with suspicion. Heinz explained the predicament, observing also that they were going to the same dance. But Scaife wasn’t about to share his toy with any of the other children at the party. “No room,” he said. “Go commercial.”
The wish to be cared for, more prevalent among the rich than among the poor, is also characteristic of most journalists with pretensions to rank. During the decimations of CBS News in the winter of 1987, quite a few correspondents observed that because they were engaged in the upholding of a “public trust,” they deserved to “be protected from the harsh realities of the world.” Within what is undoubtedly the richest of the American compounds—the residential quarter on Manhattan’s Upper East Side between Sixty-first and Eightieth streets—the local oligarchs (resting on a collective income of $4.4 billion a year) never stand in line and seldom feel the rain.
The infantilism of the American equestrian classes has an unhappy effect on the children born within the walls of the precarious Eden. The parents compete with the children for the available time, toys and attention. The weight of money, like the mass of an object within a gravitational field, imparts a corresponding velocity to the gratification of desire, and the speed with which one’s wish can be made flesh constitutes a barrier to self-denial. People might want to love their children, but they don’t have the time to notice, much less feel, their children’s need. Given their wish to make time stand still, the future appears as an ominous looming on the horizon, a dreadful shadow falling across the pools of Narcissus. Children stand in the doorways like ghosts at a banquet—memento mori reminding a man of his own mortality and prompting him to ask, with increasing bitterness and resentment, why the world should become older.87
Assigned at an early age to the care of servants, surrounded through most of their lives by enemies whom they mistake for friends, the children of the rich tend to become orphans. They become as badly crippled as George Amory, their talent and sexual desire inhibited by what they instinctively and correctly recognize as the hatred of their progenitors.
Expressed at the level of public policy, the rage against the future results in the foreclosures of “zero growth,” the steadily higher prices paid for objects that represent an investment in the past (gold, real estate, paintings, etc.), the pyramid of the national debt, the subtraction of funds from the purposes of research in the sciences or almost anything else that raises the grotesque possibility that the next generation might enjoy a range of pleasures unavailable to the senior partners.88 How else is it possible to account for the fecklessness of a society that invests so little in the health and education of its children and seeks to buy off its citizens with toys, network television and drugs instead of demanding, in the way of a wise parent, that they rise to the aspirations of which they are capable? A politician’s campaign promise is like the revision of a rich man’s will, the holding out of an illusory benefit in return for a vote or a becoming show of respect. Sooner or later, however, the selfishness of the fathers provokes anger in the sons, which in turn incites, in Wall Street brokerage houses as well as on Harlem streets, bitter distrust of law, custom and anything else that stinks of institutional authority.
The work of sustaining the American equestrian classes in the illusion of a magical present falls to the lot of their servants. When not worrying about their health and safety, the ladies and gentlemen of quality complain about the difficulty of finding “decent help.” The amenities provided by the Trump Tower (“maid service, valet, stenographers,” etc.) speak to only the preliminary sets of expectation. For forty years I have listened to people complain about the service. On first joining the conversation among the well-dressed guests around a pool it is hard to know whether they are talking about a cook, a hairdresser or a secretary of state. The murmuring of the rich and their intellectual factota—in the drawing rooms of Washington and Southampton as well as in the journals of polite literary and political opinion—has a disappointed sound. English professors avowedly leftist and dowager aunts unashamedly fascist make the same observations about the decay of craftsmanship and the frightful expense of maintaining an adequate domestic or military establishment.
The boom in the “service industries” testifies to the immense wealth of a society that can afford to hire an increasing number and variety of upper servants—swamis, consultants, stock analysts, quack doctors, tennis instructors, dieticians, tax lawyers, accountants, agents, caterers, speechwriters, oracles, pedicurists, futurists, plastic surgeons, psychiatrists, gossipmongers, metaphysicians wearing the livery of the Ford Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute. The services can become fairly sophisticated. In New York it is possible to hire, for $500, a decorator who knows how to place pillows in a drawing room by tossing them casually about with just the right feeling of insouciance. A brochure distributed in 1986 by a Los Angeles company offered “the ultimate parking service.” The second paragraph read as follows: “Valet parking is no longer a luxury for home entertaining. It has become an expected and welcome service, as it sets the tone of the party and sends the guests away at the end of the evening feeling very special and nurtured.” At a dinner in New York in December 1986 I ran across an acquaintance who had been in San Francisco that autumn and reported meeting a consultant in sadomasochism. The consultant offered counseling and instruction to clients interested in those forms of degradation that offered the best chances of sexual, psychological and social success. His business had fallen off as a result of the AIDS epidemic, but on occasion he still provided the coroner’s office with an opinion as to what might have killed an enthusiast who neglected to master one of the more complicated techniques.
Transposed into the sectors of public and civic behavior, the desire for decent help results in a bureaucracy of miraculous size and refinement. The country asks of its government what the rich ask of their servants. Accordingly, American democracy maintains an opulent domestic staff in Washington, employing a vast retinue of functionaries, orators, regulatory officials, aides-de-camp, secretaries, weapons analysts, deputies and augurs who perform the chores and ceremonies of government. Many of these services belong to the category of the superfluous, and the rules of etiquette can become as elaborate as those operative at Versailles during the reign of Louis XV.
When the American president travels outside the precincts of Washington he is accompanied by a crowd of 400 retainers (valet, barber, food-taster, speechwriters, communications specialists) as well as by another 400 representatives of the national media. Mrs. Reagan was in the habit of forwarding a replica of her own bed to the palaces or embassies in which she expected to stay the night. Occasionally she ordered the walls of the guest rooms painted her favorite shade of red in anticipation of her arrival.
Under a republican form of government the citizenry supposedly accepts the responsibility for managing its own affairs, but over the last quarter of a century the heirs to the American fortune have lost interest in the tiresome business of self-government. Rather than vote or read the Constitution—a document as tedious as the trust agreements that the family lawyers occasionally ask them to sign—the heirs prefer to go to Acapulco or Aspen to practice macrobiotic breathing.89 They have better things to do with their lives than be bothered with the details of preserving their freedom. They spend their time making themselves beautiful, holding themselves in perpetual readiness for the incarnations promised by dealers in cosmetics and religion. The country still flatters itself that it enjoys the self-government of a sovereign people, but for at least a generation the conduct of its business has been left in the hands of the servants, both public and domestic.90
Much of the same sort of languid fantasy seized the last generation of Southern aristocrats in the years preceding the Civil War. Within the sanctuaries of their plantations they could play with the toys of courtly romance. The management of their affairs were assigned to their estate agents and to their factors in Savannah, Charleston or Richmond. These gentleman bought and sold their cotton, taffetas and slaves.
In 1987 the United States as a whole bears an unsettling resemblance to the antebellum South. We import luxurious manufactures and imperfectly redress our trade balance with the export of agriculture and raw materials. The well-to-do gentry affect an aristocratic disdain for commerce and trade, and their gossip about politics betrays the infantile contradictions of people who want lower taxes and better public services, less child molesting and more pornography, no military draft and stronger armies, less crime and more profit. The business magazines that publish worried articles about the decline of American productivity—the editorialist bemoaning trade imbalances or the extent of consumer debt—also publish, often in an adjoining column, four-color advertisements for gold-headed golf clubs and matched pairs of Rolls-Royce town cars.
By abdicating their authority and responsibility, the sovereign people also relinquish their courage. Like rich old women in Palm Beach or a committee of dithering lawyers, the American electorate listens to the wisdom of its public servants as if to voices of minor oracles. Politicians and cabinet ministers appear in the role of the omniscient butler who finds phrases of art with which to conceal the embarrassments of the young master’s profligacy and reduced circumstances. If the young master no longer belongs to the hunt club, it is not because the young master cannot pay his bill but because the hunt club has been admitting Koreans. If the chauffeur has to be let go, it is not because the young master cannot afford to buy gas for his Düsenberg but because the chauffeur took to drink and Marxism.
Just as a conscientious governess hurries her well-dressed charges past unpleasant sights sometimes met with in the park—an old man mumbling obscenities, a derelict lying in a drunken stupor on a bench—the custodians of the rich hold at bay the world of death and time. The rich learn not to notice what isn’t nice. On passing through a slum or an underdeveloped country lost in the mud of the Third World, they ask one another how it is possible for people to live in such dreadful places, as if, gazing into the Caribbean Sea through a glass-bottomed boat, they were to exclaim, in sympathetic but startled voices, “How is it possible for fish to breathe in water?” They forget that people also inhabit a landscape of the mind, and they assume that happiness cannot be separated from a clean and well-lighted address.
At college I knew several boys whose mothers discouraged their sons’ acquaintance with anybody who lived in towns not adequately represented in the Social Register. If a boy didn’t come from Grosse Pointe or Burlingame or Fairfield County, then his place of origin was listed under the heading terra incognita, a probably savage heath where beasts and minority groups tore at one another for bones.
Some years ago, during a brief absence from Harper’s Magazine, I was asked by the president of a New York bank to provide him with a monthly review of events in what he called “the outer world.” He lived in a large house in Westchester County, on well-kept grounds behind a privet hedge. Every morning he was driven to Manhattan in a limousine fitted with tinted windows, and he ascended to the seventeenth floor of his headquarters building in a private elevator. Most days he talked to people almost identical to himself—other bankers dressed in the same suits, sharing the same barbers and opinions, belonging to the same clubs and forming their impressions of the world from the same sets of statistics. The banker knew that he lived within a cocoon of abstraction and that he lacked what he called “peripheral vision.”
“About the economy,” he said, “I know as much as anybody else, which isn’t much, but at least it’s something. But about the kinds of political ideas that might be out there snuffling around the perimeter, I don’t know anything at all. I can’t guess where the next blow is likely to come from.”
The credulity of the rich subjects them to the petty tyrannies of their servants—lawyers who inflict small humiliations on their patrons, denying them a second house or third marriage; doctors who recommend monstrous cures; social critics who, in mincing voices and with moistened lips, preach the virtues of reaction.
Never before in its history has the United States been so heavily armed or spent so much money on its health. Yet the newspapers and literary gazettes bring unending reports of helplessness and alienation, of malignancies in the body politic and the encroaching shadow of the Soviet empire. The prompters of public alarm announce a “missile gap” or news of American rivers boiling with nuclear waste. They speak of cancer in the rain and Nicaraguan ogres in the woods beyond the tennis courts. Every now and then the consensus of alarmed opinion declares a “year of maximum danger.”91
On their own initiative, and as a result of their own efforts, the rich acquire little else in their lives except illness. Their collection of infirmities, mental as well as physical, constitutes their principal accomplishment and, second only to the servant question, their principal topic of conversation. Who has not spent long afternoons listening to the interminable chronicles of disease—hospital tales, accounts of heart attacks and nervous breakdowns, reports of mysterious symptoms, urgent bulletins describing the advance of age spots or the subversive appearance of a faint wrinkle on the cheek? Certainly it is fair to say that as a people Americans suffer from acute hypochondria, an expensive and delicate condition of the soul available only to the rich. So virulent are the symptoms of our uneasiness that we can become inordinately frightened of the nations likely to do us the least harm. Who can imagine the British empire in the nineteenth century, or the Russian empire in the twentieth, being so terrified of states as weak as Libya, Nicaragua, Grenada and Vietnam?
The feeling of being vulnerable increases with the feeling of self-importance, and pretty soon the heirs to American fortune come to imagine themselves as fragile as antique porcelain. Their counselors observe that with enough effort it is possible to avoid a specific risk (death by asbestos poisoning, say, or lung cancer caused by cigarette smoke), and so they go on to assume that with even greater and more costly efforts (“Star Wars,” say, or machines that scrub particles of dirt from the air) they can escape all risks. The fear of death sponsors the need for more regulation, more bureaucracy, more weapons, more places in the federal household for the cook’s impoverished cousins—anything and everything the butler wants if only he will consent not to abandon them.
Every now and then the heirs make self-pitying remarks about their own weakness, but they have become too frightened, and, at the same time, too comfortable, to regain their independence of mind. The familiar lamentations (“failure of nerve,” “crisis of confidence,” “loss of will”) are phrases of flattery. Self-blame constitutes an exquisite form of self-praise. No matter how severe the adjectives, the conversation remains fixed on oneself. For the last forty years all the best people have complained of neurotic disorders. The doctrines of modernism substitute art and shopping for religion, and the lives of the saints (James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Yves Saint Laurent) demonstrate the relation between neurosis and genius. The neurosis distinguishes its host from the anonymous crowd of stolid and capable citizens who endure their lives with a minimum of self-dramatization. Who pays attention to people who don’t make piteous cries? Who wants to pay $100,000 for the movie rights to their chronicles of marriage and divorce? Who bothers to publish their photographs in Vogue? The acknowledgment of illness becomes proof of spiritual innocence, something akin to a house on the beach at East Hampton or a feather boa bought at an auction on behalf of public television.
The higher servants exploit the fear and trembling in the drawing room in order to magnify their influence and promote the cause of their own self-aggrandizement. The learned doctors of foreign policy, like society physicians who prey upon the anxieties of aging heiresses, remind the trembling patient of the trouble that can befall the unwary traveler in the Third World who strays too far from the Hilton Hotel and supplies of safe drinking water. The career of Henry Kissinger offers an especially instructive example of the rewards available to the artful pander. Being a good deal more erudite than his employers, he persuaded them that no matter what misfortune overtook his statecraft, he continued to know what he was talking about. Partly it was his accent and his actor’s sense of dramatic pause; largely it was the ignorance of his audience.
Late in the spring of 1978 I had occasion to watch Kissinger at dinner at the Council of Foreign Relations. No more than twenty-five people had gathered in the library to listen to the professor’s learned exegesis of the current crisis. With Dr. Kissinger, as with any other Dr. Cagliostro, the crisis is always current. Dr. Kissinger at the time languished in the shadow of a temporary eclipse. He was out of office in Washington, and a number of critics were writing hostile commentaries about his policy in Iran and Cambodia; although he was desperately trying to open lines to the next Republican candidate for presidency (whether George Bush, Gerald Ford or John Connally), he had failed to gain the confidence of people in Ronald Reagan’s entourage. Even so, with an aplomb expressive of his contempt for the decorous company seated among volumes of old news, Dr. Kissinger delivered an urbane and witty discourse on the bipolar dilemma. He made references to Russia in 1905, to Metternich and Castlereagh, to the Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Versailles, to the demography of Africa and Kaiser Wilhelm’s passion for uniforms. It was the kind of monologue that would have been accepted as ordinary conversation around a college high table at Cambridge University or across a café table in Paris. But to the gentlemen assembled in the library, most of whom hadn’t read anything other than best-sellers recommended by the Book of the Month Club, Dr. Kissinger’s erudition seemed to fill the room with a magician’s brightly colored silks. They listened with their mouths open, as if they were children at a birthday party. When Dr. Kissinger concluded with a joke and a bow, the audience responded with grateful applause.92
I don’t remember whether George Shultz was in the room, but several years later, having become secretary of state, Shultz gave a public demonstration of “the management style” appropriate to not very well-informed corporate oligarchs. Like President Reagan, Shultz didn’t know how or why the United States had gotten into the dreary business of shipping weapons to Iranian terrorists. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in December 1986, the secretary looked somehow like a baby who had lost its rattle. Nobody had told him that the American ambassador in Beirut was conducting back-channel diplomacy with the Israelis, and he was pretty damned mad about that. “I am, to put it mildly,” he said, “shocked.” In response to a series of questions about the particulars of the arms deals in Iran, Nicaragua and Washington, Shultz confessed his all but complete ignorance. “I don’t know the ins and outs of that . . . I don’t have the facts . . . I do not know in detail, in fact, I don’t know much at all.”
Among all their enclaves and retreats, the bourgeois masters of the universe place their fondest trust in their games and their clubs. Within the interstices of a game time ceases to exist. For as long as the light holds or their money lasts, the players inhabit the realm of fairy tale known to the myriad captives of a thousand and one obsessions, to bridge and backgammon addicts, to alcoholics and the guests at an orgy. At clubs dedicated to playing games members can also take comfort in being that much further inside the American womb, that much closer to the wellsprings of money and privilege. Not only do they see the chairman of the board in his office, but they also see him at his ease under a redwood tree or at a picnic table. The sense of intimacy enlarges the sense of security. The effect is further magnified by the clubs within clubs, little groups of ten or twelve or twenty that meet for lunch or dinner at regular intervals to congratulate themselves on their arrival at the center of the maze.
The Bohemian Club in San Francisco, arguably the most prestigious of the clubs frequented by the corporate elite, convenes a three-week encampment every summer in a redwood grove about a hundred miles north of the city on the Russian River. Each of the club’s six hundred members (all male) invites a prominent guest (also male) to spend a weekend or a week, or as many days as the gentleman’s calendar will permit, in one of the fifty-odd cabins artfully disposed among the old and patient trees. The guest list reads like a Who’s Who of American commerce; limousines come and go bearing personages of inestimable importance, and for three weeks in July the Sonoma County airport extends its meager services to the squadron of jet aircraft owned by the nation’s leading corporations.
On the first day of its encampment the club conducts a ceremony known as “the cremation of care.” On a small pond near the entrance to the Grove the member designated as “the master of the revels” sets afloat a tiny replica of a Viking ship burdened with a tiny figure of a corpse in a shroud. When the toy ship reaches the center of the pond it bursts into flame. The members and their guests, sprawled at their ease on the grassy shore, raise the subdued echo of a college cheer. The miniature fire releases them from the prison of time. The wax corpse embodies all the worst of home and office—the nagging claims of wife and children, the insolence of rendered bills, the intractability of markets that defy the laws of physics and monopoly. To my grandfather, who loved the Bohemian Grove as much as life itself, this symbolic consummation so devoutly to be wished meant that for the next twenty-one days, until the club stewards swept up the floors on that terrible morning in early August, he was free to pursue his longing for the ineffable, free to gamble without restraint, free to wander through the saturnalia staged in the tourist cabins along the Russian River.93
I didn’t attend one of the summer encampments until 1967, the year after my grandfather died, and I remember being alarmed by the musical shows. Founded in San Francisco in the late nineteenth century by a group of ne’er-do-well writers, among them Jack London and Ambrose Bierce, the club retained a tenuous connection with the arts. Bierce and his friends soon went bankrupt and sold the premises and the club motto, “Weaving spiders come not here,” to some of the city’s more prosperous citizens. The new members kept up the pretense of an opposition to social conventions of the day, and by the middle 1960s their dissent took the form of elaborately staged musical entertainments written and directed by those members who once had been active in university dramatic societies. Because no women are allowed within the sanctuary of the Grove, the female parts were played by men, and I remember being sadly and frighteningly reminded of prep school and the lost boys in Peter Pan. Even the costumes were green.
Clubs also establish the proofs of belonging and the touchstones of legitimacy. People on the inside recognize one another by the associations of emblem and place, by virtue of their attendance at the same schools, because of their familiarity with the same resorts, golf courses and wine stewards.94 Those clubs that accept their members for reasons of social or professional worth replicate, on a more intimate scale, the ethos of the dominant American institutions. They serve as staging areas for the opinions that become the received wisdom and for the businessmen who become Cabinet members. Perceived as metaphors, clubs approximate the fantastic dream of a plutocracy aspiring to the condition of Hugh Hefner—safe in bed and dressed in one’s pajamas, supported by a staff of thirty-five servants, preserved by the artifices of interior light in a world out of time, surrounded by girlfriends who seem, increasingly, to resemble governesses.
The American republic was founded on the proposition that the boundaries between the nation of the rich and the nation of the poor were easily passed. The country’s history abounds with exemplary tales about men who went west and found a fortune, who made the proverbial journey from rags to riches. To some extent the passage is still possible; certainly it is more possible in the United States than in any other country in the world. But within the last two generations, as the balance of wealth has shifted heavily from labor to capital, the frontiers have come to be more heavily defended and more closely watched. Candidates for membership in the Bohemian Club have applications submitted on their behalf at birth and count themselves lucky if they gain admission by the age of forty-five. The doorman at the Area nightclub consults a list—a computer printout redrafted every afternoon—bearing the names of the happy few allowed to pass the rope. Given the latitude to choose a few uninvited faces from the crowd clamoring at the entrance—among them women wearing clear plastic dresses and feathered earrings—the doorman, loyal to the tradition of American success, favors, in the words of the Times, “the distractingly attractive and the obviously rich.”
Despite the ceaseless murmuring of applause, the equestrian classes never feel entirely content. They worry that they might be at the wrong party, that somebody else, wealthier or more current than they, might have been invited to a more important address. Only once during the social spectacle of the last twenty years do I remember a room in which, at least for a few hours, a pervasive feeling of gratified desire sustained a crowd of at least four hundred people in a bubble chamber of collective euphoria. The effect, as obvious as a demonstration in particle physics, took place in the vacuum of the late Truman Capote’s Black and White Masked Ball in the autumn of 1966—an entertainment in honor of Katharine Graham, chairman of The Washington Post, and of Capote’s newly published book In Cold Blood. The New York Times conferred upon the party the patents of significance by publishing the guest list. Police barricades surrounded the Plaza Hotel, and as the guests—the brightest names from the spheres of show business, society, finance and the media—passed through the gantlet of cameras, the crowd in the street remarked on the costliness of the women’s clothes. Directly behind Capote in the receiving line, Suzy Knickerbocker, then the dominant gossip columnist in New York, stood listening to the recitation of names, the expression in her eyes as cold as glass. The guests had been required to wear masks, at least until midnight; some of the women looked like cats, others like Venetian ladies of the eighteenth century; the men wore whatever amused their wives or their boyfriends. No table was better than any other table; nobody needed to jostle for a place nearer Frank Sinatra or Marianne Moore. Neither did people feel compelled to betray one another with envious gossip. It was enough to be present, to be counted among the company of the elect. Because everybody was famous, everybody was safe.
While watching the dancers among the black and white balloons it occurred to me that at the point where images encounter one another the moral dimension disappears. Any image was as good as any other, no matter how it had been acquired or sustained. A White House adviser responsible for murdering 40,000 peasants in Indochina could chatter to the author of a best-selling tract denouncing the atrocity of the Vietnam War. Norman Mailer could talk to William F. Buckley about the mechanics of a mayoral campaign in New York, and Sargent Shriver, then the director of the Peace Corps, could dance with an international demimondaine wearing an emerald worth $500,000. For the time being, time had become circular. The dancers moved in a circle of stillness, where, for as long as the music played, nothing had happened that could not be altered or revised, where everything remained possible and an infinite number of transformations hovered just out of reach, where the glow of limitless promise lighted the faces of the guests with a flush as soft as candles, where history was a tale told not by an idiot but by a headwaiter.