PENGUIN BOOKS
THE SOCIAL CLIMBER’S BIBLE
Dirk Wittenborn is a novelist (Fierce People, Pharmakon), screenwriter, and the Emmy-nominated producer of the HBO documentary Born Rich. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and summers on the wrong side of the tracks in East Hampton, New York.
Jazz Johnson is a graduate of Barnard College, manages her family estate, serves as Master of Fox Hounds, and raises heritage turkeys. She hopes that collaborating with her uncle, Dirk, on The Social Climber’s Bible does not get her kicked out of any of the clubs she belongs to.
A Book of Manners, Practical Tips,
and Spiritual Advice for the Upwardly Mobile
DIRK WITTENBORN
and JAZZ JOHNSON
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) LLC
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New York, New York 10014
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First published in Penguin Books 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Dirk Wittenborn and Jazz Johnson
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wittenborn, Dirk, author.
The social climber’s bible : a book of manners, practical tips, and spiritual advice for the upwardly mobile / Dirk Wittenborn, Jazz Johnson.
pages cm
ISBN: 978-0-698-14190-2
1. Etiquette. 2. Social mobility. I. Johnson, Jazz, author. II. Title.
BJ1853.W58 2014
158.2—dc23
2014012089
Version_1
CONTENTS
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1: Why You Have What It Takes, Even if You Don’t
Chapter 2: Does Being a Social Climber Mean I Have to Become a Phony?
Chapter 3: The Wittenborn-Johnson Psychological Aptitude Test for Social Climbers
Chapter 4: Do I Have to Ditch My Old Friends to Meet Glamorous and Exciting New People?
Chapter 5: Test Your Social Climbing IQ
Chapter 6: How to Get More Out of a Cocktail Party Than a Hangover
Chapter 7: Sex and the Social Climber
Chapter 8: The Secrets of Being a Great Guest
Chapter 9: Basic Social Functions and How to Get the Most Out of Them
Chapter 10: Handling Hormonally Charged Events: Engagement Parties and Weddings
Chapter 11: What Am I Saying Yes To? Dating, Love, and Marriage
Chapter 12: A Virtual New You
Chapter 13: Networking: How to Win Friends, Influence People, and Use Them to Turn a Profit
Chapter 14: The Family That Climbs Together Stays Together
Chapter 15: Scenester Social Climbing
Chapter 16: The AARP Climb: Why Climbing Gets Easier the Older You Get, Even if You Wear Depends
Chapter 17: Riding Unicorns and Whales
Chapter 18: Mountaineering with the One Percent
Chapter 19: Climbing the Inner Mountain
Acknowledgments
FOREWORD
Dirk Wittenborn and his niece Jazz Johnson have seen the best and worst social climbers of our age at work, watched them succeed and fail in their assault on the summits of high society, new money, old money, show business, downtown, uptown, New York, Los Angeles, Europe, and beyond: Between them, they have spent more than fifty years marveling at the skills, ambition, and nerve of those who have the moral fortitude to go for the gold. In the course of their research on climbing, the authors also made a startling personal discovery that has affected their own life’s journey: Social climbers were not only getting ahead of them, they were also having more fun. Their groundbreaking self-help manual, The Social Climber’s Bible, offers two very different but uniquely revealing perspectives on upward mobility.
Ms. Johnson is a thirty-six-year-old Johnson & Johnson heiress. A former debutante and graduate of Barnard College, she has been photographed for Vogue and has created a line of her own jewelry. A distinguished horsewoman, Ms. Johnson has won in the American Hunter division at many top horse shows in the country. She manages her family estate, serves on Johnson & Johnson’s board of charitable foundations, is master of the Essex Fox Hounds, and has named her four dogs after alcoholic beverages. Jazz is an insider in that rarefied world fans of Gossip Girl and Downton Abbey dream about and social climbers of all ages want to belong to.
Her fascination with the subject of Mountaineering was sparked at age seven when she asked her parents why her dashing billionaire grandfather, J. Seward Johnson Sr., former vice president of J & J, world-renowned yachtsman, philanthropist, and founder of the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, was no longer married to her elegant and sophisticated Bostonian grandmother. The answer: Grandpa had met and married an incredibly gifted social climber who, besides being a penniless Polish immigrant forty-one years Grandpa’s junior, also happened to be the upstairs maid.
Dirk Wittenborn, a novelist and screenwriter, is a producer of the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary Born Rich. His fiction has often explored the interplay of class and money in the American dream. Early in his career via a brief connection to Saturday Night Live, the highlight of which was being filmed teaching cats to swim, he picked up enough bad habits and celebrity friends to become a part of New York City’s downtown demimonde. It was edifying to Wittenborn to watch how quickly some of Gotham’s most prominent young social climbers befriended him in the mistaken belief that he might know someone who could help them; even more enlightening was observing the grace with which those disappointed Mountaineers quickly dropped him. Old enough to remember when sex was safe and cocaine wasn’t addictive, Mr. Wittenborn was on the scene to witness that seminal moment in American history when, as he says, “ass-kissing became networking.”
In short, whereas Ms. Johnson belongs to the most exclusive clubs in the world, Mr. Wittenborn has been kicked out of them. Like those pioneering sex researchers of the sixties and seventies, Masters and Johnson, who dared to show the world that sex was nothing to be ashamed of, Wittenborn and Johnson have dared to offer an unbiased exploration of our present-day culture’s final taboo, the last form of social intercourse the world still refuses to be candid about—social climbing.
INTRODUCTION
Every year the self-help industry inundates us with new books, blogs, and TV gurus offering advice about how to maximize your human potential with promises of surefire steps guaranteed to turn your life around—sadly, those steps rarely lead you anywhere except to the depressing thought that you are the person you are, have the life you have, because that is all you deserve. That is, until now!
We have written this book because none of these guides to a brighter future has the honesty or common sense to mention—much less recommend—what scientific research, our personal experience, and interviews with highly accomplished
people in all walks of life have shown us to be inarguably true.
The surest, fastest, and most painless method of improving your position in this highly competitive world and giving yourself a chance to step into the winners circle is . . . SOCIAL CLIMBING.
Now, we know what you’re thinking. You hate social climbers. Right? That’s what everybody says. But before dismissing our offer to change your life, ask yourself this one simple question: Would you cancel meeting up with your mother, sister, old friend from college, boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, child, or that nice old lady with the wooden leg who lives down the hall with her cats if you were invited to hang out with: Bono? Michelle Obama? George Clooney, Bill Gates, Kate Moss, Beyoncé, the Pope, Derek Jeter, Lady Gaga, the Dalai Lama, Damien Hirst, David Bowie, Jerry Seinfeld, Prince William, or the Duchess of Cambridge? Sean “Diddy” Combs, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, Gérard Depardieu, Roger Federer, Stephen Hawking . . . ? Someone whose friendship could enrich your life and at the very least give you an experience to make your friends envious?
If your answer’s “No,” you’re lying.
If your answer’s “Yes,” your qualms about becoming a social climber are irrelevant, because you already are one. We’re not telling you what to want, just how to get it.
Are you brave enough to be honest about what you really desire? Willing to listen to what your inner child tells you you’re entitled to? Do you have the courage to open your eyes to the importance of the superficial in postmodern life? If so, you already have the makings of a good social climber. And our book will make you a great one!
Follow our instructions, embrace our dos and don’ts of upward mobility, and social climbing will cease to be something you have to do in order to get ahead and instead become a way of life—a shining path as contemplative and revealing of the life force within you as Buddhism, only a hell of a lot more fun.
How It All Began
According to anthropologists, social climbing was imprinted on human behavior before primitive man descended from the trees. If you didn’t have it in you to be the alpha male or female, the second best way to ensure your survival was to develop the social skills that would enable you to become the new best friend of those with the sharpest teeth and the most lethal hunting skills, before they decided to eat you. Like the ability to make a flint hand ax, or start a fire by rubbing two sticks together, social climbing was both a tool and a skill that could not only radically improve the quality of life for those who walked on their hind legs, it could save your life.
EMPOWERING THOUGHT #1
Throughout our evolution, from Cro-Magnon through Neanderthal to Homo sapiens, how to make friends and influence humanoids has been a cornerstone of civilization, or, as a theologian might put it: Social climbing is God’s way of leveling the playing field.
How Did Social Climbing Get Such a Bad Reputation?
Think of all the varieties of intimate human behavior and interaction that were once unfairly judged by the so-called moral authorities to be bad, unhealthy, and, worse, unnatural that are now embraced as varieties of normal. To nineteenth-century Victorians, masturbation, premarital fornication, oral sex, sodomy, and homosexuality were vices. Today, even the Archbishop of Canterbury recognizes them as beautiful manifestations of the drives that make us human. So why does a human form of social intercourse as age-old, widespread, and instinctual as social climbing remain a stigma?
Consider the fate of two of the most famous fictional characters of the twentieth century. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the über–upwardly mobile Jay Gatsby isn’t just punished, he’s shot in his swimming pool for a murder he didn’t commit. And how about poor Eve Harrington in All About Eve—she pays doubly for her climbing ways. Not only is she blackmailed by the slimy theater critic portrayed by George Sanders, but once she makes it to the big time, she has to pay off by sleeping with him.
How is it our culture can forgive banks their debts, the Kardashians their toxic bad taste, and Donald Trump his hair but still discriminate against the social climber?
Psychologists tell us that a healthy friendship is based on common interests, hobbies, values. If you never get the chance to socialize with your boss, or better yet, the president of the company you work for, how are you ever going to know whether you have the same interests and values? Yes, you are in the same income bracket as the drone in the cubicle next to you, but isn’t it a perverse and reverse bigotry to assume that just because the CEO has three more zeros at the end of his paycheck than you do, he is unworthy of your making an effort to get to know him?
Know that social climbing is an expression invented by snobs to make other snobs feel superior to you. Dictionary definitions of social climbing as the pursuit of friendships with those of a higher social status assume and perpetuate a notion we think is offensive, i. e., that one group of people is superior to another. We believe you are not only as good as anybody else, you’re better. Because you, by reading The Social Climber’s Bible, have joined us in our fight to redefine social climbing, to establish it as a positive attribute rather than a pejorative designed to shame you into believing you are not good enough to go to the party.
Social climbing is not about getting to know people because you want something. It is about giving highly successful people a chance to get to know you well enough to realize you’re a great person, a special person, a person worth their friendship. And if they help you when you’re in need, well, isn’t that what real friendship’s all about?
We don’t teach our children to search out playmates who will do bad things to them. Yet as adults, we are made to feel ashamed for seeking friendships that can help us fulfill our dreams. And turning dreams into reality is what The Social Climber’s Bible is all about.
Freedom from the tyranny of the class system, the opportunity for upward mobility, was the dream that brought the immigrant to America. Europe’s peasants came to our shores to escape the unfairness of the feudal system they were born into, to have their God-given right to climb the ladder.
EMPOWERING THOUGHT #2
Given that the “pursuit of happiness” is guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence, and that upward mobility is a key ingredient in the melting pot that made our country great, social climbing is as American as apple pie.
So, if social climbing is democracy in action, why all the ugly pseudonyms: ASSLICKER, BROWNNOSER, SUCK-UP?
Of course, one’s tongue and/or the exchange of bodily fluids are often involved in social climbing, but for now let’s concentrate on how social climbing became a pejorative.
The demonization of the social climber began with the Puritans. Faced with a harsh winter and failed crops, our Pilgrim forefathers would have starved to death had they not shamelessly sucked up to the Indians and invited them to cater that first Thanksgiving. Conversely, if the Indians had had a problem with social climbers, they would have butchered the newcomers when they first showed up at Plymouth Rock. The original sin and seeds of hypocrisy surrounding the stigmatization of “social climbing” can be found in the Pilgrims’ behavior at subsequent Thanksgivings. As soon as the Pilgrims had enough food to feed themselves, the Indians were disinvited to the party. Worse, our forefathers thanked their aboriginal hosts who saved them from starvation by proceeding to steal their land, infect them with syphilis, and kill off those who refused to die a natural death.
These early American asslickers then went to work ingratiating themselves with those who commanded the next rung on the ladder—the English Crown’s governors, generals, magistrates, and tax collectors. And once the Puritans had used them to get rich enough to establish their own ruling class, they thanked the royals by starting a revolution and disinviting them to the party. Having gotten more than their fair share of the pie by befriending and then betraying any and all who helped them climb to the top, our pioneer American aristocracy had no intention of letting the succeeding generations of immigrants who followed them to America exploit t
hem in similar fashion. The Puritans didn’t just torch witches; they tried to burn the ladder.
The rich have always known the value of social climbing. The nineteenth-century nouveau riche made few friends on the way up. But once they had made too much money to be snubbed, they solidified their position by marrying themselves or their offspring into families who, though not as rich, had cachet, class, accomplishment, and connections that wealth alone could not buy; or at least, not unless they had an awful lot of money.
Railroad robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt gave his daughter’s hand in marriage to the comparatively impoverished but supremely well-connected Duke of Marlborough and in doing so, was finally able to snub the Astors. So it goes a hundred years later. Ralph Lifshitz changes his surname to Lauren, makes billions selling the preppie look to people who didn’t go to prep school, has a son who marries Lauren Bush, the granddaughter of George H. W. Bush and the niece of George W. Bush, who demographics alone would lead one to believe will be the last two WASP presidents of the United States. We mention this not in any way to imply Ralph was obsessed with or fetishized the glamour of snobbery, or that Lauren + Lauren is not a love match, but merely to underscore the point that social climbing is not just about money. It’s about having the taste and intelligence to ignore what less ambitious souls have told you since you were a child you can’t have and shouldn’t want . . . and having it all.
Take a lesson from the Middleton sisters: Set your priorities and put yourself in a petri dish where great things will happen to you and the sky’s the limit. Did Kate and Pippa stop climbing when they were nicknamed the Wisteria Sisters in honor of that clingy, climbing, flowering vine? Of course not; they climbed faster. Kate went from daughter of a “trolley-dolly,” aka an airline stewardess, to mother of the future king of England. How Pippa will top that remains to be seen, but we know she won’t settle for second best, unless his name is Prince Harry.
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