EMPOWERING THOUGHT #43
While Whales will always ditch the social climber who is stupid enough to take the blame for a Whale’s misadventure with the law, the climber who is smart enough to lie for them in court will become a highly valued, lifelong friend of the whole Whale family.
MOUNTAINEERING WITH THE ONE PERCENT
The Zen of social climbing lies in the fact that the climb is never over. True enlightenment comes only when you realize that no matter how high you climb, there is always someone above you looking down their nose at your accomplishments.
In this section of our bible, we will outline the challenges, choices, and rarefied pleasures you will encounter at the high end of the food chain. High-altitude climbing is confusing, even if you’re used to the dizzying side effects of fame and fortune. For example, was certified Unicorn and songbird Taylor Swift social climbing when she dated Robert F. Kennedy’s grandson Conor Kennedy in Hyannis? Or was young Conor trying to hitch the family wagon to a star?
If you are a Big Fish spending sixty hours a week chained to a desk, compromising friends, family, and personal ethics to build up the kind of war chest it takes to pay for the thrill of swimming with Whales as equals, read this chapter carefully.
How the very rich social climb will be equally invaluable to socially ambitious but financially challenged readers who want to enjoy the perks of Whaledom without having to do the years of boring work and ethical compromises that go into actually becoming a self-made Whale.
Yes, you can have all the fun that comes to those who no longer have to fly commercial, know the joys of yachting, stay in the $50 million beach house, etc., without ever having to suffer for it. But know this: To survive, much less make the most of a weekend spent at the summit of this mountain of excess and enjoy all the toys you deserve to play with but can’t afford, you must understand the psychology and etiquette involved in social climbing among self-made Whales.
Why do Whales need to social climb if they’re already Whales? The simple answer to that is that not all Whales are created equal.
Though there is a vast difference in the number and quality of NBFs a Whale can buy depending on whether the Whale is worth $100 million or $10 billion, even the largest Whales have one thing in common with the rest of us—they want what they can’t have.
Whales feel they have earned the right to have the best of everything. The trouble is that, given that there are approximately ten thousand people in the world worth more than $100 million and three thousand in America alone, there isn’t enough of the very best or even the second best to go around for most Whales to feel they are getting their fair share of the dream that inspired them to become Whales in the first place.
The demand for the exceptional, the extraordinary, the exquisite, the prime, the ultradeluxe, the rare, and best of all, the “one of a kind” outstrips the supply, hence the Whale is both frustrated and driven by his or her longing for more and the shortage of the very best.
EMPOWERING THOUGHT #44
Whether it’s owning Blue Period Picassos or becoming NBFs with ex-presidents of the United States, there are far fewer Whale status symbols than there are Whales who are social climbing to obtain them. Which is bad news for the Whale but good news for the Mountaineer. Market side economics forces Whales to make do palling around with social climbers like yourself.
The Whale’s dilemma is further exacerbated by the fact that what qualifies as “the best” is subjective. Is it simply the most expensive or is it the most difficult to obtain? This fundamental quandary permeates and infects every area of a Whale’s social life. But it is most gut-wrenching for the Whale who gets to that stage of life when they feel the need to join a club. For the best clubs are often not necessarily the most expensive clubs to join but the most difficult to get into.
For Whales to have the top of the line when it comes to club membership, they not only have to risk semipublic rejection, they also have to do something that a great many Whales in their grandiosity have fooled themselves into thinking life would no longer require of them, i.e., they have to suck up to people who in many cases have less money that they do.
To give Big Fish who think they have the wherewithal to move up a weight class and join a Whale club a practical idea of what is in store for them, and to provide less financially fortunate readers who hope to be their guests a sense of appreciation for what their new Whale friends have had to go through in order for them to invite you to swim or sail, or to play croquet, tennis, or golf at “the” club, consider the following scenario.
Getting into the Club
Suppose you are a freshly minted centimillionaire named Chester. You have made your pile of lucre in the heartland—say, Phoenix, Tallahassee, Spokane, or Scranton. Most important, you, Chester, absolutely love to play golf. It’s more than a game, it’s an eighteen-hole religion. The dream that has sustained you while you slaved for your millions was that one day you would be able to play golf whenever you wanted on the manicured greens of one of America’s fabled East Coast old-money WASP country clubs.
Perhaps the club of this ilk that you prefer is East Hampton’s Maidstone Club. Founded in 1887, it features eighteen holes that border the priciest stretch of beachfront in the all the Hamptons, grass tennis courts by the dozen, a mock Tudor clubhouse that overlooks an Olympian pool, cabanas, beach club, and private surfside bathing beach. Maybe your dream club is Oyster Bay’s Piping Rock, which features a pillared white colonial clubhouse, grass tennis courts, clay tennis courts, indoor tennis courts, and, of course, a golf course that looks out at the very same stretch of Long Island Sound that inspired Gatsby’s dream.
Or perhaps your fancy is Pennsylvania’s famed Rolling Rock—the club, not the beer—where two-thousand-acre grounds allow you to shoot game birds and foxhunt in addition to playing tennis and golf. Or, if you’re a West Coast Whale, there is San Francisco’s Olympic Club, which, besides being the oldest athletic club in America, offers not just one but three golf courses and a lakeside clubhouse and a city clubhouse where you can play squash. Whatever . . . for the purpose of this exercise, let’s say Chester’s golf dream is an old-money WASP club called Lord’s Point.
Under the above circumstances, what are Chester’s chances of getting into the fictional Lord’s Point, or the very real Maidstone, Piping Rock, Rolling Rock, or any of the other old-money WASP clubs all golf-playing Whales want to belong to? ZERO.
How can that be, you ask? Chester has all of his fingers and toes, he knows how to say please and thank you, not to make cellphone calls in club facilities, and is a master of polite conversation. And besides having a BA and an MBA, he’s a scratch golfer.
While having a hundred million makes Chester a bona fide Whale in Spokane or Tallahassee or Scranton, that alone will not get Chester real or metaphorical membership in any of the Whale clubs in the vicinity of New York, Los Angeles, Palm Beach, etc. Even if Chester’s business acumen is such that since he began reading this chapter, he managed to turn his centimillion into a billion, Chester would still have some serious social climbing to do before he will be in a position to even apply.
Why? Because the game those who already belong to WASP country clubs enjoy even more than golf is making wannabe members suffer the same indignities that they had to go through to gain admission. Especially if the wannabe has more money than they do.
What should Chester do? To begin with, Chester, like every reader of The Social Climber’s Bible, even those with money to burn, should look at himself in the mirror and take stock of his nonbankable assets. Unfortunately, looks and charm do not go far at WASP clubs.
Top-tier Whale clubs no longer include discriminatory language in their club rulebooks prohibiting memberships on the basis of race, religion, or sex, except for the exclusive Pine Valley Golf Club in New Jersey that not only doesn’t allow women to be members but is open-minded enough to permit the wives of members to play on Sunday afternoons.
Chester should also k
now that if he happens to be Jewish, he would be in a distinct and very small minority at a WASP club like Lord’s Point. Yes, the old days of blatant anti-Semitic membership stipulations are fortunately behind us. But it is curious to note that even today, in most cases, Jewish members of WASP clubs have shiksa wives. As to Muslim membership in WASP clubs, the latest statistics have not yet been compiled. But it is safe to say that Allah will not help you get into the club.
Just for the record, we are adamantly against Chester or anyone else changing their religion, race, or sex to get into a golf club; however, ultimately, that decision is between you and your maker.
Having looked in the mirror, regardless of what he sees, Chester should know before he sets out on his membership quest that he will need to look and act like a WASP even if he isn’t one.
How does a WASP look and act? Just imagine you are suffering from constipation 24/7/365, avoid public displays of affection, never smile at strangers, and never fail to remind the outsider that he or she doesn’t belong.
To make the kinds of friends Chester needs to get into the club, he must prove that he is what in club land is often expressed as “committed to the community.” Merely renting a house for 50K to 100K a month in one of the Hamptons, Palm Beach, or Hobe Sound will not cut it.
If Chester were trying to get into East Hampton’s Maidstone Club, let’s say, and had turned his hundred million into a billion, he might be tempted to demonstrate his commitment to “the community” by purchasing a Further Lane manse like the one hedge fund king Steven Cohen recently bought up the beach from Maidstone for $60 million. The trouble is, if he did that, he would be accused of showing off.
Chester, being only a centimillionaire, can’t afford to make so risky a splash. But he should be able to demonstrate an acceptable degree of commitment to the community by purchasing an unostentatious shingled cottage close to the golf course for something in the neighborhood of $10 million. Now, if Chester is lucky, after four or five years of spending his summers next to a golf club he can afford to join but doesn’t dare mention his desire to join for fear of being rejected on the grounds he’s “pushy,” Chester might finally be good enough friends with a member to bring up the subject of applying for membership himself.
As with all levels of social climbing, there are of course shortcuts that can be taken to get into Lord’s Point or any of the other clubs mentioned. Old-money WASP clubs all pride themselves on being “family clubs,” i.e., it is easier to get in if you have a wife and children. Why? Because the little ones’ snack bar bills and daily charges at the pro shops and junior camp fees add another zero to a member’s annual dues.
Now if Chester already has his wife and spawn, there is no way he is going to be able to get out of having to spend those five years sucking up to club members and pretending to be a WASP. But if Chester is single, or loves the game of golf enough to divorce his wife and ditch his children before he buys into the community, he can cut the membership line by calling in an assist from Cupid and marrying the daughter of a club member as soon as he gets to town. Social climbers have married for less honorable reasons than golf.
Of course, if Chester doesn’t want to go that route, there is one way to speed the process of acceptance—he should stop wasting his winters back in Phoenix, Scranton, Spokane, or wherever the hell it was he made his pile and move to where the majority of Whales who belong to his club of choice live the other eight months of the year, i.e., New York, especially the Upper East Side of New York. More specifically, north of Sixty-Third Street and south of Eighty-Fifth, preferably on Fifth or Park Avenues.
A Whale-worthy apartment in a co-op building where the club members reside that he needs to spend more time with will cost in the neighborhood of $20 million. Now Chester has to only read our chapter on social climbing as a family and get his kids into one of the right schools so they can do their part to help him fulfill his dream of teeing off as a member of the club. To cement the strategic friendships he and his children are working on once Chester has gotten them into the right schools, it’s time for him to show club members his heart as well as his checkbook are in the right place by supporting the right charities.
Chester should know that purchasing a half dozen $1,000 to $2,500 tickets to his NBF’s charity events over the course of the year won’t cut it. A Whale who wants to get into the kind of club Chester wants to get into before he is too old to play golf will be expected to buy at least one table at charity events such as the Sloane-Kettering Spring Ball, the Robin Hood Foundation gala, the Rainforest Fund party, the Metropolitan Opera opening night, etc. What will that cost Chester? The top table at the cheapest of these events is fifty thousand dollars. The premier table at the most expensive—$250,000.
What would Chester be getting for his money? Well, if his benefit of choice were Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Fishermen’s Ball, the most environmental and most casual (“blue jeans preferred”) of New York City charity galas, purchasing a 100K “Enforcer Table” would be sure to make a more favorable impression on the head of the membership committee than less impressive and costly tables, whose descriptions make one think of cuts of meat—the 50K “Prime Table” or the 25K “Select Table.” Though the shabby $12,500 table is described as the “Great Table,” it is clearly also the worst table, particularly if Chester is trying to impress other Whales with his largesse.
By now, Chester and his family will have realized that in addition to golf, they will have to master other sports as well. If he or his family admits they didn’t grow up playing the “right” sports, they will draw attention to the fact that they are not as “right” as they appeared to be when they bought the Enforcer Table.
EMPOWERING THOUGHT #45
The upwardly mobile Whale can reduce the risk of being labeled NOKD (Not Our Kind Dearie) by mastering all WASP sports in secret; only after two to three years of private lessons in tennis, squash, paddle, skiing, and sailing, should you consider attempting to play with a club member, and when you do so, remember to lie and say that you have not played since you were a child.
Having done all of the above, Chester will be relieved to know he is finally in a position to apply for membership. Unfortunately, part of the application process is being interviewed by the membership committee.
When interviewing to get into an old-money WASP country club, here are some tips that will increase the odds of your making the right impression:
1. Avoid using big words. Why? WASP Whales will not appreciate having you explain that effeminate does not mean the same thing as ephemeral, especially in regard to rumors that you or your son is gay.
2. Even though our social climber’s mantra tells you to refuse to be judged, know that you are being judged.
3. Do not wear new shoes. WASPs are suspicious of people who wear new shoes and will assume you bought them because you didn’t own appropriate footwear before the scheduling of your interview.
4. Have your wife wear enough jewelry to show you can afford to buy her jewels, but not so much bling as to make your interviewer think that if he lets you into the club his own wife will make him buy her the same expensive jewelry your wife has.
5. Do not mention the fact that you own a yacht, a Ferrari, or a house in Aspen or went to one of the right schools unless you are absolutely certain your interviewer possesses similar or commensurate status symbols—Whales do not like to be made to feel small.
Unfortunately, even if Chester gets through these interviews with flying colors, he will still not be a member of the club. How can that be?
Clubs are not democracies. Part of the fun of the admission rules at WASP golf clubs is that any member who belongs to the club can, if he or she chooses, take exception to Chester or any member of his family’s worthiness at the last minute and blackball him.
What are people blackballed for? Any and everything. It is rumored that billionaire heir to a Colombian beer fortune, Alejandro Santo Domingo, and his glamorous Vogue editor wife, La
uren, were recently blackballed from the ultraexclusive Southampton Bathing Corporation, aka the Beach Club. As one anonymous anti–Santo Domingo member of the Beach Club said about Lauren Santo Domingo, “She courts publicity and that is entirely what this club eschews.” Which seems to translate as Mrs. Santo Domingo’s only sin was being younger, more stylish, and more attractive than other female club members.
Given that Chester has done everything right, there is no need for him to worry about getting blackballed. Right? Wrong. Chester has committed the most unforgivable of sins in the WASP world of clubs—trying too hard.
EMPOWERING THOUGHT #46
If you are rejected by the club of your choice, you should be ashamed—but you should also know that there is a key detail of clubdom that is swept under the carpet: Those members who serve on the membership committee are invariably the members who were initially denied club membership and were only accepted after years of sucking up.
The real price of membership to an old-money WASP club is not the $150,000 to $200,000 initiation fee, nor the $50K annual charges that a family of four is likely to incur if they take tennis and golf lessons and frequent the snack bar; it is the cost of all the status symbols they have to acquire in order to be deemed worthy—the $10 million summer house, the $20 million co-op, the millions spent on the right schools, the right vacations, the right charitable donations, etc., plus the time spent making the right friends when one could have been out making more money. Of course, for Whales like Chester, all the expenditure and humiliation involved in becoming a member are well worth it because they allow him to maintain the delusion that he didn’t buy his way into “the Club.”
The Social Climber's Bible: A Book of Manners, Practical Tips, and Spiritual Advice forthe Upwardly Mobile Page 20
