The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  Of course, this attitude underwent a shift in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when all vestiges of Depression-era thrift and upper-class noblesse oblige were replaced by ostentatious one-upmanship, and the adage “Never buy what you can’t afford” gave way to “You can’t afford not to buy it.” This was the period when real estate, as one writer put it, became “the great conversation starter in the social life of the middle class.” Everywhere you looked, someone was buying an apartment the size of a yacht or hiring out Blenheim Palace for parties, and even artists were expected to have ten-thousand-dollar-a-month lofts in SoHo. In what was one of many disquieting cultural shifts, the young children of the wealthy were no longer instilled with a becoming sense of modesty but were to be found at trendy Upper East Side tables, ordering costly plates of spaghetti that they barely nibbled at. How far this seemed from the unease, the feeling of unworthiness that led my siblings and me, cowering in the back of the car, to ask Jimmy, the chauffeur, to drop us off a block away from school—for fear that someone might connect us to the Cadillac or the Lincoln and the capped driver behind the wheel. Or from Poorhouse, the make-believe game my sister and I played, in which we tied kerchiefs around our heads and imagined that we were the directors of a Dickensian-style orphanage, where the primary activities consisted of disciplining our dolls and eating deconstructed sandwich cookies. Still, I sometimes wonder whether our game didn’t have within it the glimmerings of a social conscience—a sense of the precariousness of financial fate and of how little it depended on one’s innate human worth. This sort of counter-identification is hard to imagine today, when my daughter and her pals talk excitedly about the “stretch limo” a school friend of theirs has boasted of riding in.

  * * *

  Yet for all the loosening up that the 1980s brought—the uncensored embrace of “champagne wishes and caviar dreams,” in the greasy phrase of the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous host Robin Leach—money remains quite firmly in the closet even now. It, far more than sex, lingers as our deepest collective secret, our last taboo. Even now, you are more likely to get a woman to confess that she has committed incest with her father than to disclose what her father earns, or whether she’s being subsidized by any of his money. A shrink I know tells the following joke: “A guy comes to a psychiatrist and tells him about his sexual perversions and fantasies down to the last sordid detail. Then, at the end of the session, the shrink asks him how much he makes a year. To which the fellow answers, ‘Hey, I’m sorry, that’s too personal.’” We may think we talk openly about money—and in daily discourse we do indeed chatter about mutual funds and book advances and the resale value of beach houses. But we don’t really tell each other very much.

  So it is that to this day, I can’t figure out how it is that many of the people I know are able to live in New York on their salaries, much less send their children to private schools. As far as I can see, most of my peers handle money with the same mixture of entitlement and panic that I do. There is, for instance, the friend—a therapist married to an editor—who mutters about making ends meet and briefly considered sending her only child to public school rather than to the private school that was inevitably her daughter’s destination, but indulges in regular jaunts to Paris and biweekly forays to Paradise Market, where the fruits and vegetables glisten like jewels and are priced accordingly. Yet another friend, a writer, opts for cut-rate haircuts and takes her free reviewers’ copies of books to Barnes & Noble in order to exchange them for birthday gifts even as her parents furnish the apartment they bought for her with auction finds from Sotheby’s and Christie’s. More dramatically, there’s the friend who has conspired to live—or at least to dress—way beyond her means. Both she and her husband are in “creative pursuits,” and her weakness, she happily admits, is “what I put on my back.” She explains, “I spend it in dribs and drabs, and it all goes on credit cards with huge balances. I keep myself blind to exactly what I spend on clothes, the Armani jackets and the occasional $1,300 black cashmere sweater. Every pair of Clergerie shoes I buy for $350 or $400 really costs $500, if you figure out the interest. My big terror is that I’ll get killed in an accident and my father will find out that I was mired in credit card debt.”

  The simple truth is that I haven’t the vaguest idea what kind of money even my closest friends live on. Once in a while, something seeps out, when I happen to hear about a grandmother’s stock that was “borrowed” to underwrite a new computer system, or an inherited piece of artwork that was traded in to help purchase a larger apartment. (The clotheshorse concedes that her and her husband’s earnings—even with their cramped “college dorm” apartment and credit card stratagem—don’t completely support their lifestyle. Her father-in-law kicks in some of the children’s tuition, and her divorced parents each give them money, ranging from birthday checks to more significant annual gifts.)

  My friends, I might add, can’t have a much better idea of how I make ends meet, working as a book critic and living in pleasant, if not grand, circumstances—a two-bedroom condo on a block listing toward the decrepit off upper Lexington. They must surmise about me as I do about them. Do they surmise that I don’t live on what I earn? If so, they’d be right. I feel some discomfort about this, but it also allows me to circumvent the sense that money might have the ability to define me, might throw me into a context of second-rate aesthetic choices and chronic anxiety.

  The strangest thing about my situation is that I myself don’t have full knowledge of it: I receive a certain amount of financial help from my family, without having any idea what my father, who recently died, at the age of ninety-one, was actually worth. (Less than I infer? Much less? Or more? Much more?) There has never been a discussion about this in the family, nor, since my father’s death, has anyone mentioned his will or his estate. To try to get a purchase on the mystery, as I did some years ago, by making a visit to my father’s white-shoe lawyers, is to come up against an impregnable code of silence. Money is not supposed to matter, much less be discussed, lest—lest what? Lest I think that it’s mine to do what I like with? Lest I order a gold-plated dinner service for twenty-four? I received a tight-lipped welcome at the lawyers’ office, where they had me confused with my two sisters, and the only thing I actually found out was that my family’s money was held in what even the firm’s patrician senior partner admitted was the most illiquid state possible. I could conjecture that my inability to learn more had something to do with my being female—with the invested power of the patriarchy, with men trading crisp information in rooms high above the city—and that wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate. Two of my three brothers work on Wall Street, and they’ve clearly been told more about the situation. (One of them manages the family accounts.) Still, there is a part of me that believes—or merely hopes—that the less I inquire, the more there will be, in a sort of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil fog that will lift one day to reveal a green vista of cash.

  Maybe this is why I keep most of the money I have personally earned in an insanely liquid state—in a checking account, to be exact. In the face of my family’s clamped-down way of handling its resources, this is my version of keeping a wad of bills under the mattress: it’s as if I never know when the knock on the door will come and I will have to flee, with just the shirt on my back, my family having ceased looking, in however ambiguous a fashion, after my interests.

  We all harbor fantasies of how we were meant to live; it’s an image that we carry around in our heads, beckoning like a kitchen in Architectural Digest done up with the latest in appliances and finishes. I may not admire people who make money, but I envy whatever making money brings them—to put it plainly, I want what they’ve got. Take the summer in New York, for example. Where is the beach house I dreamed of decorating unambitiously, with pleasant knockoffs from Crate & Barrel or Pier 1? I realize that this isn’t a question to lose sleep over, but it throws me back on that old familial feeling of not understanding how much money there was in my immediate vicinity and how
it was to be used. “Surely,” a man who knows my family says to me at a dinner party, “you have a place in the Hamptons.” Ah, but surely I don’t. Is there money buried somewhere in some account or trust that I could avail myself of in order to buy—or rent—such a place? I don’t know the answer; I know only that I’ve been trained not to pose the question. Neither I nor any of my five siblings, with twenty children of our own between us, have ever rented a summer house, and it was only a few months ago that my oldest brother, a successful hedge-fund manager who owns a sprawling multimillion-dollar residence in the city, finally bought one. Even he spent more than a decade of summer weekends bringing his wife and four kids out to my parents’ place—a functional brick house with a pool in a beach community frequented by Orthodox Jews who require a synagogue within walking distance. Now not only has he found something in the same town as my parents’ house, but he appears to have inherited the Merkin gene for excessive discretion: all of us, including my mother, first heard about his purchase from someone outside the family.

  What really puzzles me is that my brother and I—and, it seems, everyone else I meet in Manhattan—inevitably refer to ourselves as upper-middle-class. Can this category really be so elastic as to include people who shop endlessly in “the bubble,” as my internist refers to the rarefied reaches of Madison Avenue in the Sixties and Seventies; people who sit in huge apartments on Central Park West when they’re not in their upstate weekend homes; and the harried professional urban couples who live in Battery Park City, rent a cottage on the Cape for two weeks in the summer, and aren’t the beneficiaries of invisible infusions of parental wealth? If everyone is upper-middle-class, where does rich begin? A European banker in his mid-forties explained the distinction to me over lunch in his bank’s private dining room, offering up the assessment that “wealth” signifies $10 million in liquid assets, while “real money” means a net worth of $100 million. “To be genuinely entrepreneurial,” he added, “you need 200 or 300 million to play with.”

  * * *

  One summer when I was in my early thirties, I was invited to spend a few days at the Canadian vacation home of my publisher, William Jovanovich, a brilliant maverick who had gone from being a textbook salesman to owning the publishing company he worked for outright. I flew up on the company’s private jet; it was lushly appointed and smelled of fine leather. There was a staff of two, a pilot and a cabin steward who fussed over me, and I remember sitting there, sipping soda, and thinking that I could get used to this very quickly. (I suppose there are people who are unmoved by luxury, but I’ve never met any, and I’m not sure I’d trust them if I did.)

  I was standing and talking to Bill, as I called him, in his heated swimming pool, behind the tennis courts and statuary and gardens, which yielded fresh raspberries. A man who was worth many self-made millions, he struck me as having a fairly unimpeded approach to matters of finance, so I was surprised when he asked me, apropos of nothing, what I thought was “behind” my father’s philanthropy. I didn’t want to explain—nor did I fully know—what moved my father so forcibly in this direction. In truth, I resented the question; it sounded unaccountably suspicious, even defensive (why, one might ask, didn’t Bill think to give more of his own money away?), and it unnerved me that something I had been brought up to think of as admirable might be considered suspect. I was, of course, cynical enough to have formulated my own theories about the status climbing that accompanied charitable enterprise. I also knew it was as good a way as any of leaving an imprint—of laying claim to a bit of immortality. But it had never occurred to me to impugn the impulse itself. The whole thing was awkward, and it made me wonder—not just about my publisher but about the worldview I had been raised in.

  I believe his inquiry was made possible, at least in part, by the simple fact of my father’s being Jewish. Jewish money is often fairly recently minted, and although my publisher’s wealth was as new as could be, it’s fair to speculate that he, a Gentile, mimicked the habits of the Wasp aristocracy when he made it: short of being Rockefellers or du Ponts, wealthy Wasps, I’ve been told, are less inclined to be charitable than wealthy Jews. They seem, rather, to be busy with horses and boats and what one Anglo-Saxon friend calls “the great Wasp affliction”—watching as their offspring fail to replenish the diminishing family fortune. I sensed a bit of reflexive anti-Semitism in my publisher’s question—a suggestion of the vulgar parvenuism that Jews have inescapably been associated with. (“Their fortitude, such as it is,” wrote the happily biased H. L. Mencken, “is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display.”)

  But that was only part of it, the part that made me feel righteous and misunderstood on behalf of my tribe. The other part was more disturbing: the brute realism of my publisher’s approach to his money (some of which he used to underwrite the lavish lifestyles of his children) suggested a clearer and more liberating approach than the one my parents favored. My father’s generosity undoubtedly did a lot of good, but it derived to some degree from the disdain he felt for the very enterprise of making money—from a need to be cleared of the taint of filthy lucre. His sense of self-worth came more from his philanthropy than from his financial success in itself. My publisher seemed free of this, and I couldn’t help thinking that had I been his daughter, he would surely have bought me that place in the Hamptons instead of supporting every Jewish organization that came calling. The encounter in the pool made me aware for the first time of the strangely hidebound approach to money that had been instilled in me. For his part, my publisher wasn’t afraid to admit that his money was his and would benefit his own. He didn’t need to put distance between himself and his wealth—to reconfigure its baseness into something glittering and prideful, a diadem of sorts.

  * * *

  Not many people are as unabashed as this baronial man was able to be. “Among the cultural elite, it’s not yet proper to acknowledge that he who has the most money wins,” a theater producer told me recently. “It’s a luxury of people who’ve inherited money—like my parents—to say that money doesn’t matter.” He believes that inherited wealth made his father “soft.” “Inherited money is shameful,” he declares matter-of-factly, adding that, as a result, “it’s very important to me that I live off my paycheck.”

  Clearly, inherited money presents more of a problem than earned money. A woman in her late thirties who is informed and competent in her professional life admits, “I don’t know how much money my husband has, and we’ve been married five years. It’s not like I haven’t asked. He hems and haws and says it’s always changing.” She adds, “He has a small inheritance, and I guess it represents something he’s uncomfortable about, something he’s not sure he’s earned.” But how many of us look at people with money, inherited or otherwise, and really think it has been earned? Don’t many of us think, why them and not us? “Money,” another friend suggests, “is sort of like morality. Everyone has their own private benchmarks. Not letting people know what you have protects you from judgment.”

  Naturally, our own irrational demands strike us as having the force of needs, while other people’s needs strike us as capricious indulgences. Few of us are able to look calmly and cogently at the issue, caught up as we are in envy and comparison. “People see money as making them special—like genitalia,” an analyst who has treated a lot of wealthy patients observes. “What possible difference could two inches make? But, also like genitalia, money is private—it’s one of those things you’re not supposed to show.”

  This can result in what a friend of mine describes as “the West Side ethos,” where the whole point of dressing is to “muffle the impact of privilege.” She explains, “The Upper West Side is the last bastion of moneyed liberalism. We have money, but we’re slightly embarrassed about it.” And another woman, an interior decorator who spends freely on herself, insists, “Anytime I’ve complimented a woman on what she’s wearing, she says she bought it on sale. There’s this anguish about spending—abou
t openly spending on nice things.” It’s almost a relief to come across someone as down-to-earth as one woman I talked with, a widow in her seventies. “When I came to America, at age nineteen, I appraised myself,” she said. “‘I’m pretty, I’m young, and I want to marry a man with money.’ Not that I wanted that much, but I didn’t want to struggle. I wanted a guy who could take me out beautifully, offer me an apartment and a nice life.” The majority of us consider ourselves to be more enlightened; we like to think we’re subscribers to Matthew Arnold’s gently didactic view that life is “not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming.” And yet we continue in our entrancement. Woody Allen, at least the latter-day Woody Allen, has become our contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald, filling the screen with the haunts and customs of the rich. He admits openly to what he calls “an enormous aesthetic fascination with wealth—with wealthy, rich kids, high prices.” He adds, “To me, it’s like staring into a fireplace—endlessly riveting.”

  * * *

  “Diamonds are cold,” my mother used to say, although I noticed that it didn’t stop her from wearing the ones she owned or from marrying a man who could afford to impress her with a chunk of an engagement ring. Money may not keep you warm, but it can take on the aspect of an embrace; indeed, it can be a stand-in for love, especially if the real thing is in short supply. “It’s only money,” sure—but do any of us really believe that? Freud conferred odious status on money. He thought it symbolized feces in the unconscious, but at the same time he was obsessed with generating more of it. “My mood also depends very strongly on my earnings,” he wrote to his confidant Wilhelm Fliess. “Money is laughing gas for me.” And we know what he means; we all recognize the absolute power money has to inflate our spirits and dispel anxiety.