Steven Axelrod notices that greed, guilt, and mendacity largely mark the Nantucket elite, and he is equally terrified and curious at the prospect of joining them.
What’s wrong with them?
The question keeps coming up.
I’m surrounded by rich people; I work for them on a daily basis; I have wealthy family members and friends, as well as various in-laws and acquaintances who would be considered rich by any normal standard, though they deny it stridently, and act insulted if you mention, not the elephant, but more like the 1955 Bentley S1 Continental touring car in the room. Or the Matisse cutouts on the wall. Almost without exception, they follow rigid protocols of behavior that I find baffling, mean-spirited, stingy, and awful.
Years ago, I overheard a friend of mine, beseeching a wealthy patron for another cash transfusion to his struggling literary magazine. I listened, stunned by the tone of the exchange. At the time, I thought it was a perverse anomaly. I know better now.
“—perhaps the magazine ought to fail,” David, the benefactor, was telling my friend Toby, when I happened on their conversation. I paused in the shadowed hallway to listen.
“Maybe,” Toby said, “but I can’t really deal with that idea right now. I have a staff of ten and a growing subscription base and I can’t let a two-week cash flow problem ruin that. You have to see that I can’t just—”
“Toby.”
“I can’t just let everything—what?”
“You talk too much. You don’t listen. That may very well be one of the reasons your business ventures fail so consistently. You can’t always count on this kind of free ride. It’s making you lazy and careless.”
I almost laughed out loud at this comment; David had, in the time I had known him, never let anyone slip more than a word or two between the cracks of his self-important monologues. He had never shown a speck of interest in anyone else’s life, their problems, or their ideas. As to the notion of a free ride, David Barandes had been bequeathed a free ride unparalleled in the history of the human species. He had never worked a day in his life, never done a scrap of laundry, cooked a meal, or even paid a bill. The Barandes family domestic staff and accountants had always handled such petty details. I remembered the lovely Jaguar XKE that he totaled at Hampshire, skidding on some black ice, driving too fast one February night. The car had barely been towed away when an equally stunning 1964 Shelby Mustang appeared in the Merrill House parking lot.
After this life of anesthetizing privilege, he had the casual temerity to lecture Toby (who held down two jobs to support himself and the crazy dream of his little magazine) about a “free ride.” Of course Toby let the comment strut past; you didn’t argue with David when you were pleading for his money.
“I understand that,” Toby said.
“It took you an extra year to pay me back last time,” David continued.
“I know. I’m sorry about that. It was just—”
“You’re talking again.”
“I—OK. Go on.”
“This is a relatively trivial issue. A magazine that no one really cares about, with the possible exception of you and my wife. But you may need money for some serious reason some day. You might find yourself with a real emergency on your hands. You might need medical attention. Or bail. Your credit is non-existent; I checked. In an actual crisis, you’d have nowhere else to turn. I’m your bank of last resort. So pay this money back on time, Toby. Every penny, including the low interest I’m charging so that I won’t have to pay a gift tax on my generosity.”
“I—”
“Because if you don’t, if you’re a day late or a penny shy, when that day comes you’ll get nothing from me. I’ll watch you go down and hope it teaches you a lesson.”
I tip-toed on to the bathroom, shaking my head in baffled wonderment: only David Barandes could turn a moment of generosity into a threat.
Or so I thought at the time.
♦◊♦
I’ve seen similar moments since and experienced many of them myself. For example: the wealthy dowager (I’m talking about a personal fortune of close to $50 million, barely scathed by the recent financial crisis), blithely showing off some new extravagance to the niece who, with her sisters, was providing hospice care for their mother with no help from anyone. The work was exhausting, even traumatic, and the aunt could have provided round-the-clock nursing care just by dipping her gold-plated ladle into the limitless sea of money at her disposal. She wouldn’t even have noticed the expense. With literally no effort (her accounts could have handled the transaction), she could have made life bearable for her nieces and eased her sister’s dying immeasurably. But it never occurred to her. Instead she spent hundreds of thousand of dollars on some vain frivolity … and carelessly boasted about it to the sleepless, harrowed young woman who was working around the clock less than a mile away. This seemed impossibly cruel to me, but I was accustomed to this kind of behavior by then. The wealthy lawyer who contributes a pittance to his infirm mother’s living expenses (but never cancels a vacation). The billionaire who left his struggling kids nothing but a few sticks of furniture.
It all feels the same: the wealthy customers who assume everyone is trying to take advantage of them, the rich girlfriend who stuffed cash in my pockets before we went to dinner so that no one would suspect she was paying the tab. The guilt, paranoia, and mendacity never seem to change.
So I started to wonder – is this nature or nurture? Do the rich people I’ve met learn these defensive behaviors, this callous oblivion, from their parents? Or is it hard-wired into the lizard brain of the human species? Is it a mental illness, or an atavistic hangover from the cave-man days when an extra pelt hidden under a rock could mean the difference between life and death?
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a little of both. Old money and new money do show small variations in their behaviors. Generally old-money people pretend they’re poor (“We’ve just been leveled by the taxes this year. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”) New-money people pretend I’m rich (“Come to Gstaad with us! We’ll have so much fun!). But the same strategy of dissimulation animates both tactics. The purpose is to conceal or elide the appalling gulf that separates them from the rest of the population. To admit their true status would be catastrophic. They would have to feel unbearable guilt or attempt unsustainable acts of generosity. They would be set upon by the jackals of the underclass and torn to pieces. Better to build walls and moats, live in gated communities, dress down, and only speak the truth to other members of the tribe.
Much of this is learned behavior, and the exquisite tedium of their cocktail party conversations (a Nantucket fund-raiser sparkles with preening yacht comparisons, pompous wine recommendations, and political hokum) testify to the fact that few of them have learned much else. The billionaire who made his brother-in-law split the tolls on the drive from New York to Connecticut, who called his party guests “free-loaders” because they were drinking his liquor, clearly learned that crass and small-minded parsimony at a parent’s knee. It might have been the same parent, in the same tight-fisted culture, that taught J. Paul Getty to install a pay phone in his house so that greedy guests wouldn’t run up his phone bill.
♦◊♦
So perhaps there’s nothing inherent in us that drives this harsh and barbaric materialism. I was beginning to think so—and imagining new schools that would train the children of wealth to a new, open-hearted humanity—until I came into some money myself.
Actually, it’s better than that. I just thought I was coming into the money. I never actually saw a dime. The big deal fell through. (Most Hollywood deals fall through—except the drug deals.) But for a few weeks there, I had a vision—I finally saw the prospect of a windfall, a period of a shining glimpse of authentic prosperity opening up on the horizon. No more debt! No more overdraft fees. No more punishing 60-hour work-weeks.
Instead: travel, freedom, peace of mind.
And what was the first thing I thought of? How to to hide my new fortune from my friends. How to protect it from my greedy ex-wife. How to use it without giving myself away, what story I could concoct to explain a new car or a flat screen TV (Small inheritance? Customer cast off?).
I was acting exactly like all the rich people I hated—and I was still broke! Just the thought of money had poisoned my mind and kick-started all the same pathologies I’d been denouncing for years. Maybe those responses are actually instinctive. Or maybe I’m just another stingy jerk.
I can’t imagine how awful I’d be if I actually did get rich. But much as I hate to admit it, I’d really like to find out.
Originally appeared at Open Salon.
—Photo 85mm.ch/Flickr
My grandfather is very wealthy. He probably has several million dollars or more but I have no idea exactly how much because such details are NEVER EVER discussed in my family. Several years ago when I was around age 18 I received a Christmas card from my grandfather for $100. Now this was around 1987 when $100 was somewhat a lot of money at the time but somehow I forgot to send him a thank you note. I had always wrote thank you notes before for any gift I received from him because my parents had made such a big… Read more »
There is a refreshingly good bit of truth in this piece, I think. My entire childhood, my parents went on and on about how we “weren’t rich.” It took me into young adulthood to start to piece together that, actually my parents must be quite rich compared to most earthlings. (I didn’t presume this trickled down to me.) My “we’re not rich” parents were following the weird rich folks’ code the author mentions and comparing their wealth to that of only the richest two hundredths or whatever percent of people! I’m middle-aged now and have had very mixed feelings about… Read more »
Peter … yeah well. I think the point is that a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would have sufficed. It was the insufferable pose of superiority and the ruthless exercise of power in that situation which disturbed me. A man working two jobs to support a struggling literary magazine is in no way a lesser creature than his fortunate friend with his immense accidental wealth and his born-on-third-base-think-I hit-a-triple mentality.
Maybe his magazine should fail. If customers aren’t willing to support it then its not as important as the editor thinks it is. If hes coming back for “yet another” loan its probably not just a “two week cashflow” problem.
I don’t know the people involved, but from what little detail you’ve provided your rich friend has a point.
I do not want to come off as offensive, but it seems like the only problem with rich people exists solely in the author’s head. Compare these two statements: He had never worked a day in his life, never done a scrap of laundry, cooked a meal, or even paid a bill. The billionaire who left his struggling kids nothing but a few sticks of furniture. Whether the author admits it or not, he is putting the rich into a bind: if they provide for their children, then they are creating privileged twits, but if they do not provide for… Read more »
This is a lot of generalization based on anecdotal experiences. Also, conflation of bad behavior with the perfectly legitimate desire to protect what’s yours. Putting a payphone in your house or calling people freeloaders for drinking your liquor at a party you’ve invited them too is going too far, but hiding money from a greedy, vindictive ex-wife who mistreated you while you were married is something you should do. No one should mistreat someone for only asking for money, but you can’t give the impression that people can have whatever they want just by asking. Even the richest people in… Read more »
Your friend David is simply a loan shark on a Wall Street scale; like the 1%, he has no principles or conscience, which is the problem that the Occupy protestors are addressing.
Loss aversion. Humans are more unhappy by losing X amount of money than we are happy gaining X amount of money. It’s a lopsided emotional equation we all fight against every day.