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 “When I came back from the East last autumn,
I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of
moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions
with privileged glimpses into the human heart.” – Nick Carraway,
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
Me too. In the 1990s, shortly after Donald Trump had launched
his private club, I was invited by some dear friends to join
them for dinner at Mar-a-Largo. We sat in the highly gilded and
rather strange dining room, watching Trump work the room. As he
flitted from table to table, my thoughts were something like:
So, this is the guy who doesn’t pay his bills, bankrupts his
companies, and throws his money around as if he were hosting a
potlach. So, this is the short-fingered vulgarian of Spy
Magazine. It appeared that Palm Beach had gone all born-again
Gatsby. It appeared that the society of mixed-breeds had
displaced the crossbreeds of feigned European aristocracy. And
there I was, easy to miss, small with ambiguously dark skin,
watching what was about to be revealed with the “eagle eyes”
that my father’s side of the family bequeathed me.
Back then, Palm Beach was as Republican as apple pie. Black tie
events, like the one I’m about to descant, often had formal
receiving lines where famously wealthy grande dames, dressed in
long wedding cake gowns designed for an audience with Queen
Victoria, held out their gloved hands for a touchless ring-kiss.
However, the strangest feature of their fusty ensembles was the
jewelry they wore. These ladies, who represented the tottering
remains of the American patrician class of WASPs, were tricked
out in reproductions of their own famous jewelry. The originals
of these jewels remained safely secured in safety deposit boxes
somewhere on Worth Avenue. As an invited guest passed through
this ghostly receiving line, they were treated to impossibly
tall, thin models, garnished in Harry Winston jewels, striding
wordlessly through the dining room.
Glass display cases were scattered throughout the receiving
room, displaying elaborate emerald and diamond necklaces that
looked sparkly, but also very heavy. Winston was cutting out the
middlemen, and this performance was a jarring tableau vivant of
the evanescing of American aristocracy, as thoroughbred breeding
yielded to the transactional grandeur of a new class of parvenu
wealth.
This was a time when, thanks to Ralph Lauren, the sport of polo,
the sport of kings, was renewed, but now the kings were from
Wall Street. Instead of a parade of historical bloodlines, high
society was now represented by the founders of American Express,
Drexel Burnham Lambert, and Burger King.
And I was an inconspicuous flâneur, a refugee from parts
unknown, probably located somewhere in the bumpkin land of the
American Midwest. I was Nick Carraway in a dress, floating in a
sea of prancing Gatsbys.
And there were charitable balls upon charitable balls during
what was known as “The Season” - the fall and winter season when
the East Coasters move to the land of the Winter White Houses.
The Season was heralded when car transports began arriving and
off-ramping their cargo: Rolls Royces: Flying Spurs, Silver
Dawns, and Silver Seraphs, all proclaiming that their owners had
literally and figuratively arrived. It was a flurry of
socializing and gown wearing in honor of some barely mentioned
charity. And it was de rigueur to attend the day’s polo match at
the then Palm Beach Polo and Country Club, followed by the
evening’s black-tie dinner - a mirthless Mummer’s Parade, no
humor and no irony, just rich people who equated wealth with
worth. Maybe that’s why they called the main street in Palm
Beach, Worth Avenue.
The Piaget Ball was the one that I remember best. The polo match
that day was both brutal and transfixing, much like a John Wick
extravaganza of balletic murder. The first part of the match was
followed by a white-tented luncheon on the polo field. I was
privileged to sit at the High Table, the table reserved for old
money and women in elaborate hats. I wore a beautiful hat
through which I talked, because even though I was expected to
know my fellow dining companions, I didn’t. Across the table sat
a DuPont – a portly woman who resembled Margaret Dumont in the
Marx Brothers’, A Night at the Opera. Beside me sat her husband,
a polo legend of the early 20th century, now crippled by
rheumatoid arthritis. On my other side sat a similar sports
enthusiast of impeccable lineage. The men sought to talk to each
other, but their efforts couldn’t get past the rim of my hat.
Since the subject matter was focused on hunting and fishing,
both in which I was highly experienced, I joined the
conversation. After a good deal of partridge and fly fishing
prattle, I innocently asked the polo legend what business he was
in. He looked at me, and explained somewhat exasperatedly: “My
dear, I play polo and shoot quail.” Unsatisfied, I slogged on in
my best Lorelei Lee voice and asked, “Does your son play polo
too, or is he involved in another occupation?” – to which he
replied “My dear, he plays polo and shoots quail.” Undeterred, I
asked, “And your father?” Polo and quail all the way down.
The evening’s black-tie gala found me at the same High Table but
with a younger set of patricians. Again, I only knew that the
man seated next to me had played in the day’s polo match. It was
apparent at first glance that he neither suffered from
hereditary hemophilia, nor debilitating anything. He was a
charming man whose wife sat across from us and was the center of
attention at the table as she announced that she was launching
the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
Even knowing that the charming man sitting next to me played
polo, my inner Lorelei Lee would not be silenced. Just as I did
in my afternoon luncheon, I asked him if he had other pursuits
beyond polo, and instead of responding as if I were a piece of
gum embedded in the sole of his shoe, he replied, “Well, yes I
do. In addition to polo, I founded Steak and Ale, and then sold
it to Pillsbury. Then I headed Bennigan's and Burger King, and
now I am currently CEO of Chili’s.”
No quail.
America is complicated. Just as the DuPonts founded their
fortune in the manufacture of gunpowder, many of today’s
powerful families have established their fortunes inventing
things we never thought were even valuable, until they were.
Today, it’s fascism, tomorrow it will be artificial
intelligence.
That day, I traveled from the irrelevance of the moneyed
lineages of the past to the uniquely American upward mobility of
today. From wealth equated with worth - to worth that springs
from the innovation of imagination. And I concluded that
everything is a function of point of view. One can be a guest of
Donald Trump’s Trimalchio, and the next day be a dinner guest of
the Princess of Thailand…
"So, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back
ceaselessly into the past.” Nick Carraway, The Great Gatsby, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, 1925 |
