Dear readers
Recently, when a friend forwarded me some new ridiculous news about millionaires, I was relieved to hear that it's the era of gangbusters to become a millionaire, but I was relieved to hear that the righteous were ridiculed. I scoffed. Boo, hiss, filthy scoundrel rich man! Feed them cryptocurrencies or whatever.
But my reading tastes tend to be less proletarian. The stories of the 1 percent occupy a large portion of my personal library, the very Davos Forum of Prosperity and Privilege, stuffed on clunky IKEA bookshelves. Give me exorbitant wealth in all its forms, fictional or otherwise. old money. new money. So much money, seemingly unfathomable, can disappear quickly, or disappear in the wake of disgraced tech tycoons and shabby aristocrats.
Its richness allows for endless subcategorization. Both of this week's newsletter picks were published in the 1980s (wasn't it called the Decade of Greed?), but are set in the early 20th century, and are written by women in the early 20th century. Written by , you could say it was born into the material.
–rear
“The Shooting Party” by Isabel Colegate
fiction, 1980
“The Shooting Party'' begins in a mansion in the English countryside, with a large number of characters and deaths painted on the mantelpiece. However, most of Coalgate's novels stray from the realm of Agatha Christie. In the final pages, it is not murder but class disparity and gross carelessness that extinguishes life.
Along the way, Coalgate introduces us to the many guests, residents, and hustling servants of Nettleby Park, an idyllic Northamptonshire estate. In the fall of 1913 there are only whispers of a war that will soon overturn the old world order that still holds there. Lord Randolph hosts a hunt, and it takes a village to sustain an endless supply of white tablecloth meals, gunable wildlife, and social intrigue.
Despite the large number of pheasant carcasses, most tracking is done indoors. There is a smoldering rivalry among men of high birth, who secretly covet the partners of others, and whose day-jobs are as alien as preparing dinner. Service staff, from scullery maids to local workers hired as “handsmen” to serve the games, each have their own romances and grudges, and a lonely boy tracks down his pet duck. spend a lot of time on. Other strange birds also appear, including a vegetarian schoolteacher who is keen to spread the gospel of animal equality to Nettleby.
Julian Fellowes, the author of “Downton Abbey,” supposedly drew major inspiration from “The Shooting Party” (he wrote the foreword for the 2007 reprint). But Coalgate had him hit for on-the-job training. Her father was a knighted member of Parliament, and her mother was the daughter of a baronet. And even as the party faces its final fatal disaster, her storytelling is painted in finer ink than his golden melodrama.
Please read if you like: Buckshots, detailed descriptions of British flora, and classy adultery.
Available from: Penguin Modern Classics, or your favorite local Viscount.
“Once Upon a Time: A True Story” by Gloria Vanderbilt
Nonfiction, 1985
Vanderbilt, the epitome of a poor rich girl, lost her father, business heir Reginald Claypool Vanderbilt, before her first birthday. He was 45 years old. Her mother was 19 years old and not particularly constrained by her husband's social calendar. (On the night Reginald died at his Rhode Island mansion, she was out at a theater in New York City with a “family friend,” Vanderbilt wrote in her second of six memoirs published during her lifetime. In 2019, he was 95 years old).
Almost immediately, custody of baby Gloria became a power struggle for the family, and then the mainstream of the tabloids. It was more or less normalized, as was the continued confusion of her primary caretakers, the nanny and the driver, but the fight went on long enough that her understanding eventually changed to the more sordid nature of the incident. I caught up with the point. The only clothes I had on were made of newspaper, and they had something written in those thick black spidery letters that I could no longer pretend I hadn't read. ”
She is mainly the most exposed bun from her mother (also called Gloria), a distant glamor pass who slept past noon and regularly disappeared to London, Paris or Biarritz with her lover or someone else. I was craving crumbs. Even when she was physically present, she was rarely there. For example, he took preteen Gloria to an appointment with his idol Marlene Dietrich and left him in Dietrich's driveway for hours, during which time she slipped into the house alone.
Vanderbilt recalls all this in the breathless prose of a former schoolgirl, filling the pages with outlandish nicknames (Big Elephant, Tootsie Eleanor, Little Countess) and sharing her most passionate words and phrases. loop when it really makes sense, makes sense, and makes sense. Still, it's hard to resist her innocent demeanor during the social events of adolescence, including weekends with William Randolph Hearst and the Prince of Wales. The Wizard of Oz Premiere Gala at the Waldorf Astoria (Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney didn't show up to the afterparty, Errol Flynn showed up, but not a single munchkin. Ta).
And we know exactly what she means when she describes her boarding school classmates as “cold mafia.” Vanderbilt was too warm for her world. Perhaps she would have been happier in Kansas, but Dorothy learned to bring Oz home.
Please read: Soda at the Stoke Club, a vintage issue of Vogue, and breakfast of “scrambled eggs, brandy peach, and champagne.”
Commonly available from estate sales and eBay.
Why don't you do it…
Will Consuelo Vanderbilt shake up the family tree even more through her rococo-inspired 1952 memoir “The Glitter and the Gold”?
Immerse yourself in the idyll of Will Vogt's “These Americans” Preppy Handbook? Jay McInerney wrote the foreword (naturally).
Consider the cautionary tale of the late Maltese Trouble by Leona Helmsley, a stalwart canine heiress of our time.
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