“While we are in thrall to this book, class consciousness goes on vacation,” Barbara Grizzutti Harrison wrote in a 1985 review of heiress Gloria Vanderbilt's memoir Once Upon a… I wrote this after evaluating “Time''. To be clear, Harrison was referring to the class consciousness of the readers, not the authors. Vanderbilt taught her that most young children don't play with emerald tiaras or maroon satin-lined alligator jewelry boxes, rely on the services of multiple butlers, or count their homes. It shows that you are fully aware of it in the book. Ms. Harrison's argument is that Ms. Vanderbilt's pen talent and her perspective on her own economic altitude made the consumers of her stories suspend their feelings of envy and the reality that they grew up in luxurious neglect. The idea was that they could work on it.
Memoirs by wealthy people are always major publishing events. Readers love wandering wide-eyed down golden hallways, and I'm no exception. A significant portion of my bookshelf is dedicated to the accounts of the Rothschilds, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Pells, Guggenheims, and other familiar names in banks, museums, and city centers.
It wasn't until I finished reading Prince Harry's Spare and Paris Hilton's Paris: A Memoir, two of the genre's biggest contributors this year, that I realized two strange facts about my collection. For one, that shelf contained nothing published by him since 2020. Second, and more importantly, there were no authors born after his 1937 on that shelf. This suggests that 1937 was the last year the Wealthman was manufactured to my exact specifications.
What a loss! Lured by the great title and the knowledge that it was written with J.R. Mehringer, who helped write Andre Agassi's memoir, Open, I gave Spare a try first. Agassi's book not only mapped the tennis star's psyche, but also included the kind of details we crave in a memoir – for example, who Agassi considered an “integral part” of the team: Such as the fact that I went on tour with my pet parrot named. Or that he (successfully) courted Brooke Shields via fax. Or Agassi, who was reportedly given two tickets within the same hour for driving a Corvette at “supersonic speeds” in Arizona, and then dragged before the judge who convicted Agassi. is a famous quote that says “Give them hell” at the next trial. tournament.
By the time The Open was published in 2009, Agassi had retired from professional tennis and could afford to speak up in print. Equally important, he had the entertainment instincts (or audacity) to do so. There's a lesson here. Interesting memoirs tend to be written by people who have nothing to lose, or who have successfully pretended they have nothing to lose. Spare and Paris: The Memoir, on the other hand, read like brand management exercises by people positioning themselves for future conquest. The Prince and Paris are never boring. They don't have any Agassi-level impermeability.
That insensitivity may come from age, money, eccentricity, or all three. Returning to the Memoirs of a Rich Man we have on our shelves, what do the authors have in common? The gold standard in this category is Guy de Rothschild's The Whims of Fate, published in French in 1983 as Contre Bonne Fortune and translated into English two years later. Following the visual conventions of the genre, Rothschild appears on the cover in a luminous portrait. His skin is tanned, his forehead is cheerful, and his scarf is graceful. A man gazed at the moonlight reflecting off the cordovan leather walls. Readers know and think what awaits them, even though they haven't read anything.
Early in his memoir, Rothschild tells a story about his grandmother. One sunny autumn day, there is a story like this. grand mer While visiting a friend, she was shocked when she saw fallen leaves strewn on the lawn. “Wonderful! How beautiful!” she cried. “But where do you get them from?” The punchline, of course, is that a woman who grew up in a well-kept garden would never have had the opportunity to observe dead leaves before. Rothschild admits this anecdote may be “too good to be true,” but he doesn't care. False or not, this is the kind of gem we seek to mine in the memoirs of the wealthy.
It is rich in gemstones. Rothschild revealed that his family employed servants whose only job was to prepare salads. Another servant was ordered to row a boat on a nearby lake during mealtimes “to enliven the scenery” and provide diners with “a poetic and charming sight.”
The kitchen of one Rothschild chateau was built 150 meters from the main house and buried underground to prevent unpleasant food odors. Meals were delivered to the dining hall using a miniature train running through a tunnel. Rothschild recalled that as a child, he would hitchhike onto trains and zip back and forth, nestled comfortably between the platters.
In terms of casual extravagance, she rivals Anne Glenconner, daughter of an earl and author of the memoir Waiting. As a child, Glenconner was tasked with “broadcasting” her family's Codex Leicester, a 72-page manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci. She fondly remembers licking her fingers and turning the pages of her diagrams and mirror letters. The Codex then fell into the hands of Bill Gates, who sold it at auction for $30.8 million, a relic “covered in my girlfriend's DNA,” as Mr. Glenconner gleefully puts it.
In “Once Upon a Time,” Gloria Vanderbilt climbs into a Rolls Royce with a crystal vase of roses and a “seat as soft as a sponge cake.” David Rockefeller wrote in his Memoirs that her childhood home was so large that it included a small private hospital as well as a room dedicated to her mother's collection of Buddhist statues. says. For most people, breakfast in bed was an absolute must. Ruining miles of bed linen with pieces of toast was considered not only the right but also the duty of the rich.
Decadence and eccentricity are closely intertwined in these volumes. In “Confessions of an Art Addict,” Peggy Guggenheim casually mentions her uncle, who “lived off the coals he fed for years.” (Her teeth turned black.) In “Wait for Me!,” Deborah Mitford describes her grandfather who “had glass eyes and used to frighten people by banging them with a fork at meals.” I'm explaining. Glenconner said her husband's family used bacon slices as bookmarks. Eve Pell, whose ancestor Thomas Pell actually once owned part of the Bronx, writes in “We Used to Own the Bronx'' that his grandfather, Thomas Pell, used his grandfather's shoes so that an employee with the same foot size could walk. revealed that he dropped off new shoes at his club. Press the leather until it feels comfortable.
Although the quality of the prose varies, each memoirist displays a formidable talent for understatement. In Reflections on a Silver Spoon, Paul Mellon describes the 1930s when Adolf Hitler's “totally outrageous” actions forced him to cancel his vacation on a German luxury liner. is lamenting. The car accident that nearly killed the author is only briefly mentioned as an incident in which Mellon's car somehow “ran off the road.”
Rothschild shows similar restraint in the section about his father's love of card games. “I remember a rather farcical incident in which he had to interrupt midway through his hand. Apparently his sister Jacqueline's first husband shot himself in the chest.” he writes.
Nicknames are also a reliable highlight. They are prevalent and can be divided into three categories: Ruthless and unflattering (Stubby, Chunky, Honks, Squeaky, Bozo Bean). and the inexplicable (m'Hinket, Gargy, Tuddemy, Jeep).
Some of the memoirs on my bookshelf are motivated by vanity. It can also be due to anger, nostalgia, introspection, melancholy, or a combination thereof. They are full of gossip. I can't imagine any author having a hard time having their manuscript vetted by a publicist before publishing it in bookstores around the world.
Which brings us to the real problem with this year's memoir. “The Spare'' and “Paris: A Memoir'' are annoyingly cautious and seriously lacking in fun. Docking points because it's not fun may sound callous when applied to people who have suffered, but the same was true for the Vanderbilts and the Mellons. No one has yet invented a way to stop death, war, addiction, and suicide with cash. The difference was that the old guard knew exactly what they, and only they, could offer their readers. Things like charm in a bucket, an old man munching on charcoal, and his first encounter with dead leaves.
