Recession and the Rich

A wealthy Boston matron has forsworn her weekly massage and canceled the family's spring skiing trip to Utah.

A West Coast tycoon has sold one of his two yachts. A socially prominent Manhattan couple has switched from vintage to nonvintage champagne, while some of their affluent friends provide only California jug wine--in Waterford decanters. A Los Angeles millionairess, Elsie Pollack, now features chili at her dinner parties; another wealthy hostess has replaced cut flowers with synthetic centerpieces. A Chicago industrialist has turned in his Cadillac for a relatively miserly Mercedes 220 with a diesel engine that gets up to 32 m.p.g.

First Budgets. The very rich in the U.S.--there are an estimated 115,000 millionaire and multimillionaire families--are not exactly impoverished by inflation and recession, though on paper their holdings have dramatically diminished. But many are trimming their lifestyles, cutting back on conspicuous expenditure--clothes, for example --and, often for the first time, drawing up family budgets. They are turning off light switches, keeping the heat at 68DEG, planning cut-rate Christmases and encouraging their kids to take part-time jobs. "We're not hurting--yet," says an heiress in New York's Westchester County. "But we've become aware for many reasons--environmental, social and fiscal--that we have lived unnecessarily high on the hog. You might say we're chickening out." Indeed, at a dinner party for ten with chicken rather than filet mignon as the entree and eliminating the caviar and Cointreau, a hostess can make considerable economies.

In Washington, D.C., the wealthy are also cutting corners. One of the most elegant caterers for big-time spenders, Ridgewell's of Bethesda, Md., notes that some gilt-edged customers are "piece-mealing"; they now furnish their own silver, tablecloths and canapes and press their children into service, thus getting by with two waiters instead of four.

Grateful Servants. In the Atlanta area, the rich are dispensing with full-time yardmen and entrusting the manicuring of lawns to commercial garden-maintenance firms; several families have put then" chauffeurs behind the lawnmower in nondriving hours. These days many servants are grateful to have any job. A wealthy Los Angeles contractor leaves his Rolls in the garage and the chauffeur in the garden when he visits a potential customer; instead, he drives his wife's beat-up Volkswagen to convey an impression of cost-consciousness.

Many moneyed families are economizing in the hope that whatever turn the economy takes, they will not be forced to shave their philanthropies. Mrs. John M. Bradley of Boston's aristocratic North Shore is concerned that the community will not continue its support for such laudable institutions as Friends of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, of which she is chairwoman, and the Radcliffe College Fund (co-chairwoman). Says Mrs. K. Dun Gifford, a conservationist leader of Cambridge, Mass., society, "I'm not complaining about the family's self-enforced economies: I find all this very healthy. I'm learning budgetary disciplines I should have acquired ten years ago. We recycle the kids' clothes like mad. I'm even getting out some old college skirts."

Some of the very rich have devised more ingenious methods to beat the cost of living. One of the Beautiful People, Manhattan's Suzie Frankfurt, a designer-collector, returned recently from a five-month tour of the Far East with her two young sons, examined the exchequer and decided that drastic measures would have to be taken if the family were not to resort to, well, frankfurters.

So Suzie Frankfurt sent out invitations to her 500 nearest and dearest friends, opened up part of her five-story, 16-room Manhattan townhouse and held a Garbage a la Rummage (pronounced Gahrbage a la Koomahge) sale. Some 3,000 nearest and dearest attended her sale, snapped up varied costly tric-a-brac--all for around $ 15,000.

$333 a Foot. Some of the rich, fearful that inflation will continue to balloon for the out-of-sight future, are living as high as ever; they believe that now is the time, as one wealthy Easterner puts it, "to turn cash into reality." Manhattan's Tiffany's reports that its bestselling breakfast item is "Diamonds by the Yard," a gold chain interspersed with diamonds that sells for about $333 a foot.

Rolls-Royce dealers say that sales are rolling as high as ever. Says a Park Avenue millionaire: "Today's inheritors of big money have a totally different attitude from their grandfathers. Grandpa tightened his belt temporarily during lean times because he perceived the System as basically stable. Today the wealthy are preparing for revolution or Communism or whatever, and want to use the cash while it will still buy something. The more they speak poor, the more they are spending rich." The scion, who has homes in Manhattan and Bermuda, is shopping for a new yacht.

"Who knows?" he philosophizes. "You might never have another chance to buy one.

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