The Sad Truth About Big Spenders

By Roger Rosenblatt

The face of luxury (a dizzy little thing) seems to pop up at the oddest times.

In our own odd times, for example, there are very few signs of a world in the chips. Yet, on a given street on a given day, Rolls-Royces idle bumper to splendid bumper; the air is soaked in Bal a Versailles; diamonds go like Tic Tacs. From now to Christmas The New Yorker will be heaving with ads for crystal yaks and other lavish doodads in "limited editions," for which one assumes there must be buyers. Saks Fifth Avenue, which advertises itself as all the things we are, has recently decided that we are a 14-karat gold charge plate ($750). Of course such stuff is not for the multitudes. But you would think that the multitudes might get rather sore at the spectacle of the luxuriating few. Occasionally they do. Today in Italy and West Germany, the rich are growing shy about strutting their stuff in public. On the whole, however, they are about as reticent as Bette Midler. On the whole, too, nobody resents the flaunting.

For luxury exists quite comfortably on two incompatible planes of thought. The higher plane is moral. On it luxury is heartily condemned, as indeed it has been heartily condemned throughout history. "Ye cannot serve God and mammon," it says plainly in Matthew. Cato offered a practical note. "Beware of luxury," he told the Romans. "You have conquered the province of Phasis, but never eat any pheasants." And that has been the general line on the subject, spliced here and there with a quibble on what actually constitutes a luxury (Voltaire holding that it is anything above a necessity), or a rare defense: "Give us the luxuries of life and we will dispense with its necessities" (John Lothrop Motley). Still, history's high livers have been accused of every imaginable sin: active, cardinal, political, cosmic, original.

Since that is so, it ought to follow that the world's big spenders would constantly be shrinking from the public's stony stare, like devils in the sunshine. That they do not shrink, that instead they swell and shimmer, may be yet another sign of our essential depravity. For all its sermons to the contrary, the world loves a big spender. We cannot help ourselves. We may be stripped of all our possessions, out in the cold, down to our last charge plate (not one from Saks), and standing last in a breadline that accepts only cash. But let a Silver Shadow come humming along, and our hollow faces will suddenly be laved in an involuntary beatific glow, like the Ancient Mariner just before the bird dropped. Why?

If such things were to be explained rationally, several possible answers come to mind: 1) luxury redistributes wealth; 2) luxury is a sign of national strength; 3) individual big spending redounds to the well-being of the masses. Unfortunately, none of these explanations pertains. The general reason the world loves big spenders is fascination--not just for what they buy, but also for who they are, what they want of life. If the rich are different from you and me, it is not because they have more money, but rather because their money has enabled them to live in an apparently perfect tense: the hypothetical fantastical. To most people the question "What if . . . ?" is mere hazy speculation. To the luxuriating rich, "What if is a lever, the foretaste of a fact. It works the same way for artists as well, but the dreams of the rich fall something short of art.

So David Bowie, the rock star, outfitted his Lincoln Continental with a television, paintings and plants hanging from the roof. And a Saudi sheik recently bought a jet that he furnished with a $40,000 mink bedspread and 24-karat gold shower fixtures. Such stuff is child's play compared with oldtime big spenders like the Maharajah of Gwalior, whose model electric train ran on 250 feet of silver tracks between the kitchen and the banquet hall. But it is all child's play: Hugh Hefner's flying rabbit no less than the royal yacht Britannia, with space for a Rolls below decks. There seems a special need on the part of big spenders to locate treasures within treasures, thus ensuring the possibility of continuous surprise and delight. When little Willie Hearst asked his mother to buy him the Louvre, he may have foreseen whole hours of contentment.

The curious thing about a "What if state of mind is that it ought to provide lives of exquisite variety. In fact, it seems to lead to the most limited choices. There have been exceptions to be sure--the Chinese Emperor Qin Shihuang, who built 270 fully equipped palaces, each a replica of one that had belonged to a defeated king or warlord; and the Roman Emperor Elagabalus, who once had slaves bring him 10,000 pounds of cobwebs because it seemed like a good idea. Among the more gallant big spenders was the 8th century caliph Harun al-Rashid, who, in order to reduce the homesickness of a Greek slave girl he was fond of, built her an exact replica of her home town, and populated it with thousands of his own subjects. Among the more picturesque was Gerald, Lord Berners, who installed a piano in his Rolls and invited a horse to tea.

Unhappily, such ingenuity is a thing of the past--except for the oil-well-off Arabs who, no matter what sniffy Westerners may think of their taste, have at least restored adventure to money. A London Arab has redone his Regency bedroom in polyurethane clouds and stars that twinkle. He shows a sweet imagination, if not a wild one. For the most part, however, the rich follow disappointingly uniform patterns of spending.

First they buy a house, a very big house, or two or ten.

These days it is a hardship even for the wealthy to build a mansion from the ground up, but they may always acquire one readymade. Jerry Buss, owner of the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Kings, has recently bought the legendary Pickfair (Will he rename it Bussfare?). It has 22 rooms, which sounds a lot for a bachelor, but big spenders always enjoy an abundance of rooms, even when those rooms have no particular functions.

It is as if the rooms were chambers of the heart, and the houses their owners objectified. Each room not only has a mood (blue, red) but also is one; and the rooms that are rarely or never entered are like secrets. The great old houses are less like gothic castles than gothic novels, laced with crooked passages and sudden stairs that add controllable menace to ensurable surprise. More child's play still. Even the temporary homes of the rich, the so-called luxury hotels, are homes with a difference. The brand-new Palace Hotel in mid-Manhattan plans a library that will contain 4,000 fake-fronted books, thus creating what has to be the largest fake-fronted book collection in the country.

After houses come gardens. A big house is one way to establish Paradise, but a garden, historically, is a more appropriate place to start. The childish "What if that envisions a mansion is not nearly so ambitious as one that seeks to transplant cypresses from one soil to another (as Hearst did in San Simeon) or to display the rarest species. (After seeing Lionel Rothschild's Japanese garden in London, the Japanese Ambassador was said to remark: "We have nothing like this in Japan.") Versailles, the model of gardening for so many big spenders, must have had Eden as its model, as a place at once disciplined and open-ended. That is the way the rich would have nature: apparently free yet under the thumb. They would have their animals the same way, which is why they are often attended by clawless panthers and gaga-looking bears.

First houses, then gardens, then animals, then man. The rich cannot create man, but they can toss a party for him. No passage in The Great Gatsby is more strangely moving than the list of party guests; the silly, nursery-rhyme names--Clarence Endive, Edgar Beaver, the Catlips--roll out like streamers. Yet Gatsby's parties were restrained compared with, say, the $200,000 "picnic" that T.C. and Phyllis Morrow of Houston threw last December for 1,000 friends, including Farrah Fawcett and John Travolta (who did not show), which featured a "country disco band." The emphasis of such fiestas is on the collecting of people, who if they cannot be owned outright may at least be rented.

But what do these versions of Genesis come to? After the big house and the big garden and the big animals, parties and people, what do most of the world's big spenders announce? That they are bored. Bored. The gods created men because they were bored, said Kierkegaard, so evidently the rich do likewise. They start out shimmying with hope and wind up hung over, believing with Baudelaire that the world will end by being swallowed up in an immense yawn. Their gardens are Candide's, not Eden's. Ever present at the creation, they find it wanting, and ask for sympathy in their autobiographies.

Does the world comply? Absolutely. For all their crackpot self-indulgences, the big spenders ought to be razzed off the earth. Instead, the world takes them to its heart, which brings us back to the why. Perhaps because we find them sad, the way a huge child can be sad--frightening because of its unnatural size, but essentially sad nonetheless. It is not that the rich are any sadder than the rest of us, of course, but that they are so surprised at finding themselves sad at all. It is not that they are any more bored than the rest of us, either, but that they go to so much trouble to avoid being so.

Then too there is the possibility that our hearts go out to these people because they suffer on our behalf. Most of us merely dream nonsense, but the rich have to live it; and while we rarely endure the consequences of our fantasies, they do so relentlessly. Allan Carr, the co-producer of Grease, reflecting on his Malibu dream house and his Beverly Hills mansion with its cop per-walled disco chamber, exulted, "This is my fantasy . . . I'm dreaming all this." Then he added that he would kill anyone who awakened him. Who would think of doing that? Thanks to the Allan Carrs, all our harebrained desires are realized by proxy, like hiring a mercenary to fight in a war.

Yet perhaps the most endearing virtue of big spenders is that they are wonderfully entertaining. There is nothing like them. If a conga line could be made up extending from Qin Shihuang and Elagabalus, through Hearst, the sheiks and Allan Carr, we would need no Broadway shows. It is not just their poly urethane clouds and disco chambers; it is their hilarious innocence, their religious concentration on themselves. What's more, they rarely know how entertaining they are. Nero, for example, when he entered his Golden House with its statue of him self, 120 feet high, and its private lake, observed: "At last I am beginning to live like a human being." Who but a real trouper could have come up with a line like that?

By Roger Rosenblatt

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