Dear readers,
When a friend forwarded some fresh ridiculous news about billionaires recently — you might have heard it’s a gangbusters time to be one — I scoffed the scoff of the comfortably righteous. Boo, hiss, the filthy feckless rich! Let them eat crypto, or whatever.
My reading preferences, though, tend to look a lot less proletarian. Tales of the 1 percent take up too many percentages of my personal library, a veritable Davos Forum of prosperity and privilege crammed into wonky Ikea bookshelves. Give me outrageous fortune in all its forms, fiction or non-: old money; new money; money so big it seems bottomless until in a dribble or a rush it’s gone, leaving a wash of disgraced tech moguls and shabby aristocrats in its wake.
All that abundance allows for endless subcategorization: The picks in this week’s newsletter were both published in the 1980s (didn’t they call it the Greed Decade?) but are set in the early years of the 20th century and were written by women who were, you could say, born to the material.
—Leah
“The Shooting Party,” by Isabel Colegate
Fiction, 1980
“The Shooting Party” opens on an English country manor, with a sprawling cast of characters and death on the mantel. But Colegate’s novel mostly swerves away from Agatha Christie territory; it’s not murder so much as class disparity and vast carelessness that snuff out a life in the last pages.
Along the way, Colegate introduces the many houseguests, residents and scurrying servants of Nettleby Park, a bucolic Northamptonshire estate that in the fall of 1913 contains only whispers of the war that will shortly upend the old world order still preserved there. Sir Randolph is hosting a hunt, and it takes a village to sustain the roundelay of white-tablecloth meals, shootable wildlife and social intrigue.
The pheasant body count is high, but most pursuits take place indoors: There is much covert coveting of other people’s partners and simmering rivalries among highborn men for whom day jobs are as foreign as dressing themselves for dinner. The service staff, from the scullery maids to the local laborers hired as “beaters” to bring out the game, have their own romances and resentments, and a lonely little boy spends a lot of time trying to track down his pet duck. Other odd birds emerge, including an earnest vegetarian schoolteacher eager to spread the gospel of animal equality to Nettleby.
Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey,” supposedly gleaned heavy inspiration from “The Shooting Party” (he wrote the introduction to a 2007 reissue). But Colegate has him beat for on-the-job training — her father was a knighted member of Parliament and her mother the daughter of a baronet. And her storytelling is drawn in finer ink than his gilded soap operas, even when the party turns to its final, fatal calamity.
Read if you like: Buckshot, in-depth descriptions of British flora, tasteful infidelity.
Available from: Penguin Modern Classics, or your favored local viscount.
“Once Upon a Time: A True Story,” by Gloria Vanderbilt
Nonfiction, 1985
The über alles of poor little rich girls, Vanderbilt lost her father, the industrialist heir Reginald Claypool Vanderbilt, before her first birthday. He was 45; her mother was 19 and not particularly bound to her husband’s social calendar. (On the night Reginald died at his Rhode Island estate, she was off at the theater in New York City with “a friend of the family,” Vanderbilt writes in “Once Upon a Time,” the second of six memoirs published before her death at 95 in 2019.)
Almost immediately, the custody of baby Gloria became a family power struggle and then a tabloid mainstay. Like the ongoing churn of nannies and chauffeurs she was largely parented by, it was all more or less normalized, though the battle dragged on long enough that her comprehension eventually caught up with the more sordid points of the case: “I tormented myself by imagining that the only clothes I wore were made of newspapers, and on each would be words in those black thick spider letters spelling out what I could no longer pretend not to read.”
Mostly, she pined for the barest crumbs from her mother (also named Gloria), a distant glamourpuss who slept past noon and regularly disappeared to London or Paris or Biarritz with some lover or another. Even when physically present, she was rarely there — taking a preteen Gloria for a promised meeting with her idol, Marlene Dietrich, for example, then ditching her in Dietrich’s driveway for hours while she slipped inside alone.
Vanderbilt recalls all this with the breathless prose of a bygone schoolgirl, crowding the page with whimsical nicknames (Big Elephant, Tootsie Eleanor, the Little Countess), and looping her most fervent words and phrases when she really means-means-means them. Still, it’s hard to resist her guileless takes on what passed for adolescent social events: weekends with William Randolph Hearst or the Prince of Wales; a “Wizard of Oz” premiere gala at the Waldorf Astoria (Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney never showed at the afterparty, nor a single munchkin, though Errol Flynn did).
And you know exactly what she means when she describes a boarding-school classmate as “cold-muffiny.” Vanderbilt was too warm for her world, a Dorothy who probably would have been happier in Kansas but learned to make Oz home.
Read if you like: Drinking soda pop at the Stork Club, vintage issues of Vogue, “scrambled eggs with brandied peaches and champagne” for breakfast.
Available from: Estate sales and eBay, generally.
Why don’t you …
-
Shake the family tree further via Consuelo Vanderbilt’s rococo 1952 memoir “The Glitter and the Gold”?
-
Dip into the preppy-handbook idyll of Will Vogt’s “These Americans”? Jay McInerney (naturally) wrote the foreword.
-
Consider the cautionary tale of Leona Helmsley’s late Maltese, Trouble, the abiding lap-dog heiress of our times?
Thank you for being a subscriber
Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.
Friendly reminder: check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online.
