Dear Mr. Alger:
I confess that at first I was strongly tempted to ignore your curious letter requesting guidelines on the art of being very, very rich. I simply did not believe your statement that you had suddenly acquired a yearly income of $5,000,000. Why hadn’t I ever heard of you?
Not that I know many of the 100,000 Americans who are now worth more than $1,000,000. But your income suggested a fortune of at least $100 million, which clearly ranked you in what I thought was our own small crowd. So I should have recognized your name. For all I knew, you were really some journalist “researching” one of those dreadful exposes’ of the superrich, such as that new book by Ferdinand Lundberg, which my wife says is so old hat that she may demand her $10 back. On principle, of course.
But then I spotted your name in FORTUNE, which listed you among the roughly 150 Americans who now have at least $100 million thecrowd isn’t so small, after all. How few of them I know! Many of thesesuper-rich seem to be technological arrivistes. Your own fascinating rise from obscurity (forgive me) typifies the phenomenon. Even though you graduated from Caltech with honors (in 1953!), who ever expected that your invention of some electronic what’s-it-scope would lead to your having your own company and then to your being bought out by IBM.
I can see why you seek advice. Without background, it must be terrifying to become a centimillionaire at 37. But let me allay your anxieties at once. Being very rich is mostly what raucous people call a gas. C. Wright Mills, one of the egghead sociologists, was near the mark when he said: “If the rich are not happy, it is because none of us is happy.” Sophie Tucker got it right the first time. “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor,” she said. “Rich is better.”
Sinful Enjoyment
There is a legend in America that because everybody has a car and a television set, and a lot of people own houses and can afford vacations, the rich don’t live so very differently from the middle class. Don’t you believe it. Still, being very, very rich is not quite as much fun as it used to be. We’ve gradually lost the old exuberance of my parents’ day. No more marble palaces or French chateaux imported stone by stone; no more parties reminiscent of the triumphal march in Aida. Instead of encouraging the peasantry to goggle enviously through our iron fences or line the roadside as we take the air be-hind a four-in-hand of matched greys, we ride around invisibly in Buicks and keep our houses as well screened from the road as possible.
We American rich have always felt a little guilty. As David Brinkley puts it, there is “an attitude widely held in this country (but almost nowhere else) that it may not always be sinful to have a lot of money, but it is vaguely sinful to enjoy it and unforgivably sinful to do so in public.” Of course, this feeling is less a matter of morality than envy. In this wonderfully egalitarian country, the have-nots naturally demand: “Why not me?” And in politics, the voters have come to accept rich candidates, if not actually to prefer them.
So, we luxuriate in private. Inside our houses (try not to call them “homes”) is where we let ourselves go with our art collections and our furniture and our closets crammed with Huntsman suits, Sulka shirts and Lock hats. It is also perfectly O.K. to amuse yourself with elec-tronic equipment. Nothing ordinary, of course. One of my friends says he uses a small computer to help him with his racing forms as well as with the stock market, and quite a few have closed-circuit television to communicate with the nursery and the servants’ wing.
Ballrooms, no; projection rooms, yes. Poolrooms are back, and pools never went away you will probably want both an indoor and an outdoor one, and the same goes for tennis courts. If you have a separate playhouse, which isn’t a bad idea, it will be no trouble to fit in a squash court and a bowling alley, as well as an extra sauna. Family compounds, such as the Rockefellers’ 3,500-acre complex near Tarrytown, may also goin for an 18-hole golf course. All this avoids those tense country clubs, where mere millionaires stare at you.
We super-rich may have unloaded our marble mansions on churches, embassies, labor unions and institutions of learning that don’t have to pay the taxes or cope with the servant shortage, but we still have plenty of places to lay our heads. Real estate is an excellent long-term investment, and one also likes to travel without having to stay at hotels, where one doesn’t have one’s own things. So we have houses all over the map.
In Europe, they seem to manage this somewhat more gracefully than Americans do. My friend Gloria Guinness, who is married to Loel of the banking (not brewing) Guinnesses, claims that it’s easier to maintain four houses than one. Her four are in Paris, Normandy, Switzerland and Palm Beach, and she keeps a skeleton staff of servants and a complete wardrobe in each house so that she and Loel don’t have to tote stuff around. “Without luggage,” she says, “you don’t have to waste time in customs and you don’t have to declare anything.” The Guinnesses are usually accompanied by a basic traveling staff of four, and they get about quite a bit, aided by their helicopter, their transatlantic jet and their 704-ton yacht with its crew of twelve. They follow the big and little seasons on such a clockwork schedule that they often don’t even have to wire ahead. “When it’s time for me to be in Paris, for instance,” says Gloria, “the people there know when to expect me.”
We Americans tend to make rather heavier weather of it. Take Marylou Whitney, whose husband Sonny (Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney to you) was a principal backer of Pan American World Airways, Gone With the Wind and enough other ventures to qualify him as a one-man conglomerate. She has five children and five establishments in Lexington, Ky., Saratoga, Manhattan, Manitoba, Canada, and 100,000 acres of the Adirondacks. So Marylou and her two secretaries (one in New York and one in Kentucky) spend a lot of time in a welter of lists, files and details. She likes to dash off notes to the help about buying ham at less than $5 a pound: As she says: “Money does not grow on trees.” And then there are decisions-decisions like what movies to choose for the Adirondacks this summer and whom to invite for the fishing and whom for the shooting. But it is a lot of fun and not even hard on the children as long as you keep them oriented by having their rooms arranged in the same way in various establishments.
One inestimable advantage of our multiple residences is that it is so easy to be not at home. Privacy is probably the most valuable thing that money can buy; the poor have practically none, and the privacy of the middle class is eroding rapidly. Only the very rich can afford it in these days of high-speed communication and whetted curiosity, and it is perhaps no coincidence that two of the world’s richest men J. Paul Getty and Howard Hughes, with close to $1.5 billion apiece are notably fanatic about their privacy.
The richest man in England is so invisible that you undoubtedly have never even heard of him. Sir John Reeves Ellerman, who inherited a shipping fortune now worth almost $300 million, is 58 years old, but he has never made a public statement other than “I have no statement to make.” Since he is hardly ever photographed, he has no trouble traveling incognito, often signing on one of his ships as a crewman though of course he doesn’t work at it. Ellerman’s passion is rodents, on which he wrote a three-volume anatomical study, the definitive work in the field.
Flaying & Finagling
The blessings of privacy, you understand, are not limited to protection from the public; they protect one from one’s relatives as well. As it happens, I ascribe much of the success of my own three marriages (that’s not many at my age I happen to be 68) to the luxury of plenty of elbow room. Association is more pleasant the more voluntary it is. A man feels the absolute need to get away from time to time to his own room, to his own wing, to his own little hideaway in the country or pied-a-terre in town and so, no doubt, does a woman.
Which reminds me that you neglected in your letter to mention your own current marital status. If you haven’t a wife at the moment, I advise you to acquire one without delay. Wives can be extremely important at tax time not, of course, for the piddling $600 exemptions they bring with them, but for their in-come-splitting potential. Philip M. Stern, a would-be tax reformer who is, I am afraid, trying to do away with this convenient practice, says that in 1964 the wife of a man with $1,000,000 in taxable income was worth $2,766,153.75 to him if his moneyman knew the right finaglings.
Women, to be sure, can also be something of a financial drainees-pecially if they have a perfectionist turn of mind, like my friend Mrs. Guinness, who feels that “for a fur coat to look proper, it must be completely new.” The quest for youth and beauty is the female way of whiling away time and money slimming expeditions to Main Chance or the Greenhouse, animal-cell injections by Niehans in Switzerland, face liftings by Rees or Converse in New York, and assorted blood aerations, breast shapings, or skin peelings. These cosmetic Sayings leave a woman pretty unsightly for a week or so. So Mrs. Marjorie Merriweather Post (you know, Post Toasties) Close Hutton Davies May solves the problem by inviting her doctor and three of her friends down to Palm Beach for a peeling, so they can hole up in her 115-room villa and play bridge while the scabs slough off.
The desire to have something to show for all our money has driven us super-rich to frenzies of collecting things, and you will undoubtedly want to join in. Art has always been our favorite combining high prices, cultural cachet and delicious opportunities to play the pa-tron with penurious young talent. Today, however, it seems to have got completely out of hand, with painters and sculptors apparently unable to turn out even fake works fast enough. Personally, I would leave the modern stuff to the likes of Nelson Rockefeller, who has the Museum of Modern Art at his beck and call, or Paul Mellon, who has something like $1 billion to dip into. Even at that, the art is not necessarily appreciated. One of Paul’s daughters brought a friend home from Foxcroft (that school demands a lot more than a “good seat” for riding these days!). Well, the friend looked at a Van Gogh and said: “Who paints in the family?” “Nobody,” the Mellon girl answered. “Dad gets them at a store.”
Sometimes a collection can be awfully handy. Winston and CeeZee Guest discovered that last fall when they were temporarily strapped for cash (not that I understand how that happened to them). Anyway, they got $812,275 for their Chinese porcelains and French antiques at Parke-Bernet, instead of the mere $500,000 they had counted on. Jewels are more durable than porcelain, but they’re easily heisted; Sonny and Marylou Whitney got robbed of $780,000 worth at Saratoga a year ago, and their insurance premiums must be ferocious. Coins can be better guarded, but someone recently stole Willis du Font’s collection only the other day he got back a single coin worth $100,000. His cousin, Alexis I. du Pont, may be better off with his collection of antique airplanes, though they take up so much room that the poor fellow has had to build himself a complete airport.
Perhaps the jolliest benefit of being really rich is that we can do little things in a big way like the Detroit race-track owner who gave sports cars as favors to a dozen dinner guests. We all have our pet charities, and some of us even have crusades for example, H. L. Hunt, the Texas oil billionaire, spends millions on propaganda against assorted people whom he regards as Red subversives. Then in Britain, there’s Sir Cyril Black, the rich Tory MP, who is dedicated to protecting the “moral” working class from dirty books. As he sees it, “the intelligentsia are the ones who are pulling down the temple.”
But even when our crusades or benefactions are less extreme than these, we rarely get much credit for them. You will soon discover, I fear, the oldest and most obvious fact about the very rich: we are not loved. I could give you quite an anthology of nasty remarks made against the rich by assorted prophets and philosophers. It begins with Plato, who observed: “To be at once extremely wealthy and good is impossible.” And it goes right on. Oh well, I suppose the public has a point with all our freedom from midnight money worries, fears of being fired and yearnings for unreachable possessions, why don’t we wealthy ones make better use of our lives? Some of us do like the Kennedys and the Rockefellers but most of us are just as confused as anybody else. Maybe more so: listen to what a lady I know told me about her good friend Gianni Agnelli, the Italian motor magnate. “When he even fleetingly wants something,” she said, “he buys it. But I think this is simply because he wants to forget that he wanted something he didn’t have.”
Whatever you do with your money, don’t let the pains of having it snuff out the pleasures of wanting. The only point of having money is the freedom it gives you to sharpen your desires to learn more, help more, play more, enjoy more, and make life even more extraordinary than it is anyway. Certainly money can buy happiness; the secret is how to use it. I trust you will use yours well. And if you find some good new way teach us. God knows we need it.
Faithfully yours,
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