Excerpt: 'The Natural History of the Rich'

ByABC News via logo
October 1, 2002, 5:56 PM

Oct. 8 -- Journalist Richard Conniff probes the age-old question, "Are the rich different from you and me?" He discovers that they are indeed a completely different animal. Here is an excerpt from his book, The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide.

Scratching withthe Big Dogs:How Rich Is Rich?

"There's a certain milieu in Aspen. To the extent that you're collecting important art, you're listening to avant garde music, and you participate as a peer in Aspen Institute intellectual discussions that, and you have $100 million then you're considered a big dog." Harley Baldwin, art dealer

If men come from Mars and women from Venus, where on earth do rich people come from? Are they, as ordinary people often suspect, an alien life form? Is their blood the color of money? Do they have special antennae, as their press people like to suggest, for picking up distant intimations of profit and loss? Can they see around corners? Is life on Canis Major, the big dog star, really light years apart from the bow-wow world of ordinary runts like you and me? The truth is that rich people are not even a different species from us. They are more like a different subspecies.

The rich themselves often say that they just want to be normal people, leading normal lives. "I just want to be middle class," was a familiar refrain among dazzled Internet millionaires in the late 1990s. Then, to their horror, they got what they wished. This ambivalence about wealth is perhaps sincere, but it's also a little disingenuous. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com made himself a folk hero of the era as a billionaire who drove a beat-up Honda and celebrated frugality. "I don't think wealth actually changes people," he declared.

But at the time he was moving out of his 900-square-foot rental in downtown Seattle to a $10 million waterfront house in the leafy suburb of Medina, where his new neighbors included Microsoft billionaires Bill Gates, Jon Shirley, and Nathan Myhrvold. Then, 7,000 square feet perhaps seeming relatively frugal in this context, he decided to expand the place. Wealth is like that.

Whether they want it or not, the dynamic of being rich invariably sets people apart. It isolates them from the general population, the first step in any evolutionary process, and it inexorably causes them to become different. They enter into a community with its own behaviors, its own codes, its own language, its own habitats. ("I'm the most normal, normal person," one extremely wealthy woman told me. "I'm not like most rich people. I work really hard. Most rich people I know don't do anything but eat, drink, sleep, pardon the term, fuck, and have a good time.")

Their children or grandchildren come to mate mainly with one another, like Whitneys with Vanderbilts and Firestones with Fords. (If you are planning to get a wedding present for little Jennifer Gates Bezos, start saving now.) Thus, from the primordial muck, something new and wondrous emerges: A cultural subspecies, Homo sapiens pecuniosus.

How to identify the breed? Is there a holotype, a specimen pinned down in a museum somewhere against which one can size up all newcomers and say this is or isn't a rich person? Is it really possible to characterize a group that includes both a comparatively dainty figure like French businessman Bernard Arnault, purveyor of Louis Vuitton and other opulent brands, and a bruiser like basketball star Shaquille O'Neal, who weighs 330 pounds and has the word "TWISM" ("The World Is Mine") tattooed on his left bicep? It is. The way to start is by defining just what we mean by "rich."

A Numbers Game

One afternoon in Aspen, I had coffee with a local craftsman. He was the second person that day to let me know early in the conversation that he didn't need to work for a living. He'd married into a prominent family, and when the name failed to produce a satisfactory response, he said, "They owned General Dynamics," a manufacturer of some of the deadliest weapon systems on Earth. "They owned the Empire State building," he said. "Do you have the Forbes 400 list?" he asked. It turned out that they are currently worth about $3 billion.

He was a solid, muscular guy, with an upright, almost balletic posture, and a manner of quiet arrogance, in the first person plural. "We really, really go out of our way not to dress particularly well, not to drive really fancy cars everybody in the world can get a Range Rover and not to let people know what our philanthropic endeavors are. Sometimes you don't want the advertisement."

He was scathing about wannabes. Maybe it was because he was himself a relative newcomer in this world. "You can't pretend to have the speed of a cheetah, when you're really a mule," he said. A new country club in town especially irked him. It created "a different level of Aspen citizen, those who belonged, and those who didn't. It was really terribly exclusive in a way a lot of us resented." He'd signed on as a charter member, just to get in a quick round of golf. But the other members turned out to be, on average, sixty-four years old. Mules, not cheetahs. They needed five-and-a-half hours to complete a round. So having bought his membership at $60,000, he sold out at $175,000 and could savor his righteousness.

He asked, as everyone did sooner or later, how I was planning to define wealth and I said that I was probably going to make my starting point between $5 and $10 million in investable assets. "I don't consider that a lot of money at all," he said. This was an entirely reasonable comment, improbable as it may seem. For $5 or $10 million, you could just about buy a suitable home in Aspen, where the average house was then selling for $3.4 million. (It would be a second home, of course, so you would also need funds to feather it, to fly back and forth, and to entertain your fine new neighbors.)

In any case, he added, money doesn't matter: "Money by itself doesn't interest me all that much." He defined wealth essentially as contentment with your lot: "My opinion of wealth is to be able to own whatever it is you have, at whatever level. If you have $50 million and you're racing around bloody well killing yourself and basically a slave to that which you are striving for, I would not count that as wealth in any shape or form." I demurred. The guy with $50 million may be a slave to it, but people still leap at his bidding.

"So this book is just going to be a numbers game, then?" he said. "It's about what's in my billfold?" He took out his billfold and showed it to me, to demonstrate how crass I was being. There was a dollar on top, evidence of how much he cared about understatement. Then he peeled it back to show me the $100 bills underneath. I picked up the check.

Money Doesn't Interest Me

It was a reminder of just how strange and complex an animal I had set out to study. Not just old money or new, but old money with nouveaux riches husbands, and trophy wives who turn around and trade up from Big Daddy to Bigger. Working rich, of course, and idle rich. First-generation tyrants and fourth-generation wastrels. Rich people who read Epictetus and honestly wonder, What can I do to make this a better world? And rich people who mainly wonder, Who can I crush today? Seattle rich who keep quiet, and Los Angeles rich who get out of bed to a crescendo of timpani. New money on polo ponies, and old money on roller blades.

What do they all have in common? Almost all in one form or another expressed the idea that money by itself didn't interest them that much. In the beginning, this sounded like the fourth biggest lie, along with "the check is in the mail," and so on. If so, it was a lie with a great tradition. In the library at The Breakers, their seventy-room cottage in Newport, Rhode Island, for instance, Cornelius and Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt had a white marble mantle bearing the venerable French inscription, "Little do I care for riches, and do not miss them, since only cleverness prevails in the end." Biographer Barbara Goldsmith writes that the Vanderbilts saw no irony in purchasing this mantle, which had been pried off the fireplace of a 400-year-old château in Burgundy.

Presumably the builder of the château also saw no irony in putting the mantle there in the first place. Rich people have always believed it is their cleverness, their wit, their taste, their athletic ability anything but their money that makes them special.And yet they often acted as if money was the only thing that interested them. They practiced the dull art of price-tag parlor talk: "The trouble with Arnie is that he'll only spend $150,000 for a pilot, when he could get a damned good one for $250,000." They applied price tags with wild, domineering abandon even to the most delicate questions of marriage and family life.