Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (10 page)

BOOK: Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin
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As the Fortune 500 became an institution in American life, I often pictured the scene at the Humboldt Country Club in Humboldt, Ohio, when an important visitor from Wall Street asks casually over drinks, “Do you have any Fortune 500 companies in Humboldt?”

For a moment, no one speaks. The “old man,” as everyone in Humboldt calls Harrison H. Humboldt, the son of Bolt & Tube’s founder, looks out at the eighteenth green, the hint of a tear in his eye. Finally, someone says, “No, but we’ve got the third-largest granite pit east of the Mississippi.”

1982

Invasion of the Limo-Stretchers

I pinned what Pam Blessinger said about rich people on my bulletin board. For a few months now, it has been in the section I reserve for permanent display, right next to a
Wizard of Oz
quotation that somehow comforts displaced Midwesterners in New York City by stating
what should be increasingly obvious: “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

Pam Blessinger spoke as president of the residents’ association of New York’s Roosevelt Island, which is in the East River in a spot usually described as in the shadow of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Developed ten years ago as a middle-income “new town,” Roosevelt Island has become a quiet, family sort of place that one of Blessinger’s fellow residents described to
The New York Times
as “an island of Indiana in the middle of Manhattan.”

Blessinger was quoted in the
Times
in opposition to a proposed expansion of the development that would include what looked to her suspiciously like luxury apartments. “We’re not against white or black or purple,” she said. “What we’re against is rich people.”

There. She said it. The rest of us have been pussyfooting around this for years, afraid of being called prejudiced. Not Mrs. B. She could envision the peaceful lanes of her little island jammed with triple-parked stretch limousines waiting in front of restaurants where a plate of spaghetti costs eighteen dollars and change. She could see the day when respectable citizens who have to get up and go to work the next morning would be awakened in the middle of the night by the braying of rich people being dropped off after charity balls: “It was marvelous, darling!” “Wasn’t it marvelous, darling?” “Yes, it was marvelous, darling!”

Mrs. B. said out loud what the rest of us have been thinking: Those people can ruin a neighborhood lickety-split.

No, we are not prejudiced. We wouldn’t mind one or two rich people, but these days the supply of them seems inexhaustible. As seems to be true of so many recent developments in American life, this surfeit of richies has come as a surprise to me. When I was growing up, one of the most important things about truly rich people was that there weren’t very many of them. Also, my high school teachers told us that people like the Rockefellers had grabbed their piles before the tax laws made it impossible to amass huge personal fortunes.

So why have so many people become as rich as the Rockefellers? Is it possible that these rich people know something about the tax laws that my high school teachers didn’t know?

Most of the rich people are in New York. I don’t care what
Forbes
says about where they live. They’re here. We’ve got Texas rich people and California rich people and Colorado rich people. We’ve got rich people with new money and rich people with old money and rich people whose money just needs to sit in the window for a few days and ripen in the sun. There’s no variety of rich people we don’t have in overstock. New York has more rich people than some cities have people.

For a while, I thought other places might be sending us their rich people. (“Listen, if Frank down at the Savings and Loan doesn’t quit talking about how many Jaguars he owns, we’re just going to have to put him in the next shipment to New York.”) It even occurred to me that whoever is in charge of these other places might have misread the poem on the Statue of Liberty, which definitely says, “Give me you tired, your
poor.
” People make mistakes.

Then I realized that the rich people were coming here on their own hook. They are swarming into New York because they want to be with people who are like they are—rich. There are a lot of places around the country, after all, where someone who is driven around in a stretched-out Cadillac limousine might be made light of (“Will you look at that thing old Albert’s got himself? Don’t you figure he must think he’s always on his way to a funeral?”). For all I know, there are places around the country where someone who is driven around in a stretched-out Cadillac limousine might have rocks thrown at him.

“Send ’em back where they came from,” a taxi driver who was hauling me up the East Side Highway one day said as he struggled to get around a gaggle of limos. He had devised a rich-people repatriation plan that sounded very much like Fidel Castro’s Mariel boatlift, except that he’d use private jets instead of fishing boats.

“But that would be prejudiced and unfair,” I said, although not terribly forcefully.

1986

Dinner at the de la Rentas’

Another week has passed without my being invited to the de la Rentas’. Even that overstates my standing. Until I read in
The New York Times Magazine
a couple of weeks ago about the de la Rentas having become “barometers of what constitutes fashionable society” (“Françoise and Oscar de la Renta have created a latter-day salon for
le nouveau grand monde
—the very rich, very powerful, and very gifted”), I wasn’t even aware of what I wasn’t being invited to week after week. Once I knew, of course, it hurt.

Every time the phone rang, I thought it might be Mrs. de la Renta with an invitation (“Mr. Trillin? Françoise de la Renta here. We’re having a few very rich, very powerful, and/or very gifted people over Sunday evening to celebrate Tisha B’Av, and we thought you and the missus might like to join us.”). The phone rang. It was the lady from the Diners Club informing me how quickly a person’s credit rating can deteriorate. The phone rang. It was my mother calling from Kansas City to ask if I’m sure I sent a thank-you note to my cousin Edna for the place setting of stainless Edna and six other cousins went in on for our wedding gift in 1965. The phone rang. An invitation! Fats Goldberg, the pizza baron, asked if we’d like to bring the kids to his uptown branch Sunday night to sample the sort of pizza he regularly describes as “a gourmet tap dance.”

“Thanks, Fat Person, but I’ll have to phone you,” I said. “We may have another engagement Sunday.”

The phone quit ringing.

“Why aren’t I in
le nouveau grand monde
?” I asked my wife, Alice.

“Because you speak French with a Kansas City accent?” she asked in return.

“Not at all,” I said. “Sam Spiegel, the Hollywood producer, is a
regular at the de la Rentas’, and I hear that the last time someone asked him to speak French, he said ‘Gucci.’ ”

“Why would you want to go there anyway?” Alice said. “Didn’t you read that the host is so phony, he added his own ‘de la’ to what had been plain old Oscar Renta?”

“Who can blame a man for not wanting to go through life sounding like a taxi driver?” I said. “Family background’s not important in
le nouveau grand monde
. Diana Vreeland says Henry Kissinger is the star. The Vicomtesse de Ribes says ‘Françoise worships intelligence.’ You get invited by accomplishment—taking over a perfume company, maybe, or invading Cambodia.”

“Why don’t we just call Fats and tell him we’ll be there for a gourmet tap dance?” Alice said.

“Maybe it would help if you started wearing dresses designed by Oscar de la Renta,” I said. “Some of his guests say they would feel disloyal downing Mrs. D’s chicken fricassee while wearing someone else’s merchandise.”

Alice shook her head. “Oscar de la Renta designs those ruffly dresses that look like what the fat girl made a bad mistake wearing to the prom,” she said.

“Things were a lot easier when fashionable society was limited to old-rich goyim, and all the rest of us didn’t have to worry about being individually rejected,” I said.

“At least they knew better than to mingle socially with their dressmakers,” Alice said.

Would I be ready if the de la Rentas phoned? The novelist Jerzy Kosinski, after all, told the
Times
that evenings with them were “intellectually demanding.” Henry Kissinger, the star himself, said that the de la Rentas set “an interesting intellectual standard”—although, come to think of it, that phrase could also be applied to Fats Goldberg.

Alone at the kitchen table, I began to polish my dinner-table chitchat, looking first to the person I imagined being seated on my left (the Vicomtesse de Ribes, who finds it charming that her name reminds me of barbecue joints in Kansas City) and then to the person on my right (Barbara Walters, another regular, who has tried to put me at my ease by confessing that in French she doesn’t do her r’s terribly
well). “I was encouraged when it leaked that the Reagan cabinet was going to be made up of successful managers from the world of business,” I say, “but I expected them all to be Japanese.”

Barbara and the Vicomtesse smile. Alice, who had just walked into the kitchen, looked concerned.

“Listen,” Alice said. “I read in the
Times
that Mrs. de la Renta is very strict about having only one of each sort of person at a dinner party. Maybe they already have someone from Kansas City.”

Possible. Jerzy Kosinski mentioned that Mrs. D is so careful about not including more than one stunning achiever from each walk of life (“She understands that every profession generates a few princes or kings”) that he and Norman Mailer have never been at the de la Rentas’ on the same evening (“When I arrive, I like to think that, as a novelist, I’m unique”). Only one fabulous beauty. Only one world-class clotheshorse.

Then I realized that the one-of-each rule could work to my advantage. As I envisioned it, Henry Kissinger phones Mrs. D only an hour before dinner guests are to arrive. He had been scheduled to pick up a bunch of money that night for explaining SALT II to the Vinyl Manufacturers Association convention in Chicago, but the airports are snowed in. He and Nancy will be able to come to dinner after all. “How marvelous, darling!” Mrs. D says.

She hangs up and suddenly looks stricken. “My God!” she says to Oscar. “What are we going to do? We already have one war criminal coming!”

What to do except to phone the man who conflicts with the star and tell him the dinner had to be called off because Mr. D had come down with a painful skin disease known as the Seventh Avenue Shpilkes. What to do about the one male place at the table now empty—between Vicomtesse de Ribes and Barbara Walters?

The phone rings. “This is Françoise de la Renta,” the voice says.

“This is Calvin of the Trillin,” I say. “I’ll be right over.”

1981

CRIMINAL JUSTICE, CRIMINALS, JUSTICES, BUT (PROBABLY) NO CRIMINAL JUSTICES

“I am an absolutist on the First Amendment, except for people who show slides of their trip to Europe. They should be arrested. If they can’t be held, they can at least be knocked about a bit at the station house.”

Crystal Ball

So far, despite all the attention given to the wannabe terrorist from Nigeria widely known as the Underwear Bomber, nobody has mentioned that I predicted this turn of events. How many dead-on predictions does a person have to make to get a little credit around here? Am I implying that I’ve been similarly prescient in the past? Well, now that you mention it, yes. In a 1978 column about what was then
being called the New Right, I said that I’d had some experience in the early sixties with the previous New Right, a movement most memorable for speeches that reached a level of boredom not witnessed in this country since members of the Communist Party droned their way through the thirties. Given the number of years between the two New Rights, I wrote, another New Right should be coming along around 1994. Sure enough, in 1994, a number of readers (three, if memory serves) wrote to remind me that my prediction had been uncannily correct: Newt Gingrich had led the Republicans in a historic takeover of Congress, and the press was full of stories about the power and vibrancy of the New Right.

A coincidence, you say? A lucky guess that I couldn’t repeat? Wrong. In a book I published in 2006 called
A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme
, here is what I said, in one of the nonrhyming passages, about the so-called Shoe Bomber of 2001: “I’m convinced that the whole shoe-bomber business was a prank. What got me onto this theory was reading that the shoe bomber, a Muslim convert named Richard Reid, had been described by someone who knew him well in England as ‘very, very impressionable.’ I had already decided that the man was a complete bozo. He made such a goofy production of trying to light the fuses hanging off his shoe that he practically asked the flight attendant if she had a match. The way I figure it, the one terrorist in England with a sense of humor, a man known as Khalid the Droll, had said to the cell, ‘I bet I can get them all to take off their shoes in airports.’ So this prankster set up poor impressionable Reid and won his bet. Now Khalid is back there cackling at the thought of all those Americans exposing the holes in their socks on cold airport floors. If someone is arrested one of these days and is immediately, because of his MO, referred to in the press as the Underwear Bomber, you’ll know I was onto something.”

BOOK: Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin
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