Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir

by Wednesday Martin

  Other unanticipated aspects of paralyzing your facial muscles are aesthetic. “Why does that cute mom look so strange? What happened to her?” my husband asked me on a day he had done playgroup with our younger son. He figured she was getting a divorce or had lost a parent—her face seemed to have aged that dramatically, years within weeks. I knew exactly who he meant. Several of the moms had been talking about it over coffee after “class.” She got Botox too soon, they agreed, and now this beautiful, previously fresh-looking woman in her early thirties, she of the sparkling eyes and easy smile, had the Face, which we initially associated with youth (unlined) but now associated with age and Botox—Sphinx-like and unexpressive. Unhappy. Old.

  I often thought of the symmetrical, still-faced women around me, many of whom had had rhinoplasties before their weddings, as pretty, picture-perfect zombies. They looked beautiful, but they seemed to feel nothing, their eyes, Botoxed all around to prevent crow’s-feet, dead in their faces even as they laughed or smiled. Sometimes I imagined them chasing me down the hallways of the school or down Madison Avenue into Sant Ambroeus, their arms outstretched, cornering me in the elevator or on a cozy banquette, where they proceeded to eat my brain. I was partial to acupuncture facials, having developed a huge bruise around my eye from my inaugural Botox experience. In spite of this fact, joining them—zombified, injected, quelled—seemed inevitable. Then came the fillers. I knew women with faces as big as basketballs from the endless tweakings with Restylane and Juvéderm. Their moon-pie visages atop their starved bodies seemed perfect for a photo essay in National Geographic: “Bizarre Beauty Practices among the Exotic 10021 Tribe of Kroywen.”

  Wanting to get a different kind of purchase on women’s willingness to do so much and go so far in pursuit of beauty, I turned to Richard Prum, professor of ornithology, ecology, and evolutionary biology at Yale University. A specialist on the topics of mate choice, sexual selection, and aesthetic evolution among birds, Prum has a keen interest in human evolution as well. He suggested, as we chatted in his office that seemed to have mushroomed massive piles of books and tins of green tea over the years, that beauty insanity holds sway across species. “A lot of the beauty of birds, and humans, is about the issue of sexual beauty, all the observable features that make a particular mate attractive and desirable,” he explained. For birds, this could involve choosing a guy who not only looks good but also sounds good. Brown and white with black wings, appearing to wear a little red beret, male club-winged manakins (Machaeropterus deliciosus) of Andean northwestern Ecuador don’t look so different from their other songbird brethren. It’s their sound, and how they make it, that sets them apart.

  In his courtship displays, the male club-winged manakin actually plays his wings like a violin. He emits a clicking, buzzing sound more often associated with crickets, who produce music the same way. “It’s a ridiculous way for a bird to communicate!” Prum enthused to me, noting, “These guys are capable of just fine vocal communications. So the question becomes why? Why this fiddling?” The answer: to get the girl. Female club-winged manakins liked the song. They found it beautiful. It attracted them and they chose males who could play the tune. And this preference had, over the course of generations, pressured and ultimately changed male club-winged manakin behavior. What was more shocking to Prum and his then graduate assistant Kim Bostwick was their discovery that this female preference had a profound impact on not only male manakin behavior (song) but also male manakin morphology (body structure). Every other bird on the planet has an ulna that is hollow. But in the male club-winged manakin, the ulna is thickened, twisted, planar—and solid bone. This female preference for “winging” versus singing has had an unexpected effect—and strange consequences. The male’s amped-up ulna makes it easier to make beautiful-to-female-manakins music—but harder to fly and escape predators. Meaning . . . male club-winged manakins are dying for beauty. “It’s an aesthetic trait that evolved in spite of dragging down the male’s reproductive fitness,” Prum marveled.

  The view in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology has long been that “beauty” is about utility and fitness. Beauty, Prum summarized neatly as we chatted, “is presumed to be bristling with information. It supposedly communicates, I’m healthy! You want me!” This is a functional take on beauty, beauty as a barometer of health, faces and bodies as a shorthand of sorts, the outward manifestation of “healthy” genes. In this model, straight teeth and symmetrical features “mean” that a potential mate doesn’t have parasites, or heart disease. But, based in part on the fact of the irrational, exuberant, and decadent male club-winged manakin’s song, a song that gets him the girl but little else, Prum doesn’t buy the popular belief that beauty is just information; he believes it is more likely “stuff happening”—stuff that helps individual birds attract others. Evolving a beak that can crack a nut is pretty straightforward. “But seducing a mind,” Prum observed with wonder, opening his eyes wide, “is an infinity problem.” Natural selection alone, he says, cannot account for aesthetic preferences like the one for the crazy violin solo of the manakin, a song that may get him a mate, sex, and offspring but also imperils him in basic ways, so that he may get none of those things. In the world of the manakin, as well as the rarefied world of the female primates I studied, Prum suggested, beauty is often decadent, irrational, and out-of-bounds. It can be exuberant and stunning, ruinous and potentially deadly. It is often a system unto itself, untethered from practicality and functionality, a world apart.

  Rebecca lived in a massive triplex in a “great building” on Sutton Place. This location aligned her with a slightly older, more genteel lower Upper East Side, before it had stretched itself out, Manifest Destiny–like, to reach all the way to the low Nineties. It was said that Rebecca’s husband had first bought the apartment from Rebecca’s parents, and then decided to buy the entire building. He wasn’t a developer; he was a hedge-fund guy, and presumably, buying a building—the one he lived in—was something to do. The elevator opened directly into Rebecca’s home. There I handed my coat to a staff member, taking in the unreal views of the river—I had never seen it from this height or distance, right across the street, at the penthouse level, a perspective that gave it and the rest of the neighborhood the aspect of a diorama or stage set. Another elevator then swept me up to the third floor of the apartment, the very top floor of the building and, apparently, Rebecca’s private aerie. There were light-colored flowers everywhere, and beige furniture, and a beautiful long beige marble table facing tall windows. Staff members dressed in beige offered clear drinks (vodka, tequila, and white wine) and simple, light canapés. There was a Hockney—it looked like a portrait of Rebecca—and a massive Cecily Brown and a Tauba Auerbach. I had heard talk of couples with “art budgets” of up to $200 million, and it wasn’t hard to imagine as I took in what hung on Rebecca’s walls. To the side was an off-white Eames table piled with hostess gifts in bags from Tiffany and Ladurée and Diptyque. My hostess gift—cookies I had baked with my son—had been eagerly and gratefully accepted by the hostess’s adorable twin sons at the door. There was something else on the table, too, I noticed—a jumble of what looked like gems. Drawing closer, I saw that the women had all brought little bags and dropped them here—tiny Hermès Kelly bags in jewel tones (one looked to be bright-red crocodile) and quilted, graffitied, and lacquered Chanel bags and diminutive Dior bags with Ds and heart-shaped medallions hanging from them. I placed my own bag—a relatively humble black clutch with a red rose—with the others. And took a deep breath. This was definitely not a bunch of moms ordering pizza and hanging out.

  Rebecca, looking radiant, floated over and steered me toward the middle of the room, introducing me to the women I didn’t know. Many were the wives of billionaires who owned TV networks and Fortune 500 companies and ran real estate empires and hedge funds. Some were moms from the school, and some were not. There was a former fashion editor who was now a fashion plate and full-time mother of three, with another on
the way. There was a former news anchor who had recently quit her job to spend more time with her three kids. She was pregnant with twins. There were, inevitably, a couple of stunningly beautiful and extremely smart “art consultants,” a niche profession that expanded and contracted with the fortunes of the One Percent. No one was fat. No one was ugly. No one was poor. Everyone was drinking. And everyone seemed comfortable and friendly in a way they didn’t at school or on the street or at events. The usual wariness was gone. It dawned on me that the women were relaxed. I relaxed a bit, too, as I noticed that the Queen of the Queen Bees was not in attendance and my uniform was in sync with what the others were wearing—on the money, so to speak, albeit steeply discounted.

  The talk went beyond the usual chat about kids and vacations. There was talk about politics and of a friend not there that evening because she and her husband had recently separated, and of another friend of many of the women in the group who was on her umpteenth round of IVF, supposedly in the hopes that another baby would keep her traveling husband interested and closer to home. Something tugged at me when there was very quiet talk, and lowered eyes, and obvious sadness and compassion about this woman’s previous miscarriages, and another friend’s devastating amnio results. I was ashamed by the realization that I had assumed, stupidly, that the lives of the women around me were charmed in every way. They weren’t. And then the talk shifted again and it was, as always, of what everyone was wearing.

  The magnificent, extravagant setting and impeccably dressed and made-up group couldn’t have been further from the Efe and Aka people of the Ituri Rain Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or the !Kung San of the Kalahari desert. These hunter-gatherers are radical egalitarians, meaning they live in groups without hierarchy or socioeconomic stratification, as humans did for nearly all of our evolutionary prehistory. Among these tribes, no one owns anything and no one’s status is any higher or lower than anyone else’s. The notion of property is unknown. This state of affairs is reinforced by several mechanisms. One is object demands. It is common for one woman to walk up to another and demand her beads, for example, or for a child to approach an unrelated adult and demand a portion of his or her food, or for one man to demand and receive another’s spear tips for hunting. Saying no is unheard of. These gift demands reinforce the notion that nobody owns anything. Self-effacement and downplaying one’s own achievements and those of others is another way to ensure no sense of hierarchy develops. “We’re not sure who killed the duiker we found under the acacia tree,” someone announces after a successful hunt, knowing full well who did. “Maybe it was someone from another group. We will get it, all of us, and we will distribute it to everyone.” The man supplying coveted meat cannot take or receive credit. Everyone and no one killed the duiker, and so everyone is and remains equal.

  Of course, the fastidiously turned out women at Rebecca’s—elegant, refined, polite, and rich—would have fainted if I walked up to any one of them and demanded, “Jane, give me your three Pomellato stacking rings and Lanvin Happy bag NOW!” But there was a strict etiquette regarding compliments that struck me in this setting as it never had before, bringing to mind these African hunter-gatherers. At all costs and by all means, praise about oneself, in this and other women-only settings, was to be aggressively deflected. All evening, “Is that blouse Chloé? It’s such a beautiful color on you!” was met with, “This thing is four years old. And I look like I haven’t slept in a decade!” When told “Your skin looks amazing!” the proper response was “It breaks out all the time. If it looks good, it’s just the makeup, believe me!” “Did you lose weight? You look incredible” was met with a flat denial and a diversionary parry along the lines of “No, these pants hold me in like a girdle. But I heard you’re working out with Tracy [Anderson] every day, and it shows!”

  At first I figured that these deflections and denials and returns served to ward off envy. If someone liked what you had, you had to discount its value so she wouldn’t resent you and ultimately harm you with resentful intent (in the Mediterranean and Middle East this is referred to as “warding off the evil eye”). But I was wrong. Actually, through this kind of discursive volleying, this back-and-forth of praise and self-abnegation in response to it, the hierarchy among women of endless means, a system that could quite easily be in constant flux given the ease with which one could get and have whatever one wanted, was kept stable. The compliment was a test: Will you affirm that you are one of us, and answer as we answer? Do you know your place? Or are you going to try to shine and rise above? Only Rebecca, I noted, was allowed to simply accept a compliment. When told she looked fantastic (she really did), she smiled and said, “You are so sweet!” Like the wealthy and socially influential toddler-playgroup mom who merely nodded condescendingly and gave a tight smile whenever someone told her she looked gorgeous (the same one who had performatively exiled me and my son from the summer playgroup), Rebecca was in charge here, and everyone was acknowledging it. Everyone might look beautiful, but no one was admitting it. That was the pact.

  Over a delicious dinner—gluten-free and organic and healthy, placed discreetly in front of us by the staff—the talk turned to a West Coast interloper on the New York social scene. A wealthy couple from LA, specifically the wife, had recently upstaged a titan of industry, a longtime fixture on the charity scene, at a gala in his honor. At the moment it was announced that he was donating a million dollars to the cause in question, the brash brunette had jumped up and shouted, “We’ll donate two!” The room went silent at her gaffe, and her gall. She was promptly taken to task by the arbiters of the New York charity circuit—by word of mouth, in print, and by social exclusion. The jury was out about her in the room where we now sat. “She’s very LA. Very direct,” one of the women tactfully observed. “When I was first introduced to her, she asked who did my breasts. She said, ‘There’s no way those are real.’ They are!” The others laughed and nodded, agreeing that it was mostly just an issue of the LA couple’s not yet knowing the rules, the Manhattan-specific social laws and codes they themselves had long ago internalized.

  The peculiar, seasonal social dance in Manhattan is at least a century old. During “gala season,” from April through June, and then out in the Hamptons all summer long, and then back in the city from September until November, there are dinners for an honoree who has paid heavily for the privilege, charity and cause breakfasts, and an endless line of luncheons. The cause may be research into a disease, or conservation, or an issue such as literacy, or supporting a cultural institution. All except the dinners, when husbands materialize, are intensely sex-segregated, women-only affairs. The rules are clear. You may buy a ticket, or be asked to be a guest at someone’s table, or buy a table yourself if it is your cause, a board you sit on, or a committee to which you have lent your name and/or your time. A table for yourself and nine of your closest friends might run you $3,500 to $7,500 for a luncheon, and $10,000 and up for a dinner. Many of these events also have silent auctions, long tables of luxury goods you can bid for anonymously on a chit, raising even more money for the cause. Whenever I went to such an all-women breakfast or luncheon, it reminded me of grooming behaviors among nonhuman primates—capuchins and howler monkeys and baboons tending to “friends’ ” fur, sometimes for hours, beefing up the sense of connection among them through proximity and affectionate touch, paving the way to alliances that could literally be lifesaving at some point. We weren’t picking bugs off one another, but we may as well have been. In talking to one another and eating and drinking together, asking about outfits and kids and work, gathering for a cause, we were also reassuring, connecting with, and touching one another. And a phenomenon primatologists call reciprocal altruism—“You groom me, I’ll groom you”—is in full effect all gala season long: “I’ll go/give to your charity thing if you go/give to my charity thing!” This is one of the ways relationships are built and maintained among the privileged in Manhattan. It is also a way to give to a cause, while showing that
you can give to a cause. Like all primates, humans are affiliative and prosocial. And, like so many humans living in the shadow of agriculture, we tend toward hierarchy and stratification. This breakfast-lunch-dinner social circuit of causes and charities proves it.

  The evening events, with the husbands in attendance, are more likely to have live auctions, where paddles are raised in the quest to show one can overpay for a trip to Anguilla, a fractional jet share, a suite at a Yankees game, or floor tickets at Madison Square Garden for a Knicks game. At one school gala’s live auction, it was said, the cookie jar made by the 4s went for $60,000. A class’s group finger painting went for $20,000. Conspicuous consumption never felt so virtuous (or, in the case of the kids’ art, so humble). Spending money is part of the equation. But who you know at an event, whom you talk to, where you sit, whose guest you are, or who your guests are—all are factors that also help establish your rank. Those who depart from the script—the woman from LA and Felix Rohatyn before her, who had grumbled publicly that it would be far more efficient to simply write checks to the charities one chose rather than attend round after round of excessive “Cancer Dances,” was promptly ostracized, and eventually wrote an explanation of his views that was part mea culpa in the New York Times—quickly learn how entrenched and inflexible these hallowed tribal ways are.