Of course, the fastidiously turned out women at Rebecca’s—elegant, refined, polite, and rich—would have fainted if I walked up to 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 Chloe? 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 had 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 they 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 between 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 had been 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 mostly it was just an issue of the LA couple’s not yet knowing the rules, the Manhattan-specific social laws and codes they had themselves 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 like 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 loaned your name and/or your time. A table for yourself and nine of your closest friends might run you 3.5–7.5K for a luncheon, and 10K and up for a dinner. Many of these events also have a silent auction, 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’s breakfast or luncheon, it reminded me of grooming behaviors among nonhuman primates—capuchins and howler monkeys and baboons tending to a “friend’s” fur, sometimes for hours, beefing up the sense of connection between them through proximity and affectionate touch, paving the way to an alliance that could literally be lifesaving at some point. We weren’t picking bugs off each other, 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 pro-social. 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 a live auction, 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 sixty thousand dollars. A class’s group finger painting went for twenty thousand. 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 a check 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.
“Social climbing” is real in Manhattan, and when I hear the phrase, I see before me stilettoed women—Queen Bee and her friends at the top, the rest coming up close behind—in Chanel dresses and Yves Saint Laurent tuxedo jumpsuits, glittering minaudières in hand or hanging from their slender shoulders, skillfully making their way in the dusk up a tree, negotiating the branches, finding an ideal spot at an optimal height that gives them a perfect view of the forest floor below or the savannah before them. This perspective makes them, like primates of all species, including our own Homo sapiens ancestors, feel safe. And rich.
As the evening wound down, women parted with thank-yous to Rebecca and kisses for one another. And tonight, as always, in departing, they said, “Will I see you at the thing on Thursday? Are you going to the school meeting tomorrow?” Like the demurral of a compliment, the confirmation of the next meetup affirmed that they were one.
Women of the tribe I was studying paid the price for beauty, looking frozen, feeling disconnected, starving and exercising their bodies into submission. They did the never-ending work of forging and maintaining social connections and social status for themselves, their children, and the couple. But it was men who picked up the tab. It was easy to believe, that night at Rebecca’s apartment, that all these women, wealthy, competent, and beautiful, were powerful as well. But there was the nagging fact, for me, always, of the apartness, the undeniable cloistering from men. “It’s more fun t
his way!” the women would say whenever I asked. “Are you kidding, we prefer it!” the men told me at one especially lovely and friendly dinner party—where men and women sat at separate tables in separate rooms. Like “staying at home” with the kids, sex segregation struck me as a state of affairs quite possibly giving clue to some deeper, meaningful reality but masquerading, like a Save Venice ball reveler, as a simple preference. Like a designer frock hanging in a walk-in closet, one among many, sex segregation, I was told, was a “choice.”
Worldwide, the ethnographic data tells another story: the more stratified and hierarchical the society, and the more sex segregated, the lower the status of women. One had to consider the initially unlikely-seeming possibility that here was no exception. What were the men doing, while the women of my tribe hung together in the various retail and social zenanas around the city—the women’s committees of the boards, the upscale breakfast spot next to the toddler music class, luxe exercise studios and spas—discussing the children and the Parents Association? Usually, they were off with other men, at work, in the public world of still-mostly-men and of commerce. Sometimes they were at the Dad’s Poker Night, a private school fund-raising fixture across the city where no wife dares show up and no questions are asked. And sometimes, the women around me fretted and confided, they suspected the powerful, wealthy men they were married to were enjoying flirtations and dalliances and extramarital affairs—which field biologists refer to, when they happen among animals, as “extra-pair copulations.”
Through the lens of anthropology and primatology, this is mostly an issue not so much of moral failing but of circumstance. Of course, many men of the tribe I was studying chose monogamy. But several factors conspire to allow high-ranking, wealthy men the world over to engage in extra-pair copulations at will, with no consequence, in the hypothetical and in reality. First, following the typical pattern among all the great apes, it is female Homo sapiens who tend to disperse at sexual maturity, losing crucial social support from their families and rendering alliances between (unrelated) females predictably fragile. (Female bonobos, alone among the great apes, have come up with a strategy to improve this situation and build bonds: frequent homosexual encounters with their female troop mates.) It is easy to see how dispersal and relatively weak social bonds make it harder to contemplate up and leaving with your kids than if you lived in a compound (or on a savannah) with your own family of origin, surrounded by welcoming relatives who have your back. “I can’t move back to Long Island with my parents and uproot my kids,” one woman told a mutual friend, explaining what compelled her to stay with her philandering husband until their young kids were off at boarding school.
Female dispersal is not the only thing that gives males more power than their mates. Female Homo sapiens face a fundamental hardship, one unprecedented in the world of nonhuman primates: they are uniquely dependent. We are the only primates that practice intensive food and resource sharing, the only species in which females, in many societies, depend on males for shelter and sustenance. Female birds, Efe mothers, and chimps with offspring never stop searching out and finding food of their own. Indeed, among the !Kung, even women with very young children bring in upward of 85 percent of the group’s daily calories. Agta women of the Philippines hunt while pregnant. Their status as “breadwinners” empowers them—to leave a partnership when they want, to take lovers, to come or go, to have an active and influential voice in their communities. As in the Kalahari Desert and the southeastern Asian rain forest, resources are the bottom line on the Upper East Side, and in Upper East Side marriages. If you don’t bring home tubers and sha roots, if you don’t earn money, your power is diminished in your marriage. And in the world. Period.
The men I was observing and socializing with (often awkwardly—everybody seemed a little out of practice) had more than circumstances in their favor. Like male primates everywhere, the highest-ranking among them have a repertoire of strategies for compelling their females to stay, no matter what. Male hamadryas baboons use eye-flip threats and neck bites to control the females in their harem-like groups and discourage them from mating with others or even straying too far away. Rhesus macaques in Puerto Rico chase and sometimes wound females who attempt to copulate with low-ranking males. And many nonhuman primate males practice infanticide, killing the youngest offspring sired by other males in order to bring a female back into estrus, that she may bear his.
Male primates of Park Avenue are more subtle, certainly, in their tactics. They subjugate their dependent females, ensuring continued unique access to them, regardless of how they themselves are behaving, by controlling female access to resources. Disbursing and withholding luxurious gifts, lavish vacations, allowances for seasonal wardrobe upgrades and “work” on faces and bodies, allowances that pay for women’s charitable work, their ticket to the public world—all are common practices among a certain set. So, several women let me know, are “year-end bonuses” for wives, which may be outlined in a prenup, or may just be given out of “largesse”—or withheld for any reason. It’s an open secret uttered among those who already know, at board meetings or a girls’ night out: “I’m not sure what I can give this year because I don’t know what my charity allowance will be.” “My yearly bonus hasn’t been set [by my husband] so I don’t know whether I’ll take a table at the patron’s or benefactor’s level.” These are the coercive tactics, disguised as cushy and generous enticements, that many high-ranking men use to reinforce their considerable power within their society and their ultimate power within their marriages.
The more I looked, the more I saw the asymmetries of power played out, not just interpersonally between women, but institutionally, socially, and culturally. Financially successful men in Manhattan sit on major boards—of hospitals, universities, and high-profile diseases, boards with yearly give/gets (the combined amount you agree to donate and procure from others) of $150,000 and more. Their wives are frequently on lesser boards, women’s committees, and museums in the outer boroughs with annual give/gets of $5,000 to $20,000. Wealthy and powerful husbands are trustees of prestigious private schools; their wives are “class moms,” tasked with being an official and unremunerated social and communications hub for all the other mothers. While their husbands make millions, privileged women with kids capitulate, with little choice (“I need to be a good volunteer, so my kid gets into a good school,” these moms were always saying), to the “Mommynomics” of the Upper East Side. They give away the skills they honed in college and in graduate school and in their vaunted professions to their children’s schools for free—organizing the galas, editing the newsletters, running the library, staging bake sales. Schools would go under without this caste of privileged mommy volunteers, who provide hundreds of thousands of dollars of free work per year. In a way, a woman’s participation in Mommynomics is a way to feel and be busy and useful. It is also an act of extravagance, a brag—“I used to work, I can, but I don’t need to.” But compare it to what some of their husbands have done and aspire to do—amass enough money not to merely quit work, but to take the “Giving Pledge,” a public avowal billionaires swear to give away half their wealth.
Wives lunch with other women with children at Fred’s and Bergdorf Goodman while their silverback husbands move with ease among their watering holes—a few years ago, at the 21 Club, one could see Henry Kissinger, Roger Ailes, and William Safire, all seated within feet of each other, table hopping and reinforcing their world dominance. The Grill Room might as well be a men’s club, my husband observed one day when the ratio of women to men there was one-to-four (other men told me the ratio was usually one-to-two). These are places business is done and among the tribe I studied, business is mostly done by men.
As I stood in front of Rebecca’s building that night hailing a cab, I recalled the view from her massive windows twenty-six stories above. In the most elite sector of the world’s most elite economy, in a tiny corner of a specific neighborhood, a prolifera
tion of women have left work or have never had to work. From an anthropological perspective, these wealthy women who seem and are so fortunate are also marooned in their sex-segregated world, at their charity breakfasts and luncheons and in their playgroups and on their lesser boards and in their Hamptons homes all summer long. With sex ratios in their favor, with resources under their control, with wives who are dependent on them caring for their even more dependent offspring, privileged men of the Upper East Side can do as they please. Men may speak the language of partnership in the absence of true economic parity in a marriage, and they may act like true partners. But this arrangement is fragile and contingent and women are still dependent, in this instance, on their men—a husband may simply ignore his commitment at any time. Access to your husband’s money might feel good. But the comparative study of human society and our primate relatives shows that such access can’t buy you the power you get by being the one who earns it. And knowing this, or even having an inkling of it, just sensing the disequilibrium, the abyss that separated your version of power from your man’s, could keep a thinking woman up at night.
CHAPTER SIX
A Xanax and a Bloody Mary: Manhattan Moms on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
I AM WEARING an army-green vest with ample pockets and a practical rubber-soled shoe, stealthily making my way across the second floor of Bergdorf Goodman. Laden with lavender shopping bags for camouflage, I am on the hunt for The One amid the Prada and Lanvin. No luck. Adjusting my blowgun, the type biologists use in the field, I ascend the elevator to the jungle of “young and fun!” designers on 5. It is hard to choose from the specimens around me, since so many fit the criteria: remarkably thin, highly stressed, sleep-deprived, economically privileged reproductive Upper East Side females in midlife. But they tend to travel in packs, and are partial to leather leggings and jeans, so my task is complicated, all about finding not just the right animal, but also the right moment. I can wait. This is important. Thus far, I have mostly studied the troop’s group behaviors. Now I need to understand them individually, from the inside out. A blood sample could reveal so much about their physiology and emotions.
Primates of Park Avenue Page 15