My name-dropping fell off after that until I became an editor of a scholarly magazine that had an editorial board with some highly droppable names from the worlds of art, intellect, and scholarship: Lillian Hellman, Jacques Barzun, and Diana Trilling are a representative sample. Later I was made a member of the National Council on the Arts, which caused business in this line to pick up substantially. At quarterly meetings in Washington, I met and spent a fair amount of time with Celeste Holm, Robert Joffrey, Roberta Peters, Martha Graham, Toni Morrison, Robert Stack, Helen Frankenthaler, and other men and women who are, as the English say, rather namey. Some I came to like, some I thought greater bores than are to be found on a howitzer, some I had no feeling about at all. By now, most of those still alive probably have little or no memory of me.
I had a three-year friendship in the late 1970s with Saul Bellow, who during that time won a Nobel Prize. I was once taken to a Chicago Bulls basketball game—in the $350-a-seat front-row section—by Gene Siskel, whose fame came from his television show on the movies with Roger Ebert. Before the game he introduced me to Oprah Winfrey, who seemed, like many another early-middle-aged woman, tired after a tough day at the office. I had coffee and dessert with Dick and Lynne Cheney at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, and Lynne Cheney at another time had a light dinner at my wife’s and my apartment before giving a talk at Northwestern University. I was once the only guest on The Phil Donahue Show, in connection with a book I wrote about divorce, a ninety-minute show that felt just a tad longer than a bad fiscal quarter. In connection with the same book, I was the subject of a most unreal article in People. I’ve dined with five other Nobel Prize winners, three in economics, two in physics. I once had dinner with the television actress Barbara Eden. I went to high school with the film director Philip Kaufman, who remains a friend. One of Monica Lewinsky’s attorneys is another friend of mine. I had a whitefish dedicated to me and Pierre Boulez by a great though too-little-known chef named Ben Moy. I occasionally receive nice notes from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. I’ve never, alas, slept with, or known anyone who slept with, Rita Hayworth.
With that, I believe I have got most of the name-dropping out of my system, except to add that a while ago someone told me that a woman had dropped—of all names—my own with him, which was all right with me. And more recently a friend in publishing told me that his dropping my name with a young woman who liked my writing helped him, as he put it, “to score” with her. Hearing this made me happy. Better to be dropped than to resort to dropping. Still, I feel that my roster of names is, among heavyweights in this line, rather pathetic.
If one wants to see serious name-dropping on display, one can scarcely do better than consult the earlier mentioned Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the memoir of his life among artists and collectors of art by John Richardson, the biographer of Pablo—not to be confused with, shall we say, Bob—Picasso. “Many years later,” Richardson writes, “I told Princess Margaret the story of Picasso’s quest for her hand.” Attending a music festival in Aix-en-Provence, Richardson was longing for sleep, but, “unfortunately, Segovia, most revered of classical guitarists, had the room above mine, and was practicing for a concert later in the week.” When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis attempted to visit Chateau Castille, the house in France that Richardson lived in with his friend Douglas Cooper, Richardson is able to report Cooper’s delight in telling friends: “The Onassis woman tried to invade my house, but I sent her packing.” Now here is prime-quality name-dropping.
The art of name-dropping requires that one match up name to audience, and the practiced name-dropper is likely to feel immense frustration when the match isn’t there. The playwright Alan Bennett, so far as I know no name-dropper, illustrates the point in an anecdote he told about trying to explain to his mother, the wife of a butcher, that the daughter of one of their customers married T. S. Eliot. “The thing is,” Bennett said to his mother, “he won the Nobel Prize.” To which Mrs. Bennett, not overly impressed, replied: “Well, I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
Sports, show business, art, intellect, commerce: different games call for different names. A name that has real bounce in Washington, D.C., may not leave the pavement in Los Angeles. Proust says that in art, fashion, and medicine there must always be new names, by which he meant that even if there aren’t people worthy of being “names,” someone must be chosen to play the role of significant personage in the field. The Anglo-American world is without a great poet just now, but according to Proust’s dictum that cannot be permitted, so a name must be found and of course one has: the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, a quite good poet yet nowhere near the scale of the great poets of even the recent past, among them Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden. Yet someone must be called upon to accept all those grants, awards, prizes, praise. Fashion as much as poetry dictates it, and so the modest Mr. Heaney, lucky man, has been chosen. For now, if one wishes to drop the best of living poetry names, Seamus Heaney’s is probably untoppable.
In one of his journals, Edmund Wilson likens the persistent name-dropping of the writer Paul Horgan to that of rain pattering on a tin roof. To get in a quick drop here of my own, I knew Horgan, chiefly through telephone calls and correspondence, and he seemed a very decent man. Why, then, this robust propensity to name-dropping? My guess is that Edmund Wilson may have done more than a little to bring this out in Paul Horgan. Between the two men, Wilson was the more important writer, the more admired, powerful, influential, with a reputation as something of an intellectual bully. Perhaps Horgan, in Wilson’s company, was trying to make up some ground. He was a friend of Igor Stravinsky, and must have tossed that name into the conversation a fair amount. He’d had dealings with T. S. Eliot, and that, too, might have made for useful ammunition. He must have tossed in whatever else he had at hand, poor fellow. Meanwhile the pattering of all those names on that tin roof proceeded, and one’s heart goes out—at least, mine does—to Paul Horgan in his use of name-dropping as a defensive measure in the attempt to preserve his own standing.
Sometimes one feels the name-dropper is operating on purely snobbish grounds. Janet Malcolm, in an article in The New Yorker, claimed that “[psycho]analysts are the worst name-droppers in the world.” Julian Symons remarked, of the published journal of the critic Cyril Connolly, on “its snobbery, that passion for the right people and the right places that never left him.” One feels something of the same quality in the published diaries of Robert Craft, the junior partner of the firm of Stravinsky & Craft, whose name-dropping, persistent though it is, has the quality of a small boy still slightly astonished to have been invited to the party with so many intellectual and artistic celebrities present.
Big names have been known to drop names on their own. Or, on occasion, to drop people when their own social fortunes have risen. I not long ago read, in a biography of John Sparrow, the warden of All Souls College, that he used to save the letters of the poet Edith Sitwell, though she never saved his. But once he became warden of the prestige-laden All Souls, Miss Sitwell began saving Sparrow’s letters, at which exact point John Sparrow ceased to save hers. The story is one that shows with a fine perfection—and a fearful symmetry thrown in at no extra charge—how the seesaw of social power and status can work.
Many years ago I met a man who ran a drugstore in Chicago who told me that he used to acquire all sorts of pills and other illegal substances for comedians, singers, and jazz musicians who played the city’s Near North Side nightclubs. With great pride he recounted how, when in town, they would gather at his house—the names came burbling out of his mouth like froth from champagne, those of Lenny Bruce and Miles Davis most prominent among them—which was known as “the shooting gallery.” What exactly did he get out of this? The right to claim an intimacy with the talented that his own less than bedazzling charms minus the drugs would never have earned. Sad, I thought, the chronicles of this happy pusher to the stars.
What’s in a name? Quite a bit; enough, in fact
, that being a mere relation to a name is sufficient to unhinge people. Eleanor Coppola, wife of the movie director, in her journal for June 26,1976, notes: “When I am cashing a check or using a credit card, people often ask me if I am related to Francis Ford Coppola. Sometimes I say I am married to him. People change before my very eyes. They start smiling nervously and forget to give me my package or change.” That’s partly what’s in a name; if it is the right name, it can turn almost everyone else into a fluttering, pathetic upward-looking snob.
Sometimes one doesn’t mind name-dropping because it seems so genuine in its enthusiasm. The two brothers John Gregory Dunne and Dominick Dunne are impressive name-droppers, but among the two I much prefer Dominick, the older brother, for his forthrightness at the game. Some while ago John Gregory Dunne, asked by the editors of Esquire to name a woman he admired, chose Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of the Nation and granddaughter of the powerful Hollywood agent Jules Stein. Mr. J. G. Dunne reports first sighting Katrina vanden Heuvel at parties at her grandfather’s, where “one mixed with Gregory Peck and Warren Beatty and Jennifer Jones,” and later, in Manhattan, at parties “where all the nobility of arts and letters regularly congregated” and where one encountered “William Styron and Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and Lillian Hellman and Robert Rauschenberg.” Note, please, those breathy “ands,” and note also the admirable indirection of the name-dropping that allows Mr. Dunne to drop—bombs away!—without making too great a display of his own presence among those glitterati. This is art.
Indirection in name-dropping is not to be confused with the “secondary name-drop,” said to have been perfected by the public relations man Ben Sonnenberg, who claimed to, and probably did, know everyone: “I know the difference between Irving Berlin and Isaiah Berlin, and I know them both,” he said. Asked if he knew George Gershwin, Sonnenberg, in a deft secondary drop, replied, “Know him—I used to play gin rummy with his mother!”
Dominick Dunne plays no games with his name-dropping. He tells you straight out that he is thrilled to have been in the company of the famous. In a recent book, The Way We Lived Then, to which he appended the subtitle Recollections of a Weil-Known Name Dropper, Dunne gives us the background to his passion for what might euphemistically be called exclusive company. The background, as in many another case of American snobbery in the twentieth century, was Dunne’s Irishness.
Dominick Dunne was born in 1925, and his father was a successful heart surgeon in Hartford, Connecticut. “We were the big-deal Irish-Catholic family in a Wasp city,” he writes. “We were venerated by the Catholics of the city but only tolerated by the Protestants.” The situation is reminiscent of that of John O’Hara, whose father was a physician in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, but whose Irishness kept the family outside the first circle of the town’s social life. Though Dr. Dunne sent his children to boarding schools, belonged to the right golf and tennis clubs, and was a powerful moneymaker, none of this cut perfectly square ice cubes with the important families in Hartford. “Irish Catholics didn’t come into social respectability,” Dunne writes, “until after Jack Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier and became the 35th president of the United States.”
Dunne allows that he had “always been star struck,” and tells about having been rendered speechless when spoken to as a boy by the bandleader Eddie Duchin. Of an early meeting with the diarist Anaïs Nin, he writes: “I was also a natural-born star-fucker even then, before I’d even heard the term.” After Williams College and a tour in the army during World War Two, Dunne became a stage manager during the early days, of television. From there he moved to Hollywood, working his way up to become a producer, though along the way he married, wisely and well, a woman whose family had made the wheels for all the railway trains in America before the advent of air travel. Soon after his arrival in Hollywood, fortified by his wife’s money, he was invited to a party given by Humphrey Bogart—a graduate of Andover and, Dunne reports, a bit of a snob himself—at which he met Spencer Tracy, David Niven, and Judy Garland; Frank Sinatra sang, Lana Turner appeared latish, and the then Mrs. Henry Fonda did a knockout imitation of joan Crawford. “I thought to myself,” Dunne writes, “This is how I want to live.”
And for a long while he did. Katharine Hepburn, Kirk Douglas, Claudette Colbert, Jack Benny, Gloria Vanderbilt, Rex Harrison, Mia Farrow, Oscar Levant, Vivien Leigh, Merle Oberon, Steve McQueen, Natalie Wood, Bette Davis, such was the company in which he found himself: the names whir by, usually accompanied by photographs of these people, most of them taken by Dominick Dunne himself. “There was never anything quite like Roddy McDowall’s Sunday brunches in Malibu,” he writes. “Strictly hot dogs and beer, and everyone you ever heard of came.” Dunne and his wife were mentioned in Joyce Haber’s gossip column in the Los Angeles Times, he reports, as “members of the A group in Hollywood society.”
“Beverly Hills was a very glamorous place,” where one found the best furniture, jewelry, and art during “a very glamorous time.” “Once we’d lived in Harold Lloyd’s and Louis B. Mayer’s beach houses,” Dunne writes, “and President Kennedy helicoptered in for Sunday brunch, and Marilyn came and Judy came, and you knew that where you were was the best place to be at that moment in time.” So open is Dunne’s exultation in the surroundings in which he has landed himself that one feels he has stepped beyond and above mere snobbery into very heaven itself. A rare bird, Dominick Dunne, the happy snob.
Dunne comes across as a heterosexual Truman Capote, whom he much admired, but without the guile. But even happy snobs cannot seem to stand the heights they have long sought; they grow dizzy and totter and eventually fall. Like Capote, Dunne, too, would crash. One night, at a fashionable restaurant of the day called The Daisy, Frank Sinatra, who viewed Dunne as a social climber who had attained a position he didn’t deserve, paid the captain of waiters $50 to punch him in the face—an act of true malevolence. (“I’m so sorry, Mr. Dunne,” the waiter whispered before letting fly. “Mr. Sinatra made me do it.”)
This marked the beginning of the end for Dunne. His drinking, already well under way, picked up; later he would do a fair quantity of cocaine. His wife eventually left him, and then died an early death from cancer. (He would also be tested by the death, through murder, of his daughter.) Dunne brought himself back and returned to reality, but it took real character to do so. An extreme case, Dominick Dunne’s, of name-dropping and social climbing, but one with what I suppose must be thought a (relatively) happy ending. While retaining his fascination with glamour, he shook his utter dependence on it.
Most of us don’t turn a nice little knack for name-dropping into a way of life, the way the young Dominick Dunne did. But few among us can resist the casual drop, which doesn’t always have to be of a name. One can drop an address (Kensington in London), a town (Princeton, Jackson Hole), a restaurant (Ducasse, Le Cirque), or a hotel (George V in Paris, Brown’s in London). I sat a dinner some while ago at which a woman couldn’t seem to complete a sentence without a good school in it: “My son-in-law, whom my daughter met at Oxford . . . my other daughter, who began at Princeton, the same year my son started his first year at the Yale Medical School . . .” (“Daddy,” I wanted to say to her, “was at Leavenworth.”) Name-dropping of this kind is the reverse of guilt by association; it is glory and glamour by association, though the glory and glamour can scarcely be thinner.
Name-dropping is also a form of social climbing—social climbing on the cheap. It’s social climbing because it suggests to people on whom one uses it that you are in a higher, more exciting world than you probably really are; and it’s on the cheap because, unlike a serious social climber, one hasn’t had to pay out much in the way of effort to get to the sacred city suggested by one’s easy dropping of names that have the magic of fame, achievement, or great wealth attached to them—the exclusive city on the hill inhabited by only the best people. If the upward-looking snob exists in a state of nearly perpetual envy, through the device of name-dropping he hopes to garner, a
t least a little, the pleasure of being envied.
Still, one likes to think that there is benign name-dropping—one’s own, naturally. Sometimes famous people really are among one’s friends or acquaintances and say or do things worth reporting to other friends. Sometimes, too, there are stories in which the famous are wonderfully foolish, and these stories seem especially worth recounting, in the spirit of “See? The famous are as (cheap, spiteful, unsophisticated, peevish) as you and I.”
I have been known to begin a story by warning the people I am about to tell it to that it contains a fairly heavy dose of name-dropping. Yet if the names are good, even with my mild disclaimer, I suppose I am reaping some of the easy rewards of name-dropping. Perhaps the only check on this minor snobbish vice is to ask oneself, Would I tell this story anyway, even if it didn’t involve an excellent name, which, through this flimsy association, makes me look good? Am I, in other words, using the fame of others for my own aggrandizement? Not always an easy question to answer.
Perhaps the only way out of the silly game is for oneself to have a name of such thumping grand distinction that, after dropping it upon introduction, none other need be mentioned and everyone can settle down to an evening’s enjoyable conversation, name-free and beyond all this fiddle.
20
The Celebrity Iceberg
NAME-DROPPING is closely and naturally connected to celebrity. And celebrity is crucial to snobbery in its new, post-Wasp-dominated American setting. Certainly it is if I am even roughly correct in the following one-sentence history of social power in the United States: It used to be who you were, then it was what you did, then it was what you had, then it was whom you knew—and now it’s beginning to be how many people know you.
Snobbery Page 20