True Prep
Page 9
• Museum of the City of New York Director’s Council Winter Ball
March
• Associates Committee of the Society of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Annual Bunny Hop
• Private School Fundraisers
April
• Spring Gala, the New York City Ballet
May
• The Frederick Law Olmstead in Central Park Luncheon—“The Hat Lunch” held at the Conservancy Garden (big hats prevail; attendance is 85 percent female)
• The Frick Museum May Dance (“Free with membership, so the perfect preppy party.”)
• Memorial Sloan Kettering Spring Ball
June
• New York Botanical Garden Ball
• Museum of Modern Art Party in the Garden
September
• New Yorkers for Children Gala
• Metropolitan Opera Opening Night Gala
November
• Opening night of the New York City Ballet
• Opening night of American Ballet Theater
December
• New York Botanical Garden Winter Wonderland Ball (“Junior event. Husbands complain bitterly about the trip up and back.”)
PALM BEACH
Season: February–May, except for the Coconuts New Year’s Eve dance at the Flagler Museum.
February
• The Flagler Museum’s Whitehall Society—Dancing After Dark. Younger Event in Palm Beach (“a relative term here”)
March
• Boys & Girls Clubs of Palm Beach County— Barefoot on the Beach
• Young Friends of the Historical Society of Palm Beach—Evening on Antique Row
April
• The Garden Club Small Flower Show
May
• The Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach’s May Garden Party
PHILADELPHIA
January
• The Academy of Music Anniversary Concert and Ball, Philadelphia Orchestra
March
• The Philadelphia Flower Show
May/June
• The Bryn Mawr Hospital’s Devon Horse Show and Country Fair
June
• Zoobilee, Philadelphia Zoo
November
• Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show, Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Your child’s prep-school benefits
SAN FRANCISCO
January
• The Benefactor Dinner, San Francisco Ballet (“You need to be a ‘great Benefactor’ in order to sit in the City Hall Rotunda for the pre-dinner. Don’t go if you can only afford the side courts.”)
April
• Director’s Circle Dinner, SFMoMA
• Zoo-fest, SF Zoo
August
• Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s annual dinner for the Speaker’s Cabinet is $30,000 a couple; held at Ann Getty’s house
• Save the Lake benefit luncheon in Tahoe; fashion show by Oscar de la Renta
September
• Patrons’ Dinner, San Francisco Symphony Opening Night Gala—sit in the patrons’ tents.
• Opera Ball, San Francisco Opera—season opening, sit in patrons’ tents
October
• Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival—founded and fully funded by billionaire banker Warren Hellman, so it is not a fund-raiser; open to the public; gets about 750,000 people; must have VIP friends and family passes
• Enterprise, a youth job-training center’s annual fall antiques show (“Buy the top ticket, which gets you in a couple of hours before the climbers. A biggie.”)
November
• San Francisco Free Clinic—the Luncheon (“especially important for Nancy Pelosi to come by your table to say hi”)
• Golden Gate National Park
• Your children’s independent school’s dinner auction
The fellows known as Larry and Sergey (pictured) started Google while graduate students at Stanford; its original address was google@stanford.edu. A mathematician and computer scientist, Larry had an idea (for which he recruited his friend Sergey) to combine all Web pages into one digital library that was based on numbers of views per page and algorithms, and even in its simplest closest-to-English I Can Read–level explanation, the basic history of the formulas that made the company is somewhat unintelligible to the art and English majors behind True Prep.
This much we know. The company was founded on September 7, 1998. By August 19, 2004, the date of the company’s initial public offering, 900 millionaires were born, some worth multimillions on paper. The stock opened at $85 a share, closed at $100 that day, and has slid between $283 and $630 per share in 2010.
Silicon Valley has long been familiar with the haphazardly or geeky rich. (Indeed, they are indigenous to the region, with Apple, Google, Yahoo!, eBay, etc., all local petri dishes.) What makes these millionaires different from the garden variety of American millionaires (bankers, CEOs, musicians, ne’er-do-wells) is that you cannot look at them and know they have money.
Most pictures of Larry and Sergey are of men in T-shirts and baggy jeans. Most pictures of Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and their ilk are of guys in open-necked sports shirts and jeans (or black turtlenecks, in Jobs’s instance). If their images weren’t so well disseminated, you might think they were still beer-drinking, animation-loving, Avatar-obsessed fraternity boys. They all have jets and backpacks. They wear Tevas. They drive expensive hybrids with incredible stereo systems. When there are wives, they are mostly fresh-faced. Some, like the inventor of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg (see the Timeline), graduated from Exeter. (He launched Facebook as a kind of techy prank for his friends at Harvard. True.) Mostly, though, this cohort (one of their words) is not preppy, but they do resemble preppies in a significant way.
According to The New York Times, the motivation to go to work in the high- tech world isn’t filthy lucre. “ ‘It isn’t considered “Googley” to check the stock price,’ said an engineer, using the Google jargon for what is acceptable in the company’s culture. ‘As a result, there is a bold insistence, at least on the surface, that the stock price does not matter,’ said the engineer, who did not want to be named because it is considered unseemly to discuss the price.”
If you would like to know if you are in the presence of engineery wealth, we suggest you take your mountain bike to northern California. While in Palo Alto or Sausalito, Woodside or San Raphael, step inside a Peet’s Coffee or a Whole Foods and look at the people who shop while wearing their bike helmets and their iPhones. If they speak in math.
Once upon a time, nice people did not speak of money. Daddy went to an office. No one really had a clue what he did there. He sold things. He bought things. He built things. He traded things. He went out to lunch. The three times we met his secretary, Rosemary, she was very nice to us, and let us use the stapler and copy machine as much as we liked.
Was there a lot of money? Who knew? There was enough. We went on vacations. There was always some staff working in the house. Still, we were often cautioned to save our allowance and not spend it all on some dumb thing, like ice cream from the truck on the way home from school.
Did we have a driver? No. A plane? No! Who ever heard of a thing like that? Did Mummy have a stylist, a nutritionist, and a personal shopper? No she did not. She had her own style and she went to the hairdresser pretty frequently and got a new mink stole every few years but no one talked about it. Life was pleasant and private. Nannies did not come on vacation with the family, since the point was spending time as a family. Personal trainers and even tutors weren’t in evidence then . . . since they weren’t invented, no one needed them yet.
Then Ronald Reagan became president while Dynasty, Dallas, and Falcon Crest were hits on TV. Everyone adored John Forsythe as the limousine-taking, tuxedo-wearing, mansion-dwelling oil tycoon Blake Carrington. Rich was fun! Yay money! It didn’t help things that this was the exact moment that Donald Trump announced
himself with his brass, and crystal and marble structures all T’d out till kingdom come.
What happened? Suddenly it wasn’t enough to drink Seagram’s; you had to drink Ketel One or Stoli. You couldn’t drink Moët & Chandon champagne; it had to deplete bottles of Cristal. Brand names were used in polite company. And smart people like you joined in because you wanted to fall in step. Your car wasn’t in the shop; your Mercedes was getting fixed. You didn’t wear shoes; you wore Manolos. Sex and the City made it safe to be a profligate clotheshorse, and worse, a label slave. (In the show, women—whom we were supposed to believe had accomplishments and careers of importance—could weep with joy for certain designer handbags. Whole plots revolved around expensive accessories.) That certainly didn’t help. You wanted everyone to know you were flying out of Teterboro, so they knew you had a G5 of your very own (or a fractional ownership, but still . . . ). And houses! Whoa! Was it in Greenwich that The New York Times said, without a Dumpster parked in front of your house, you felt like a have-not? No extensive renovations for you? No screening room, sauna, or chapel in your McMansion? Well, certainly a room for the masseuse who comes weekly. America had known its share of giant estates and white elephants. Asheville, Hearst Castle, Mar-a-Lago, Pocantico—all from a more gracious if still ostentatious time. But now there are aerial views of houses that resemble full campuses and resorts. For a family of three! Sixteen thousand square feet of indoor space. An extra garage for the extra cars that are never driven. Full-sized basketball courts. Indoor and outdoor pools. Upstairs kitchens, so no one has to go downstairs if they want a snack.
In a word, it was gross.
Currently, during the extended, um, “market correction,” people with money have tried to tone down their materialism. Mrs. Richard Fuld, wife of the Lehman Brothers rascal, shopped over Christmas 2009 with plain brown shopping bags so people wouldn’t see her expensive brands. Others, more frugal, have begun to “shop in their closets,” take “staycations,” and are even depilating at home for the first time.
But if you are not suffering with the markets, follow the lead of Bill and Melinda Gates, or the Tisch family, and start your foundation. Being philanthropic is 2010’s answer to Dumpsters on the front lawn and enormous gourmet kitchens.
Buy some land and quietly donate it to the National Parks. Or endow a sixth-grade class in the “I Have A Dream” project, and pay for tutors for underprivileged kids until they graduate from high school. Or give money to The Mount, Edith Wharton’s Berkshire home, which could use your donations.
Whatever you do, whatever you decide, please don’t announce that you want to “give back in the time I have left.” That’s cliché.
And don’t hire Rod Stewart, Michael Bolton, Elton John, or Celine Dion to entertain at your 50th birthday. It’s been done.
It appears that the first naming opportunity in North America occurred on May 14, 1607, when English settlers organized themselves as the residents of the Jamestown Settlement Colony, in what became Virginia. King James I put the James in Jamestown, as well as in the James River.
Since then, practically anything can be named: a museum, a library, a hospital, a college, a road, a field house, a museum wing, a dormitory, a lounge, a seat at the symphony, an endowed chair, or, at Brown University, for the sum of $100,000, “name a lane in the new swimming pool.” Add $700,000 to your gift and you can name the lecture hall in Rhode Island Hall after whomever or whatever you like.
Yale University, née Yale College, got its name from one Elihu Yale, in 1718. According to the university’s official history, Mr. Yale, a Welshman, had “donated the proceeds from the sale of nine bales of goods together with 417 books and a portrait of King George I.” His sons probably had no trouble gaining admission into the school in New Haven.
Harvard University’s main library, the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, was given to the university by his mummy, Eleanor Elkins Widener, in her son’s memory. Harry, who graduated in 1907, died on the Titanic. Before his voyage, he would talk about his plan to donate his own books to Harvard when the university built a bigger, better library than the one in the basement in Gore Hall that was used during his tenure there. Widener opened in 1915, with more than fifty miles of shelves. It has been expanded, modernized, renovated, and improved several times since then, and is still the flagship library of all Harvard.
Payne Whitney, after whom the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic and the Yale University gym are named, was in fact Mr. William Payne Whitney, a Groton and Yale graduate (and a Bonesman). It is said he inherited almost $65 million from his uncle alone (about $600+ million today). In 1923 he donated $12 million to the New York Public Library (the equivalent of $153,336,568.05 in 2010 dollars), and at his death in 1927, $20 million to New York Hospital ($244,010,169.49 in 2010), specifically for its psychiatric facility, which grew to be one of the most important in this country. There was a great deal of interest in why Mr. Whitney would associate his name in perpetuity to a “mental hospital,” the same institution which inspired books recommended in our Master Reading List (The Group and My First Cousin Once Removed).
Philanthropist and statesman Andrew W. Mellon wanted to help establish a major art museum in Washington, which he thought our capital needed. In 1930 and 1931, Mellon bought twenty-one paintings from Leningrad’s Hermitage Museum, including works by Rembrandt, Raphael, and van Eyck for more than $6.6 million (or $87,184,378.88 today). He was prepared to donate his collection to what he hoped would become the National Gallery. President Franklin D. Roosevelt advised his Congress to accept the gift, and so it did on March 24, 1937, as part of the Smithsonian Institution. Mellon commissioned John Russell Pope to design the building along the Mall near Capitol Hill. Andrew Mellon died less than three months after construction began. John Pope died less than twenty-four hours later. When the National Gallery was dedicated in 1941, Mellon’s son Paul (see Bunny Mellon) gave the building and his family’s exceptional art collection to the United States.
Not all donations are preppy. In 1718, Mr. Yale might have been rewarded without asking for the college to bear his name. (And it goes without saying that Eli is a nickname for Yalies.) But these days modesty has left the building (along with Elvis).
When Stephen A. Schwarzman, a Yale graduate, pledged $100 million to the New York Public Library in 2008, negotiations on signage were extensive. New York City has had two major libraries since the nineteenth century. In 1849, the Astor Library was opened as a reference library with a $400,000 bequest ($11,111,111 today) from John Jacob Astor, who was, at his death the year before, “the wealthiest man in America.” It was located on Astor Place, in downtown Manhattan. The Lenox Library was given to New York by James Lenox in the space that became the Frick Mansion on East 71st Street. It was filled with rare books, including the first Gutenberg Bible on this continent. By 1886, former governor Samuel J. Tilden had donated $2.4 million ($57 million currently) to establish a library and reading room for the city.
In 1895, the powers-that-be agreed to combine the Astor and Lenox collections with the Tilden money to form the New York Public Library. Its location on Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd streets, where it has presided ever since, was then a reservoir. Its cornerstone was laid in 1902. The library was dedicated by President Taft in May of 1911, and the very next day, when it was finally opened to the public, between 30,000 and 50,000 visitors arrived (in 2010 population, that would be between 30,000 and 50,000 people).
Now the Main Library—with all of its history and Beaux-Arts splendor—is part of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.
of the secondary-school population board, where they live with their friends and their English teachers, their choral directors and their soccer coaches. In fact, the number is closer to two-tenths of 1 percent. There are approximately 17 million high-school students in the United States, and 35,000 of them are enrolled in college preparatory boarding schools.
We admit we got a leg up, maybe two legs up, when we wer
e sent by our parents to prep school. But for the record, it is not just the lifelong ability to be able to say, “While I was at Farmington” or “At Brooks, we …” or “The art collection was better at Andover than it was at …”
It is, when all is said and done, an excellent place to grow. To be surrounded by the most curious, ambitious, and creative young minds. To be encouraged by dedicated teachers, who are as inspired as they are inspiring.
Not to mention that graduation from one of these elite schools helps pave the way towards an elite college or university for you. You really can’t beat that. Especially at today’s prices (no matter when today is).
You are not a prisoner of your history. We hate to dispute all-time prep great F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said, “There are no second acts in American lives,” but he never got to live through the TMZ era. If Tom DeLay can compete on Dancing with the Stars, if Mario Lopez can interview the president, then you can have a second or even a third act. You can reinvent yourself at any point along your travels.
You can decide you want to be a preppy now, right this moment (see Manifesto). Or you can be one of the few who attend private school and don’t become affected by its long reach. You can have that great education but deny your elite past.
For a while.
Then one day, it will come out. It might be the quote from Cotton Mather you didn’t know you remembered. Or the way your cuffs hang just so. Or that while wearing a wrist full of leather thong bracelets, and even with a tiny tattoo on your wrist (naughty!), you’ll be able to tie a reef knot with your eyes closed.
It’ll come out in a trickle at first, but within no time at all, it could become a flood. And by the time you have children yourself, you will be hoping that favoritism to legacies is still the modus operandi at your alma mater.
Thirty years ago, some boarding schools resembled prisons. Now prisons are aiming to emulate boarding schools. You had a strict dress code, had to spend most every weekend on campus, and if you left, it was only because one of your parents picked you up. Your room had to pass daily inspection. You could go downstairs to the common room of your dorm to watch Miami Vice with the other girls or boys, but, of course, no dorms were coed, and most schools were not coed.