High life
Rich, not rare
Taki
Oddly enough Sigmund Freud was among the more recent soi-disant wise men to have made the following ridiculous claim: happiness, the Viennese genius said, is the adult fulfilment of a childhood dream; children do not dream of money; ergo money does not buy happiness. As usual, Freud was wrong. The truly rich never pay for anything, as somebody else is always happy to do that chore. And as everyone knows the super rich never carry money with them. I once witnessed a scene I thought impossible. I saw the most parsimonious man I know, a certain Tommy Ford from Detroit (no connection with the better Fords), actually pick up the tab for Henry Ford II in the bar of the Hotel de Faris in Monte Carlo. The barman did not know Mr Ford II. And the deuce did not have money on him. Tommy Ford, who has been known to walk up mountains when Skiing rather than pay for the ski lift, was only too happy to oblige. Nor are the truly rich ever lonely, even when widowed. In the case of truly rich women, losing a husband usually means picking up a European title. There are thousands of noble prospective bridegrooms waiting in the wings. When a truly rich man is widowed, well, the perfect example is the case of William Paley. The infighting among the ladies over his soonto-be octagenarian body has managed to debase romantic love to the level of some of his CBS programmes. The truly rich never look behind them when they open a door and drop their coat. There is always somebody there to catch it. Equally, they never look behind them when they sit down at the dinner table. There is always a flunkey to push a chair beneath the gilded buttocks. If the merely rich were to attempt passing as truly rich by not looking behind them they would wind up with compression of the coccyx.
The truly rich do not have to chew. As Gloria Guinness once remarked, all one should eat is pate, caviar, soufflé and chocolate mousse. (But don't worry about their jaws shrivelling from under-development. Backbiting is good practice and nobody does it better than the truly rich). They always carry two ounces of cocaine; peasants carry two grams. One famous Italian producer enjoys pointing to his nose in impressionable female company. 'One million dollars,' he says pointing at one nostril. Then he points at the other. 'One million dollars,' he repeats complacently. The behaviour of the truly rich has no parallels with that of the merely rich. An aged, but accurate story, has the late Duke of'Marlborough descending the stairway of a country-house one morning, waving his toothbrush in the air, and complaining that 'The damn thing doesn't foam.' It happened that The Duke's manservant had recently died and the new one was unaware of the fact that toothpaste had to be smeared on the brush before his grace used it.
The merely rich buy art: the truly rich buy artists. The truly rich are not bothered by things like guilt or introspection. Their insouciance borders on inhumanity. There is a perhaps apocryphal but indicative story of this insouciance. During a pheasant shoot at a truly rich estate during the heyday of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the host was informed by a servant that one of the guests had shot a pheasant on the ground. 'What?', roared the host with indignation at this unheard-of behaviour. 'Yes, sir' repeated the servant, 'The gentleman shot a peasant.' 'Oh, is that all, a peasant,' answered a relieved host, and the shoot went on.
Of course there is a catch to the unending happiness of the truly rich. As Logan Pearsall Smith pointed out, they have to live with the other rich and their families. And that is the true unhappiness that money can buy.
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