Before we had our own house in East Hampton, my wife Debbie and I would often stay as houseguests at the Hamptons home of our good friends. Our friends’ house, unassuming from the outside, tasteful and comfortable on the inside, overlooked the beach and the ocean.
Toward the end of one long summer weekend, Debbie and I and our friends were lounging on the deck. I don’t recall the time of day or how brisk the ocean breeze was or the strength and slant of the sun. Likely, the four of us were reading or just sitting with our own thoughts and listening to the sounds of the surf and seabirds.
Then the billionaire drove up uninvited to the house. He called out the names of our friends and followed their answering voices onto the deck.
Debbie and I had encountered this man before, but only through our friends who were as wealthy as one could wish to be but not quite as wealthy as the billionaire
The billionaire had once told me with pride that he never read books because that was a waste of his time. I also remember during the crash of 2008, when he was, briefly perhaps, a sub-billionaire, he told a small group of us that he’d provided enough for his children and grandchildren so that no matter what happened next, they’d be taken care of.
When he arrived that day on the deck, the billionaire seemed surprised to see my wife and me. He had a habit of thrusting his large bald head forward, the head of a bull. Now he thrust it toward my wife and me.
He said, “There they are, the moochers.”
Astonishment. Silence. Silence of the creeping, crawling kind. “Moochers” is such an ugly word.
It was a sucker punch of rudeness. At the time I had no idea why the billionaire had chosen to insult us. True, Debbie and I were guests of our friends a few times each summer. But we and our friends had established a relaxed rhythm of being together and nothing had gone amiss among the four of us.
The billionaire left just as abruptly as he’d arrived. Our friends apologized to us for his behavior. They were visibly upset. We were all embarrassed. Not for ourselves but for the billionaire.
Hamptons houseguests
It’s a key part of the social fabric of the Hamptons to have houseguests. Most people build or buy their houses hoping they will have many visits from their friends and families. It’s an opportunity to spend time with people you love and like in a beautiful place. And the pleasure you provide to your guests adds to your own pleasure.
As a host, your goal is to make your guests feel that your home is their home. That they are free to come and go as they please so that time spent together is a mutual choice rather than an obligation. You also are protective of your guests, wanting to prevent any nastiness or harm to interfere with their pleasure.
As a guest, you don’t want your hosts to feel forced to entertain you or that your presence prevents them from doing what they want. The social cues are subtle and you can sense quickly when things are going smoothly or not.
Double-barreled insult
When the billionaire aimed his cry of “moochers” at us, he fired off a double-barreled insult.
By calling us moochers, he’d implied that our friends were oblivious to our “mooching,” that we were taking them for “suckers,” another word I suspect featured prominently in the billionaire’s vocabulary. And in his zero-sum worldview of winners and losers, where everything could be reduced to prices and money.
Brashness and a lack of a filter were characteristic features of this billionaire, an alpha male who moved with cocksure confidence through his world of fawners and flatterers.
Yet even taking into account the billionaire’s lack of politesse or a filter, the insult of moochers was still egregious by any social standards. It’s still fresh in my mind after all these years.
The mystery of what had motivated him to say such a thing made us wonder if we were missing something about our behavior. Maybe there was some truth to what the billionaire had called us. Because why else would he have said it.
The billionaire felt disrespected
It wasn’t until many days later that I figured out why the billionaire had insulted us.
Earlier that same weekend, on a night before our lovely time on the deck was ruined, our host friends had thrown a party. One of their guests was a well-known actor who I’d gotten to know at other events. This actor loved to read, and when he and I discovered that we shared a love of Proust, we became engrossed in a discussion of our favorite characters and favorite scenes.
A love of Proust is not so rare within communities of readers but it is quite rare to discover a fellow “Proustian” at a Hamptons cocktail party. The more the world of Proust expanded for the actor and me, the more the world of the party contracted, as we went back and forth, trading our favorite bits.
In the midst of our discussion, the billionaire arrived at the party and made a beeline to the actor.
I believe the billionaire felt a kinship of fame with the actor and thought the two of them should bond in a fellowship of fame as the two best-known people at the party. He greeted the actor heartily and ignored me. Everything about the billionaire’s body language indicated that he expected to displace me as the actor’s conversational partner.
Instead, the actor gave the billionaire a perfunctory “hello,” and he and I went right back to discussing Charles Swann, Odette, the Vedurins, and the other Proustian characters we were having fun gossiping about.
The billionaire stayed in place for a few beats, seeing if he could jump into our conversation. But he couldn’t. He had no idea what we were talking about. I’m not sure he was even aware that we were talking about fictional characters rather than real people.
As noted above, the billionaire had once told me, with pride, that he didn’t read books, because doing so was a waste of his time.
It was in recalling this scene at the party, itself delightfully Proustian, that I understood why the billionaire had called us moochers later that weekend. It was his way of getting even with me. At the party the actor and I, ensconced in our world of Proust, had ignored him. Listening to our literary discussion, a language he neither understood nor had any interest in, the billionaire had found himself lost, irrelevant, and ignored, a state of being that must have been as abhorrent to him as it was rare. He must have been furious.
Different sources of capital
Financial capital may be paramount but not singular. As well, there is social capital and intellectual capital.
By social capital I mean manners, wit, conversational ability, and other non-material ways of making people want to spend time with you. However, there’s a lot of room for ruin in a billionaire’s social capital. Most people will put up with quite a lot of rudeness and boorish behavior if it benefits their financial standing and network.
As for intellectual capital, I’d define it as fluency with the higher planes of knowledge, whether art or history or literature or philosophy. A billionaire who dismisses books as a waste of time won’t have intellectual capital. And when he’s confronted with this lack, when he encounters people who clearly relish their intellectual capital, an unfamiliar feeling might strike him. He might feel weak and ridiculous.
“A man in my position can’t afford to be made to look ridiculous.”
Iconic scene from The Godfather
David, you have briefly referenced both of these incidents in the past, but I am glad to have the full account.
Just to pull an Emily Post on you, it is regarded as quite rude to get into a deep discussion à deux that effectively excludes the rest of the company. It turns a pleasure shared by all into an excluded majority that cannot enjoy the intense pleasure of the two who have paired off.
I say this in full knowledge of the fact that I would certainly do this myself if I ran into a kindred spirit at a party.
Of course, your understanding of the event is also entirely correct. The billionaire wanted to dominate the party by creating his own his own dyad of the two most famous people at the party, but you preempted and frustrated his maneuver.
Any number of asshats could be the billionaire. I truly believe that in order to amass that much wealth you must be lacking humanity.