Old Money Vs. New Money

Dear Aunt Beatrice,

You will be pleased to know I met your old friend and my new neighbor, Mrs. Muckety, although I am afraid I did not escort her to lunch at her club, as you suggested, but took her to mine, where she immediately identified her entrée as the product of a chef my club had poached from hers. She didn’t soften again until the crème brûlée, but then we had a heartfelt talk about the ways in which she and her Old Money compatriots are alarmed by the way New Money is comporting itself in the Gulfshore. She is somewhat specifically alarmed about the bowling alley my family is including in our home renovation. I was very moved by her story and the discreet way she’s given so much back to my new hometown. When I told her that I wanted to understand the differences between our two cultures, so that we can bridge the gap, she suggested I ask you, as it was not that long ago that you were New Money yourself.

Love, Charles

P.S. I remember that you thought the bowling alley was a bad idea, too, but I already ordered the pin setter.

Dear Nephew Charles,

While I am happy to share all I know, you have caught me in a mood today, as the landscaper just delivered a death sentence to one of your grandmother’s lilacs. About Mrs. Muckety’s admirable discretion: Your guilelessness is such a pronounced trait in the men of our family that it surely must serve some evolutionary purpose. When you yawned your way through that chamber concert last month (everything gets back to me, Charles), didn’t you notice that you were fidgeting in the seats of Muckety-Muck Hall? And when you broke your ankle last spring at tennis, you must remember being wheeled past the hospital’s Muckety-Muck Wing?

Mrs. Muckety has always made the common mistake of assuming that all new arrivals are also New Money, but it is true that being received into the Gulfshore’s Old Money circles took time. I was fortunate to fall under the tutelage of our late friend, Mrs. Quiet Wealth, and so was accepted within the decade. These days I am told ladies expect big donations and opulent parties to secure their social standing within a season. What a world, what a world, as Mrs. Muckety might say.

It is true that the old crowd seemed less eager to put their names on things here, but you might read them on edifices across the Midwest. Mrs. Muckety’s father knew his son’s antics were more easily excused if his university bore a building or two with his surname. You and your friends are more likely to be raising younger children, and so there are plaques honoring you at our local private schools for the same reason, although I hope none of them are the holy terrors Mrs. Muckety’s brother was.

Then, too, charities didn’t solicit these "naming opportunities" so boldly, with an itemized list of what it costs to have a tower here, or a fountain there, almost like a dim sum menu. I can’t blame you for thinking that opening your checkbook is an instant path to respectability, and I can’t blame you for wanting to avoid tiptoeing around the other patrons’ feelings about whether you are giving enough to be so honored. It’s all business. But before you chisel our proud family name on a building, learn about the people who cared enough to create and maintain the institution behind it, and make it a point to thank their descendants. They are your neighbors, and they have long memories.

It’s true that your crowd’s extravagant galas and auctions have breathed new life into our charities. We might have held our quiet luncheons and dinner dances forever, looking up one day to see there was no one under 80 at the table. But you may sometimes sense that not everyone is oohing and ahing when you bid more for a box of cigars or a case of wine than it costs to put a child through college. It was once understood that large donations were made quietly, and that auctions were good-natured (really) romps where you might bid a little extra than you meant to for something useless you had to have. Now these ladies go home empty-handed. It rankles, and it may make them a little more critical than they have to be about your big spending in general. What I am saying, Charles, is that Mrs. Patron will not begrudge you and friends your mega-mansion, so long as you let her win that ugly candelabra.

As for your "renovation," Charles, call it what it is—a teardown. You weren’t raised to speak out of both sides of your mouth, but then I have never known you to bowl, either, so perhaps you are full of mysteries. Mrs. Muckety can be expected to be upset. She has had 40 years to enjoy the view of the bougainvillea winding around the back courtyard of a home the same size as her own. Now she has until the end of her days to stare at a three-story, Mediterranean behemoth, one that blocks her afternoon sunlight, with the added anguish of knowing that somewhere within those walls, children are bowling.

You must understand how attached we get to things staying the same, and of course they never have. Both Mrs. Muckety and the former owner of your home tore down small cottages to build their domiciles, and I suspect the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth was the same. Those cottages, and the quiet homes along the river north of you, were built by enterprising men who had materials delivered by boat or railcar or even donkey, in hopes of making the area a successful resort. (And how.) Had their generation, or Mrs. Muckety’s, found it as easy as you to build their own Taj Mahals, most would have.

This is why I, for one, resist faulting your group for conspicuous consumption. You will be told that we enjoyed dressing down, as though the shopping gene, carried down from Eve, had skipped this particular group of unrelated women. In truth, there were fewer places to spend our money. Our cry against wearing the same gown to every ball or the same set of pearls every day summoned boutiques and jewelers and shopkeepers, many from our own small towns. That opened the door for the splashy names your crowd can’t live without. (I hear that even Mrs. Muckety has replaced her one good handbag with an Hermès.) Just as the women’s liberation movement owed its thanks to the suffragettes, so did our band make it possible for your wife to spend $8,500 on a gown. (I understand that’s a reasonable price for a superior design, but given how expensive the fabric also was, it’s a good thing there was so little of it.)

Thanks to a web of trusts and shelters, Old Money moves in ways more mysterious than the Lord’s. And while we have clergymen to help us interpret the actions of a Higher Power, those who manage inherited wealth must remain tight-lipped about the miracles they perform. It isn’t ours to know—and it’s rude to speculate—whether Mrs. Landed Gentry is sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars or turning out lights to reduce the electric bill.

You enjoy this privacy with the nest egg my father left you, although I understand it is but pennies compared to the riches you have earned with your little computer. That figure, Charles, is available to anyone, including your neighbors, who can type your name into a Web site and call up the exact amount you netted on the sale of your last company. (I must say, Charles, that even Mrs. M. is impressed.)

It was easier once to keep your money quiet—a person settled here, declared himself just plain folks, and slowly spread the story of an ancestor clever enough to have invented some radio part or chemical whose endless profitability left him at leisure. This was a tale floated sometimes even by those with fresh fortunes, who made their fathers and grandfathers the posthumous founders of their businesses. You see, Charles, New Money has always been with us, but they tried hard to pass as Old.

That is why it is so puzzling to me that you will insist on downplaying your own roots. I know that because you are still working, you want people to believe you are a little hungrier than might be indicated by your Ivy League M.B.A. or our ancestral home. But be careful. I knew a young financier with a good name who was so intent on being "self-made" that it was easy for his rivals to dismiss him as a rube unfit to handle money. Even people who had known his family for generations began to think of him as a poor relation, while his dear mother sat on her vast estate up North, powerless to help.

Control the message you send about your money, or give rise to talk. When Mr. Big first joined our set, he was so evasive about the source and depth of his fortune that there was no choice but to listen to whispered rumors that he was an arms dealer or a Mafioso. The truth, which will always emerge, is that he entered a booming field as a poor young man and emerged 30 years later as a wealthy one. Our speculation gave him an air of mystery all those years at the grindstone had denied him.

Contrast him with our friend Mr. Robber Baron. We knew he was at the center of a growing financial scandal, but the passionate defense he wove for us was long and complicated and rich with details. So complicated, actually, that we didn’t understand a word of it, except that we weren’t to worry about all of those poor widows and orphans, and that the truth would reveal him to be the good-hearted fellow we knew he was. We dined happily with him up to the day he donned pinstripes for the federal penitentiary. He still writes me the most amusing letters from prison. That man, Charles, knew the value of keeping a story straight.

Understand if an Old Money acquaintance holds his checkbook a little tightly around you at first. Many silver-tongued devils have ridden into town to separate Old Money from its wealth, and those who are able to present themselves as honest, forthright men have sold many who might have known better on the most outrageous investment schemes. The duped are not only poorer but horrified at being revealed as unsatisfied with their current fortunes, particularly if they have made a point of turning a nose at New Money’s constant enterprise.

Although I deplore your phrase "bridge the gap," perhaps this secret greed provides the truest link between the Haves and the Have-Had-Longers. After all, Charles, New or Old, doesn’t all money believe it deserves a little more of it?