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So, we luxuriate in private. Inside our houses (try not to call them "homes") is where we let ourselves go with our art collections and our furniture and our closets crammed with Huntsman suits, Sulka shirts and Lock hats. It is also perfectly O.K. to amuse yourself with elec- tronic equipment. Nothing ordinary, of course. One of my friends says he uses a small computer to help him with his racing forms as well as with the stock market, and quite a few have closed-circuit television to communicate with the nursery and the servants' wing.
Ballrooms, no; projection rooms, yes. Poolrooms are back, and pools never went away you will probably want both an indoor and an outdoor one, and the same goes for tennis courts. If you have a separate playhouse, which isn't a bad idea, it will be no trouble to fit in a squash court and a bowling alley, as well as an extra sauna. Family compounds, such as the Rockefellers' 3,500-acre complex near Tarrytown, may also go in for an 18-hole golf course. All this avoids those tense country clubs, where mere millionaires stare at you.
We super-rich may have unloaded our marble mansions on churches, embassies, labor unions and institutions of learning that don't have to pay the taxes or cope with the servant shortage, but we still have plenty of places to lay our heads. Real estate is an excellent long-term investment, and one also likes to travel without having to stay at hotels, where one doesn't have one's own things. So we have houses all over the map.
In Europe, they seem to manage this somewhat more gracefully than Americans do. My friend Gloria Guinness, who is married to Loel of the banking (not brewing) Guinnesses, claims that it's easier to maintain four houses than one. Her four are in Paris, Normandy, Switzerland and Palm Beach, and she keeps a skeleton staff of servants and a complete wardrobe in each house so that she and Loel don't have to tote stuff around. "Without luggage," she says, "you don't have to waste time in customs and you don't have to declare anything." The Guinnesses are usually accompanied by a basic traveling staff of four, and they get about quite a bit, aided by their helicopter, their transatlantic jet and their 704-ton yacht with its crew of twelve. They follow the big and little seasons on such a clockwork schedule that they often don't even have to wire ahead. "When it's time for me to be in Paris, for instance," says Gloria, "the people there know when to expect me."