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We Americans tend to make rather heavier weather of it. Take Marylou Whitney, whose husband Sonny (Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney to you) was a principal backer of Pan American World Airways, Gone With the Wind and enough other ventures to qualify him as a one-man conglomerate. She has five children and five establishments in Lexington, Ky., Saratoga, Manhattan, Manitoba, Canada, and 100,000 acres of the Adirondacks. So Marylou and her two secretaries (one in New York and one in Kentucky) spend a lot of time in a welter of lists, files and details. She likes to dash off notes to the help about buying ham at less than $5 a pound: As she says: "Money does not grow on trees." And then there are decisions-decisions like what movies to choose for the Adirondacks this summer and whom to invite for the fishing and whom for the shooting. But it is a lot of fun and not even hard on the children as long as you keep them oriented by having their rooms arranged in the same way in various establishments.
One inestimable advantage of our multiple residences is that it is so easy to be not at home. Privacy is probably the most valuable thing that money can buy; the poor have practically none, and the privacy of the middle class is eroding rapidly. Only the very rich can afford it in these days of high-speed communication and whetted curiosity, and it is perhaps no coincidence that two of the world's richest men J. Paul Getty and Howard Hughes, with close to $1.5 billion apiece are notably fanatic about their privacy.
The richest man in England is so invisible that you undoubtedly have never even heard of him. Sir John Reeves Ellerman, who inherited a shipping fortune now worth almost $300 million, is 58 years old, but he has never made a public statement other than "I have no statement to make." Since he is hardly ever photographed, he has no trouble traveling incognito, often signing on one of his ships as a crewman though of course he doesn't work at it. Ellerman's passion is rodents, on which he wrote a three-volume anatomical study, the definitive work in the field.
Flaying & Finagling
The blessings of privacy, you understand, are not limited to protection from the public; they protect one from one's relatives as well. As it happens, I ascribe much of the success of my own three marriages (that's not many at my age I happen to be 68) to the luxury of plenty of elbow room. Association is more pleasant the more voluntary it is. A man feels the absolute need to get away from time to time to his own room, to his own wing, to his own little hideaway in the country or pied-a-terre in town and so, no doubt, does a woman.
Which reminds me that you neglected in your letter to mention your own current marital status. If you haven't a wife at the moment, I advise you to acquire one without delay. Wives can be extremely important at tax time not, of course, for the piddling $600 exemptions they bring with them, but for their in-come-splitting potential. Philip M. Stern, a would-be tax reformer who is, I am afraid, trying to do away with this convenient practice, says that in 1964 the wife of a man with $1,000,000 in taxable income was worth $2,766,153.75 to him if his moneyman knew the right finaglings.