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He can afford to: Author K's revenues from his memoirs are expected to reach the $5 million mark, to which his five-year contract with NBC may add another $1.5 million. Indeed, Henry the K seems to be holding down half the top jobs in the country. He has joined Chase Manhattan's board of international consultants, is booked for several "substantially paid" speaking engagements later this year, and will take a one-year appointment as professor of diplomacy at Georgetown University.
For others megamoola can be, literally, an embarras de richesse. Novelist Stephen King, 29, who in three years and three books (Carrie, Salem's Lot and his latest, The Shining) has deposited $2 million in advances, says plaintively: "Somebody ought to give a correspondence course on what to do with sudden wealth." King wants to take tennis lessons, but is "afraid of looking nouveau riche."
Other megabuckers have not had breathing space to adjust to the reality of wealth. Laments Harriet Selwyn, 46, who built her California fashion firm Fragments into a million-a-year enterprise last year (TIME, Feb. 21): "One really needs two lives. One to get to the top. The other to enjoy it all."
For Farrah Fawcett-Majors, fame and fortune at 30 means that she and Husband Lee Majors (Six Million Dollar Man) can hardly poke their heads out of their big Bel Air home without being mobbed. Says the Texas-born prima inter pares star of TV's Charlie's Angels: "The spontaneity is gone. We used to be able to fly to Las Vegas for a night. Now if we want to go away we have to rent a place on a desert island as Mr. and Mrs. Doe." Los Angeles Author Nicholas Meyer, also 30 and a new millionaire, finds that his loot has made little difference to his life. Despite the immense success of his two Sherlock Holmesian pastiches, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (he also scripted the film) and The West End Horror, Meyer observes: "Everyone has this one fantasy about success and money, that it will solve all his problems. Money will do this in the short term: it will pay the bills. But it throws the real problems into sharp relief. Like, why can't one sustain a relationship?"
The harvest of Roots has yet to make Author Alex Haley feel relaxed. Though he will garner at least $5 million from his book, Haley's comet is sputtering. He is dead tired. He has been out on the lecture circuit or visiting Gambia or receiving honorary degrees almost every day of the month. As for his megabucks, Haley says that so far they have enabled him only to get out of debt—a feat that might in itself rank as the differentiating factor between the rich and the merely upwardly mobile.
Whether or not they are happy, it seems almost an axiom that the rapidly rich fritter few hours frivolously. They mostly abhor time-consuming activities like heading Kiwanis drives, playing golf, drinking till dawn, and being sick in bed. Though they often complain about their limited playtime, almost all the nouveaux share a drive to accumulate assets beyond any expectation of liquidating the lucre.