(3 of 4)
These days it is a hardship even for the wealthy to build a mansion from the ground up, but they may always acquire one readymade. Jerry Buss, owner of the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Kings, has recently bought the legendary Pickfair (Will he rename it Bussfare?). It has 22 rooms, which sounds a lot for a bachelor, but big spenders always enjoy an abundance of rooms, even when those rooms have no particular functions.
It is as if the rooms were chambers of the heart, and the houses their owners objectified. Each room not only has a mood (blue, red) but also is one; and the rooms that are rarely or never entered are like secrets. The great old houses are less like gothic castles than gothic novels, laced with crooked passages and sudden stairs that add controllable menace to ensurable surprise. More child's play still. Even the temporary homes of the rich, the so-called luxury hotels, are homes with a difference. The brand-new Palace Hotel in mid-Manhattan plans a library that will contain 4,000 fake-fronted books, thus creating what has to be the largest fake-fronted book collection in the country.
After houses come gardens. A big house is one way to establish Paradise, but a garden, historically, is a more appropriate place to start. The childish "What if that envisions a mansion is not nearly so ambitious as one that seeks to transplant cypresses from one soil to another (as Hearst did in San Simeon) or to display the rarest species. (After seeing Lionel Rothschild's Japanese garden in London, the Japanese Ambassador was said to remark: "We have nothing like this in Japan.") Versailles, the model of gardening for so many big spenders, must have had Eden as its model, as a place at once disciplined and open-ended. That is the way the rich would have nature: apparently free yet under the thumb. They would have their animals the same way, which is why they are often attended by clawless panthers and gaga-looking bears.
First houses, then gardens, then animals, then man. The rich cannot create man, but they can toss a party for him. No passage in The Great Gatsby is more strangely moving than the list of party guests; the silly, nursery-rhyme names—Clarence Endive, Edgar Beaver, the Catlips—roll out like streamers. Yet Gatsby's parties were restrained compared with, say, the $200,000 "picnic" that T.C. and Phyllis Morrow of Houston threw last December for 1,000 friends, including Farrah Fawcett and John Travolta (who did not show), which featured a "country disco band." The emphasis of such fiestas is on the collecting of people, who if they cannot be owned outright may at least be rented.
But what do these versions of Genesis come to? After the big house and the big garden and the big animals, parties and people, what do most of the world's big spenders announce? That they are bored. Bored. The gods created men because they were bored, said Kierkegaard, so evidently the rich do likewise. They start out shimmying with hope and wind up hung over, believing with Baudelaire that the world will end by being swallowed up in an immense yawn. Their gardens are Candide's, not Eden's. Ever present at the creation, they find it wanting, and ask for sympathy in their autobiographies.