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Does the world comply? Absolutely. For all their crackpot self-indulgences, the big spenders ought to be razzed off the earth. Instead, the world takes them to its heart, which brings us back to the why. Perhaps because we find them sad, the way a huge child can be sad—frightening because of its unnatural size, but essentially sad nonetheless. It is not that the rich are any sadder than the rest of us, of course, but that they are so surprised at finding themselves sad at all. It is not that they are any more bored than the rest of us, either, but that they go to so much trouble to avoid being so.
Then too there is the possibility that our hearts go out to these people because they suffer on our behalf. Most of us merely dream nonsense, but the rich have to live it; and while we rarely endure the consequences of our fantasies, they do so relentlessly. Allan Carr, the co-producer of Grease, reflecting on his Malibu dream house and his Beverly Hills mansion with its cop per-walled disco chamber, exulted, "This is my fantasy . . . I'm dreaming all this." Then he added that he would kill anyone who awakened him. Who would think of doing that? Thanks to the Allan Carrs, all our harebrained desires are realized by proxy, like hiring a mercenary to fight in a war.
Yet perhaps the most endearing virtue of big spenders is that they are wonderfully entertaining. There is nothing like them. If a conga line could be made up extending from Qin Shihuang and Elagabalus, through Hearst, the sheiks and Allan Carr, we would need no Broadway shows. It is not just their poly urethane clouds and disco chambers; it is their hilarious innocence, their religious concentration on themselves. What's more, they rarely know how entertaining they are. Nero, for example, when he entered his Golden House with its statue of him self, 120 feet high, and its private lake, observed: "At last I am beginning to live like a human being." Who but a real trouper could have come up with a line like that?
By Roger Rosenblatt