The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America by Martin Amis Page B
Authors: Martin Amis
Ads: Link
shopping streets in Palm Beach there is a plush-looking office called Creative Realtors. Perhaps there is even a course at Miami University in creative realting.
I visited an average middle-income Palm Beach home and was shown round by its droll and hospitable owner. From the point of view of ostentation — well, the house had a monogrammed marble driveway, and went on from there. Additional features included a telephonic computer system (if you dial a certain number in the study, the drapes draw shut in the bedroom), weather control in the jungly courtyard, visual and aural monitoring of the sculpture-infested grounds. In the garage is a custom-built $90,000 Clenet ('I have some Rouses out there too, and they ain't bad'). In the Mae-West bathroom art jereboams of Madame Rochas and Paco Rabanne. The lawn is like astroturf, the carpets like bubble-baths. Never in my life have I seen such clogged, stifling luxury.
My host was a businessman from the North who had settled in Palm Beach. On arrival, he did not attempt to join the 'most exclusive' club in town. There would have been no point: he is a Jew. He did try to join the club next door. He was willing to pay his dues ($10,000 a year), and could prove, as all hopefuls must, that he had given over a million dollars to charity. He couldn't get in there either. His wife hired a press secretary, and the couple began to appear in the Palm Beach Daily News, or The Shiny Sheet' as it is known. Eventually they were accepted by Palm Beach cafe society. Like all provincial elites, the Palm Beach beau monde is both baffling and uninteresting, an enigma that you don't particularly want to solve. Names are mentioned with reverence, irony or contempt. Some have an old-style Confederate ring; others sound ersatz European. Appropriately for America, the only monikers with an aristocratic tang are brand-names - perfumes, cars, domestic appliances. There are occasional scandals. The loo-paper heiress has run off with the bra-strap boss! The deodorant queen has divorced the bath-salt giant! Large parties are thrown under the cover of charity. You buy your own drinks and the money goes to a disadvantaged minority group, or to combat a fashionable disease. I formed the impression that most of the entertaining consists of small but opulent pool-side dinner-parties, in which each hosting couple tries to out-Gatsby the other with the vintage of their wines, the poundage of their steaks, the antiquity of their tableware, the multitudinousness of their servants. But there are other big dates on the calendar too.
'The drama of diamonds!... Yes, diamonds are a girl's best friend ... This exquisite necklace! A unison of noble gems. Yours for a mere — $250,000!’
This was the seasonal Gucci party, given at the Gucci arcade and fronted by Gucci himself (or, rather, by 'Doctor Aldo Gucci' himself. 'Doctor': don't you love it?). Gucci himself is a resplendently handsome maniac with operatic manners and impossible English. 'Let us give thanks that God has forgiven this evening,' and so on. Swanky girls and jinking pretty-boys modelled the Doc's latest creations. Gucci then repaired to the minstrels' gallery and, with a tambourine in one hand and a microphone in the other, actually mimed to the songs being played by the sedative pop group behind him.
Meanwhile I mingled with the clotted cream of Palm Beach. The old men — these tuxed gods and molten robots, with silver-studded dress shirts and metallic hair, all doing fine, alt in great shape. 'How are you, Buck?' 'Good, Dale. You?' Tm good, Buck. I'm good.' And the women, still going strong, prinked, snipped, tucked, capped, patched, pinched, rinsed, lopped, pruned, pared, but still going strong, and intending to be around for a very long time.
The average age in Palm Beach is fifty-seven. According to popular belief — i.e. according to the famous Alan Whicker documentary a few years ago — the Beach is peopled entirely by widows with faces like
I visited an average middle-income Palm Beach home and was shown round by its droll and hospitable owner. From the point of view of ostentation — well, the house had a monogrammed marble driveway, and went on from there. Additional features included a telephonic computer system (if you dial a certain number in the study, the drapes draw shut in the bedroom), weather control in the jungly courtyard, visual and aural monitoring of the sculpture-infested grounds. In the garage is a custom-built $90,000 Clenet ('I have some Rouses out there too, and they ain't bad'). In the Mae-West bathroom art jereboams of Madame Rochas and Paco Rabanne. The lawn is like astroturf, the carpets like bubble-baths. Never in my life have I seen such clogged, stifling luxury.
My host was a businessman from the North who had settled in Palm Beach. On arrival, he did not attempt to join the 'most exclusive' club in town. There would have been no point: he is a Jew. He did try to join the club next door. He was willing to pay his dues ($10,000 a year), and could prove, as all hopefuls must, that he had given over a million dollars to charity. He couldn't get in there either. His wife hired a press secretary, and the couple began to appear in the Palm Beach Daily News, or The Shiny Sheet' as it is known. Eventually they were accepted by Palm Beach cafe society. Like all provincial elites, the Palm Beach beau monde is both baffling and uninteresting, an enigma that you don't particularly want to solve. Names are mentioned with reverence, irony or contempt. Some have an old-style Confederate ring; others sound ersatz European. Appropriately for America, the only monikers with an aristocratic tang are brand-names - perfumes, cars, domestic appliances. There are occasional scandals. The loo-paper heiress has run off with the bra-strap boss! The deodorant queen has divorced the bath-salt giant! Large parties are thrown under the cover of charity. You buy your own drinks and the money goes to a disadvantaged minority group, or to combat a fashionable disease. I formed the impression that most of the entertaining consists of small but opulent pool-side dinner-parties, in which each hosting couple tries to out-Gatsby the other with the vintage of their wines, the poundage of their steaks, the antiquity of their tableware, the multitudinousness of their servants. But there are other big dates on the calendar too.
'The drama of diamonds!... Yes, diamonds are a girl's best friend ... This exquisite necklace! A unison of noble gems. Yours for a mere — $250,000!’
This was the seasonal Gucci party, given at the Gucci arcade and fronted by Gucci himself (or, rather, by 'Doctor Aldo Gucci' himself. 'Doctor': don't you love it?). Gucci himself is a resplendently handsome maniac with operatic manners and impossible English. 'Let us give thanks that God has forgiven this evening,' and so on. Swanky girls and jinking pretty-boys modelled the Doc's latest creations. Gucci then repaired to the minstrels' gallery and, with a tambourine in one hand and a microphone in the other, actually mimed to the songs being played by the sedative pop group behind him.
Meanwhile I mingled with the clotted cream of Palm Beach. The old men — these tuxed gods and molten robots, with silver-studded dress shirts and metallic hair, all doing fine, alt in great shape. 'How are you, Buck?' 'Good, Dale. You?' Tm good, Buck. I'm good.' And the women, still going strong, prinked, snipped, tucked, capped, patched, pinched, rinsed, lopped, pruned, pared, but still going strong, and intending to be around for a very long time.
The average age in Palm Beach is fifty-seven. According to popular belief — i.e. according to the famous Alan Whicker documentary a few years ago — the Beach is peopled entirely by widows with faces like
Similar Books
