Gilding the Lilly

Years ago, mostly for a lark, I made a short 'art' film (now listed on the Internet Movie Data Base) called Bad Marion's Last Year, a cheesy takeoff on the Alain Resnais film 'Last Year at Marienbad.' It featured two then-hot actors from the Andy Warhol social circuit: Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn and jazz singer Asha Puthli, along with 'Boys in the Band' star Frederick Combs, complete with a guest appearance by then-producer Dominick Dunne. The real star, however, was a rich ingenue from the Manhattan-Hamptons elite: Gillian Fuller, who kindly loaned us her father's vacant Southampton mansion for the occasion (mind you, this was in January). Gillian played herself: a bored rich girl with nothing at all to do other than pick up boys (Combs--never mind that he was gay) and bring them home to take drugs and get bored together. Enter the two Warhol girls as righteous angels, determined to either make Gillian see the error of her ways, or be carried off to the next world as just punishment. This film had a single showing, but a glamorous one to be sure: at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the screening of which was attended by Andy Warhol himself, who kindly bought me a bottle of champagne at the post-screening party afterwards (on which I got thoroughly drunk).

The reason I bring up this event is current news: that Scott Fitzgerald may have been wrong after all, and the rich really aren't that different from you and me in a key way that was certainly obvious to John Lennon, if not the rest of us: that money can't buy love. Or happiness either. Go figure. And here money is all that most Americans seem to have been focused on since, well, Reagan's time.

Now it turns out that the children of the gilded are not immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune after all. They just have shinier arrows. Poor trust fund heir Tommy Gilbert, who had to endure a $200 cut in his monthly allowance. The indignity of it all, and right in front of his better-endowed friends! Small wonder he had no choice but to kill the old man. But seriously. Consider this: if you have a, say, ten million dollar trust fund, what, exactly, is it that is going to compel you to want to actually get up in the morning and do something constructive? Sure, sure, Daddy insists that you go to Princeton, and maybe you will just manage to squeak in there on the shoulders of a generous donation. But then what? What is going to motivate you to actually achieve something, when it's all been handed to you in advance on a silver platter? Study hard? What for, when your own hedge fund awaits you? Small wonder it turns out that rich kids are binge drinking, using drugs, lying, and stealing with the best of the rest of us (or rather, worst).

To be fair, having it all might just be a serious handicap to actual accomplishment in life. Who will believe you, even were you to do something brilliant, that it wasn't all handed to you? On the other hand, it's really, really hard to empathize with people who wouldn't dream of giving you the time of day if you weren't driving a Ferrari. Small wonder the wealthy Menendez brothers were forced to resort to a unique defense back in 1994 after murdering their parents in Los Angeles for a similar deprivation of privilege: pity poor us! Now we're orphans!