Friday, March 15, 2013. Fair, cold, and sunny yesterday in New York; high 40 degrees mid-afternoon.
The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) opened with its gala preview yesterday in Maastricht, The Netherlands. TEFAF is without question the most extraordinary fine art and antiques exhibitions in the world.
![]() | ![]() | | Baron Willem van Dedem, president of TEFAF's board of trustees. | ![]() |
Readers of the NYSD have read about it on these pages for years. JH and I have made four of five of those openings and each one is better than the one before.
This year Augustus Mayhew who covers a lot of Southern Florida Arts and Architecture stories for NYSD, is reporting for us from Maastricht. It is his first visit and so it’s all new to him. He will bring something fresh and always interesting to it for you. His first day of coverage is on today’s NYSD.
The Lottery. On my way home yesterday afternoon, the last block before East End at 82nd Street was temporarily closed, so the cab dropped me at 83rd Street and York Avenue. There’s a Korean bodega on the corner where they always have a good deal on fruits and berries.
The man who owns the store told me, in a moment of distress, that his rent for his narrow little sliver of a shop was $7,000 a month. He was telling me this because his business was off.
I was shocked by the size of his rent, given that it was a half of the ground floor of a 19th century tenement building in the neighborhood (lower-middle-to-upper-income residential). But then “thousands” still seem a lot to me, having grown up in a world where hundreds was a small fortune. That was, of course, a long time ago, as inflation was just settling into our way of life.
Yesterday I bought two boxes of blueberries. 2 for $3. I eat blueberries everyday now. There was a time, almost forgotten, when blueberries and raspberries were available in summertime only. Now it’s year round and sold by sidewalk vendors.
![]() | ![]() | | Empire State Building. 2:00 PM. Photo: JH. | ![]() |
Rich is better. I also bought a PowerBall lottery ticket which is now up there in the centimillions. Actually I bought three for six bucks. I’m not a regular buyer of lottery tickets, although I have occasionally (and never won a dime). I’m not a casino-style gambler. My father was, and he was lousy at it. The domestic cost was in some cases insurmountable and threatening to the mental health of those living under his roof. It’s one of the few life lessons I learned early (if at all).
The lottery ticket purchase was impulse. I had been thinking about billionaires -- as a category, as a type, because the other day a friend sent me a new list of billionaires that came out in the LondonDaily Telegraph. There were hundreds of them. About fourteen hundred. I was astounded by the number not to mention the aggregate fortune of that fourteen hundred.
Growing up, the notion of a “millionaire” was a rich fantasy in families like mine. Maybe everybody’s. Sometime in the late '60s or early 1970s, Forbes Magazine published their first annual Forbes Four Hundred Richest list. These were Americans.The richest of them possessed tens or hundreds of millions. No one had a billion. Or if they did, they weren’t talking about it.
I think it was in the early '90s that the annual Forbes list contained its first “billionaires.” Two men on the list I knew as fathers of friends, the brothers Jack and Lew Rudin who owned Manhattan residential real estate‚ a business started by their father back at the beginning of the 20th century. Forbes reported their net worth as something like a billion and a half bucks.
I was told later that both brothers were troubled by the number (and the publicity) and officially claimed that it was a gross exaggeration. I think that was also the last time we saw them on any rich list. The Rudin brothers were old school: flaunting one’s wealth was not their style. They were not alone although the times were moving in the opposite direction.
![]() | ![]() | | Ralph Lauren. | ![]() | | Bernard Arnault. | ![]() | | Carlos Slim. | ![]() | | Bill Gates. | ![]() | | Warren Buffett. | ![]() | | Michael Bloomberg. | ![]() | | Amancio Ortega. | ![]() | | Crown Prince Felipe. | ![]() | | John Kluge. | ![]() |
Today that attitude may be rare. Only a few years later, in the mid-90s, I was having a cocktail party conversation with a very rich man here in town. We were talking about the latest Forbes 400 list. He brought it up, asking if I’d seen it. I hadn’t. He then told me that he was on it as being worth two or three billion‚ I can’t remember specifically -- still an astounding figure back then. He added that he was glad they used that number because if they knew what he was really worth, “it would blow their minds.”
I’m been in the company of men and women who are billionaires fairly frequently for a lot of my adult life. And in my line of work, I am often in social situations or being entertained by very rich people. They, like their mere centi- and multimillionaire confreres are different from the rest of us in one fundamental way: their fortunes give them a sense of acting out authority, a self-assurance, if you will, on which they would otherwise have no claim. This isn’t so much about the nature of any individual’s personality or character, as much as it is the effect that money has on us homo sapiens. This is what it does to US.
I thought it was interesting that the Telegraph list contained the name of several self-made billionaires who are in the schmatte business. and all vast fortunes made in one lifetime, sometimes even in a single year or even a day (IPO’s). Ralph Lauren is one. Another famous name is Bernard Arnault of LVMH. There are a half dozen members of the Walton Family of Wal-Mart whose net worth clocks in at a combined $200 billiion.
Carlos Slim of Mexico is supposedly the richest of them all with $69 billion, and Poor Bill Gates at $61. Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha, tallies a paltry $44 billion, while our current Mayor of the City of New York, Michael Bloomberg, is said to be worth a self-made $27 billion.
So what’s it like to have all that dough? Troubles over? Life of Reilly? I do know they don’t worry about the rent or the mortgage or the credit card or the medical or the tuition or warm coat or the heating bill. Instead of worrying about no food on the table, they have the opposite problem: the fine line between hunger and gluttony. Yes, we should all have those problems instead of the aforementioned.
One of the richest of the billionaires on the Telegraph list, Amancio Ortega of Spain is said to be worth $37 billion. Sr. Ortega lives very quietly. There are only a few photographs of him known to exist. Someone described him as a “total hermit.” Although he is seen at times, surrounded by bodyguards.
It is said that he’s well fortified when moving about in public because he is “shy.” Others say it is because he’s terrified of kidnapping and extortion. Spain’s current unemployment percentage numbers reach from the high 20s into the 40s depending on the age. Ironically Sr. Ortega employs thousands.
Schmatte business aside, Sr. Ortega wields great power in his world. He is famous in Spain for making the Crown Prince Felipe wait in his secretary’s office for an hour while he finished a conference call. Business is business, and who’s on first. Certainly not His Royal Highness. Sr. Ortega’s business: he owns Zara, the international bargain retail chain.
Something Better With Their Money.What is most striking about these lists of holders of vast wealth, in numbers unimaginable to the billions who are just getting by, or the billions more on the edge of starvation, is that their numbers refer to an immense prosperity which includes billions of individuals who support and even depend on some of the aforementioned businesses. On the other side, in far great numbers, are those who are pretty much depending on the possibility of the game of chance. At the casino. Or government assistance. There is great objection to this among the big money boys. This seems to be a natural state of affairs with us homo sapiens also. There is the popular idea that poverty results from sloth and laziness.
I don’t actually entertain the possibility of winning this lottery or any lottery, even though I bought the tickets. It’s a perfect flyer for a non-Casino-gambler. I will admit I have asked myself what I’d do with all that money if I were to win. I mean, I know I couldn’t spend it on endless buying.
My first thoughts were of all of us out there who are in need; so where do you start. Today, 47 million Americans are using food stamps to feed themselves and their families. Millions more are having trouble feeding themselves and their children, and keeping up rent or mortgage.
These are hard times, made harder by our in-bred propensity to consume as an entertainment palliative. There are so many animals and children desperately in need of care and shelter from abuse‚ much of which is fostered by poverty and its sedatives, drugs and alcohol. The question would be how to spread it around to the optimal advantage. But then, these are the thoughts of a working man and not a billionaire.
About fifteen years ago, I went to a dinner one night on a private yacht docked on one of the West Side piers on the Hudson. It was a new yacht, well over 200 feet, built to order for John Kluge, the media communications tycoon.
Mr. Kluge was then in his late 70s or early 80s. He’d invited twenty to dine in honor of our mutual friend Judy Green. During the evening, the yacht cruised out into the harbor, and around Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty where a century before millions whom Emma Lazarus famously referred to as "your tired, your poor," landed in the New World looking for a better life, free from poverty and wars. It was a lovely night in New York and the evening was an impressive luxury, and a pleasure for all.
However. After the dinner, I hitched a ride back into town and the Upper East Side in a car owned by Warren Avis, the entrepreneur who started the famous car rental business which he later sold for a fortune.
Warren was then about the same age as our host Mr. Kluge. And he was chiding Mr. K’s attitude about his current business. John Kluge was by then an acknowledged possessor of some five or six billions. During the evening he had told his guest Avis about some business deals he was going into with another (much) older businessman/entrepreneur/tycoon.
It galled Avis. “These men are boasting about their deals and they’re only doing deals because they’re bored. They don’t have anybody to go to lunch with. As it is they can’t spend their incomes because they don’t need anything. You’d think they’d do something better with their money.” |
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