The sweet spot for my individual strain of nostalgia is right around 1965. That was about the time I began to get an allowance and to be free to wander around on my own — which, taken together, meant I could go to Saturday matinees, buy comic books, baseball card, and model airplanes, and eat at the snack bar. In other words, begin to exist as a semi-autonomous consumer of then-contemporary culture. I knew, of course, that I was on the outside of the real world — the adult world — but at least now I could press my face up against the glass.
There were many things about the adult world I didn’t understand, but there were a few things that I knew for sure belonged to adulthood. Driving and cars, of course. Smoking and drinking. Hairdos for women and suits and ties for men. Cocktail parties and dancing. These were all things I saw my parents doing, wearing, going to, talking about — but the guides to the adult world I trusted most were magazines like Life, Time, and (when I could sneak a peak at it) my dad’s Playboys.
The adult world I saw in the ads and photo spreads in these magazines is the world of Edwin Gilbert’s The Beautiful Life (1966). Everything that constituted “the beautiful life” — the life led by the best people, the in-est of all the In Crowds — as represented in the magazines can be found here. Slim, straight-line, minimalist dresses; Twiggy-style short hairdos; glamorous women in evening gowns on the arms of rich, handsome men in tuxedos; discotheques and designer living rooms; pop art and dinners at the Four Seasons.
As a work of fiction, it’s moderately above average. Gilbert made his living writing well-constructed but somewhat superficial novels that offered readers glimpses into worlds they probably didn’t have access to: the late-stage 400 (Silver Spoon, 1957); silver salver diplomacy (The New Ambassadors, 1961); Detroit auto executives (American Chrome, 1965); old money (Newport, 1971). He was a craftsman whose sales and reputation depended more on consistency than genius.
This shows most in Gilbert’s choice of protagonists. Bayard Burton “Grove” Grovenour is a 30-something heir with old money and new ideals. He and his daisy-fresh wife Rosemary return from the Siberia of suburban Connecticut to dive into the deep end of Manhattan life, taking a penthouse apartment at 1027 Fifth Avenue as their modest pied-a-terre. Grove wants to save New York from godless modernistic architecture and city planning. Rosemary just wants to belong. Grove fails spectacularly; Rosemary manages to reach the epicenter of In-ism, becoming the icon everyone wants at their party or on their magazine spreads. But none of that much matters: they are merely the jetsam Gilbert tosses in to lure the sharks, remoras, and other prey and parasites of High Society.
It’s not the story that matters here, anyway. The best way to enjoy The Beautiful Life is as a time-capsule. It’s like a trip back to the poshest parts of Manhattan when to be rich, young, and white in Manhattan was to be at the apex of the food chain.
But that’s not what makes the book interesting. Grove, Rosemary, and all their rich friends are, after all, pretty dull stuff. It’s the ecosystem that serves, entertains, dresses, drives, houses, feeds, doctors, and otherwise supports them Gilbert meticulously documents that raises The Beautiful Life above its mid-60s airplane reading peers.
Gilbert structures his book as a series of set-pieces, each taking place at a specific address, each hosted by a particular enabler, starting with Andrew, the doorman of 1027 Fifth Avenue. Andrew “knows his air of solicitude is both pleasing and proper to their rank (or what they might wish their rank to be)” and maintains careful control of the hierarchy of the building’s tenants through the nuances of his service. Mrs. Alfreda Peysen, 44-year resident and minked-and-bejeweled heiress, gets “his warmest (seniority) greeting.” Young Mr. Grovenour, newly-arrived and prone to poking around at the base of the trees along the sidewalk, on the other hand, gets just enough politeness to cover up Andrew’s contempt.
Next, we meet Katherine Reeves, the stiff-coifed, tight-lipped real estate agent who shows the Grovenours their prospective apartment. Their judgment of the place, of course, is far less important than her approval of them. She finds “simple satisfaction from passing judgment on the lowly and on the highly who come within the precinct of her verdicts.” As a result, Gilbert tells us, she is “one of the happiest of human beings.”
Gilbert’s tour of High Society’s courtiers and household staff continues with a visit to Big D’s, the Park Avenue discotheque where DJ Ray Noonan (a surrogate, perhaps, for Killer Joe Piro) takes control over a crowd of the idle and powerful each night:
Watch him now: a record is playing on the first turntable; a second record is already silently spinning on the second turntable; a third is in place. As the first disc nears its rockrolling end, Roy deftly drops the arm onto the second platter so that one overlaps the other and he reaches to the control panel and juices up the volume so that the changeover is made with kinetic brilliance; and then he dials it down again and prepares the record to go next on turntable number three.
But this is not the artistry for which he is paid. Roy’s gift lies in his ability to pace the dancers, and to anticipate their moods:
Is the Frug blasting too long?
Is the age group changing?
Is fatigue or boredom seeping in?
Has he caught the signal from the bar that business needs to be escalated?
Roy, an ex-GI from Oklahoma who quietly seeds his fat tips into a house for his family in Queens, has classified all the fauna that congregate on his dance floor: “the old Crust and the young Crust, the Cafe Mafia, the Jets, the Pop people, and a few, a very few Just Plain Money.”
Gilbert’s tour continues with a lunch visit to Le Trianon, overseen by Claude Troube, who enforces the restaurant’s code with a velvet-gloved iron hand:
His attention is also sensitive to the welfare of the diners, particularly to those who are new to his tables, those who might violate any of a number of decrees: pipes and cigars are interdit; cigarettes are permitted but not between courses. It is also to be understood that since too many martinis before dining anesthetizes the senses, the waiter will not serve more than one, possibly two, cocktails; but not a soupçon more. As for the so-called health diets of some Americans who fuss about the use of butter, cream or salt — such idiocies will not be tolerated here.
In the course of the book, we meet Chet Darnell, the fresh-faced juvenile of 46 who tickles the ivories for the private parties of the most exclusive clientele; Lorio, maître d’ “haute coiffure who turns each customer “from a flat-heeled, over-scrubbed, dull-suited, tight-curled nonentity into a chicly shod, clad and coiffed creature of infinite allurement’; Martine, who dresses them at her by-name only boutique, and Dolores the masseuse, catering to the oft-divorced and accustomed to “working on the same body while the name keeps changing.”
We hang out in the chauffeur’s room in the garage of 1027 Fifth Avenue and in the apartment of Hank Hartley, art dealer to the elite, who helps them cover their walls “with paintings of monumental cheeseburgers, colossal Coke bottles, cans of baked beans, soaring syringes, F.B.I, posters, ceiling-high photos of Clara Bow’s face and Elizabeth Taylor’s mouth, and many other fine artworks of this genre.” We visit the atelier of Waldo Stryker — Andy Warhol stand-in — who produces these paintings to fund the art films he forces his patrons to endure:
There followed a shadowy view of an amorphous room which contained a bed on which lay a long-haired, pock-faced girl in white leotards; she was reading a book and she would wriggle around sporadically, and then putting the book aside would stare languidly to her left. The camera would hold on her for what seemed an interminable time as she stretched her body and began undulating in a clumsy and prolonged exhibition of sexual frustration or, if you chose, desperate longing for human recognition and affection. Alternating with these views, the camera would swing leftward to show nearby a brutish young man of outsized shoulders and biceps, attired in the glossy black deep-sea diving gear of a frogman, as he kept checking his twin-tubed oxygen tanks and his elongated spear gun, working away with total masculine preoccupation.
In silence the film’s monochromatic images continued their alternating rhythms with absolutely no variety and with no regard for time until the final shot, which was sustained for nine minutes as the camera held on the girl’s blemished face, the only relief coming when a fly, which touched down on her cheek, caused her to twitch the insect away.
As we swirl along through the haunts of the hoi-polloi, we watch as earnest Grove is discreetly shuffled off to the fringe as an idealistic nut-case and Rosemary becomes a star entrant in the popularity contest, “in full combustion as she hastened her pace, projecting her personality, driving fiercely to hold onto her rating in the popularity poll, the trophy that confirmed her position as one of the prize tigers running in the annual New York In-ism Sweepstakes.” The lesson, I suppose, is that success is hollow, but Gilbert makes Grove’s righteous failure look pretty hollow, too. The only characters who truly seem happen in this book are all the extras who open the doors, spin the records, tinkle the ivories, drive the cars, and otherwise make sure that the Good Life, if not really all that good, is at least comfortable. They seem to have the wisdom to stay on the sidelines of the Rat Race and carefully manage the bits of cheese they collect.
You can have your Jane Austens, or go back to the Regency days courtesy of Georgette Heyer, or the tea-cosy days courtesy of E. M Delafield. When I’m suffering from a serious spell of nostalgia, keep that land spreadin’ out so far and wide — just give me Manhattan in ’65.