Word: parvenues
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That sense of belonging seems to gentle his judgments. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the builder of his family's fortune (and of the New York Central Railroad), was a whiskey-swilling, street-fighting parvenu who bullied his wife and children, cheated the public and gave away pittances from the $100 million he amassed. Auchincloss notes, a bit sorrowfully, that Vanderbilt and his colleagues in stiff-collar crime like Jay Gould would not find themselves out of place on Drexel Burnham Lambert's Wall Street. Still, the author can find it in his heart to suggest that the commodore's coarseness...
Brook meticulously undercuts or complicates every stereotype with a welcome particularity. The crucial performance is by Film Star Brian Dennehy (Silverado, F/X) as a benevolent yet diffident Lopakhin, less a brash parvenu than a man poignantly conscious of his humble origins and clumsily trying to fit in. He is in his own way just as dreamy as Lyubov (Natasha Parry), the estate's spendthrift owner, whom he constantly upbraids for her impracticality. She ignores the impending auction of her home because any available means to "save" it would change and therefore destroy it. When Lopakhin cannot recruit...
...only beat the Brahmins, he joined them and established the Kennedy style: an irresistible fusion of the parvenu with a parody of the old-shoe aristocrat. As a movie-industry wheeler-dealer in the '20s, he introduced a bit of Harvard to Hollywood. But back East it was show business as usual, especially when he introduced his mistress Gloria Swanson to Rose. The high point of his social climb was undoubtedly the * ambassadorship to the Court of St. James's in 1938. "This is a helluva long way from East Boston," he told his wife during a weekend with...
...briefcase indicates an attorney's status: junior associates haul home thick wads of raw documents in bulky bags, while partners take away the distillate of that material: a few sheets in a thin leather envelope. He deftly sketches the ballets of protocol between august attorneys and rich parvenu clients, the ugly skirmishing between partners near retirement and their power-hungry successors, the condescension of smug lawyers toward everyone who works for them...
...people who live on Manhattan's Upper East Side, belong to the Knickerbocker and Colony clubs, send their sons to schools such as Groton and Yale (the author's alma maters), and consider the Rockefellers, who came into their billions less than a century ago, slightly parvenu. This time around, Auchincloss is concerned with the female of that rare and resplendent species: twelve women who met once a month, from 1908 to 1972, to enrich themselves still further by discussing a book. The narrator, Christopher Gates, is the decorator son of one of the dozen in the Book...