Word: riche
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...seek advice. Without background, it must be terrifying to become a centimillionaire at 37. But let me allay your anxieties at once. Being very rich is mostly what raucous people call a gas. C. Wright Mills, one of the egghead sociologists, was near the mark when he said: "If the rich are not happy, it is because none of us is happy." Sophie Tucker got it right the first time. "I've been rich and I've been poor," she said. "Rich is better...
There is a legend in America that because everybody has a car and a television set, and a lot of people own houses and can afford vacations, the rich don't live so very differently from the middle class. Don't you believe it. Still, being very, very rich is not quite as much fun as it used to be. We've gradually lost the old exuberance of my parents' day. No more marble palaces or French chateaux imported stone by stone; no more parties reminiscent of the triumphal march in Aida. Instead of encouraging the peasantry to goggle enviously...
...American rich have always felt a little guilty. As David Brinkley puts it, there is "an attitude widely held in this country (but almost nowhere else) that it may not always be sinful to have a lot of money, but it is vaguely sinful to enjoy it and unforgivably sinful to do so in public." Of course, this feeling is less a matter of morality than envy. In this wonderfully egalitarian country, the have-nots naturally demand: "Why not me?" And in politics, the voters have come to accept rich candidates, if not actually to prefer them...
...super-rich may have unloaded our marble mansions on churches, embassies, labor unions and institutions of learning that don't have to pay the taxes or cope with the servant shortage, but we still have plenty of places to lay our heads. Real estate is an excellent long-term investment, and one also likes to travel without having to stay at hotels, where one doesn't have one's own things. So we have houses all over...
...inestimable advantage of our multiple residences is that it is so easy to be not at home. Privacy is probably the most valuable thing that money can buy; the poor have practically none, and the privacy of the middle class is eroding rapidly. Only the very rich can afford it in these days of high-speed communication and whetted curiosity, and it is perhaps no coincidence that two of the world's richest men J. Paul Getty and Howard Hughes, with close to $1.5 billion apiece are notably fanatic about their privacy...