Gone native: how Manhattan’s richest women follow the laws of the jungle
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Version 0 of 1. From Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities to Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City, New York’s Upper East Side has long offered novelists and satirists a rich seam to mine. But until Wednesday Martin came along, no one had thought to use primatology in a portrait of one of America’s wealthiest – and most competitive – urban enclaves. Martin, mother-of-two and wife of a banker, is the author of Primates of Park Avenue, part-memoir, part-study of young East Side mothers and their social customs. The book, published last week, has been variously described as sexist, harsh and inaccurate. It has certainly struck a nerve. Not necessarily because society types object to being compared to bonobos and apes, but due to Martin’s observations on motherhood, social status and wealth. One claim by Martin is that über-rich hedge fund and private equity husbands, satisfied with their partners’ work maintaining the household, raising children, staying slim and working on behalf of the family’s social position, regularly issue negotiated “wife bonuses”. The women of the district are up in arms. Prominent socialite Debbie Bancroft told the New York Post that Martin gets it all wrong: “She’s no anthropologist.” Martin is wary of saying more on the subject, and it’s a small detail in the book. But the notion of “wife bonuses” has exposed fissures between old money and new, and left almost everyone angry with the author. “I set out to write a memoir with some anthropology, social research and some dish,” Martin, who describes herself as a “cultural critic at large in high heels”, told the Observer. “But that apparently is a problem for people.” Many have objected to the idea of introducing primate studies to describe human dynamics. Martin describes, for example, her quest for a status-enhancing Hermès Birkin handbag as akin to the display of a chimp, observed by famed primatologist Jane Goodall, who signalled his status by swinging an old kerosene can. In another passage, she describes being “charged” by older women and forced off the pavement. It was after that encounter, Martin writes, “when she realised it was time to start paying attention, really paying attention, to Upper East Side primate social behaviours”. Some women, she concluded, were using their handbags to assert dominance, even brushing rivals with them. “It was not simply ‘get out of my way’ but something more pointed – ‘I don’t see you, because you don’t even exist’.” Martin, rich and diminutive, is no stranger to treading on sensitive territory. A previous book, Stepmonster, drew upon her own mixed experience as a stepmother. For Primates of Park Avenue, she concedes, she picked another minefield – privilege and motherhood. The Michigan native, who moved to New York 26 years ago, asked women in her social circle and mothers she met at her children’s school if they would participate. Many agreed. “I tried to interpret the culture I had access to, and to tease out the meanings,” she says. “I also tried hard to be diplomatic.” In one passage, Martin paraphrases British ornithologist David Lack when she describes interviewed mums as “appearing to sprout the darkened feathers and sharp beaks and compassionless, glinty eyes of birds ... bird mothers, to be specific”. What has particularly caught New Yorkers’ attention is Martin’s portrait of isolated women – “Manhattan geishas” – locked in an extreme body-display culture that rivals Hollywood, raising children in a condition of almost limitless resources. Martin calls this the dark side of motherhood – “an affliction of the privileged”, according to sociologist Sharon Hays – that plays out in extremis on the Upper East Side. With their exercise classes, pricey beauty routines and charity causes (what legendary banker Felix Rohaytn once called “cancer dances”), many women lead highly pressured parallel lives, rarely spending time with their spouses. “Of course, these are not the same pressures as being impoverished or unable to find work,” Martin says carefully. “But if you look at it with a neutral eye, there is gendered pressure to be that attractive and on display all the time.” Town and Country magazine sniped that Primates reads like several episodes of the American reality-TV series The Real Housewives of New York City stitched together. For Martin, watching her human primates is a kind of bleak zoological entertainment. The women, she writes, were willing to “practically kill themselves” in the quest to have the bodies of childless twentysomethings. “As for food, fat-free and low-cal was pathetically passé. It had to be organic, biodynamic, detoxifying and antioxidant-rich.” Accurate or not, Martin is not the only author turning her attention to the enclave. Jill Kargman, a novelist with a native’s eye to the subject, is behind a new TV series, Odd Mom Out. She recently described the contemporary line-up of neighbourhood characters: “Blonde tits on sticks, nannies in zip-up outfits, rexi pregos, Park Slopers who nurse three-year-olds, foodies, Wall Street schmucks, the usual.” Nor is Martin alone in running into criticism for attempting to describe the local customs of Upper East Side. Several years ago New York Times writer Alex Kuczynski faced a backlash after describing how using a surrogate mother after failing to conceive herself spared her the fat and body issues that come with pregnancy. Primates, Martin concedes, is “titillating for people who want to see that rich isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; and disconcerting for women who don’t work outside the home and are married to wealthy, powerful men to recognise there are power imbalances in their marriages”. As the rise of inequality and income disparity becomes a political issue, wealthy women are soft targets, she argues. They’re stuck in a contradiction: they don’t need to work, and if they did they would be criticised for leaving their children. What of the men? Martin describes them as choosy, coy observers of the women on display. Disparities in the ratio of women to men adds to the pressure on women to compete. “The women have these fantastic bodies, the beautiful outfits, but there’s an amazing lack of flirtation,” Martin observes. In the book, she writes how the men always seem “distracted and bored ... by the endless smorgasbord of stunning women all around them, all the time, preening and primping for their benefit”. A LITERARY STROLL DOWN PARK AVENUE by Robert McCrum Park Avenue is the spinal cord of the Upper East Side. In the city’s early days, this was known to New Yorkers as the Silk Stocking District, and it has never shaken off its association with the rich and famous. Today Park Avenue, along with neighbouring Upper Fifth Avenue, is home to some of Manhattan’s most affluent (and Republican) citizens. In American fiction, many writers and their characters have passed through the Upper East Side here. Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth is the predecessor of all the women shopping and lunching there today – and fretting about, or possibly cheating on, their husbands. Sex lies just below the surface in this neighbourhood. In F Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s drunken relationship spirals out of control here. A generation later, JD Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, a privileged “preppie” from Pencey, spends much of a lost weekend trying to make sense of his troubled self in and around Park Avenue. In Breakfast at Tiffany’s , Truman Capote makes his heroine, Holly Golightly, into “an American Geisha” who gets some of her kicks, as Wednesday Martin does in her memoir, by shocking her audience with outrageous opinions, and sensational snippets from her private life. Park Avenue is also home to the “masters of the universe”, a term made famous by Tom Wolfe in his age of greed classic The Bonfire of the Vanities. The darker character of the Upper East Side in the 1980s is also the subject of American Psycho , the Bret Easton Ellis novel that fetishised conspicuous consumption in Reagan’s America. Both of these books may, in turn, have influenced Lauren Weisberger to explore the nastier side of fashion journalism in The Devil Wears Prada. From the American reader’s point of view, Park Avenue and the Upper East Side are as instantly recognisable as the Amazon rainforest. Set your novel, or memoir, there and everyone will immediately identify the landscape, know who the natives are, and thrill to the latest news about the strange things they’re getting up to. No one ever went broke playing anthropologist with US popular culture as Candace Bushnell discovered when she wrote Sex and the City, a book which began life as a column on the New York Observer. |