Happy Birthday, C.Z. Guest

1. You died long before I had any idea of who you were, and when I did find out, I admired you as I do all spectacularly elegant bitches.
2. I spent a long time reading and thinking about you and all the other “social x-rays” without really getting the picture.
3. It just seemed fun and sassy and somewhat frightening, all that “Ladies Who Lunch” business.
4. Not being even slightly attuned to American class dynamics and never having come across a debutante, I don’t think I even understood that you were rich, or “aristocratic”, or as your friend Ann Landers said, “Born to the purple.”
5. I’m exaggerating. I understood that you were rich, because just look at you, but I had no way of incorporating that fiendish and corrupting kind of intergenerational wealth into my wider understanding of the world.
6. I went to the same university at the same time as Chelsy Davy, and for a long time she was my sort of touchstone for “the richest a person can be.”
7. As you can see I have led a sheltered life.
8. What I am saying is that I didn’t get it, which is probably why I still feel quite warmly towards you despite my conviction that billionaires mustn’t exist.
9. I think a lot of people feel this way. You were after all a spectacularly elegant bitch.
10. So then. For those of us who would like to retain fond memories, I would recommend avoiding almost everything written about you, because a lot of it is quite damning and guillotine-courting and bad.
11. For instance, when you were on your book tour, in the seventies, some woman asked you if you were rich. Recounting the incident afterwards, you said: “Well, do you know what I did then? I said to her, ‘Have you ever had an abortion?’ Naturally she looked shocked so I said, ‘My dear, you have just asked me the rudest question one human being can ask another. So I thought I would ask you the same kind of question.'”
12. Well then.
13. Also: “If Nixon had had the proper breeding, Watergate would never have happened.”
14. And: ”Nobody knows that Howard Hughes had a factory in California simply for paraplegics.”
15. And furthermore: “The richer you are the harder you have to work. The rich don’t have to work but we like to work. We feel it is our duty.”
16. Well good heavens.
17. It is impossible to tell if you were joking or not, but because it is your birthday I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
18. You were probably not joking.
19. Happy birthday.

Rosa Lyster