In his 1926 story “The Rich Boy,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote:
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.Ernest Hemingway offered up his even more famous response, in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”: The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Julian, “Yes, they have more money.”Fitzgerald worked, uncredited, on the script to George Cukor’s 1939 film “The Women,” which I discuss in the clip below. The movie is based on a play by Clare Boothe Luce; I haven’t read the play, so I don’t know the extent of the changes wrought on it by the credited screenwriters, Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, or by Fitzgerald and the other uncredited writer, Donald Ogden Stewart. In any case, the movie’s benign view of the very rich, in the depths of the Depression, was not unique. In Cukor’s film, there are wealthy women who are as capable of low deeds as are poor ones, but they are so much more sympathetic and pitiable for seeming merely absurd, whereas the fierce grasping of Joan Crawford’s perfume-counter gold-digger comes off as pure evil.
It seems to me that there are two different kinds of rich people in question: those who earn their wealth, and those who enjoy inherited wealth. Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is a cynical depiction of acquired wealth; his Monroe Stahr, in “The Love of the Last Tycoon,” a more admiring one. But he never took up the challenge of looking at the kind of industrialist that Theodore Dreiser wrote about, in “The Financier” and “The Titan”—precisely the kind of people whose money comes into play in “The Women.”
P.S. Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” features a great speech, delivered by Bill Murray to a chapel full of private-school students, on the subject: > You guys have it real easy. I never had it like this where I grew up. But I send my kids here. Because the fact is, whether you deserve it or not, you go to one of the best schools in this country. Rushmore. You lucked out. Now, for some of you it doesn’t matter. You were born rich and you’re going to stay rich. But here’s my advice for the rest of you: take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs. And take them down. Just remember: they can buy anything. But they can’t buy backbone. Don’t let them forget it.
(The speech, from the script that Anderson co-wrote with Owen Wilson, is based on remarks by Wilson’s father.) The great paradox is what happens when these smart young strivers with backbone—say, Max Fischer—not only take the rich down, but bring themselves up and, through their exertions, become rich.
