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Super-rich, gifts and birthdays

Thursday, October 11, 2007

First, Fortune got famous for its five hundred. Forbes got into the act much later, with its mere four hundred. But in line with magazine journalism’s ever-growing celebritization, that later compendium comprises 400 super-rich individuals, not institutions.

The Forbes list of loaded people is 25 years old this Fall (by contrast, that fuddy-duddy, institutional Fortune list of companies is more than twice as old) and to mark the birthday publishers Alfred A Knopf are giving us All the Money in the World: How the Forbes 400 make - and spend - their fortunes, written by a team of business writers and edited by Peter W. Bernstein and Annalyn Swan.

 

This veteran duo of reporters was previously responsible for, among other things, the indispensible Secrets of the Code: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind the Da Vinci Code. According to the pair’s publicists at Knopf their new book “goes behind the celebrated list to paint a vivid and revealing portrait of the wealthiest Americans of the past quarter century”.

 

Maybe. What the book certainly provides is a sharp socio-economic snapshot of a certain slice of American life. And treated as journalistic data, that amounts to some helpful source material.

 

For instance, the role played by inherited wealth has clearly lessened over quarter of a century. It accounted for 47% of the list back in 1982 and now just 30%.

 

In part that explains the steady loss of women from the list – less inheritance means fewer heiresses, right? While there were 74 female members of the list when it started, that number has nearly halved now, down to 39.

 

And of course racial minorities don’t feature much at all – except for showbiz luminaries like Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby and until recently Black Entertainment Television’s founder Robert Johnson (until actually, in the words of co-editor Bernstein, “his divorce halved his fortune”).

 

The editors also estimate between ten and twenty percent of the 1346 people who have appeared on the list since its inception never finished college - and four out of the very top five are drop-outs, with the most famous drop-out of all heading the parade. That would be Bill Gates (above, left  - with an unaccustomed chalkboard). The solitary graduate up there is Warren Buffett.

 

 

 

WE HAVE AN EARLIER SUPER-RICH NON-GRADUATE, the Scots immigrant Andrew Carnegie, to thank for the medium of music’s super venue – New York’s Carnegie Hall. As you can tell, I’m a fan – and that’s despite my enthusiasm for London’s Wigmore Hall and the still newish Disney Music Hall in Los Angeles.

 

The philanthropic but testy old Scotsman’s gift to this nation’s ears was wonderfully put through its paces last week after the new season opened (the Hall’s 117th) and the visiting Lucerne Festival Orchestra performed Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was supposed to have been conducted by the orchestra’s founder, the acclaimed 74-year old maestro Claudio Abbado, but he had to cancel because of ill-health (he survived one bout of stomach cancer seven years ago).

 

To the rescue leaped 49-year old David Robertson, the sparky Californian who directs the once-troubled, now healthy St Louis Symphony Orchestra. He had very limited rehearsal time with the European visitors and the New Jersey-based Westminster Symphonic Choir, but any fears I had about missing Abbado’s sure touch were quickly dispelled.

 

The whole performance was energetic without ever being jerky (and that in the face, I have to say, of initially a fusillade of emphatic upticks from Robertson’s baton). And, for all we know about this being a choral as well as instrumental symphony, it still came as a glorious shock to hear the human voice – specifically the German bass Reinhard Hagen’s – proclaim “Oh Freunde” during the pulse-racing finale.

 

Robertson had his own, idiosyncratic sure touch. When latecomers were allowed to take their seats between the first and second movements, the process seemed to take for ever and began to sound like a clumsy stampede, but the conductor broke the tension by turning to the New York audience with: “The traffic here is terrible, isn’t it?”

 

 

 

QUITE A DIFFERENT BAND PLAYED CARNEGIE HALL JUST ONCE -  The Beatles. Their exhilarating performance on February 12th, 1964 came twelve weeks after the US was sunk into sadness and confusion by John F Kennedy’s assassination.

 

In time now for this week’s (October 9th) John Lennon birthday - sadly a reminder of another, later assassination - a delightful new book YESTERDAY: The Beatles Once Upon A Time has appeared from Vendome Press, presenting duotone photographs of the band in its early years. It captures the four young musicians just beginning to savor their fame, and their then still unmodernised, ungentrified Liverpool seedbed. (Ringo Starr is seen - a detail, above right - at home with Mum).

 

The pictures were taken by German rock photographers, the late Max Scheler and Astrid Kirchherr, whose close connection with her subjects goes back to their days in 1960’s Hamburg, when she was engaged to Stuart Sutcliffe, the original drummer who was soon replaced by Ringo.

 

I hope Ringo won’t mind the following story being recalled (since I am sure it was a Lennonesque joke). Lennon was once - considerably after the time of these images - asked if Ringo was “the best drummer in the world”.

 

Lennon answered: “Ringo’s not even the best drummer in the Beatles”.

 

 

 

LIKE THIS WEEK’S NOBEL PRIZE-WINNER GERHARD ERTL, I MYSELF (… haven’t you always wanted to start a sentence like that? …) have a birthday that falls on the day of the award’s announcement. I’m still patiently awaiting my own call from Sweden, of course.

 

As the years pass, like many of my elders I’m perfectly capable of reflecting ad nauseam on the world’s changes that have occurred in my lifetime (though unlike a few of those elders, I have no recollection of the price of twenty cigarettes during my childhood).

 

Just imagine, I can predictably say today, a world without Google, the iPod or the iPhone, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the blogosphere, YouTube, or MySpace and Facebook.

 

The kicker for me, in these fast-moving times, is that I could have listed exactly those same elements of everyday life, now ubiquitous but unknown when I was born, if this week had seen my tenth birthday.