Living on Half a Million a Year
Stein, Benjamin J.
Benjamin J. Stein
LIVING ON HALF A MILLION A YEAR
But beware of tax-shelter friends, and keep your dog away from Love on a Leash.
A his is a story of illusion.
When I was a child, my parents...
...We sold the house in Aspen and the condo in Palm Springs...
...This way of life did not seem to me like something reckless or unforeseen...
...We also had a Jenn-Air in Aspen, an automatic, nonstop icemaker in Rancho Mirage, and seven television sets, all color, all hooked up to the cable, including Home Box Office, all kept up to the minute in case their lordships, me and my wife, should want to come to town on the spur of the moment...
...Not only that, but 1 was earning the money in a totally different environment...
...I had to work for it night and day, in Aspen, in Chelsea, in Rancho Mirage, in the Wagoneer...
...I asked...
...Who even noticed if Beverly Hills Mercedes charged me eight hundred dollars for a tune-up with no complications...
...How humiliatingly wrong that was for people like us...
...When I passed by Tiffany's and saw men walking out with beaming women carrying little robin's egg blue boxes, when I passed by La Cote Basque and saw couples radiant with prosperity, the cruelty of my own middle-class poverty was excruciating...
...After a stretch of one year away from Aspen, my wife and I decided that we might enjoy it more if we drove across country with the dog...
...We were tired and victimized and frightened...
...Instead, it seemed like what I had always been owed...
...But I understood...
...In the East, I had my Subaru, which was dark blue, and my wife had a light green Pinto...
...My wife and I spend our evenings at home, eating Diet Lasagna and reading...
...When I moved to New York, I watched the investment bankers cruise by in their Porsches on Benjamin J. Stein is a writer and producer in Hollywood...
...Counting all three houses, the one on Pacific View Drive, the one on West Hallam Street, and the one on Racquet Club Drive, we now had ten bedrooms and six bathrooms and twelve telephones for two persons and a Weimaraner dog...
...We sold it after we had owned it for three months...
...A typical day's work assignment for the girls was: 1) take the car to car wash...
...Put another way, the problem was that I felt I had every right by taste and education to live as if I had a lot of money, only I had no money...
...I would say twenty seconds...
...We thought we were rich because we took limousines from the first-class lounge to the Helmsley Palace to La Cote Basque...
...Not if you do it carefully...
...margin call from your broker on a commodities contract, you have never known fear...
...But it took three years to realize that I should not go from there to Hamburger Hamlet or The Old World or even The Mandarin...
...2) cash check at bank...
...Instead, by 1980,1 should be going to La Scala or Mr Chow or The Palm every night...
...Three days after I bought gold at the highest price of all time, it had the largest fall that any metal commodity has ever had since records have been kept...
...The man who spent eighty thousand on his bathroom is divorced, alone, drinking heavily...
...Instead of spending time with cautious penny-pinchers in lower Manhattan, I spent my days with real estate playboys, super-hot agents and producers like Michael Shamberg and Allen Greisman, and women with inherited money whose idea of a winter's work was to find a perfect seal point cat...
...They had huge slabs of it in the living room of their mansion in Bel Air, where they had three live-in help, including a full-time plumber/electrician...
...We were lucky...
...She read the monthly expenses out of her spread sheets, by category: Florist-$600 Jewelers-$850 Mortgages on houses and rent-$11,600 Travel-$6000 Meals and entertainment-$4200 Dog-sitting and messenger-$1800 . . . I stopped her at that point...
...After all, you could fly to Las Vegas and have dinner while watching Sammy or Shecky...
...We made money on the place in Aspen...
...4) give dog flea bath...
...She was required to be present at any hours I wanted her...
...When I was a child, my parents considered me hopelessly spendthrift...
...She did not type or file, but she did know to suggest that at lunch time we should go to Ma Maison...
...I did not like the dry feeling in my throat when I got a call from Creative Artists telling me Warner had said no to a script sale I was counting on to make three mortgage payments...
...It is a story of delusion as well, about just what it means to live as if the money were never going to run out and you were a figure in a magazine advertisement...
...In a few weeks time, I sold a novel for a small advance, sold a script to a studio, sold another novel simply on a phrase, became a consultant to a major Hollywood producer, and went cruising through the revolving doors of the Good 'n' Plenty Restaurant...
...I hired three college girls to work for me on rotating shifts so that I should never have to be without company...
...I hate avarice or even caution...
...In the East, we had somehow managed in one-bedroom apartments with occasional trips to resorts where we stayed in hotels...
...In law school, I worked and got an allowance and had a generous LBJ-era loan, but I still found myself writing those horrible letters home...
...I got an adequate allowance, but it was never enough...
...We drove it once across country, then paid a woman in Aspen to drive it back to Los Angeles...
...Our transportation habits changed...
...Housing required surgery at least as drastic...
...We stopped renting the house in the Malibu Beach Colony...
...That's the fun of it...
...We also had gardeners and a maid regularly at each house, and snow clearance in Aspen and grass cutting in Rancho Mirage...
...Now, with the standard of living for which we were destined, that was out of the question...
...6) buy Chew Toys at Love on a Leash...
...You're rich when you have spent enough to sleep comfortably at night, and we were up at two in the morning, wide awake...
...We decided that not every Valentine's Day was an occasion for a diamond bracelet or a videotape outfit...
...Not only that, but people rip you off when you pretend you're rich...
...Our house in Los Angeles was modest enough-three bedrooms, two baths, and a study overlooking the Valley lights...
...No matter how much allowance I got, it was not enough...
...That way of life might be called "young heir away at school with forbearing, absent-minded trustee...
...After all, I might have gotten a Gulfstream, like my pal Barron Thomas...
...We stopped eating at Mr Chow and La Scala unless we could charge it...
...It took practically no time at all before my bill each month from Mr Chow alone was larger than my mortgage payment...
...The secretary quit to live with a wealthy real estate promoter...
...He died at forty-four of a heart attack brought on in part by overwork and worry about money...
...The secretary's job was to follow me around and listen to any ideas I might have that could be made into movies or TV shows...
...There are a lot of worried people in there...
...It needed work, and we hired a contractor to get it looking spiffy...
...Then, in one swoop, everything changed, and that is the story of illusion...
...We put an iron clamp of three hundred dollars a month on our florist bills...
...The day I heard the mellow-voiced CBS radio announcer talk about the gold, the day 1 got the margin call, the day my bookkeeper told me I was spending money like a sheik's son, spending every cent I earned and then some, was the day it finally dawned on me that getting and spending were not as much fun as they were supposed to be...
...If it had, I might have realized that it might some day end...
...By the end of 1980, we were spending as much maintaining the two houses where we almost never were as my wife had recently earned as an associate at a major Wall Street law firm...
...I was then a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and I could afford to go to one movie per weekend and then have Shake 'n' Bake chicken...
...We left the dog without sitters...
...We thought we were rich because we spent all our days with men and women who paid eighty thousand dollars to redo a powder room, and we thought that because we were rich, we were happy...
...The afternoon I sold out of my gold "position;' I went to see my bookkeeper...
...You should do the same...
...Once I realized that I was supposed to live like Scott and Zelda, it was clear that I should never have to be lonely...
...We made a nickel on the house in Palm Springs, before the collapse there...
...Unfortunately, I was the child of extremely pragmatic, salary-earning economists who had grown up in the Depression, most decidedly without a forbearing trustee of their own, not to mention a trust...
...Of course, taking the Mercedes or the Jaguar was out of the question...
...From our years of living like the grandson of a successful wildcatter, we have a file cabinet filled with used first-class airplane tickets, American Express bills that would embarrass Karl Maiden, and yellow repair bills from Beverly Hills Mercedes...
...The problem, as I always saw it, was that I was entitled to a certain kind of life-style...
...In a hundred ways, our life changed...
...Not that there aren't adjustments- when I first moved to Los Angeles, the Shake 'n' Bake boxes went to the back of the cupboard...
...You have to expect to lose at the beginning...
...The girls who sat with the dog told me stories of college life I was able to sell to studios...
...What if they should break down on rough mountain roads...
...Meanwhile, one of our friends who had grown wealthy making up videotape tax shelters had been watching our style of life...
...Only put up a hundred thousand or so at first," he said...
...When the houses were all fully up and running, we had bills pouring in from the phone companies, electric companies, gas companies, local tax collectors, roof repairmen, underground sprinkler installers, fence menders, lawyers protecting us from lawsuits from neighbors, property managers, and alarm services...
...In two days of trading, we lost as much money-not on paper, really lost-as I had earned in my first two years out of law school...
...Where my parents would have had a good reason to eat out at any restaurant at all, my new friends and colleagues thought that to spend one hundred dollars for dinner for two with a fair wine at Ma Maison was the most Spartan kind of bare nourishment...
...Norman Podhoretz, no slouch in the observations department, said that it took about twenty minutes to accustom yourself to a life of luxury after a life of care...
...When a producer or a publisher says no, we yawn...
...But we were not rich and we were not happy...
...Anyway, compared with my old friend Michael Miller, who had two Rolls-Royces, we were practically taking the bus...
...But then again, this was apparently meant to be my permanent way of life, which meant that I would surely always be able to afford it...
...I put my Subaru in gear and headed home for Hamburger Helper-Beef Stroganoff Flavor...
...They were right...
...I simply worked incredibly hard and it took a toll...
...But that's part of the fun of it," said my tax-shelter friend...
...Then you should try speculating in commodities," he said...
...Then you'll have a source of income so you won't have to write all the time...
...His own wife had recently taken up the connoisseurship of antique marquetry...
...No matter how much money was budgeted for popcorn, a candy bar, and a soft drink at the movies on a Saturday afternoon, there would always have to be still more popcorn, Jujubes, licorice, and a soft drink for every frightening part of The Creature from the Black Lagoon...
...I know you have already sent my allowance but unexpected...
...I passed by Duke Zeibert's and La Bagatelle and watched the lobbyists step out of their Cadillacs to eat squab...
...I was not, and am not, a particularly successful writer...
...Aren't they incredibly dangerous...
...When I got to the stage of earning more in a lucky week than I had earned in my first full year out of law school, it seemed to me as if that was equilibrium, the natural state of things that would continue forever...
...The work and the iffy nature of my payment, combined with a steady torrent of spending, meant that editors and publishers and real estate brokers could control how many hours I slept each night...
...To make up for it, we bought a five-bedroom house in the West End of Aspen, where every neighbor had four syllables in his last name followed by a number...
...It certainly did not provide for taxicab rides from school to Paul Stuart...
...We're making a fortune on this stuff," he said, pointing at the wood carved panels...
...The repair department at Beverly Hills Mercedes was like a third signature on our checking account even when nothing was wrong with the car...
...Benjamin J. Stein LIVING ON HALF A MILLION A YEAR But beware of tax-shelter friends, and keep your dog away from Love on a Leash...
...Where my parents or my friends from the East might have considered a cross-country airplane flight an extravagance unless it was a $200 Super-Saver special for a VERY IMPORTANT REASON, my new friends thought I was incredibly clever and shrewd simply to fly First Class at twelve hundred dollars the ticket to see a show...
...In something safe like gold, which only goes up...
...Each girl was paid ten dollars per hour...
...It was supposed to allow for subway rides from Morningside Heights to Barney's...
...If you have never had a seven a.m...
...A said this was a story of illusion, and it is...
...It had red leather upholstery and walnut burl on the dashboard and who cared if it cost seven hundred dollars to repair the windshield wipers, as it surely did...
...I was having one of those when I got my margin call...
...Before that contractor had even begun (he never finished), we also bought a house (well, really a condo) in Rancho Mirage, a tony offshoot of Palm Springs...
...Instead, we bought a new, top-of-the-line Jeep Wagoneer Limited with imitation wood paneling and leather seats...
...Our "property manager" in Aspen thought nothing of charging us two hundred dollars a month for snow removal when there was no snow on the ground...
...By the end of our time in Aspen, he put tenants in our house against our orders, without permission, and without giving us a dime of rentals...
...For one thing, you get incredibly tired...
...The situation did not improve in college...
...Not only that, but the money did not always come when I needed it...
...Life was meant to be lived, not worried over...
...From my very own apartment, I could see the limousines picking up the haute bourgeoisie at Lincoln Center while I thumbed through TV Guide...
...The money 1 spent was not inherited...
...The tax-shelter promoter is broke, in extremely serious legal trouble, long gone from his fabulous house in Bel Air...
...It was a debt of fortune that was at long last being paid, with modest interest...
...We also know to be extremely wary of the room with the windows we had been looking through...
...I had long cold streaks, when my savings would disappear like water down a drain...
...Since my wife sometimes left the house, I hired a secretary...
...All great men have spent money freely...
...At the age of thirty-one, I felt as if I were destined to stand with my nose pressed against the windows of privilege forever, when by all possible claims of wishing and needing, I should be inside...
...The house was a Victorian with a modern addition...
...As soon as the checks could be written out, we had a Mercedes 450 SLC for me and a white Jaguar XJ-6C for my wife...
...If you can't sleep at night, you're spending too goddamned much...
...Nor would we even think of doing anything as tacky as worrying about what the meal cost...
...Again, 1 understood everything...
...I said that...
...3) take dog to beach [did I mention we had also rented a house in the Malibu Beach Colony...
...Naturally I did not do anything as tacky as keep track of my expenses myself...
...5) buy champagne at Liquor Locker...
...I had become a literal peon trying to pay for the lifestyle of a prince...
...He added, as if talking to a small child, "You don't understand...
...the way to Lakeville for the weekend...
...For the first six years out of law school, this problem dogged me mercilessly...
...F. Scott Fitzgerald said that...
...I don't know anything about it," I said...
Vol. 18 • May 1985 • No. 5
