A Life Less Ordinary

One of the things that has amazed me about the “current economic crisis” – and I can’t tell you how sick I am of hearing those three words – is the unfolding revelation of just how many very banal people made huge amounts of money.

Back in the good old days (whenever they were), money men were meant to be sober-sided individuals, the Captain Mainwarings of life: “risk-averse”, as they say in financialese – or dull, as we say at FQR. They were not gods; they were men, and rather unremarkable ones at that.

One of the very few things I remember from my studies of our beautiful language and its literature is Samuel Johnson’s definition of a stockjobber as “a low wretch who gets money by buying and selling shares”. Hardly a noble calling, then.

And yet in the past 20 years or so these “low wretches” have assumed a Nietzschean status in our society. Take disgraced financier Sir Fred Goodwin, just one of the many pantomime villains of the financial conflagration. I saw a picture of him at a day’s shooting and he looked so, well, normal. He had none of the flamboyance with which I like to associate shooting. Instead, he evinced all the sartorial flair of… sorry to be so blunt… a suburban bank manager. And yet our society has conspired to reward these very ordinary men, to heap cash and honours upon them until they can be quite forgiven for getting a little bit above their station and thinking that they were superior to the forces of nature, one of which is the old rule that what goes up has a habit of coming down.

Of course, we all like money, even we cerebral individuals who inhabit the lofty moral and intellectual plane of life at FQR. In fact, we like money a lot, as it buys us the trinkets that divert us from pondering the futility of existence and, on the whole, the presence of the folding stuff makes the journey from cradle to grave more comfortable than it might be. Plato recognised this well enough and, in his Laws (think John Grisham in sandals and a chiton) he accepted that some men would always be better off than others, arriving at the slightly Orwellian conclusion that each man “by a law of inequality, which will be in proportion to his wealth… will receive honours and offices as equally as possible, and there will be no quarrels and disputes”.

It takes a classical scholar of the rigour and intellect of London Mayor Boris Johnson to fully understand what the old Greek was getting at, but even I can get the gist of Plato’s notion that “the legislator” should determine the basic unit of wealth and “permit a man to acquire double or triple, or as much as four times the amount of this”. Any more, however, and he must “give back the surplus to the state, and to the gods who are the patrons of the state”. In giving up the excess, “he shall suffer no penalty or loss of reputation; but if he disobeys this our law anyone who likes may inform against him and receive half the value of the excess, and the delinquent shall pay a sum equal to the excess out of his own property, and the other half of the excess shall belong to the gods”.

It is worth reflecting that if Plato were in charge of Great Britain and his wealth ratio of 4:1 were enshrined in law, Sir Fred’s pension pot of £16m would mean that the rest of us would receive a minimum of £4m. Or, if it is true to say that from 1993 until 2007, Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers received half a billion dollars, then the humblest hamburger flipper would have made 125 million bucks in the same period, albeit without having to cope with the stress of running a generations-old multibillion-dollar business into the ground. And I would hazard a guess that the workplace of the average chef de cuisine in Mr McDonald’s eponymous restaurants spends less on his workplace environment than John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, who is said to have dropped $1.2m on sprucing up the office in early 2008. Thain was probably spending too much time looking at curtains and antiques to spare much attention for the collapsing financial markets.

The recent period of decadence flouted Plato’s law of the relative ratio of affluence with an almost obscene blatancy and now it would appear that the gods have decided their tithe is somewhat overdue. One of the lessons we can take is a rather trite one – that much as we like money and the things it can buy us, we must be careful not to let it stand in the way of our dreams. Look at Plato; he may have been born into a posh Athenian family and he could have pursued a life of Fred Goodwin-like indulgence, but instead he chose to hang out with Socrates.

Together with Theaetetus he started something called the Academy (for all I know, he might have given the first Academy Awards); and we are still talking about him over 2,000 years later. In short, the guy is a legend.

So in this issue we have assembled our own little pantheon of legends and whether people, places or things, they represent the triumph of individuality over conventional wisdom.

A couple of years ago my friend, art dealer Fabien Fryns, told me about his latest discovery. Fabien has introduced some of the major Chinese artists to Western collectors, in fact Fabien is something of an individual himself, but back to his discovery; I was expecting to hear about yet another unpronouncible Chinese painter. Instead, he told me the story of Larry Schiller, who, it seemed, had photographed the American 1960s in its entirety: Kennedy, King, Newman, Redford, Monroe and, my favourite Schiller, the one above of Tippi Hedren and Hitch himself in a typical cameo as the backseat driver. Fabien understood that it was time for Schiller to shine again.

I have met Larry with Fabien and I am pretty sure that both of them would make Charles’s Maverick List. One of the most individual people I have yet to meet is the mother of our features editor. If you were German during the 1980s and going to a certain sort of party the chances are that you would have bumped into Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, a party girl whose sobriquet, an acronymic shortening of her name, TNT, said all you needed to know. But then, just to confound us all, this former cynosure of the international set became une femme sérieuse… but not too sérieuse, as she reveals when she writes about her groupie-like crush on the artist who I believe is called Prince again.

And on a personal note, as a young man I modelled my hat-wearing on David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth, so I am thrilled that the maker of that epoch-defining film, Nic Roeg explains how to go about becoming a legend. Apparently, it requires a baffling death.

In fact, this issue of FQR positively brims with legends. We have Prince Alfonso Hohenlohe’s legendary medallion photographed on a powerboat out at sea in front of the legendary Marbella buffet with its legendary chocolate mousse. Sticking to the waves, New Wave legend Debbie Harry offers vital tips on pop stardom. We sneak a peek at Fulco di Verdura’s legendary jewellery and sup on Maya Even’s legendary fish soup, bouillabaisse. If you can’t face cooking it yourself, next time you are in Cannes (about which Hollywood legend Sharon Stone writes) simply head off to the legendary Tétou, and if you have trouble getting a table, drop the name of our very own in-house legend Charles Finch. That’s quite a lotta legends and certainly enough for one paragraph.

- Nick Foulkes is Editorial Director of Finch’s Quarterly Review

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