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‘The Queen of Versailles’ Puts Her Life in the Hands of a ‘Wicked’ Diva

 

Marisa Chafetz for The New York Times

‘The Queen of Versailles’ Puts Her Life in the Hands of a ‘Wicked’ Diva

 

A 2012 documentary asked if Jacqueline Siegel was a benefactor or victim of American greed. A new musical starring Kristin Chenoweth raises doubts.

 

Zachary Small

By Zachary Small

Aug. 29, 2025

Updated 8:52 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/theater/queen-of-versailles-chenoweth-broadway.html

 

When the cameras rolled, Jacqueline Siegel glided through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s period rooms like she owned them — poised, polished and attuned to the quiet performance of being watched. She paused before an embellished wooden table once owned by Marie Antoinette, running her eyes along its glossy surface, before letting a smile break through. “I wish this museum was a store,” she said, half joking, half dreaming.

 

Off-camera, the shimmer dulled as the 59-year-old former pageant winner’s shoulders drooped ever so slightly. The self-styled “Queen of Versailles,” who was immortalized in a 2012 documentary about her family’s stalled effort to build a replica of the French palace in the Orlando suburbs, was suddenly less a performer and more a person. She admitted to being nervous about the photo shoot, more than she had predicted after a decade chasing the spotlight of reality television.

 

The documentary had shown the beauty queen in the half-finished ballrooms and boudoirs of her mansion, planning for the day when she could add a Benihana restaurant and ice rink to its sprawling blueprint. But after her billionaire husband, David, spent millions on construction, the 2008 financial crisis forced him into a fight for the survival of his timeshare empire. The family retained control of the house and have spent the intervening years crawling toward the finish line of construction.

 

Siegel’s excesses and tragedies are being restaged at the St. James Theater on Broadway this fall (previews are set to start on Oct. 8) in a new musical with songs by the “Wicked” composer Stephen Schwartz and a book by Lindsey Ferrentino. Kristin Chenoweth will step into Siegel’s stilettos to re-enact the most infamous tableaux: a dead pet lizard, the mansion filled with dog poop. (F. Murray Abraham will play her husband.) But the show also digs deeper, tracing Siegel’s working-class origins and the 2015 opioid overdose that killed her daughter Victoria.

 

A production image of Kristin Chenoweth, standing while wearing a short pink dress and holding shopping bags. There’s a screen with an American flag and a Wall Street street sign, and people standing or sitting while looking off to the left.

 

“We have talked about it as a cautionary tale from Day 1,” Ferrentino said she has told Siegel, explaining how the blond glamazon exemplifies the pernicious “more is more” mentality at a time of rising income inequality. “The desire for more includes a desire for more attention — and a desire to tell your story,” Ferrentino said.

 

Siegel never flinches when others repeat this explanation. “I hope to inspire people,” she responds. However, she understands her role as the show’s antihero: She’s an example of what happens when one’s delusions of grandeur become attainable. But as the musical heads to Broadway and she prepares to finally move into her Versailles palace, the delusion seems to be cracking. It has been only four months since her husband died of cancer and her sister, Jessica Mallery, overdosed on cocaine laced with fentanyl — on the same day. (Mallery died a few days later.)

 

After the photo shoot with Chenoweth wrapped in the period rooms, Siegel requested one more location. The group followed her to the museum’s sculpture gallery where she posed underneath a statue by the 18th-century Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. The artwork depicted Perseus holding the severed head of Medusa. Siegel chose to stand underneath the snake-haired gorgon; she smiled and gestured toward the decapitation like Vanna White revealing a vowel on “Wheel of Fortune.”

 

Was it just a silly tourist picture or did she see herself in the monster?

 

The Girl From Endwell

Siegel tried to become a chorus girl on Broadway in the late 1980s, dancing for casting directors for “Cats” and “The Will Rogers Follies” before making a name for herself in beauty pageants and modeling campaigns. The dream of being onstage vanished after she moved to Florida in the 1990s, married a billionaire and began raising eight children.

 

Several years after the “Queen of Versailles” documentary was released, Ferrentino was pursuing an adaptation; the stage director Michael Arden had expressed interest with the hopes of attaching Schwartz and Chenoweth.

 

“Jackie is a harbinger of where America is heading,” Arden said during a phone interview, describing Siegel as a character that would allow Chenoweth to flex her comedic chops and dramatic range. “The role might just seem funny, but there is deep pathos underneath it.”

 

Ferrentino was also drawn to the idea for personal reasons: The Siegels had purchased several properties in her Florida hometown, Cocoa Beach.

 

“They bought the pier and hotel,” said Ferrentino, who arranged a meeting with Siegel in 2017 to discuss the possibility of a show. She assured Siegel that she would not be written as a punchline. “I’m not interested in putting her onstage and tearing her apart,” the playwright continued. “But there is a crucial difference between putting someone onstage and glorifying that person.”

 

Siegel said their encounter was more like a celebrity sighting, with Ferrentino approaching her on the beach like a fan girl. “I don’t know how she recognized me,” Siegel recalled. “I wasn’t even wearing makeup.”

 

That period in her life was admittedly a haze. Victoria’s death in 2015 shook the family and reconfigured Siegel’s image of herself. Siegel was busy fulfilling her daughter’s last wish to publish the contents of her personal diary, which were eventually released with a text message in the introduction that Victoria had written in case she overdosed.

 

“I’ve never shown anyone my journal but there’s no one else I would rather pass it onto than you. My business is everyone else’s business now and I’m OK with that mom ❤️ hey maybe you can publish my teenage journal and bump up your career,” the note said. “If it worked out I’d be so proud of u. I’ll always be proud of you.”

 

Siegel agreed to Ferrentino’s musical without asking permission from her family. “I had already made up my mind,” the queen said. She even invested in the production, explaining that Victoria once told her she would win “a Grammy or something.” (She figures she meant a Tony.) And though the creative team said she had no artistic control, Siegel would still profit from her story if it’s a success on Broadway.

 

But her relationship to the documentary’s creator, Lauren Greenfield, was complicated. Shortly after the movie’s release, David Siegel sued for defamation, claiming “The Queen of Versailles” was “more fictional than real.” He ultimately lost the lawsuit and was ordered to pay $750,000 in legal fees, according to Greenfield, who had continued to travel through Europe with Jackie to promote the film while their lawyers battled.

 

“Jackie is quite different from when I first met her,” said Greenfield, a producer on the musical. “She is still the same person, but she doesn’t have that innocence anymore.”

 

Greenfield attributed the shift to Siegel’s time on reality television, which has included an episode of “Celebrity Wife Swap,” her own series called “The Queen of Versailles Reigns Again” and several appearances on the “Below Deck” franchise. She became more aware of the camera and less afraid to toy with the audience’s perception of her as a materialistic trophy wife.

 

The musical introduces Siegel in a negative light. Chenoweth steps onstage with a number called “Because We Can,” in which she revels in the conspicuous consumption of floors studded with precious gems and walls covered in gold. But the portrayal softens as the show dives into her childhood in a working-class family from Endwell, N.Y., a bedroom community for IBM employees where she spends her days looking into rich people’s windows and watching “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” When her engineering degree and entry job at IBM fail to meet her standards, she searches for other levers of wealth and happiness.

 

“Here lies Jackie Mallery. Minimum wage salary,” Chenoweth sings in the role. “With a tiny life and great big dreams she has no clue how to achieve.”

 

There is a sound cue in the show described in the script as a “pong,” which represents Siegel’s ability to constantly bounce between obstacles and opportunities. (The sound is also a reference to her love of the video game Pong.) It plays when she leaves her IBM job; when she leaves her first husband, Ron Solomon, whom she called abusive; and again when she meets her second husband, David, who compliments her daughter Victoria for having a royal name.

 

She has continued to pingpong through life, surviving hardships by switching her focus.

 

After Victoria’s death, she established a nonprofit called Victoria’s Voice Foundation to promote drug awareness and prevention. She worked with the Obama administration to help pass the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act in 2016 and appeared in the White House more recently with President Trump, a friend of her late husband, when he signed the Halt Fentanyl Act.

 

“I am tired of death,” Siegel said, explaining that watching the musical was like being reunited with the departed members of her family. “When I saw Victoria onstage, I felt like my daughter came back to life and I started crying.”

 

She views her life as part of a divine plan that includes fame, fortune and now a pint-size soprano named Kristin Chenoweth.

 

“When I got married, my husband started designing Versailles on a napkin,” Siegel said. “It was his dream, not mine. And I have been reflecting a lot since my husband passed away: Why did God put this in my path when I didn’t even ask for it?”

 

Switching from a pilsner beer to a piping kettle of mint tea at the Met Museum’s balcony lounge, Siegel outlined a new vision for Versailles without her husband. She wanted to use the 90,000-square-foot mansion to draw guests into fund-raising events for issues like health care and drug addiction. She rationalized that a high-profile musical would only extend her reach to do good in the world.

 

“This Broadway show is going to help me save lives,” Siegel said.

 

Palace Intrigue

About two years ago, Chenoweth made a pilgrimage to Orlando, driving beyond the palm trees to the quiet shores of Butler Lake where Versailles stood, almost finished, in the dust bowl of construction machines.

 

Both the actor and her subject had eagerly anticipated this meeting. Broadway musicals overwhelmingly focus on historical or fictional events; it’s exceptionally rare for an actress to cultivate a long relationship with a subject that she will embody through pop ballads and box steps. Especially one who’s investing in her project.

 

Chenoweth arrived at the mansion to an illustrious surprise. Siegel had written the actor’s name in lights as if it were spelled out on a Broadway marquee. The former pageant queen was wearing a long, pink Balmain dress, which Chenoweth complimented.

 

“The next day, she had it delivered to me,” Chenoweth said as she recalled the meeting over tea at the Met Museum.

 

Siegel added with a smile: “It was the last one in the country.”

 

Chenoweth said, “My immediate reaction was that this was going to be a friend of mine.”

 

Not only is Chenoweth making her return to Broadway for the first time in nearly a decade, she is also making her debut as a theater producer. “The Queen of Versailles” is the 57-year-old actor’s chance to prove herself to the business community.

 

“I don’t think anyone should ever invest in anything on Broadway expecting a profit,” Chenoweth said, briefly pausing to gleefully acknowledge the irony of her next statement. “Of course that’s my goal with this show.”

 

But she has tasted success more often than most actors on Broadway, originating the role of Glinda in “Wicked” and gaining mainstream recognition in television shows like “The West Wing,” “Pushing Daisies” and “Glee.” In addition to her steady film career, the Tony and Emmy winner has also gained a large following on TikTok, where she occasionally sings her old repertoire, belts high notes from a public toilet and discusses her love of 7/11 Slurpees.

 

In some ways, Chenoweth has been waiting for “The Queen of Versailles” since debuting in “Wicked” over two decades ago, when Schwartz, the composer, promised to write her next musical. It wasn’t until 2015 that he hinted about the opportunity — and then another five years before they started to collaborate on the project.

 

“I did question how we would make this work,” Chenoweth said, but then she saw the potential of Siegel as a larger-than-life personality who came from a small town just like her. “I love my home state, I am still an Oklahoma girl, but I did have a dream of getting out and making my own money.”

 

There was an immediate connection between the women during their meeting at Versailles, which was scheduled as a photo shoot to promote the musical’s world premiere in Boston last year. Siegel was understandably nervous about meeting the actor portraying her, and Chenoweth could sense it.

 

And as Siegel continued to show support for the musical, Chenoweth became more nervous. During one of the last readings, she pulled Siegel aside and told her, “As we tell your story, I just don’t want you to be hurt by it or be saddened by it.”

 

“I remember that,” Siegel said, bidding for the actor to continue.

 

“We are telling your story and there are going to be lots of reminders for you. And she just gently and beautifully gave me permission to not worry about it,” Chenoweth said, adding that Siegel told her, simply, “Just play me.”

 

Of course, it’s not so simple.

 

When a House Is Not a Home

The documentary ended with Siegel realizing how little she knew about her husband’s finances after David revealed that Versailles was headed toward foreclosure. The couple vowed to start living within their means, just like many other Americans did following the Great Recession. But soon after the timeshare business recovered and the family fortune was to some extent restored, the Siegels continued to build even in the face of Victoria’s death.

 

“The well of grief is so deep,” said Ferrentino, who thought it was a uniquely American problem to put one’s entire identity into a symbol of wealth. “What this house has come to represent — the scale of her ambition, the scale of every dream she has ever had for her family — when that well inside you is so deep, no building will ever contain that.”

 

She continued: “I witnessed it over the years. They would finish sections of the house that could have been move-in ready but then decided they wanted something bigger and better. They would take it out and start again.”

 

Siegel is now facing the reality of Versailles’ completion alone. She will take her five dogs to the completed palace, but most of her children are living in different parts of the country. The bedroom planned for Victoria has been converted to a prayer altar. “Her spirit can stay with me in the master bedroom,” she said.

 

When asked about her plans for the move, the widow winced. “It’s going to be sad,” she said. “I don’t have any immediate desire to move in, plus all my memories are at my old house. I still have my husband’s memories there. His toothbrushes are right there.”

 

When our afternoon at the Met was finished and we walked toward the exit, I thought back to Siegel’s playful pose underneath Medusa’s severed head. Was it just a bit of camp from a woman who has spent years performing for the cameras? A little nod to the “off with her head” style of execution that the other queen of Versailles faced during the French Revolution?

 

Siegel later told me that she was attracted to the statue because it reminded her of a fountain she owns that includes a sculpture of the sea god Poseidon. I told her that the two mythological figures are connected; in some version of the myth, Medusa is transformed from a beautiful maiden into a monster after Poseidon seduces her.

 

The story reflects a recurring theme in Greek mythology, where women bear the brunt of divine conflicts. And Medusa is a mythological figure who has been recast for centuries: vilified by some, worshiped by others, always frozen in the moment of her undoing. Perhaps Siegel sees herself there, a woman who is both a spectacle and a survivor, staring back at a world that has already decided what she is.

 

When I told her all this, she said it was possible that fate led her to the statue. But she herself, didn’t know why. She said, “I forgot the story, in all honesty.”

 

Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology.

REMEBERING, 10/01/2013:The Queen of Versailles ...

 The Queen of Versailles is a documentary film by Lauren Greenfield. The film depicts Jackie and David Siegel, owners of Westgate Resorts, and their family as they build the largest and most expensive single-family house in the United States, and the crisis they go through as the US economy declines.
The documentary won the U.S. Directing Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize from the Brisbane International Film Festival, a Best Director Award from the RiverRun Film Festival, and the Special Jury Documentary Feature prize from the deadCenter Film Festival. "The Queen of Versailles" was also nominated for Best Documentary Film, 2012 by the International Documentary Association (IDA).

The film has met strong critical approval, earning a critical approval score of 95% on Rotten Tomatoes (95 of 100 reviews being positive), with an average score of 8/10 and the consensus statement, "The Queen of Versailles is a timely, engaging, and richly drawn portrait of the American Dream improbably composed of equal parts compassion and schadenfreude."
Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein described the documentary as "perhaps the single best film on the Great Recession", writing that one scene, in which Siegel recounts a series of transactions that allowed him to purchase at a fraction of its original value a loan on which he owes money, "might stand as the single most complete vignette on the mechanics of the financial crisis and the subsequent slow recovery." In a review of the film, The Economist wrote that the documentary is "an uncomfortably intimate glimpse of a couple’s struggle with a harsh new reality," concluding that "the film’s great achievement is that it invites both compassion and Schadenfreude. What could have been merely a silly send-up manages to be a meditation on marriage and a metaphor for the fragility of fortunes, big and small."

 Let Them Eat Crow
Review: ‘The Queen of Versailles’ by Lauren Greenfield
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: July 19, 2012 in The New York Times / http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/movies/review-the-queen-of-versailles-by-lauren-greenfield.html

It has been said that we live in a new gilded age, in which the rich take it as their sovereign right and civic duty to get richer, while the rest of us look on in envy, simmer with resentment or dream of rebellion. “The Queen of Versailles,” a new documentary by Lauren Greenfield about life on the thin, fragile, sugarcoated top layer of the upper crust, captures the tone of the times with a clear, surprisingly compassionate eye.
A gaudy guilty pleasure that is also a piece of trenchant social criticism, the movie starts out in the mode of reality television, resembling the pilot for a new “Real Housewives” franchise or a reboot of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” Before long, though, it takes on the coloration of a Theodore Dreiser novel — not quite an American tragedy but a sprawling, richly detailed study of ambition, desire and the wild swings of fortune that are included in the price of the capitalist ticket.

When they first sit for Ms. Greenfield’s cameras, in 2007, David and Jackie Siegel are living an outsized, unlimited version of the American dream. His time-share business, Westgate Resorts, is booming. Families seduced by easy credit, aggressive sales tactics and the chance for a taste of luxury are eager to sign on the dotted line, and a sleek new Westgate dream palace has just gone up in Las Vegas.

Mr. Siegel is happy to talk about his modest beginnings in Indiana, his hard work and his devotion to causes including the Miss America organization and the Republican Party. His wife, a former model and beauty contestant, is outgoing and unpretentious, so tickled by her extravagant life that it is hard not to share her enthusiasm.

Feeling a bit squeezed in their 26,000-square-foot mansion in Orlando, Fla., the Siegels are building a palatial home more than three times as big. Envisioned as the largest residence in America, the house is modeled, with little irony and less restraint, on the French chateau referred to in the film’s title.

History buffs will note that the inhabitants of that Versailles were evicted by an angry mob. The Siegels, as of this writing still in possession of their heads, were kept out of their stately pleasure dome by the invisible hand of the market, to which Ms. Greenfield may owe a story credit. If you detect a spoiler here, it’s hardly my fault: blame the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent collapse of the real estate market, events that “The Queen of Versailles” recaptures from an especially intimate and fascinating perspective.

The Siegels are separated by 30 years — Jackie is David’s third wife; he is her second husband — and united by seven children, who traipse through the movie, along with a staff of maids and nannies and an indeterminate number of fluffy white dogs. The household is a busy place, its rhythms determined by Mr. Siegel’s work ethic and Mrs. Siegel’s passionate consumerism. They are frank and open with Ms. Greenfield’s crew and generous with their time, allowing a remarkable degree of scrutiny even as the gilding begins to peel away.

(It’s true that Mr. Siegel is suing Ms. Greenfield and the film’s distributor for defamation, but in America, to paraphrase William Blake, litigation is true friendship.)

It may seem at times as if the Siegels are being held up for ridicule or facile judgment, and “The Queen of Versailles” does have its moments of real-life comedy. “How was it, flying commercial?” Mrs. Siegel asks one of her children as they arrive in her western New York hometown for a visit. Descending on the car rental counter, she asks, “What’s the name of my driver?”

But back in Florida her actual driver speaks of Mrs. Siegel and her husband as friends, and their relations with the people around them seem relatively untouched by snobbery or noblesse oblige. It is hard not to enjoy Mrs. Siegel’s company or to be unmoved by aspects of her life story.

Not that everything is harmonious. There are visible strains in the marriage, and a fair amount of evidence that Mr. Siegel is not always such a nice guy. One of his sons from an earlier marriage, now a partner in Westgate, says some things that hint at a cold, narcissistic paternal core. But the children of farmers, doctors and factory workers have also been known to find fault with their distant, driven, demanding fathers.

“The very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “are different from you and me.”

“Yes,” Ernest Hemingway may or may not have replied. “They have more money.”

“The Queen of Versailles” upholds Hemingway’s demystified view and testifies to the curious logic of class in the new gilded age. The Siegels are proud of how much they have, embracing the idea that what distinguishes them from others — from Westgate’s customers or the members of its sales force, from friends and family in the heartland — is not quality but quantity. They are just like everybody else; they just have more. Mrs. Siegel treats herself to a tin of caviar on Christmas morning, but she also likes Chicken McNuggets and diet soda.

David and Jackie Siegel are no better than any of the rest of us. That may go without saying. But the reverse is also true, and Ms. Greenfield’s real achievement is to disarm the reflex of superiority that the spectacle of her subjects’ way of life may provoke in some viewers.

Schadenfreude and disgust may be unavoidable, but to withhold all sympathy from the Siegels is to deny their humanity and shortchange your own. Marvel at the ornate frame, mock the vulgarity of the images if you want, but let’s not kid ourselves. If this film is a portrait, it is also a mirror.

VIDEO Watch on YouTube: French Art Dealer Vanishes With $50 Million | The $50 Million Art Swindle

5 years ago

The Shocking Truth Behind New York’s $55 Million Art Swindler

https://fineartmultiple.com/blog/art-swindle-new-york/

 

Initially Michel Cohen’s method was perfectly legal: he’d borrow a piece of work from a reputable gallery, invite round a network of art collectors to come and see it then sell it to one of them for an inflated price. It was simple, legal and highly effective. At his peak, he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars profit a month and chartering private jets and living in the most sought-after property in Malibu. Yet after more than a decade of living the highlife, his near manic compulsion to make money caused him to fall into a spiralling debt hole. By the end he felt he had no other choice but to run, leaving behind him a trail of broken friendships and a tale that is rich in greed, motive and morality.

 

The new documentary The $50 Million Art Swindle by Vanessa Engel tells this remarkable story and reveals the barely believable events that transpired after his disappearance. Incredibly, the documentary makers managed to do what Interpol, the FBI and allegedly various hitmen failed to do, they managed to track Michel Cohen down. Right from the beginning of the documentary he is there. Still handsome, still mercurial and still showing no signs of contrition. We see him washing up dishes in his home and walking in the woods, friendless, isolated and living a life in total contrast to the extremity of his former existence.

 

Born in France in 1953, Cohen left school early and quickly discovered a talent for salesmanship. By 1980 he was in San Francisco selling posters to Francophile Americans but it was not enough, his ambitions were boundless. He realised that by trading in Picasso’s, Monet’s or Chagall’s you couldn’t really go wrong. Once he had firmly established himself in New York, the epicentre of the art world, he began studying contemporary auction catalogues, memorising everything about the works price, size, materials and provenance.

 

The art world is still a society that bases trust largely upon appearances, a handshake is enough to get you into the private salons, the right introduction opens the right doors (Just look at the Knoedler Art Trial). Slowly he began to build up a network of trusted dealers, gradually working his way up to ever more significant artworks. Without leaving any form of guarantee, he would even on occasions carry the works straight out the gallery door. In 2001, he took a $2.5m Picasso work from Richard Gray Gallery to his private warehouse and sold it to a collector for $3.5m. It was that easy, ridiculous sums of money could be made in an afternoon. A new deal every day.

 

 

Cohen became so convinced of his methods that he began to apply them to the option market. In 1996 he turned $30,000 into $13m. He was invincible, large sums of money flowed into his lap effortlessly – until of course it didn’t. Like every true gambler you don’t “stop when you’ve won, you only stop when you lose.” With mortgages, a stable of horses and a brand new sports car each month, Cohen’s expenditure was out of control. With debts mounting he returned to the art world and began selling the same artworks to multiple collectors.

 

Gaunt and haunted-looking, galleries realised something was up. Sotheby’s broke first, demanding the payback of a $10 million loan and promptly called the police. With the FBI circling he made a dash for it, flying straight to Rio. A few weeks later his German wife and two children joined him. The story would be remarkable if it ended there but it doesn’t. What follows is a barely-believable adventure involving an underground South American jail, a crafty prison escape, precarious river crossings and then of course his 17-year disappearance.

 

The documentary takes us on a rip-roaring ride through his nefarious art career, a how-to-guide to making it to the top of the art world with absolutely no training. Spliced with interviews with bemused former friends and bitter former associates: all of them grappling with the character of man who not only betrayed their trust but who managed to dodge any form of punishment. On the phone from London, Engel tells me that she found him to be “nice, thoughtful” even “sweet” but twenty years later, dogged in his self-delusion, he denies that the works were even stolen. It’s just taking him a long time to pay the original owners back. Anyway, what does he care? “These are people who have assets of $50 million to billions, so it did not affect their lives.” Though of course, it did. The Bill Beadleston Gallery was forced to close down, people lost their livelihoods.

 

What Cohen did was bring a Wall Street approach to the art market. To trade it like it was any other commodity, he could just as well have been dealing in football stickers. One of his former friends, the collector Robert Galoob, describes him as a “young French Jewish Icarus” but that would be to over-romanticise him. If anything he was a gambling addict, with startling powers of self-delusion.

 

At the end, Engel’s atmospheric and highly-engaging documentary leaves us with more questions than answers. What happened to the money? And isn’t he being absurdly reckless in revealing himself with so many people baying for his blood? I put these questions to Engel but she tells me her job is “Not to come in judgement but to come in with curiosity.” Would she be surprised one morning to wake up to discover that something had happened to Michel Cohen? “There are dark forces in parts of the artworld,” she answers, “Do I think from my research that there are people in the art world with connections to the mafia and are capable of something like that? Then yes.” A sinister thought, but it makes you wonder what Cohen might really be up to. Maybe, we’re all being duped by this astounding story.

 

 You can watch the The $50 Million Art Swindle on the BBC Iplayer if you are a resident of UK or have a VPN. The documentary will also be available on worldwide release in the year ahead.

 

 Duncan Ballantyne-Way

The Real TRUTH Behind Tommy Hilfiger

How Ralph Lauren Lost Its Place

L'exposition "Worth" sur les traces du père de la haute couture au Petit Palais./ The Palais Galliera is joining forces with the Petit Palais to present an exceptional exhibition dedicated to the Worth house.

https://www.petitpalais.paris.fr/expositions/worth-0

 

The Palais Galliera is joining forces with the Petit Palais to present an exceptional exhibition dedicated to the Worth house.

 

Founder of a house that has become the absolute symbol of Parisian luxury, Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895), born in England, is a key figure in the history of fashion. At the origin of haute couture, Worth founded the eponymous house at 7 rue de la Paix, whose history spans four generations and nearly a century.

 

Presented on 1100 m2 in the great galleries of the Petit Palais, this retrospective which brings together more than 400 works – clothes, objects and accessories, paintings, graphic arts – is presented as a vast fresco looking back at the creations of the house of Worth as well as the protagonists who wrote their history. It promises to be out of the ordinary, given the rarity and number of pieces presented from prestigious international collections.

 

From the Second Empire to the Roaring Twenties, a page of history was written: that of the invention of the figure of the great couturier and the mechanisms for creating and marketing fashion that are still in force, and for which Worth laid the foundations at the end of the nineteenth century.

 

https://www.petitpalais.paris.fr/expositions/worth-0

 

Le Palais Galliera s’associe au Petit Palais pour présenter une exposition exceptionnelle consacrée à la maison Worth.

 

Fondateur d’une maison devenue symbole absolu du luxe parisien, Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895), né en Angleterre, est une figure incontournable de l’histoire de la mode. A l’origine de la haute couture, Worth fonde la maison éponyme au 7 rue de la Paix, dont l’histoire se déploie sur quatre générations et près d’un siècle.

 

Présentée sur 1100 m2 au sein des grandes galeries du Petit Palais, cette rétrospective qui rassemble plus de 400 œuvres – vêtements, objets et accessoires, peintures, arts graphiques – se présente comme une vaste fresque revenant sur les créations de la maison Worth autant que sur les protagonistes qui en ont écrit l’histoire. Elle s’annonce hors normes, eu égard à la rareté et au nombre des pièces présentées provenant de prestigieuses collections internationales.

 

Du Second Empire aux Années Folles, une page d’histoire s’écrit : celle de l’invention de la figure du grand couturier et des mécanismes de création et de commercialisation de la mode encore en vigueur, et dont Worth pose les bases dès la fin du XIXe siècle.

 

Prince Andrew’s sex abuse accuser Virginia Giuffre to publish new tell-all book from beyond grave

Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre’s memoir to be published posthumously

 

 Nobody’s Girl, which Giuffre had been working on before her death, is set to be released this autumn

 

 Donna Ferguson and agency

Mon 25 Aug 2025 00.03 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/25/epstein-accuser-virginia-giuffres-memoir-to-be-published-posthumously

 

 The posthumous memoir of Virginia Giuffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s most prominent accusers, will be published in the autumn, a publisher has announced.

 

 Giuffre had been working on Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, with the award-winning author and journalist Amy Wallace before her death earlier this year.

 

 The 400-page book will be released on 21 October, according to the Associated Press.

 

 Giuffre, who alleged she had been trafficked for sex to Prince Andrew, had completed the manuscript before she took her own life in April, the publisher Alfred A Knopf said.

 

 Prince Andrew has denied Giuffre’s allegations. In 2022, Giuffre and the prince reached an out-of-court settlement after she sued him for sexual assault.

 

 Knopf’s statement includes an email Giuffre wrote to Wallace 25 days before her death, stating that it was her “heartfelt wish” the memoir be released “regardless” of her circumstances.

 

 “The content of this book is crucial, as it aims to shed light on the systemic failures that allow the trafficking of vulnerable individuals across borders,” the email reads. “It is imperative that the truth is understood and that the issues surrounding this topic are addressed, both for the sake of justice and awareness.”

 

 Giuffre had been hospitalised after a serious accident on 24 March, Knopf said, and sent the email on 1 April. She died on 25 April at her farm in Western Australia, where she had lived for several years.

 

 “In the event of my passing, I would like to ensure that Nobody’s Girl is still released. I believe it has the potential to impact many lives and foster necessary discussions about these grave injustices,” she wrote to Wallace.

 

 Knopf’s statement says the book contains “intimate, disturbing, and heartbreaking new details about her time with Epstein, Maxwell and their many well-known friends, including Prince Andrew, about whom she speaks publicly for the first time since their out-of-court settlement in 2022.”

 

 Knopf editor-in-chief, Jordan Pavlin, said Nobody’s Girl was a “raw and shocking” journey and “the story of a fierce spirit struggling to break free”.

 

 In 2023, the New York Post reported that Giuffre had reached a deal “believed to be worth millions” with an undisclosed publisher.

 

 Knopf spokesperson Todd Doughty told AP that she initially agreed to a seven-figure contract with Penguin Press, but moved with acquiring editor Emily Cunningham after she was hired by Knopf as executive editor last year.

 

 Doughty declined to provide further details about the Epstein associates featured in Nobody’s Girl, but confirmed that Giuffre made “no allegations of abuse against [Donald] Trump”, who continues to face questions about the disgraced financier and his former friend.

 

 Nobody’s Girl is distinct from Giuffre’s unpublished memoir The Billionaire’s Playboy Club, referenced in previous court filings and unsealed in 2019. Through Doughty, Wallace says she began working with Giuffre on a new memoir in spring 2021.

 

 “Nobody’s Girl was both vigorously fact-checked and legally vetted,” a Knopf statement reads.

 

 Giuffre’s co-author on her memoir, Wallace, is an award-winning magazine and newspaper reporter whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.

 

 A representative for Andrew did not immediately return the AP’s request for comment. Buckingham Palace was asked for comment.

 

 Additional reporting by the Associated Press

Grant Harrold - King's former butler on what life is really like in the Royal family | The Daily T

“Preppies: The Last Upper Class?”

 

“Preppies: The Last Upper Class?”

By Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr.

Atlantic Monthly, January 1979 (excerpts)

 

Home Tradified

Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. on Preppies

August 8, 2025

https://www.ivy-style.com/thirty-years-later-aldrich-on-preppies.html

 

Mentioned recently in the post “Searching For The P In WASP,” this 1979 cover story on preppies is one of the most important historical documents on Ivy Style. It’s situated between the end of the heyday of the Ivy League Look and the preppy trend of the 1980s. It was first posted here in 2009 and is long overdue for a revisit.

 

* * *

 

Almost two years before “The Official Preppy Handbook” made preppy affectation accessible to all, Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. had already caught wind of the zeitgeist.

 

His January 1979 cover story for the Atlantic Monthly, “Preppies: The Last Upper Class?” is a seminal work of exposition on the manners and mores of the WASP establishment. It is also helpful in filling out the dark years between the fall of the Ivy League Look circa 1965, and the revival of what remained of it, combined with new styles and attitudes picked up during an intense period of social change, in November 1980 with the publication of “The Official Preppy Handbook.”

 

In honor of the article’s 30th anniversary, Ivy-Style herein presents this largely forgotten historic document now digitized for the Internet.

 

In the article, Aldrich — who authored the book “Old Money” and edited the oral history of George Plimpton Ivy-Style wrote about a while back — attempts to outline the behavioral characteristics of the prep-school set, their likes and dislikes, values and revulsions. Aldrich links the ideology of the preppy to his forbearer, the WASP, to whom the preppy owes his austerity, deference, and attitude toward money.

 

Aldrich devotes only a few paragraphs to preppy clothing; in his view the term “preppie” designates a group of people, not simply a style of dress. When he does mention clothes, he does so to illustrate the insularity of preppy society, in which the tiniest modifications of attire can carry great significance.

 

Worth noting is the passage in which Alrich argues that the distinguishing sartorial details of preppy style — presumably things like hooked vents, lapped seams and two-button cuffs, or perhaps embroidered whale belts — are relished by outsiders once they’ve figured out the secret code, but viewed as “oppressive” by the preppies expected to follow the code.

 

Along those lines, the famous preppy nonchalance envied by all may not come as easily as it appears. Writes Aldrich:

 

For the Preppie, on the other hand, gracefulness is less a gift than a standard, something to measure up to, a performance. The delight of the thing comes from the knowledge that it’s all contrived, that the effect of effortlessness requires a good deal of strain, that negligence requires attention, that indifference requires concentration, that simplicity and naturalness require affectation. The most delicious “in” joke of Preppiedom is the anxiety everyone feels about being carefree.

 

Aldrich’s attitude toward preppy culture is ambivalent. At times the article parodies the anxieties of preppies, yet Aldrich also seems to exalt their modesty and discretion. Although preppies may be the target of his satirical tone, he finds redeeming qualities in them which he suggests may be growing rare.

 

Ultimately his article is less the lampooning of a social class and more the taxonomy of an odd breed. Less than two years later, this taxonomy would reappear as a New York Times best-selling handbook.

 

The article is long and sometimes tedious, and so we’ve opted to present it in an excerpted format. This also presumably reduces our culpability in any copyright infringement accusation.

 

In addition to “Preppies,” Aldrich uses the terms Archies (from the Archie comic books) to denote the suburban middle class, and City Kids for the urban working class. — ZACHARY DELUCA & CC

 

* * *

 

“Preppie” is a catchall epithet to take the pace of words too worn or elaborate for everyday use, words such as privileged, ruling class, aristocrat, society woman, gentleman, and the rich. Ideological struggle is too shaming to talk about these days. Lifestyle rivalry is the new engine of history. In this sort of society, Preppies pass for an upper class.

 

There are two sorts of Preppies, the self-made and the hereditary. Hereditary Preppies will have a Preppie parent or two — a parent, that is, who went to a prep school. But the purest of the type will go to the same prep school as his parent.

 

Contrary to widespread belief, most students at prep schools are not hereditary Preppies.

 

Historically, of course, most Preppies have been privileged WASPs. The Preppie ideal is therefore indelibly stamped with a certain privileged WASPishness.

 

WASPishness may be defined as a particular squeamishness. WASPs are readily revolted by the following facts of life: physical flabbiness, homosexuality, enthusiasm, Archies, cynicism, fearfulness, salesmanship, flamboyance, money, self-assertion.

 

More positively, WASPishness may be defined as a certain bravery in the face of other facts of life: disease, demonstrative women, impotent men, accident, disgrace, and physical hardship (especially when suffered, or inflicted, in the name of a civic virtue such as patriotism).

 

* * *

 

Whether or not they are in fact rich, all true Preppies act as if they were. But there are many ways of acting rich. Misers act rich by acting as if they were poor. Spendthrifts act rich by openly impoverishing themselves. Technicians of wealth merely get rich, by knowing how to use money. All these ways of being rich manifest a belief that riches are important. The Preppie way of being rich is to act as if riches had no importance at all.

 

Preppies are not abnormally obtuse. They know that people are generally valued according to the work they do, and that the work they do is generally valued according to the money that’s paid for it. Nevertheless, all prep schools and many Preppie parents got to some lengths to cultivate in their charges an unfeigned indifference to money. The indifference will be either high-minded or careless. High-minded indifference leads to ambitions of public service, in which case the Preppie may easily attain a place in the top 5 percent income bracket. Careless indifference leads to careers in arts, letters, and leisure, in which case the Preppie’s indifference will soon be tested by poverty. Usually he flunks the test, and ends up putting a very un-Preppie-like value on money.

 

Inherited wealth is widely believed to offer the best base from which to cultivate high-mindedness or carelessness with respect to money. This is correct, as a general rule. It is a great mistake to conclude, however, that all high-minded and careless Preppies are hypocrites enjoying the benefits of their trust funds while also enjoying feelings of warm superiority over their rivals, the striving City Kids or the anxious Archies.

 

In the first place, while wealth does not confer Preppieness, prep schools do, and attendance at a prep school is expensive, around $5,000 a year.

 

Like all ideals, the Preppie ideal represents a collective yearning; with respect to money, it is a yearning for a triumph — of class over income, of grace over works, of being over doing. The City Kid, of course, represents a yearning for more worldly triumphs. Archies worry too much to yearn for anything but peace.

 

* * *

 

Preppie clothing is so uniform that it betrays a group consciousness as distinct as that of investment bankers or arriviste Arabs. A list of articles in the Preppie wardrobe would be tedious, but the following are some of the more familiar items: LL Bean boots, Top-Sider moccasins, tasseled loafers; pure wool socks, black silk socks, no socks; baggy chinos, baggy brick-red or lime or yellow or pink or Pulitzer trousers, baggy Brooks Brothers trousers, baggy boxer underpants; shirts of blue, pink, yellow, or striped Oxford, sometimes buttoned down, some made for a collar pin, usually from Brooks or J. Press or The [name of town or college] Shop; jackets of tweed, corduroy, poplin, seersucker with padless shoulders, a loose fit around the waist, and (if tweed) a muddy pattern; a shapeless muddy-patterned tweed overcoat, its collar lopsidedly rolled up under one ear, a shapeless beige raincoat bleached by years of use and irresistant to rain; no hat, a cross country ski cap, a very old snap-brimmed felt hat, a very old tennis hat.

 

Thus the male preppie wardrobe.

 

It is true that Preppie women are alone in all the world in their devotion to Fair Isle sweaters, while Preppie men are alone only in their devotion to a particular ensemble. Nevertheless, the most remarkable aspect of Preppie attire is that males and females, lacking any difference in size or form, could help themselves to each other’s clothes without any embarrassment whatsoever.

 

There are peculiarities of fit in the Preppie costume. On Brooks Brothers trousers, for example, the crotch invariably floats midway between the Preppie crotch and the Preppie kneecaps. Alternatively, the trouser crotch is where it belongs, near the Preppie crotch; but in that event, the trouser cuff will float midway between the Preppie instep and the Preppie calf. The reason for this characteristic float is that at fittings, Preppies always repel too intimate a calculation of the inseam length of their trousers.

 

Preppies are made squeamish by other aspects and articles of clothing, too. They never wear anything made of acrylic fibers, or double knit. They always eschew the display of any totemic figure on their sport shirts, unless, at the farthest limit of the permissible, it’s their own country club’s totem. An alligator worn on the breast of an otherwise Preppie-looking fellow indicates either an incomplete emergence from Archieness or an imminent collapse into it.

 

Like bankers and Arabs, Preppies occasionally enjoy stepping out of sartorial type. When they do, it is with exquisite prudence and calculation. With regard to clothing, as with most human performances, the Preppie is a connoisseur of marginal differences. The most vital difference is the one he guards between himself and the Archies. Yet Archies, unlike the vaguely Italianate City Kids, have no distinctive uniform for Preppies to avoid. Fortunately, however, there are certain costumes they would never wear. An Archie would never dress like a farmworker or a lobsterman, for example, or a City of Londonman either in the city or enjoying a four-day weekend. Thus, Preppie deviations always run in vaguely aristocratic directions, toward nature’s noblemen or what he thinks of as Europe’s. Preppie women are even more cautious in their deviations, always wearing a modest pin or earrings with their jeans.

 

The Preppie’s connoisseurship is most rigorously tested when he is still in prep school or college, for then he must decided what to wear as a Preppie among other Preppies. For this audience, most Preppies select margins of differentness so subtle as to be invisible to anyone else. This intense rivalry of small differences is experienced by almost all real Preppies as oppressive; only would-be Preppies or late converts engage in it happily. Yet the oppressiveness has one great virtue; it provides the necessary circumstances against which a few Preppies may act out thrilling dramas of costume rebellion. And the fact that most prep schools still enforce dress codes, albeit less rigorously than do banks or construction firms, contributes a whiff of real peril to the fun.

 

With respect to most other aspects of appearance — straightness of teeth, of nose, healthy complexion, and so on — Preppies are no longer distinguished, if they ever were. A more general prosperity has put these good things in the grasp of all but the poor. But with respect to the appearance of youthfulness, Preppies still cling to an advantage over their life-style (or, if you will, class) rivals. So important to Preppies is the obligation to seem young that two of the most egregious qualities of their costume are contrived to that end. One is the amazing stability of the Preppie style, which, having changed scarcely at all in forty years, enables Preppies to wear in middle and old age the inimitable clothing of their youth. The second is the odd Preppie palette. Preppies of all ages and both sexes demonstrate an unwavering taste for luminescent pastels and hard primary colors, a taste evidently designed to evoke the infantile gaiety of the nursery or the youthful certainties of Playskool.

 

* * *

 

Preppies are not the only class of people in society to acknowledge the value of charm, but they’re the only ones to cultivate it. Preppies work on their charm the way City Kids work on their wits, and the way Archies work on their golf game.

 

Preppies tend to think of their charms as virtues. Perhaps they are some of them. It is virtuous, for example, to put people at their ease, which is what many of the Preppie charms aim to do. Still, Preppies think of their charms as “working” or “not working,” and this is not the way people ordinarily think of virtues such as goodness or courage. The Preppie charms, then, include discretion, modesty, self-restraint, deference, gratitude and grace. All grow out of the principal characteristics of prep-school life, its harshness, competitiveness, and unending publicity, its hierarchies of winners and losers, and its quality of constant performance.

 

Discretion. In social situations, Preppies seem to be guided less by their intelligence than City Kids are, and less by convention than Archies. They move instinctively, and the instinct most alive in them is discretion.

 

Discretion is alertness. The Preppie is exquisitely alert to the most delicate reverberations of his own impact on a social situation, and of everyone else’s. Discretion is a sense of occasion. Preppies mete out their feelings and thoughts and gestures in discreet performances, chosen and shaped for their appropriateness like a daub on a pointillist’s brush.

 

Modesty. The essence of Preppie charm, to those who aren’t wholly contemptuous of it, is that it is disarming. It’s meant to be. Preppies know that they are seen as privileged and on that account are envied. Much Preppie charm, especially modesty, is calculated to disarm envy.

 

Modesty is the economy of egotism. Its first rule is to honor the claims of others to a share of the audience’s time, if only so that they may make fools of themselves. Its second rule is to be aware that in the perspective of history (with which the Preppie fancies himself on special terms), all feats are soon undone, surpassed, or shown to have had evil consequences. Thus Preppie modesty downplays all accomplishments, not just one’s own.

 

Deference. Deference is the ghost of chivalry that hides in every Preppie’s closet. It is learned at boarding school through the experience of unremitting subordination — to the headmaster, to the faculty, and to boys and girls older and better than you.

 

Deference, moreover, is not only an expression of eager subordination; it also expresses a faith that society may really and truly be composed of hierarchies of excellence, that America is a landscape of natural pyramids. Thus, a son who shows deference to his father, or a student to his teachers, or an associate to his senior partners, or an adviser to the President of the United States, is not only granting to paternity, knowledge, seniority, or high office the authority that in the Preppie view they deserve; he is also reinforcing his belief that paternity, knowledge, seniority, and high office still continue as the chief organizing principles of society. Therefore, deference is a Preppie charm in the quite literal sense that it makes the world seem a place in which Preppies get what they deserve, and where those who get more than others do deserve deference as well.

 

Gratitude. The wealth of the Preppie is measured in “contacts,” not in bank accounts. Some of them come to believe that contacts count for everything in the world, in which case gratitude is the essential element in their Preppie modesty. None of them ever believes, or is ever allowed to believe, that “he made it on his own.” Archies and City Kids can be self-made men; Preppies can only be grateful.

 

Grace. Of all the Preppie charms, grace is the hardest to achieve. Grace is what separates princes from frogs and hobgoblins (or Preppies from Archies and City Kids). Grace is a sign of legitimacy; Grace is the ultimate favor in the gift of the Great Contact on High.

 

With the charm of grace, the Preppie enters the very heaven of social ideals. All his other charms are distinctive and difficult and rare. But gracefulness in word and deed, sprezzatura, désinvolture, nonchalance, a manner that embraces carelessness, negligence and arrogance, a manner that’s languid and easy, proud and indifferent, reckless and uncalculating —  such a charm lifts the Preppie from time-bound figment of social imagination to myth. Which naturally enough, is where he’d like to be.

 

With the charm of grace, the Preppie is the envy of the world, a reminder of the strange workings of Fortune, which is unmoved by solicitations, prayers, merit, intelligence, violence, or any of the other things that people usually have to rely on to get ahead in the world. To Archies and City Kids, the graceful Preppie is a rebuke to effort, a living portent of the fundamental injustice of the universe.

 

For the Preppie, on the other hand, gracefulness is less a gift than a standard, something to measure up to, a performance. The delight of the thing comes from the knowledge that it’s all contrived, that the effect of effortlessness requires a good deal of strain, that negligence requires attention, that indifference requires concentration, that simplicity and naturalness require affectation. The most delicious “in” joke of Preppiedom is the anxiety everyone feels about being carefree.

 

* * *

 

Life after prep school is for most Preppies a lengthy process of learning the dead spots in the various auditoriums where they’re called upon to perform. Not only are whole groups of people — policemen and bureaucrats, for example — unmoved by their charms, almost eveyrone fails to be charmed at one time or another.

 

One explanation for these failures is that Preppies often operate from an inadequate theory of social life, according to which the division of society into Preppies, Archies and City Kids corresponds to older triparite divisions such as aristocrats, bourgeois, and commoners, or capitalists, managers, and proletarians, and these divisions are fixed. In this scheme of things charm is a quality of manners, and manners are a dramatization of differences in status, and status is a perfectly intelligible matter of one’s place in the social structure. Thus everyone has manners and charm, so long as everyone stays in his place. Moreover, everyone’s place is such that within his own class there will always be someone above and below him, so that no one will be deprived of the gratifications of subservience, and the pleasures of mastery. This theory, if believe in and acted upon, causes the whole auditorium to go dead.

 

A more adequate theory for the effective exercise of Preppie charm is one that sees society in the image of a cruise ship. The ship has a number of classes of accommodation, which have no congruence with the Preppie, City Kid and Archie classes. The theory recognizes, moreover, that a substantial minority of the passengers do not feel comfortable in their assigned accommodations. Accordingly, for as long as the cruise continues, there’s a good deal of running around as the people push, work and bribe their way into cabins where they think they belong.

 

How the Preppie acts on the basis of this theory depends on whether he decides to stay in his cabin or join the others running around all over the ship. Many Preppies never emerge from their suites, but pass away the time giving parties. These deploy their charms on each other, and are consequently soon bored. Other Preppies, remembering their prep school competitiveness, “get out there and fight,” “join in,” and soon begin running around the ship looking for better quarters of their own. These Preppies learn quickly to think of their charms not as semaphore of a status already arrived at, but as tools with which to acquire status, or to defend it once acquired.

 

So far the theories assume an intelligible society. What happens when it ceases to be intelligible? Now everyone is running around looking for better quarters. Now the scene has none of the qualities of a contest, with formal boundaries, agreed-upon rules, and recognizable trophies. Now everyone keeps score in his own way, counting two units of happiness as the equivalent of one million dollars, or good health as the equivalent of a son in medical school, or a house in the country as the equivalent of a satisfying job. Now the great group competitions break up, too, as Preppies and City Kids find the game too complicated to play anymore. As this happens, the conflict becomes unmanageable, at once limitless and instantaneous, like an endless series of random murders in the corridors. What good is Preppie charm in a society like that?

 

The answer is that Preppie charm must then become frankly a branch of situational theater, with this difference: Theatrical workers never aim to deceive, only to create an illusion that everyone knows to be an illusion. Charm-workers do aim to deceive. Their lives depend on it. They create order and status by creating an audience. In the new world of the free-for-all, Preppies many have a better chance even than City Kids, for they’re nothing if not trained for performances.

 

* * *

 

There were once two readily distinguishable sets of Preppie ideals.

 

One set was preached and occasionally practiced at those schools that had been established on the model of the English public schools. They were known as the “St. Grotlesex” schools. The chief characteristic of  St. Grotlesex idealism was that it was self-consciously aristocratic. The good life was a life of service and of heroism, preferably in war but if necessary in one of its moral equivalents. The text adumbrating these ideals were to be found in the more martial passages of the Old Testament, especially the story of David before he became king, and in Malory and Tennyson. an aristocratic kind of egalitarianism was preached, as when people feel about each other, “Why, you’re as good as I am.” And this style affected to despise the acquisitive life in all its forms, except the collection of beautiful objects.

 

The second set of ideals — preached and occasionally practiced at schools such as Exeter, Choate, Hotchkiss and Milton — was more bourgeois than aristocratic, more Congregational or Unitarian than Episcopal, more New England than old, more industrial Victorian than sentimental Victorian. It seldom preached the doctrine of service, except in the utilitarian sense that he helps all who helps himself, and instead of the heroism of battle, it emphasized the heroism of hard work. Self-consciously democratic, it encouraged the sort of egalitarianism that says, “I’m as good as you are.” Though these schools were as scholastic in tone as the St. Grotlesex ones were athletic, they produced as few intellectuals and perhaps even fewer artists. The acquisitive spirit was held, if not in honor, then certainly in respect.

 

In the past 10 or 15 years [1964-1969], under the influence of coeducation, the commingling of students of different backgrounds, and the attrition of the older teachers and headmasters, there has been a certain convergence of the two sets of idealism. And with the convergence it has become difficult, as it never was a generation or two ago, to tell what ideals, if any, are inculcated at prep schools. Among the students, there is a certain reaction against the relentless competitiveness of Preppie life, in the name of cooperation. And out of this reaction, some prep schools have tried to create an odd set of ideals compounded of Christian, Maoist and Rogerian elements that many of the students seem to find affecting, if not yet soothing.

 

Just discernible in this new Preppie idealism is a wish, barely disguised as a fear, that the era of economic growth may really be finished, and that a New Dark Age may be upon us. In that event, the prep schools might at last find their historic mission and in the fullness of time redeem the uselessness of their past. For in a world of rapidly diminishing resources, the prep schools — compact, highly organized, egalitarian societies that they might be — could finally become the models of the way we must all learn to live.

 

Aldrich photo by Adrian Kinloch.