Yore Stories
It seems fitting that in the 100th edition of THE RAKE, one of our longest-serving commentators, NICK FOULKES, takes us back to the Big Bang of style, wealth, luxury and taste. In other words, to that midcentury moment when high society went global in the beautifully manicured hands of the jet set. What remains of this leisured and cultivated era?
A few years ago I wrote a book called Swans, a reference to Truman Capote’s coterie of couture-clad, mid-century muses — Marella Agnelli, Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill, Slim Keith, C.Z. Guest and the enigmatic Gloria Guinness, among others. Anyone who watched last year’s Feud: Capote vs the Swans will have become familiar with them as they gossiped, shopped and lunched their way round the New York of the Le and La restaurants: Le Pavillon, La Côte Basque, and so on.
The book’s title is slightly misleading, and not just for those who might be looking for a work of ornithological literature. Beautiful and fascinating though they were, the Swans were just one group of actors in the epic drama of a self-selecting elite, a few hundred people who between the early 1950s and the early seventies lived as gods on a modern Olympus, their flying chariots replaced by sleek tubes of aluminium that propelled them through the skies at hundreds of miles an hour, figuratively and physically, high above the common run of mankind.
It didn’t occur to me that ‘Swans’ was documenting a rare and exotic species on the brink of extinction.
In the 1950s times were changing, and fast. High society had gone global. The veteran gossip columnist and society busybody Elsa Maxwell put it well: “Socially speaking, this is not the space age; it’s the pace age.” These pace-agers needed a name. Terms like ‘le gratin’ or the ‘Four Hundred’, which had once described the social elites of Proust’s Paris and Wharton’s New York, seemed impossibly antiquated. And, like its king and queen, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the cognomen ‘Café Society’ was showing its age.
“Casting about, I came up with a winner: I invented the ‘jet set’. It was the only name for my gang because it succinctly conveyed, technology willing, a style that was new in the fifties,” wrote socialite turned newspaper columnist Ghighi Cassini in his 1977 memoir. “Jets were glamorous then, and speeding across the globe, snafus apart, gave a sense of luxury and power. The expense guaranteed exclusivity and the fillip of unexpected encounters with friends in the V.I.P. lounge.”
The jet set was not defined by distance but by velocity. The contemporary socialite now thought internationally, not locally. The old aristocracies, battered by wars and revolutions, found themselves joined by a new breed: industrial barons, oil magnates, film stars, and those simply known as the beautiful people, the happy few.
Conflict in Europe had generated a gilded diaspora of aristocrats, artists, bankers, businessmen and sundry cosmopolites, many of whom settled in New York, which became a crucible in which the fragments of a shattered continent could be melted down and recast. This wave of, often, well-heeled and talented immigrants enriched and seasoned the bubbling social bouillabaisse of the New World. ‘Jet set’ was a shorthand way of describing a heterogenous group of nomades de luxe who identified more with a particular way of life than a nation state. By the time the passenger jet arrived, they were ready to fulfil their destiny. For a few years the world would be their oyster and they would shuck it with style and gusto.
Paris, Gstaad, Cannes, Capri, St. Moritz, Rome, Portofino, Monte Carlo, then a little later Marbella, Mykonos, Saint-Tropez, Porto Ercole, the Costa Smeralda and Acapulco... just like the shards of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope that rearrange themselves into different patterns, so the jet set continent-hopped their way around the world, joining the dots on a global map of privilege and pleasure, the same group of people gathering and dispersing as the rituals of the seasons decreed. The magical planet-shrinking power of the jet ensured that the world was no longer a series of isolated outposts of gracious living; all of a sudden it became a single, shiny playground.
