There are young women who quickly discern the lures of truffles, corner tables and corporate jets. Yet a climb to the social heights can bring them to the depths of silver-plated solitude.
The September Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair, two of our uncompromising arbiters of social mores, offer companion pieces on the loneliness of the long-distance striver, or ”trophy wife.”
Cosmopolitan`s ”Memoirs of a Trophy Wife” is said to be a first-person account by a writer of disguised identity. ”Alison S.” says she was nearly 30, toiling in public relations for a major New York company, when swept off her feet by the ”gray but virile” 50-ish chief executive officer.
The boss displayed the utmost sensitivity at a time of crisis-the death of Alison`s cat-and, soon, the couple were exchanging intimacies on the rug near her non-working fireplace at home. He got a divorce, they married and, as she flew in the company jet and bought floor-length dresses for parties, she was transformed into the ”younger symbol of the rich middle-aged man`s power and virility.”
Well, he lost his job and then injured his back, making their previously fruitful bedroom escapades difficult. With true magnanimity, a chagrined Alison declares that she`s a ”piece of property that tells the world that Harry is virile, rich and still young. Ironic for someone now functionally impotent!” According to a magazine spokesman, Alison has split since publication.
Vanity Fair, which tends to leave far less to the imagination, names famous names as it inspects the ”Faustian pact” made by Babe Paley, late wife of CBS founder William Paley and a star of Manhattan society for three decades.
She was 32 when she married Paley, 45, in 1947. ”Babe had found the wealthy and powerful man she had been bred to marry,” writes Sally Bedell Smith. ”Paley (the son of Russian Jewish immigrants) had found the perfect sophisticated WASP beauty.
”He wore her like a medal,” Smith declares.
Well, the medal became tarnished as the CBS chief turned unfaithful and overbearing, the wife ”pained and self-pitying” and even jealous of her own daughter. She confided distress to chum Truman Capote and, loyal guy that he was, she read his 1975 Esquire piece that disclosed a sordid sexual foray by her husband. Only in her dying days did Babe become abusive to Paley.
Elsewhere, there`s a nifty bit of reporting that actress Kathleen Turner may have sneaked a peek at. It`s a dissection of the business machinations of Alexander DiLorenzo III, a hippie-turned-multimi llionaire New York slumlord, which includes damning details about business partner Jay Weiss. He`s a building manager and leaseholder practiced at aggressive evictions, an aspiring rock musician, and Turner`s husband.
L.J. Davis, one of the better financial journalists, is acerbically lucid in a fine overview of the savings and loan debacle in September Harper`s, making clear that it could largely have been avoided with a modicum of Reagan administration regulation and key elected officials being more concerned with ”the taxpayer`s dollar than the thrift owner`s millions.” Elsewhere, historian Christopher Lasch makes a case for the rise of a non-partisan press having gone hand-in-hand with the power of public relations and advertisers, concluding that the press has become a ”conduit for the equivalent of junk mail.” September Howeowner includes a big ad for Bob Vila`s ”Home Again Series,” surely a mere coincidence as the monthly profiles the first 26 shows: the redesign of a Cape Cod-style home in Marstons Mills, Mass., and remodeling of a Victorian graystone in Chicago`s Wicker Park. . . . American Home, a glossy new quarterly from Hearst Magazines, for ”today`s nesting baby boomers,” is a decorating magazine whose focus gets blurred as it mixes the traditional (like needlepoint) with a somewhat strained, even self-righteous thrust to ”nurturing.” That`s defined here as providing and supporting the need to ”survive, to be satisfied and to grow.” The premiere is too trendy for its own good. And it might have found a different home from actor Bruce Dern`s to spotlight. House & Garden did it in July.
September-October Mother Jones has the upteenth, still chilling, look at the federal prison at Marion, Ill., and discloses that a woman who posed as a housewife in a disputed June issue of Esquire is wife of a Procter & Gamble spokesman, adding that several photos displayed P & G products.
