Social Tithing: Highbrows, gift bags, and kraut dogs in Times Square

By Robin Postell

(First published in Razor Magazine)

 Couture-draped coquettes teetering drunkenly on Monolo Blahnik stilettos; liquored-up, red-faced blue bloods, powdered and coiffed like ribald porcelain dolls; leopard-slippered playboys who have never worked an honest day (and never will); and old-guard thoroughbreds, wrinkled, paunchy and preternaturally sheltered in a blithe contentment stare back at me as I browse through Mark Peterson’s photographs of New York’s high society.

The irony of their acts confounds me; gathered together, scarfing down caviar, hobnobbing with their well-heeled cohorts, all to raise money, mixing with celebs, politicians and nouveau riche, while the subjects of their partying starve, suffer and wonder how they’ll survive.

A genius isn’t required to do the math and wonder why so much money has to be spent to induce selfless philanthropy. The old capitalist adage murmurs in the back of my mind, you gotta spend money to make money, spend money to make money.

But these are nonprofit organizations, after all, in the richest, most dazzling country in the world. According to a 2003 report by the American Association of Fundraising Counsel, a network of consulting firms that works side-by-side with NPOs, the US gave $240.92 billion to charities in 2002 – which was one percent above 2001 figures.

Anybody who needs a free drink, a gift bag, and a chance to see a celebrity or supermodel vomit in the bathroom in order to entice them to help the luckless lot amidst the wealthiest in the US can’t be all that virtuous or grand. True generosity, it would seem, would not be so hard to skim off the surfaces of cups running over.

There is simply something wrong with this picture, I muse. Money is being given, and that is the important matter. How it is done can be held in question, but to what extent, ultimately? That’s the catch, the Catch-22, if you will.

Tithing, whether it is through religious discipline or in the realm of social obligation, is done for personal reasons. Everyone has their own motives when emptying their pockets. For some, it is as simple as a tax break, while others do it out of sheer guilt because of their own good fortune. Some of the richest, like Bill Gates and Ted Turner, are known for giving far more than they are even able to claim as a tax break. In 1999, Gates gave a $15 billion gift to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

For still others, it is a philosophical ideal about giving unconditionally without expecting anything in return – a sort of universal balancing system. Some do it because it makes them feel good, period. And then, of course, some just do it so they can go to the parties for an invigorating social climb and grab the cool gift bags.

The names on the charity ball list cast spells on those who think money and names matter – Aerin Lauder, Cathy Hilton, Ricky Lauren, Pia Miller Getty, Alexandra Von Furstenberg, Carol Mack, Alison Stern, Amy Fine Collins. But to most of the US, these names mean nothing.

To the clock-punchers and La-Z-Boy set, Cathy Hilton just happens to have the same name as that fancy hotel where they never get to stay.

When New York high society was first being wrought, names like Rockefeller, DuPont, Fairchild, Vanderbilt, and Roosevelt were the ones throwing the diamond-studded BBQs and tossing cash to the swine. These illustrious families paved the way for the watered down versions of today – not as recognized, but still as critical in the circles that count.

To catch a firsthand glimpse of these fundraising fetes in and around Manhattan, I know I must attend.  In order to give my eye a guttural, yet glitzy, peek into a world to which most aren’t privy, I’ll have to take a gander through the peephole into which can be a bit painful to gaze for a classic writer and photographer trying to make it story to story.

I go in armed and ready to deride these people for being so flagrantly, frivolously boneheaded about giving up some of their amassed treasures to the poor folk somewhere out there on the other side of their rainbow.

Some social critics might take offense to these gatherings in an offhandedly besmirching way, but others (even myself) should look deeper – far beyond the shiny veneer of wealth and seemingly unabashed privilege, and into the simple, edifying reality of human nature.

True, there is something unsettling about going to an event decked out in a few thousand dollars worth of clothing and drinking up a paycheck’s worth of drinks all in the name of some poor shivering AIDS patient stuffed in and out-of-the-way clinic; of some starving, uneducated child on the outskirts of the city who sips sugar water on good days and gets a good ass-beating on bad ones.

The charities run the gamut of causes – from Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic to the Rita Hayworth Gala for the Alzheimer’s Association and the New York Botanical Garden. Traditionally, “monkey suit” season starts in September and trudges through December, but lately events are being staged year-round. The Museum of Modern Art, the Central Park Conservancy, and even Bal Polonaise, held at The Plaza, are all hot tickets.

The nonprofit organizations are out there trying to coax big bucks out of deep pockets. A huge gala might take nearly a year to produce and cost up to half a million dollars. Gross earnings for the 20 most profitable functions range from $250,000 to $4 million. This sounds ghastly, but these benefits comprise a hefty chunk of the NPO’s pie chart.

Up to 25 percent of their budgets go toward these lavish events – and, yes, often it costs half the ticket price to produce them.

Some invitation-only events can cost up to $10k per couple, or $50K per table.

The Hamptons, which was once the place where high society New Yorkers summered and aspired to do absolutely nothing, has become a virtual party zone, with little time these days to lie about indolently.

“There’s a party every night,” said one exasperated Hampton-ite. “I just don’t know if I can keep up the pace. Don’t print my name. I wouldn’t want anyone to think badly of me.”

While we attempt to balance all this taking and giving, and drinking and eating, and cutting the rug, we have to also look at some of the statistics. According to research from the New Tithing Group, a San Francisco-based NPO dedicated to encouraging charitable action, average “upper middle class” and “middle rich” filers donated a lower percentage of their investment asset wealth to charity than did average filers in any other tax filer category. That means debutantes and their mamas and daddies on Park Avenue or the Upper West Side, aren’t giving as much as their intellectual counterparts living in Greenwich Village or Brooklyn.

Astoundingly, had the rich folks who wake up gazing out over Central Park from their boudoir windows been as generous as the average folks whose dining rooms are poised above trash dumpsters or basketball courts, total individual contributions to charity would have been an estimated $41.6 billion higher.

The cycle of pluses and minuses never ceases.

That, as they say, is life.

The flight into JFK from Georgia is coach – not First Class, thank you very much. There’s no limo waiting, but there’s a yellow cab idling that takes me to the Hotel Chelsea, the epitome of living simply, casually, freely, without ostentation, or pretense, no matter from which social echelon you hail. Ethan Hawke lives here in its humble embrace. Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman were recently running all over the place filming a movie. The only pretense is the drive to not be pretentious, which in the wrong hands can itself be a pretension.

A middle-aged black man, wiry and shifty-eyed, zones in on my bags and grabs them. He looks like he just crawled out of a cardboard house on the corner of 23rd Street and Seventh Avenue. His clothes are old, disheveled.

“It’s OK,” he tells me, with the slightest, ornery sort of vexation. “I work here. I’m not stealing your bags.”

This is my bellboy/concierge, Jerome, who has been employed at Hotel Chelsea for 20 years.  I shuffle moronically, trying to pretend I never thought such a thing.

I’ve come to potentially attend The Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS (DIFFA) “Viva Glam Casino,” an annual fundraiser hosted by svelte runway denizens Maggie Rizer and Gisele Bundchen (among other top-shelf social luminaries). Sponsored by an endless array of eye-popping names, ranging from JP Morgan Chase to Bloomingdale’s, and held at the new location of the old dinner club stronghold, the Copacabana, tickets range from $350 to $1,000. Photographer Mark Peterson and I had applied for media credentials two weeks in advance.

I went ahead and booked my flight and reserved my room, although Peterson had been told we wouldn’t know whether we’d been given access until the very day of my planned arrival – the day prior to the event.

“It is part of the game,” Peterson had written in an email the day before. “It’s part of the power play, to wait until the last minute to let you know whether you get in or not.”

Wonderful, I think.

Within minutes, still dripping water from the Chelsea’s rickety old bathtub shower, I’m informed by Peterson that no, we’ve not been admitted to DIFFA’s chi-chi event, and he apologizes, embarrassed, saying that he’s found another one we can attend. The Partnership with Children Junior Committee (formerly Big Sisters Inc.) would be holding their Summer Blast Benefit at the Loft at Trust (421 West 13th Street) in the Meatpacking district.

Tickets are reasonable for this one- $75 in advance, $85 at the door. Claudia Stepke, out contact person, was more than happy to comply with our request for attendance. Still, I am skeptical.

Peterson picks me up downstairs. En route, we drive past the Copacabana and see the beginnings of DIFFA’s swank event. The nostalgic agony of being excluded registers like the old days of high school effrontery from cheerleaders wanting to keep me out of their clique. Aggravation is easily piqued, and insult is natural. Nobody likes to get cut. The sting is just enough to remind me of what it feels like to be snubbed, and I remind myself that this is a story about charity, not about getting ostracized by the richies.

Only human to want to belong, even when in your heart you know it doesn’t really matter, in all honesty, DIFFA’s event sounds like fun with a lot of stars swaddled in clothing worth the sticker price of a BMW, gift bags of M.A.C. cosmetics, and chances to win all kinds of goodies. I’m sure had I actually made it in the door I’d have come out a fan and forgotten the fact the same money could have been spent saving perhaps several more lives suffering with AIDS.

Inclusion often overwhelms a person’s idea of righteousness, and exclusion is often the very enticement that abrades those in the trenches of revolution, ready for a good fight at the slightest prompting.

And so, I must admit, even though Partnership with Children has opened its arms to me, I am ready for combat, not martinis.

Peterson and I have a chance to talk on the way. I’m interested to hear what he thinks about his subjects, who he’s been photographing for a decade. From Minnesota, he’d moved to the city in the ‘90s, and since then has worked for a heady assortment of publications, ranging from New York Magazine, to The New York Times. His interest in the upper crust had begun when he was assigned to do a piece on aged heiress Brooke Astor.

“There were just as rich people in Minnesota,” he tells me, driving, his eyes crinkling as he struggles to express himself. “But I’d never seen people who looked like that. They were like a tribe. I’m a color photographer, so it’s like walking onto a set with these people. There are designers, there are people always there to make things look nice, look scrumptious.”

“Vegas in the flesh,” I suggest, and he nods.

“Every night of the week there’s singing and dancing in the name of the homeless and poor,” he adds.

This is the way they do things. The men come to the events in order to meet new contacts, to network, and the women come to give them something to do other than sit at the house (or penthouse), or spend all day shopping aimlessly. This gives them purpose. In the process, they are performing acts of charity, however flooded with ironies they may be to the observing, scrutinizing outsider’s eye.

Fortunately, I find myself tamed by Partnership with Children, in part because the organization is nearly 100-years-old, and the group gathered is not in any way affected with airs. The Junior Committee supports Partnership with Children by throwing several fundraising events, like Summer Blast, throughout the year, which contributes over $30,000 annually in additional funds.

The mission of Partnership with Children is to “strengthen the emotional, social, and cognitive skills of at-risk children so that they can succeed in school, in society, and in their lives.”

Several of the social workers that I congregate with by the bar are by no means snooty and clearly don’t mind getting their hands dirty with the hoi polloi.

They speak about the children in their programs with the same affection as parents, once or twice fighting back misty eyes as their passion unfolds beautifully. They forget me for moments at a time as they recall this child or that one, calling them by name, smiling or laughing at a memory that lingers.

Bank of America underwrites the event. Thong Nguyen, senior VP of Marketing and Development for Bank of America’s Asset Management Group, dressed in debonair, ultra-chic black, attests to the organization’s dedication to keeping it real. A Vietnamese refugee who migrated here in 1985, Nguyen understands the value and the pursuit of the common good in a more visceral way.

“A hundred percent of the ticket proceeds go directly to the organization,” he says. “We’ve even brought in Jay Gottlieb of NYU to measure the impact of nonprofit organizations. As a result, by putting a business spin to it, the charity has charted 100-250 percent improvement in their programs with at-risk children, and instead of the usual 25 percent usually spent on these functions, they’re at 18 percent.”

Not only that, Omar Griles, a social worker with Partnership with Children’s Open Heart Open Mind Program says, “We’ve lost our United Way funding because our scores are so high. It’s good that we’re doing so well and having such a positive impact, but it’s kind of bad we don’t get their support anymore.”

I congratulate him and he nods proudly.

Everyone I’m talking to uses phrases like, “done on a shoestring” and they are wearing more J.Crew than Chanel. (Not that I have anything against Chanel.)

These are good people, I decide.

Meanwhile, Peterson hovers and settles here and there, his camera flash splattering light now and then on a moment he deems recordable. Two young women and one tall gangly man in a gray suit dance in tipsy rhythm as Peterson sneaks up behind them and catches their inhibition.

I’m sucked into their cause, a pup to a teat; this is the kind of organization you want to put your money into, not only because it is a good cause, but because the people involved seem genuinely engaged and dedicated in a heartfelt, sober way. There is nothing here to discourage me from believing they are all about making change, not just guzzling free booze and arranging booty calls between the uppity.

After we leave, Peterson and I decide to drive past the DIFFA event. By now it has reached a heady froth. Everyone’s got a buzz and several people are gathered in clumps outside to smoke cigarettes or talk on cell phones beyond the inner din. Even the infamously eccentric Craig “Radioman” Schwartz, who shows up to literally every movie set on New York City soil, is hovering outside.

This man, who has had a documentary made about him, and who, when you call him, has a message telling you every possible spot in New York where  you can see a filming, a star, or anything in between, wouldn’t be here unless he smelled a spectacle. If Radioman’s here, by George, you know you’ve got an event.

Rail-thin waifs gather in a supercilious hen-fest just outside, as if they have just seen so-and-so and they just said so-and-so, can you believe that?

Others are still nonchalantly edging their way toward the entrance as Radioman mutters to the doorman, who is polite and tolerant.

There is nothing outrageous unraveling, or anything particularly obnoxious or riveting - which means that the excitement is either all going on inside, or nobody exciting has made their appearance yet.

There are no models staggering blindly and drunkenly out to fall headfirst into their limos, no fashion designers sashaying up red carpets with young boys holding their capes. I’m doggedly disappointed, but curious. I go in for a closer look.

Frazzled and wooly, Radioman wears a cheap boom-box around his neck on a rope. I decide he’s more interesting than the others, although I am objective enough to figure I might sing a different tune if they’d let me in the door. He says he’s come to check things out, maybe get a gift bag. “Some of them are pretty cool,” he says of the attendants. He finally realizes I’m on the sidewalk with him instead of behind the velvet ropes.

“Aren’t you going in?” he asks us.

“No, they wouldn’t let us in,” I shrug.

“Did you tell them who you’re with?” he asks, and I nod.

“Assholes!” he exclaims.

+++++

Back at the Hotel Chelsea, I make fast friends with Stanley Bard, the owner. I’m going to miss this place.

Times Square somehow seems like the place to be, typical as it is for a visitor. I grab a cab and minutes later, with a flask of vodka in my hip pocket, I slide out of the taxi and head to the corner stand.

Dog in hand, I cross to the center of the universe, gazing up at the dazzling assortment of neon and flashing American pomp, a perfect, glaring, obtrusively and orgasmic expression of all things capitalism.

“OK,” I say. Sometimes I come here to remind myself of who I am and where I come from, for even country girls from dirt roads of factory workers 9-to-5ing in Des Moines are still from this place.

This is the heart, the pulse, the barometer of our wealth and our greed and our vice, and, by at least some definition, our worth.

Unscrewing the cap off my flash, I swig, chasing it with a bit of pig and kraut and bun.

I idle, and then go back across, sauntering up the mad, teeming aisles of the city. A homeless man sits against the wall, forlorn, holding a sign that reads, “Feed me, I’m poor.”

Our eyes meet and I continue to ramble but then stop, passersby banging into my flanks in their tourist-heady haste.

I turn around. He’s looking at me. Back to the corner dog stand, I load up on several more and top it off with some candied cashews, wandering back to the man. I squat by his side.

“Hungry?” I smile. This is a joke he gets after a pause. We laugh.

I pass him one and sit down on the gum-coated, spittle-spackled sidewalk that millions upon millions have tread upon, making their pilgrimage to this place that is an outdoor cathedral worshiping humanity’s ingenuity, creativity and avarice.

“Thanks,” he says, leaning his sign against the wall.  People step over us but don’t see us.

“This is good real estate you got here,” I say.

“Yep,” he nods. “Real good.”

“Can’t get any better,” I say.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“Robin. You?” I respond, offering him my flask.

He takes a sip and he’s nodding, and answers, “Trey.”

“Hey, Trey, thanks for having me over,” I smile, handing him the flask back and taking another bite of a kraut dog.

He laughs and says, “No problem. Any time.”