Beach Bound / Culture Watch
High Society
Money, manners and mad behavior blend as intoxicatingly as gin and vermouth in a Tiffany cocktail shaker—even as the ice is rapidly melting—in Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor (Little, Brown & Company) by Tad Friend. His observation of the once golden even if slightly tarnished reign of the privileged Wasp establishment is written with wit, insight, humor and good sportsmanship.
[photo: Tad Friend]
HAMPTONS: How has life in the Hamptons changed for you as the culture and people have changed?
TAD FRIEND: We’ve always tried to ignore whatever’s going on just outside the wide view from the porch. Still, change we must: we now stock in three days’ worth of food at a time just so we don’t have to travel on Route 27. Then we hunker down and pretend there is no Hamptons.
[photo: book jacket front]
H: Doesn’t the very act of your writing this book say something about the vitality of the world you come from?
TF: We’re forgotten but not gone. I’d like to think that I channeled the example of my writer forebears—the wit and the voice and the determination to do things thoroughly and with style—while omitting the serial cocktails that tended to slow the process of composition.