There's something flourishing in America which has almost died out in Britain: Society. Every big town, and Chicago is no exception, has a highly visible social order. At its pinnacle are descendants of the families which made the city rich and endowed its institutions: the meat magnates, prairie kings, agricultural machinery inventors and railroad builders of a century ago. But almost anyone can enter on a lower-rung, and giving is the way to do it. At a hundred auctions, balls and charity fashion parades you can see them, the newly rich, buying in and getting on.
It is difficult-not to mention expensive-being rich, and it is especially tricky to decide what the final resting place for your money will be when you have gone to a place where the rustle of bank notes is never heard. It used to be mostly the widows of wealthy men whose delightful decision this was-as my husband and I discovered during our last US posting, on the west coast. The job he had then entailed a fair bit of fundraising, which flung us on to the luxuriant but distinctly American terra nova of philanthropy, a complex ecology of wants and needs where foundations and the wealthy lived in happy symbiosis.
It was a mutually beneficial arrangement, until one of the parties (and it was always the same one) departed to reap an unearthly reward. Well aware of this built-in handicap, many donors teasingly enjoyed their sundown years. Fêted by institutions and showered with invitations, they distributed largesse as a series of tasty appetisers, while making sure that the main course would be a posthumous one. As to that, some made promises, others only dropped hints, guaranteeing the constant attentions of their beneficiaries until the very end.
My husband needed money for an ambitious programme of building and research. His terms of engagement, however, were stiff. Like a Victorian lover, he was required to bring the affair to the point of a declaration but forbidden to pop the actual question. That was the job of the development office of the university where he worked, which kept extensive files on actual and potential donors. Were he to lose his head, so to speak, press the affectionate patron to his bosom and ask point-blank for the required millions of dollars, and were the astonished patron to agree, the university might gain a sprat only to lose a mackerel: the donor, in the afterglow of embrace, seeing that the immediate payment of a small sum would push into the shadows-for the time being at least-the promise of something greater.
My husband felt that a miasma of solicitation and money hung about him and he detested his task. Moreover, the small talk required to make donors feel at ease was not his forte-and if, out of free associative embarrassment, he launched into a discussion of 18th century tax, they were likely to flee altogether.
This was where I came in. No aura of cash or over-intellectuality surrounded me, and, being a woman, went the unspoken lore, it was easy for me to sympathise with the donors' concerns. With that subtext, it wasn't surprising that the days before fundraising events were particularly tense ones in our small West Hollywood bungalow. Requested, cajoled, required and finally begged to go along, in the end I usually did; and since no biographer is ever really unhappy listening to life stories or tales of hysterectomies and hip replacements, I invariably enjoyed myself, too.
I drew the line, however, at doing the university's business. Asked to tea by one charming widow, I received a Chandleresque call from the development office. Could I look around and see what was there? It was known that she had a fine art collection, but no one from the office had actually... At that point I mysteriously forgot my art-historical training. I was, I replied, completely unqualified to tell a Monet from a Morandi or a Picasso from a Pollock; and there the matter rested.
By now most of these kind and shrewd old ladies have probably made their final gifts and smile down eternally in Mediterranean mausoleum-style from laminated photographs on the walls of the institutes and galleries named after them, their dear departed husbands by their sides.
The philanthropic world they lived in has undergone a sea-change, too, transformed by a wave of competitive gift-giving among dot.com millionaires and billionaires who are no longer waiting until death (or even old age) to disperse their fortunes. No one has yet trumped Bill Gates's $21.8 billion charitable foundation. But former Netscape president James Barksdale, who winningly described his fortune as "north of $700m," recently gave $100m to his alma mater, the University of Mississippi, for literacy programmes in that state. Such gifts, if not yet commonplace, are no longer unimaginable.
There are formidable tax incentives and a long tradition of philanthropy in the US which encourage charitable donations, and there is no doubt that there can be, as one professional put it to me, "transforming gifts." So, few ask, "why do it?" The soul buy-back still operates, which means that, in the manner of a medieval banker founding a lay order or a Counter-Reformation widow endowing a saint, with one huge donation you can remove from your conscience the thousands of hapless souls who have toiled in call centres to help make you rich. In this moral economy it is not how much you have that defines your worth, but how much you give away: moral and monetary value sit in inverse relation to one another, and you pass through the holy portals clothed in virtue but naked of wealth.
