Norman Mailer's Alimony; British Rich Lists; The Layoff Binge; Loving the Unabomber
The item caught my eye and I haven't been able to sleep ever since. "Adele Mailer, 75, one of five former wives of Norman Mailer, has sued the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, claiming that her alimony checks are so small they have left her poverty-stricken."
"I don't think he should allow me to live like this," crows Adele. "He owes it to me."
Well, I don't know Adele and I will take her word for it, but is it possible to be receiving payment since 1962, when JFK was president and Robert Wagner mayor of New York City, and be complaining about it? There should be a statute of limitations to alimony, just as there is for other crimes. The screwing you get for the screwing you got is an outrage, especially in America. Norman Mailer is a friend of mine, but even if he were Sid the Scumbag Blumenthal, I would have reacted the same way. (Actually, not really. Sid the Scumbag should be taken to the cleaners, perhaps by Monica Lewinsky.) Mailer has been writing his heart out throughout his life, and his nobly gotten gains have mostly gone to his ex-wives. Something is very wrong here.
Germaine Greer, that unattractive Australian academic and pop philosopher, once attacked Norman, in a debate about feminism, as a male chauvinist pig and the rest of the usual garbage. Mailer was polite, but failed to point out that all his moolah has gone to support women he bedded and eventually married, as honorable an act as stripping a man from his loot after love's flown is dishonorable.
My first wife was considered the prettiest debutante of the 1962 Paris season. She was a duke's daughter and Paris Match put her on the cover, such was her youthful allure. I remember my mother seeing her picture and telling me that's the kind of girl I should marry, "rather than those tarts you're always running around with." Mama was right. Ladies do not take you to the cleaners, semi-ladies do. After Cristina caught me cheating for the umpteenth time, she moved out of my Paris flat and into her grandmother's in the South of France.
My father happened to be on his boat in St.-Tropez, so I flew down to see him and asked him to go to Monte Carlo and get her back. I stayed on the boat (with his mistress, incidentally) and waited for him rather nervously. "I offered her a nice house and told her I would double your allowance, but she interrupted me and said that she would pay me to take you back if she had the money," said old dad.
Needless to say, Cristina was so anxious to be rid of me, she demanded nothing but a quickie divorce. I had lived openly with various mistresses, we were only married three years, we had no children, so I consented right away. And we remain very, very good friends.
See what I mean about ladies? And my moolah had come the old-fashioned way, through Daddy. Imagine working for your money?and writing is the hardest work I know?and then having to give it all away to some Lydia Languish. Perhaps the ex-Mrs. Mailer should have tried working; after all, it's been 39 years. Or perhaps I am being unfair to her. I have no idea whether she did work, it's only that 39 years is a hell of a long time to be paying.
Mailer is an obvious romantic who believes in love and has been mugged by it. Romantic love is by its nature delusional and brief, a fine madness. It also thrives on obstacles and danger. Love is ontological?being in its most vivid state, and nothing is more vivid than the start of a love affair. But does that mean a man has to pay for the rest of his life?
We Europeans used not to divorce, and a good thing it was, too. My father had mistresses all his life, and my mother never looked at another man. That is the way it should be, but no longer is. My second wife, an Austrian princess, had the audacity to sue me for divorce after I refused to give up an English mistress of mine. Seventeen years after his failed mission to Monte Carlo, old Dad had to fly to New York and talk Alexandra out of it in 1985. This time he succeeded. In fact, when he heard how little she was asking after 15 years and two children he told her she should have sued her lawyer, "not my useless son."
My friend Chuck Pfeiffer served in Vietnam, was decorated, worked his butt off and then had to give half his fortune to his wife after six years of marriage and no children. (She resented the fact that he chased women and had the occasional drink. How typical of an American woman.) Perhaps I've been lucky, but in 45 years of constant skirt-chasing I have never been sued or even come close to it by a member of the fairer sex. No palimony, no broken-promise suits, no broken-engagement charges. I guess it all has to do with the kind of girls I go out with.
One thing is for sure. Unlike Bill Clinton, I do not ask women I've just met to kiss it, I do not rape them, nor do I force myself upon ladies in distress looking for help. Norman Mailer is a perfect gentleman and a good guy, but instead of keeping mistresses, he married rather a lot. I can see Patricia Duff taking Ron Perelman to the cleaners?he's a billionaire and wealth should be spread about?but Mailer is a writer, and writers should be declared an endangered species who don't have to pay alimony after, say, 10 years at the most.
For someone of limited means like me, this is a tough time to be a British citizen. I'm not just talking about the cost of living in London. No, this is the time of year when Fleet Street starts publishing lists of the richest people in the country. In America, you only have the Forbes 400 to deal with. Over here, we have The Mail on Sunday's "Rich Report," The Observer's "Young Rich" and The Sunday Times' "Rich List." Luckily, my girlfriend has hidden the Nembutal.
An enormous amount of hoopla surrounds the publication of these lists. For The Mail and The Sunday Times, they're the most expensive editorial projects of the year, costing more than a million pounds to put together. The reason they devote such massive resources to them is because they're genuine circulation-boosters. According to Philip Beresford, the man responsible for compiling The Sunday Times' list, the paper's circulation increased by 14 percent when it published its first ever "Rich List" in April 1989. On the day The Mail on Sunday published its list last month, circulation went up by 5 percent.
The idea of publishing a list of the richest people in Britain was first mooted in 1982 by Tiny Rowland, a swashbuckling entrepreneur, at a lunch with Ivan Fallon, the city editor of The Daily Telegraph. Fallon immediately set about compiling the list, but quickly discovered that not all of Britain's richest men were keen to publicize their wealth. The Duke of Atholl, for instance, called Lord Hartwell, then the proprietor of the Telegraph, and told him that if his name appeared on the list Hartwell wouldn't be invited shooting that year. The Duke of Devonshire buttonholed the editor of The Sunday Telegraph at the bar of White's and let him know that he took a very dim view of the matter. The Sainsbury family complained to Scotland Yard.
Nineteen years on, few of Britain's richest individuals object to their net worths appearing in print. On the contrary, some of them complain that their wealth has been seriously undervalued. For instance, after The Sunday Times estimated David Sullivan's fortune at £60 million in 1990?Sullivan is a Soho porn baron?he wrote a furious letter to the editor enclosing details of his accounts and pension fund. The following year, The Sunday Times increased its estimate of Sullivan's worth to £100 million.
So what gems does The Sunday Times have in store for us this year? According to a teaser that ran on Jan. 21, Paul McCartney has become the world's first pop billionaire, provided his wealth is calculated in dollars rather than pounds. Apparently, the ex-Beatle's fortune has increased by £175 million in the past 12 months, thanks largely to the fact that his wife, Linda, left him £150 million in her will. His net worth is now £725 million ($1.06 billion), making him the richest pop star in the world. If 1 outstrips Thriller to become the bestselling album of all time, it won't be long before he becomes a pound billionaire as well.
The Sunday Times lists Britain's 1000 wealthiest individuals and, this year, you have to have at least £35 million to qualify (up from £30 million last year). There are several interesting new additions. For instance, one new entry is J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter novels. Her net worth is estimated at £70 million. Another is Paul Smith, the man who devised the quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Thanks to selling the format around the world, his fortune is calculated at more than £100 million.
However, it's those who've fallen off the list who are the big news. Kevin Leech, for instance, was a Jersey-based investor who The Sunday Times claimed was worth £1.2 billion last year, making him the 17th-richest man in Britain. His wealth was almost entirely based on dotcom stocks, and this year he doesn't even make the top 1000.
Another casualty of the dotcom recession is Tim Jackson, the founder of QXL, the British equivalent of eBay. Last year The Sunday Times put his fortune at £272 million, whereas this year he's nowhere to be seen. That came as quite a relief to me, I must say. Jackson was my tutorial partner at Oxford.
For people like me, who spend hours combing these lists for people they know, then get terribly depressed when they find someone, one source of comfort is the enormous discrepancy between them. After all, if the papers can't agree on who's worth what, perhaps the whole exercise is entirely speculative. For instance, The Mail on Sunday estimated Paul McCartney's fortune at £640 million this year, £112 million less than The Sunday Times. Some solace for Ringo there. Last year, The Mail on Sunday claimed Tim Jackson was worth £320 million, which sent me into a terrible tailspin until I saw that The Sunday Times had estimated his wealth at £48 million less.
Another source of comfort is that, compared to America's plutocratic elite, our lot are small potatoes. The Sunday Times is pretty excited about the fact that the number of Britain's billionaires has increased to 30, up from 26 last year. Compare this to last year's Forbes 400, which included 298 billionaires. Admittedly, there's a dollar/pound discrepancy to be factored in, but that's pretty embarrassing nevertheless. The total net worth of the 1000 richest people in Britain is £150 billion, according to The Sunday Times, up from £145 billion last year. This is roughly equivalent to the total worth of the top five in Forbes' list, which in 2000 came to $211 billion. Still, it looks as though both The Mail on Sunday and The Sunday Times have figured out a way around this problem: they've started including Americans on the list. This year, for instance, The Sunday Times has put in Madonna (£200 million) on the grounds that she's er, got a house in London. Bill Gates is rumored to be looking for a house in London too, so it can only be a matter of time before he's included as well.
In the great American capitalist way, companies are competing with one another as to who can fire the most workers most expeditiously. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were about 327,000 layoffs in December. This figure only includes cases in which 50 or more employees were dismissed at once. The total number of people laid off last year was more than 1.8 million. In recent days, we learned that Verizon is eliminating 10,000 jobs; and DaimlerChrysler is getting rid of 20 percent of its workforce. Amazon.com is laying off 15 percent of its employees; BarnesandNoble.com 16 percent; Cnet Networks 10 percent. Xerox, JC Penney, Textron, Lucent Technologies, Toshiba America Inc. and AOL Time Warner are all cheerfully firing workers en masse. General Electric's CEO Jack Welch, legendary for ruthless cost-cutting at the expense of his employees, is promising to shed 75,000 workers.
Needless to say, all this is being accompanied by corporate-owned media twaddle about our glorious lean, mean capitalism, and the thrills of economic insecurity. "Neutron Jack is roaring back," gushes Business Week. "GE is planning massive job cuts on a scale not seen since the early days of Welch's tenure." Gosh! "[We] are not seeing a great deal of old-fashioned job insecurity where people are not sure if they will even have a job," New Economy propagandist Robert Reich announces airily. "There's no reason to suppose that we'll see a sharp increase in unemployment." Newsweek writes fatuously about how "matter-of-factly?even happily?many elite workers are taking their 'reduction in force' notices? Despite all the dour headlines, today's job market remains remarkably strong. Unemployment still hovers near a 30-year low, and recruiters say most laid-off workers are finding new jobs quickly."
That is splendid news. It is the mark of a vibrant economy that former dotcom executives are taking jobs as waiters, and plant workers as telemarketers. Half the workers filing for unemployment insurance pay in December had been employed in the manufacturing industries. Many of these jobs have now been shipped overseas. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturing is expected to account for less than 12 percent of all jobs in 2008. It had accounted for 16 percent of jobs as recently as 1988. Contrary to myth, most of the new jobs are not in high-tech. The computer industry employs relatively few people. The jobs are in retail, marketing, sales, healthcare, social services and administration.
While the media rhapsodizes about our "cruel-to-be-kind" corporate managers, no one ever bothers to ask whether, instead of firing workers, CEOs could take a cut in pay. CEO take-home pay has been soaring for years with little, if any, relationship to company performance. According to Executive Paywatch, in the United States "the average CEO of a major corporation made $12.4 million in 1999, 475 times more than an average blue-collar worker." German CEOs, on the other hand, "make 13 times what the average manufacturing employee makes. In Japan, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio is just 11-to-1."
While Jack Welch hacks away furiously at the fat at GE, one area that will remain undisturbed is his pay packet. In 1999 Welch was paid $45.7 million. In addition, he received stock option grants worth $46.9 million. He also has stock-option exercises to the tune of $48.5 million and unexercised stock options worth $436 million.
The mass firings so beloved by the corporations have nothing to do with recessions, falling demand or market downturns. They are all about boosting profit margins and thereby increasing shareholder value. Wall Street interprets mass layoffs as a sign that corporate managers are serious about "trimming the fat." They therefore buy into company stock and raise its value. An announcement of a huge layoff invariably leads to a surge in the company's share prices. Moreover, since company executives are now paid in stock options instead of cash, they have every incentive to do whatever is necessary to boost the value of their own holdings. Cutting the workforce is the easiest way there is to boost profits.
The threat of layoffs has the additional happy consequence of securing a docile labor force. General Motors demonstrated last year how little mass firings had to do with company performance. After recording one of its most profitable years ever, company managers showed their gratitude to their employees by laying off 15,000 workers. General Electric also enjoyed record earnings in 2000. But according to Business Week, that is not good enough for Welch. GE wants superprofits?an earnings growth of 20 percent next year.
The largest private employer in the United States today is Manpower Inc., the temp agency providing labor services to companies. Reducing all of their workers to the status of temps is probably the ideal toward which the corporations would like to head. Temps are the perfect employees. They can be hired and fired on the cheap. No need to have headhunters, personnel departments, job interviews; and you save on healthcare costs, pension plans and severance pay. Temps, moreover, fall outside the jurisdiction of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which only applies to company employees. They have no right to collective bargaining, since even if a union does exist at the workplace only company employees can belong to it.
Some years ago Delta Airlines fired its baggage handlers and then rehired them as independent contractors. The workers took a 35 percent cut in pay and lost most of their benefits. The shareholders did very nicely, though. It is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. Marx would be amazed at our indifference.