Zusatztext A masterly popular novel . . . by a man who knowsalong with F. Scott Fitzgeraldthat the rich are very different. And wonderfully fascinating. Kirkus Reviews Dead-on-target. New York Times Book Review Spicy. Los Angeles Times Wickedly sharp. Philadelphia Inquirer Informationen zum Autor Dominick Dunne is the author of five bestselling novels, two collections of essays, and, most recently, The Way We Lived Then , a memoir with photographs. He is Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair and lives in New York City and Hadlyme, Connecticut. Klappentext Before they had Too Much Money, the inhabitants of Dominick Dunne's glitzy, gossipy New York Times bestselling novels were People Like Us . The way journalist Gus Bailey tells it, old money is always preferred, but occasionally new money sneaks in-even where it is most unwelcome. After moving from Cincinnati, Elias and Ruby Renthal strike it even richer in New York, turning their millions into billions. It would be impolite for high society to refuse them now. Not to mention disadvantageous. As long as the market is strong, there's absolutely nothing to worry about-except for those nasty secrets from the past. Scandal, anyone? Zusammenfassung Before they had Too Much Money, the inhabitants of Dominick Dunne's glitzy, gossipy New York Times bestselling novels were People Like Us . The way journalist Gus Bailey tells it, old money is always preferred, but occasionally new money sneaks ineven where it is most unwelcome. After moving from Cincinnati, Elias and Ruby Renthal strike it even richer in New York, turning their millions into billions. It would be impolite for high society to refuse them now. Not to mention disadvantageous. As long as the market is strong, there's absolutely nothing to worry aboutexcept for those nasty secrets from the past. Scandal, anyone?...

8220;A masterly popular novel . . . by a man who knows–along with F. Scott Fitzgerald–that the rich are very different. And wonderfully fascinating.”—*Kirkus Reviews

• “Dead-on-target.”—New York Times Book Review

“Spicy.”—Los Angeles Times

“Wickedly sharp.”—*Philadelphia Inquirer

Autorentext

Dominick Dunne is the author of five bestselling novels, two collections of essays, and, most recently, The Way We Lived Then, a memoir with photographs. He is Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair and lives in New York City and Hadlyme, Connecticut.

Klappentext

Before they had Too Much Money, the inhabitants of Dominick Dunne's glitzy, gossipy New York Times bestselling novels were People Like Us.

The way journalist Gus Bailey tells it, old money is always preferred, but occasionally new money sneaks in-even where it is most unwelcome. After moving from Cincinnati, Elias and Ruby Renthal strike it even richer in New York, turning their millions into billions. It would be impolite for high society to refuse them now. Not to mention disadvantageous. As long as the market is strong, there's absolutely nothing to worry about-except for those nasty secrets from the past. Scandal, anyone?

Zusammenfassung
Before they had Too Much Money, the inhabitants of Dominick Dunne’s glitzy, gossipy New York Times bestselling novels were People Like Us.

The way journalist Gus Bailey tells it, old money is always preferred, but occasionally new money sneaks in–even where it is most unwelcome. After moving from Cincinnati, Elias and Ruby Renthal strike it even richer in New York, turning their millions into billions. It would be impolite for high society to refuse them now. Not to mention disadvantageous. As long as the market is strong, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about–except for those nasty secrets from the past. Scandal, anyone?

Leseprobe
Except for July and August, when everyone was away from the city, Maisie Verdurin, the art dealer, entertained in her Park Avenue apartment at large monthly dinner parties that had become so significant a part of the social life of New York that even people in the subways, at least those people in the subways who read the social columns, knew her name. In her interviews, as a hostess of repute, Maisie Verdurin often talked about society today being made up of people of accomplishment—the doers, she called them—and she had only words of contempt for the highly pedigreed few who rode through life on inherited wealth and social perfection. What she could not, simply could not, stand, ever, was to be bored, she often said, and the kind of people who came each month to sit on her sixty gilded ballroom chairs placed around eight tables—six tables of eight, two tables of six—set up in her drawing room, dining room, and library, were guaranteed to provide the kind of conversation that could never, ever, bore.
 
All the Cézannes, Van Goghs, Picassos, and Monets on her green moiré walls were for sale, and her dinners, which her detractors claimed she used as tax deductions, were a way of doing business and bringing together the political, financial, media, and literary figures of New York into her Rigaud-scented rooms.
 
Maisie infinitely preferred her own dinners to other people’s dinners, but on the occasions she was asked back by the people she had invited, she sometimes called Augustus Bailey to escort her. Gus Bailey, a perennial spare man, obliged if he was free, and their conversations, in taxicabs on their way to and from the dinners, were always monopolized by Maisie, who rarely expressed any curiosity about Gus’s life. She knew that he had a California past; she knew he had been something or other in films at one time; but neither California nor films interested her, in the way that Wall Street financiers did, or arbitrage traders, or real-estate entrepreneurs, whose first step on the road to riches was the acquisition of art, and she simply assumed Gus’s agreement when she sometimes asked, “Aren’t you glad to be away from California?” Gus was glad to be away from California, but not for the reasons Maisie supposed, which had mostly to do with what she called a singleness of theme, the movies, in dinner-table conversations “out there.” Maisie also knew that Gus had a wife in California, with money, called, improbably, Peach, whom a lot of people knew, but that sort of information was of less interest to Maisie than the facts that Gus Bailey had a good dinner jacket, could keep up his end of the conversation, and didn’t have to be whispered to by the butler to remove the finger bowl and doily before the crème brûlée could be served.
 
Maisie took Gus to Rochelle Prud’homme’s party at Clarence’s to launch her new line of cordless hairdryers, which Gus hadn’t wanted to go to, but there he ran into his old friend Nestor Calder, a Brooklyn-born novelist of note, whose latest book, Judas Was a Redhead, was on the best-seller list.
 
“I liked your new book, Nestor,” said Gus. “It’ll make a terrific movie.”
 
“They don’t make movies of books anymore, Gus. They make mini-series of books. One of the studios is interested in making a mini-series of it,” answered Nestor. “But they don’t want me to write the screenplay, and I’ll only sell it if I do write the screenplay.”
 
“It seems to me I’ve heard that song before,” said Gus.
 
Nestor laughed.
 
“How’s it going, Gus?” asked Nestor Calder. They had once worked on a film together.
 
“Oh, okay,” replied Gus. When anyone became personal with Gus Bailey, he replied in as few words as possible.
 
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