Not Our Class, Dearie

THE RIGHT PEOPLE by Stephen Birmingham. 360 pages. Little, Brown. $10.

In these paltry times of inconspicuous consumption, when the rich no longer recognize their obligation to entertain the poor by erecting Rhenish castles and commissioning steam yachts, a book such as this guide to posh deserves the Jay Gould Award for Public Service. It is already a bestseller--which gives Stephen Birmingham, author of Our Crowd, the distinction of having two books on the Big List simultaneously. The dust jacket of The Right People describes it as "an important, authoritative work of serious social comment." Fortunately, this is nonsense. The Right People is malicious storytelling, leavened by gossip, and puts the well-born and well-climbed of the U.S. back to work at their appointed task of being funny.

There is Society, Birmingham announces; then there is Real Society. "There were few Real Society people in attendance at the wedding of Luci Johnson." But: "Nor were there Real Society people at the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco. ('I hear that they met,' said a Philadelphia Society woman at the time, 'at the home of a mutual friend in Ocean City, New Jersey. But how can that be? No one has gone to Ocean City for years')."

Lacy Branches. Some of the Right People, in other words, are Righter than others. Members of mere Society all know who Real Society people are, but members of Real Society cannot be expected to keep track of all of the worthy but numerous thanes who make up Society. The Social Register is not a reliable guide to who is Real. Birmingham implies that it is rather too democratic (it is published for profit, and one is not likely to buy it if one is not in it). Some citizens who are Real choose not to be listed. The author quotes Novelist Louis Auchincloss, however, who says: "The Social Register has gotten so enormous that it looks rather peculiar if you're not in it."

Auchincloss is Real, and so is his cousin Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jackie Kennedy's stepfather. Birmingham pronounces the Auchinclosses "the definitive family of American Society." Although he is not abnormally giddy, as society writers go, he says prettily that "the lacy branches of the Auchincloss family tree spread across Society's entire landscape."

Real Society women tend to be tweedy-leathery, observes Birmingham --the leathery part being the texture of their perpetually tanned skin. "Hair is a blond mixture, streaked from the sun, of middle length, and is often caught at the back of the neck in a little net bag." Despite such allure, a man of Real Society may become jaded, and if this occurs, says the author, he may be permitted to keep a mistress. Here is a true class distinction: the lives of the lofty are spacious enough for mistresses, but the lower orders have only adultery. It is the difference between maintaining a yacht and day-chartering a party boat.

Haoy, There! Birmingham knows that as a dealer in legend his job is to bunk, not debunk, and when a scrap of utter rot fits nicely into a paragraph, he quite properly leaves it there, without apology. Describing the Society voice, for instance, he discerns "a certain New England flatness, a trace of a Southern drawl, and a surprising touch of the New York City accent that many people consider Brooklynese. Therefore, in the social voice, the word 'shirt' comes out halfway between 'shirt' and 'shoit' . . . whereas the greeting, 'Hi,' is nearly always heavily diphthonged as 'Haoy.' This speech has been nicknamed 'the Massachusetts malocclusion,' since much of it is accomplished with the lower jaw thrust forward and rigid, and"--here comes the rot--"in a number of upper-class private schools, children are taught to speak correctly by practicing with pencils clenched between their teeth." Splendidly bunked.

Birmingham is good on local vagaries. A businessman from Philadelphia's Main Line, he says, may close a deal with "All righty-roo," or take leave of his hosts with "Nightie-noodles." In San Francisco, "it is still fun to buy up whole rooms from French chateaux, have them dismembered, shipped home, and reassembled in suburban Burlingame, a practice which palled in other sections of the country three decades ago." Competition is severe there, and newcomers are likely to be described as "N.O.C.D.--Not Our Class, Dearie." In Palm Springs, Right People who would be hideously Wrong anywhere else live in an elaborate trailer camp, one of whose units has been transformed, at a cost of $50,000, into a replica of Mount Vernon.

The Right People grew somewhat patchily from a series of magazine articles, and some of the omissions are surprising. There is a good chapter on the insecurities of Grosse Pointe, for instance, but none at all on the securities of Boston. Real Society is a matriarchy, Birmingham says, but even allowing for this he is uninformative about the concerns of men who happen to be Real. A corollary is a lack of information on the extent to which Society still has and uses power--apart from the power to write checks and say "Nightie-noodles" without getting arrested. Can what Birmingham suggests really be true--that Right People, unlike Our Crowd, are without political instincts? If so, have they a survival instinct? Wrong People will wait by their bookstores for Birmingham's dispatches.

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