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I was already a grown up woman when somebody explained to me why certain wealthy Wasp-y families are generally good looking. (By the way, I have not personally observed this). The person who explained it to me, Georgia, was in a women’s support group I attended every month. To be truthful, it was a Goddess group and we met on the full moon at somebody’s house, usually Stephanie’s, never mine (whole other story).
This time we were in the rented house of one of my fellow goddesses, Beth, who was temporarily working as a producer for a big studio. It was immense, exactly the kind of rental people in show business seek when they start making bank. They don’t know, ordon’t want to believe, that they may be let go at any minute for any reason, as Beth was shortly after this meeting, and have to find roommates or sublet or do something – marry someone, call home, go into teaching, until the two year lease lease is up..
We were all in the huge kitchen drinking wine and the blood of little Christian babies, you know, as you do in a Goddess group. My fellow Goddesses were talking about how uncomfortable it was to get a cleaning lady you trusted and how weird it felt to give someone orders about cleaning your toilet. Georgia didn’t find it odd at all. She had never done her own housework, or anyone else’s, except to maybe load the dishwasher and refresh the ice machine. She was a great niece and heir of an American Scion. She had inherited a lot of shipping money and would get more later probably, depending on how fast and how much her generation propagated themselves. The family had greatly diversified its interests in the 150 years it had become scionic. Her Dad was a famous lawyer. He promoted the well-being of some of the most egregious corporate polluters in the world so Georgia knew a bit about the super rich.
She was one of 6 children and only one of only two daughters. Her brothers were very athletic and very mean, she said although they’re all friends now that they’re grown up. They have to be. They’re all at the same trough. They understand each other, they know where the bodies are buried. They have enough on each other and other family members to make looking cooperative a must.
She told me a story about her childhood that has always stuck with me (apart from the Wasps looking good detail, to follow). When she was a girl, her brothers used to seal off a room, an important room like the upstairs bathroom, or a whole wing, with their hands and not let the girls in. They sealed it invisibly with a gesture, but if you crossed it, they would pounce on you and punch you and threaten you with tickling you until you peed yourself if you made a sound. Obviously, they would kill you if you ever told. Parents weren’t hovering and the help was hidden away somewhere.
That’s not why Georgia thinks they’re good looking. The good-looking part is that the original family wasn’t very attractive. They married their ugly daughters to rich philanderers, some of them gay, who would take them for their money. Their homely sons, didn’t need to shop around. They picked the prettiest, dumbest women they could find to marry and breed with.
In this way the super-rich or, okay some of the super-rich, successfully propagate mean, athletic looking kids. The adults become an entirely different thing. Their other genes express themselves – the greed, the rapacity, the bullying, the cruelty, Nobody bred for character; more’s the pity.