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The Big Spenders
The Epic Story of the Rich Rich, the Grandees of America and the Magnificoes, and How They Spent Their Fortunes
By Lucius Beebe
Paperback: $15.00 $13.50 (10% discount!) •Free Shipping •ISBN: 978-1-60419-006-9
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[In]…this gossipy and amusing book…Beebe writes of vast sums expended by Vanderbilts, Goulds and Morgans on yachts, castellated mansions, cotillions, fine libraries and blooded horses.”
—Time Magazine
Summary
The Big Spenders was Lucius Beebe’s last and many think his best book. In it he describes the lavish spending of the Gilded Age, not from a puritanical perspective, but rather as a theater critic might. One spending spree might be called excessive and tasteless; another might have been excessive, but it was amusing, or a grand spectacle, and tastefully done.
Beebe enjoys it all immensely, and so do his readers. Whether it is James Gordon Bennett buying a Monte Carlo restaurant because he was refused a seat by the window, Boni de Castellane spending $12 million of robber baron Jay Gould’s money in record time, Spencer Penrose leaving a bedside memo reminding himself not to spend more than $1 million the next day, or a legion of high-fliers brushing their teeth in vintage champagne after dining on a gold table service on board an immense yacht.
About the Author
Lucius Beebe (1902-1966) was born into a wealthy family in Massachusetts, was expelled from Yale, but graduated from Harvard. In 1933, in the midst of the Depression, he began a newspaper column called “This New York” which chronicled the doings of high and café society. A 1939 Life Magazine cover described him as “Mr. New York.”
He was also very interested in railroads and the West, which led him to move to Nevada in 1950 and also to a new column for the San Francisco Chronicle called “This Wild West.” A self-styled snob, gossip, dandy, and hedonist, Beebe remarked that, “All I want is the best of everything.” He did seem to be enjoying himself, and his wit and non-conformist attitudes were widely appreciated even in the high period of American conformism, the 1950s.