Poor Little Rich Kids

During college, I dated a girl whose friends hailed from what might be called the Paris Hilton set: the socially connected children of New York's inherited wealth class. One day I found myself at an Upper East Side party celebrating the first anniversary of an oil heiress' debut. We got there early, and my girlfriend and the debutante chattered off to the kitchen to get drinks. It was a very nice apartment, but I'd seen a lot of very nice apartments, and I found this one to be unexpectedly unspectacular -- a little ratty around the edges even, a lot of pillows and woven throws covering the aging fabric of the cushions. I sat with the heiress' two blond brothers -- the older one an investment banker, the younger taking a break from investment banking to try to be a model -- who kept up a laconic banter over my head.

They talked, almost wearily, about unsuccessfully trying to pick up the waitresses at the bar down the block; about the best restaurant bathrooms in which to blow cocaine; about a prep school friend who'd been pulled over for weaving along a Connecticut road and acted more drunk than he really was, hoping the cops would just write him up and not search him for the bag of weed he'd stuffed in his crotch. They had these brittle, smirking laughs. My girlfriend and the heiress came back with drinks for everyone; we sat around with the oldest money there is drinking Coors Light on ice, out of mugs. Somehow, I had expected martinis.

It was a strange evening. Demographically, there wasn't much to separate my own background from these heirs -- many of my friends had grown up pretty rich, in the same zip code, had gone to the best private schools. My friends and I were the children of doctors, lawyers and bankers -- competitive, high achieving kids. But we were also only second- and third- generation Americans, the children and grandchildren of Jewish and Asian immigrants, and we had been raised with the understanding that we had been born during the upswing of our family epic, bound to higher achievement than even our own (by any standard, inordinately successful) fathers and mothers. We also had no big trust funds waiting for us, and so had to work for our livings.

The kids at the party, by contrast, had grown up believing that they were presiding over the decadent decline of their families, and, without the grit to compete academically with the aspirants and strivers, ended up chasing the depravity sweepstakes. The Coors Light, the weed in the crotch, the coke in the bathrooms, the banter about slutty waitresses: These were all self-conscious signals that they knew that they represented families and fortunes on their downswing, and that they were determined to live that decline to the fullest.

The culture I glimpsed in that apartment is now playing out on gossip pages and TV screens. America has become rather suddenly obsessed with the antics of young, wayward socialites who dance topless on nightclub tables and pose shamelessly for publicity cameras at every Hollywood premiere and Manhattan after-party. There are near-daily updates about Lionel Ritchie's daughter Nicole trying to quit heroin and getting into fights at New York nightclubs; Johnson & Johnson heiress Casey Johnson indulging in plastic surgery and getting into fights at the same nightclubs; and Paris Hilton doing virtually everything and anyone. (Last November, millions of Internet-capable Hilton fans had the pleasure of watching a home video of Paris and a then-ex-boyfriend having bored, flamboyant sex -- in one magnificent moment, she demands that he pull out so she can answer her cell phone.)

Those who wish for an even closer look -- if that's possible -- at the lives of our decadent elites can now choose from three documentary programs dedicated to exploring the psychologies of the young and extremely wealthy. The most successful, ratings-wise, has been Fox's show "The Simple Life," billed as a non-fiction version of "Green Acres," which sends Paris Hilton and her best friend, Nicole Ritchie, to spend two months on an Arkansas farm.