The unknown previous owner of my secondhand copy of “How to Marry a Multimillionaire: The Ultimate Guide to High Net Worth Dating” (2005) left penciled-in checkmarks next to the self-help points she found most salient and helpful.
Reading through this magical book at 6:30 in the morning during a late-November thunderstorm with the dog cowering in my lap, I found her emphatic checkmarks, for example, in the margin beside passages about “Mastering the Art of the ‘Inadvertent’ Pregnancy;” “His Weaknesses Are Your Opportunities;” and, oddly, a couple of references to “toe-sucking.”
You might think I’m making this book up just to be funny, but I swear I’m not: I have a paperback copy, its ice-blue cover featuring a ginormous diamond engagement ring, by my elbow right now. The (clearly pseudonymous) authors of “How to Marry a Multimillionaire” are Ted Morgan, described in the back-jacket blurb as “the quintessential WASP,” Wall Streeter, socialite, and divorcé with houses in Palm Beach and Southampton, and Serena Worth, described as a business journalist and lifestyle coach married to a Manhattan investment banker.
Let me start by saying that Ted is obviously not who he says he is. What genuine socialite refers to himself as a socialite? (And Serena, we see you: Your pen name is supposed to evoke Edith Wharton, but it more readily brings to mind Dynasty-era Barbara Cartland.)
“How to Marry a Multimillionaire: The Ultimate Guide to High Net Worth Dating” is, nevertheless, an absolute gem. I can imagine an Ivor Novello-esque character, played by Jeremy Northam, reading it aloud for comic effect in a movie about a weekend house party among the bon ton. I can imagine it being the highlight of that riotous if-you-are-drunk parlor game — a game actual socialites have been known to play — in which you take turns reading the jacket copy of a book and the others have to write the pretend first sentence, and whoever tricks the most fellow guests with their writing skills wins. The advice contained in it is truly hold-the-phone-and-shut-the-front-door jaw-dropping.
Which isn’t to say that Ted and Serena are entirely wrong. They aren’t entirely wrong.
If employed by the right guileful gamine, their patented program — a.k.a. evil scheme — might just work.
Ted and Serena’s writing voice stabs at dark humor here and there, but you can tell that behind the mask they are 100 percent serious about the enterprise and the sacred knowledge they are imparting. Like when they advise the wide-eyed reader that “Morality Is an Option”: “Your job is to get your guy, not to speculate on the moral fabric of the universe. It is rare that two people’s views of morality will coincide. Don’t worry about the morality of marrying for money, worry about your waistline and the size of your ass. That is far more productive.”
I don’t know which one of them it is, but could either Ted or Serena be a sociopath?
A particularly fascinating feature of this slice of postmillennial, pre-pandemic social history, for Star readers, is that Ted and Serena specify a slew of South Fork restaurants, watering holes, and annual benefits where the happy huntress should stalk her prey. I wonder if either Ted or Serena, cunning minds, succeeded in marrying rich by doing all the things they suggest: tripping over an aging high-net-worth man at the bar at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, rooting through his medicine cabinet when let into his Ox Pasture Road abode on the third date, and sticking strictly to the Gold-Digger’s Diet of seltzer water (see? a real WASP socialite would call it “club soda”), coffee, ice, cigarettes, fiber pills, amphetamines, chromium picolinate, and apple cider vinegar with honey?
Again, Ted and Serena aren’t exactly wrong. They’re not wrong. In 2020, you do still generally have to be thin and run well in high heels to pick up a high-net-worth man at a James Beard Foundation fund-raiser.
Nitpicky, I do quibble with a few of the East End locations they suggest that the modern-day Becky Sharp should frequent. No one is meeting Ty Warner at a 5 p.m. reading at BookHampton. And you really can’t strike up sexy chitchat with a high-net-worth man at Nick and Toni’s. I mean, there are plenty of high-net-worth men there on the average weekend, eating polpettine, but what are you supposed to do, slide up to their table and sit down in their lap, balancing a Meyer lemon Cosmo in your hand?
All of this is of little use to me. I believe I understand more about the class structure than Ted and Serena do, but I’m the wrong age and completely the wrong dress size to follow their prescriptions and proscriptions.
Anyway, who wants to bag the sort of man who enjoys hanging around the bar at Bice in Palm Beach? Or who is dimwitted enough to fall prey to the old place-card switcheroo in the Whale Room at the American Museum of Natural History gala? Probably not me. I have no interest in starting on amphetamines at this stage. But if I were 25 again, I might convince a girlfriend to test-drive Ted and Serena’s mad schemes as a lark. If not billionaire husbands, I bet we could plot our way into a movie deal.