Fifty-four years ago, mid-winter Manhattan in the year 1970, Leonard Bernstein and his beautiful wife, Felicia, hosted a party and fund raiser in their swanky Park Avenue duplex in honor of the Black Panthers. The Bernsteins had invited several dozen of their society and show business friends, including Peter Duchin, the society band leader, and his wife Cheray, who was thrilled to attend. “I’ve never met a Panther—this is a first for me!” Mrs. Duchin breathlessly told everyone.
The Panthers were celebrities. With their military berets cocked at a jaunty angle, leather outfits and automatic weapons, they were tall, handsome Black men with a frisson of violence. Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver had seized the popular imagination in a mix of fascination and horror. The Panthers openly referred to themselves as revolutionary Black nationalists; anti-white messaging pervaded their public pronouncements and writings. Bernstein, Felicia and their wealthy peers would surely be among the first to be lined up against the wall and summarily dealt with when the Revolution came. Yet here they were, not just the Bernsteins and Duchins but Jason Robards, Gian Carlo Menotti, Schuyler Chapin, Goddard Lieberson, Mike Nichols, Lillian Hellman, Larry Rivers, Barbara Walters, Aaron Copland, Richard Avedon, Milton and Amy Greene, Lukas Foss, Jennie Tourel, Samuel Barber, Jerome Robbins, Steve Sondheim, Adolph and Phyllis Green, Betty Comden, and scores of other rich and famous bastions of Manhattan’s glitterati—all white, wealthy, and predominantly Jewish.
The writer Tom Wolfe was there and wrote about it for New York magazine in an article that was to become famous in the annals of the New Journalism. “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” introduced the term to American culture; it was a skewering of the pretentions of what we today would call wealthy progressives, of the type that are generously sprinkled throughout our Oakland hills, Montclair and Piedmont.
But today’s hill dwellers and those yesteryear denizens of the Upper West Side and midtown had much in common. Both were touched by the plight of the poor, particularly the Black poor. Both felt guilt at their own success, which seemed to have been built on the backs of the poor. And both wished to do something about it, especially if they could do so publicly, in a way we today call virtue signaling.
Wolfe had fun writing his satirical article. “Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels wrapped in crushed nuts this way,” Wolfe acerbically wondered, “and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which are at this very moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons”? “Such are the pensées métaphysiques,” he concluded, “that rush through one’s head on these Radical Chic evenings just now in New York.”
We too have pensées métaphysiques rushing through our head regarding our Radical Chic liberal neighbors in the hills. They’re the owners of 5,000-square foot mansions who voted for Pamela Price and Sheng Thao. I have to assume these people are educated and aware of the news. Do they not know that if they can grab enough power, Price, Thao and their friends Carroll Fife, Nikki Bas, Rebecca Kaplan and Dan Kalb would aim their bazookas at them, the hill dwellers, in order to finalize their plot to seize their wealth and give it to their friends in the crime-ridden flatlands? Do they, the hill dwellers, not know how loathed and resented they are by the democratic socialists who live 700 feet below them, in pathetic little apartments with no view? Do they not know that every time they send a donation to Pamela Price or any other woke politician, they’re laughed at behind their backs as useful idiots?
All this is worthy of a mockumentary, which is what Wolfe specialized in. Reading “Radical Chic,” and seeing the bio-flick, “Radical Wolfe,” on Netflix, one can’t help but do a little armchair psychoanalysis. In Protestant-dominated America guilt at one’s success comes with the territory. It’s morally corrupting to be wealthy, goes the reasoning. Of course, the rich enjoy their perquisites and are loathe to give them up, but they can, at least, signal that they’re sensitive to the plight of the poor. How? They can donate a little money to leftist politicians. They can vote for progressive candidates. They can even host fundraisers in their posh homes. All this enables them to feel good about themselves. What’s more, it doesn’t actually threaten their economic and cultural supremacy. All it does is blunt the show-offy pretension. We’re not really vultures, they can tell themselves and us, we’re compassionate, liberal Americans who just happen to be wealthy, and who realize that we have a duty to our less fortunate brothers and sisters.
This is praiseworthy and harmless; if the rich can look in a mirror and like what they see, more power to them. No one will lose any sleep that Felicia Bernstein thought she was special as she gazed at her perfect beauty reflected back to her by the mirror in the teak vanity, before which she brushed her long hair and adjusted her pearls. Her contemporary hills counterpart could, after all, explain away her good fortune with the parry that she voted for Pamela Price, sent her campaign $50, and has a Black Lives Matter sign in her front yard. Never mind that the Montclair millionaire also has a “Neighborhood Watch” sign on her house, and that, at the first sight of a Black man outside her picture window, she would be speed-dialing 911. The thought that Pamela Price regards such actions as racist vigilantism, and villainizes them, hardly occurs to our Montclair friend. She sleeps soundly at night, secure in the knowledge that her home is safe; and anyway, her husband keeps a loaded 12-gauge shotgun in the Edelman four-door armoire ($7,000) next to the bed. The Montclair lady has the best of both worlds: wealth, security and taste, on one side, and, on the other, the self-knowledge that she’s a good, kind, caring human being with concerns for the poor always uppermost in her heart and mind.
Steve Heimoff