On Not Being a Millionaire
By ALAN BRIEN LIKE most other readers of the Spectator, I have often been conscious of times when I did not have any money. There have also been even more times when I had sonic money but not as much money as the man on my right. But it was not until I met Lord Beaverbrook that I realised that I was.not a millionaire.
The excuse for the meeting was to cctablish whether a reference of mine to Billy Bunter in an Evening Standard film review was a wanton display of esoteric knowledge (as he held) or a rather regrettable clichd (as I claimed). After several telephone calls to executives of Beaver- brook Newspapers, all of whom answered with notable caginess, not being sure whether the group was pro- or anti-Bunter that week, I was vindicated. But I really couldn't care much either way so conscious was I of the thought passing like a moving neon headline behind that walnut facade—'This man is not a millionaire. When I was thirty, I was a millionaire. He is thirty now. He is obviously vain, greedy, ruthless, in- telligent, aggressive and ambitious. But he is not a millionaire. That is why he is working for me. With all his Oxford education, and clever writing, and obscure references to Billy Bunter, he will probably always be working for me, or some- body like me, in so far as there will be anybody left like me by the time I am de—by the time I ' am retired.'
If I were a millionaire (the very expression of the wish reveals my inability to compete in the race) I should not wish to be Lord Beaverbrook. It would be very agreeable to have establish- ments ever-ready staffed at Cap d'Ail on the French Riviera, in the Bahamas, in New Brunswick, at the Waldorf Towers in New York and in Arlington House, St. James's. And I have always believed the unlikely rumour that each one prepares breakfast every morning of the year in expectation of a sudden descension of the Lord. But in his place I would ensure that the legend became fact. The drawback of being this particular (or, in some respects, not so particular) millionaire is that it entails enslavement to the most poisonous will-o'-the-wisp of our time—the ondine of personal power over history.
He has to be interested in almost everything —in hobbies and hobby-horses, in fashions in overtures and in underwear, in politics and art, in fashionable wits and half-wits. He is Midas playing Mrecenas, the first Duke of Marlborough doubling as the eleventh Duke of Marlborough.
In Michael Pearson's Millionaire Mentality* is a catalogue of men who have amassed money by discovering those seams of profitability that were invisible to their fellow slag-combers. They wear blinkers which keep their eyes to the ground. They work like pack animals but they own their own harness. And the dozen or so in this book have certainly stumbled on the gravy. Yet, despite Mr. Pearson's explanations and justifica- tions, I cannot help feeling that it was mainly luck which guided their noses to the trough. Why did I not have the same luck? Because these gluttons for work and devourers of routine, these • Seeker and Warburg, 16s. Sidgwiek and Jackson, 25s. chancers of arms and riskers of necks, were will- ing to play bingo through a thousand nights until their numbers came up. Mr. Pearson can se: some grand plan of fate in each success. Should he not examine the bankruptcies of the last twenty years and canvass the ulcerated gold- rushers of a hundred backstreet companies? When an army storms a citadel with only twenty weak points, those who penetrate the capitol (or capital) will be a random selection of the intake. Were the best swimmers saved from the Titanic, or the most heroic soldiers the survivors of Passchendaele, or the healthiest athletes those who lived on through the plagues?
We, the un-millionaires, are not without germs of this infection existing in a mild, recessive form. Almost all my intellectual friends cherish some pet project which would make them a for- tune—one even claims to be able to produce a cash-coining scheme for every plateau of profit from 0,000 to £500,000. I myself am the man who first thought pf turning Tower Bridge into Europe's most expensive night-club, who first saw the possibilities of the electrically-driven toothbrush, who in August, 1960, was convinced that an investment in Beyond the Fringe could not lose. I have plans to cream the froth off the .affluent society by bringing champagne to the people in refrigerated ice-cream vans at race- courses—whoever loses on a race someone must win, get your ice-cold status symbol here. But, of course, these plots remain in my head like un- written letters to the newspapers. Luck played an enormous part in the conversion of Mr. Pear- son's subjects from men with a millionaire men- tality to men with a million. But they did at least go out in the thunderstorm and put themselves in the way of 'being struck by a fortunate light- ning stroke. The rest of us stay at home in bed.
Apart from Onassis, the millionaires in The Millionaire Mentality seem a dull lot. They carry on making money for themselves while (usually) providing some useful and admirable service to those who can afford to buy it. But they don't do any of the things I would do if I were a top mil- lionaire: such as building Citizen Kane palaces, buying newspapers, taking a freehold on a few politicians, backing mammoth musicals, giving unexpected windfalls of money to random passers-by, pursuing endless cat-and-mouse ve dettas against tyrants and phonies. The rle British generation of millionaires hardly seen, realise that money is power.
Mr. Paul Getty, for one—probably the world richest man with 1,000,000,000 dollars—sure ought to have the potentiality of being the co plete Renaissance man. His biographer Rat Hewinst does his best to convince us that he 'He can master anything which can be leant having enormous capacity for concentrati insatiable curiosity, an uncanny memory a limitless ambition: engineering, production, d tributing, marketing and finance; law. histor; 01 writing and languages; geology, archttologi fc zoology, surveying or navigation; music, operall singing, ballroom dancing or art; airplanes, shill a buildings or real estate; boxing, weight-liftial th lawn tennis, swimming, motoring, horticulture' IN even his own appetites,' breathes Mr. Hewirl Unfortunately this combination of Leonardo d v, Vinci and Francis Bacon never really gets ,v and walks in the book. Page after page we heJra of his taste and his classical learning and pc mastery of languages and his instinct for seienct „ and his intuitions about money, but whenever h h, is quoted from his own mouth he sounds mer like an amalgam of Mr. Pooter and Mr. Babbil Typical brilliant Gettyism on economics fr his diary of May 10, 1950, reads: 'Inflation starting up once more. It is not serious but 0 wi the next few years it will mean a generally higW l) price level.' bc For some years after first becoming consciet A of not being a millionaire I determined that I least I could be unpleasant and contradictory those millionaires I did meet. But it is a poolie sport—who would want to boast of beating MI Paul Getty in an argument? On the one subjd they are knowledgeable about we are ignoll muses. On matters of taste, they practise nof attachment and will accept any opinion whic' semes to have a chance of being fashiona0 They want information and not ideas. The' pictures, are bought for them, their houses af decorated for them, their books are read for the' their philanthropies arc organised for them. 11 do-it-yourself creed applies only to their obse' sive creation of the primitive yellow stuff.
But Lord Beaverbrook wants to manipulal people and mould history—to re-write the pe and tame the present. He seems to be the nal hL dangerous millionaire left in Britain.
'--And happen to think the Americans will get here first:
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