Looking for Mr. Goodbucks

THE FORTUNE HUNTERS

Dazzling Women and the Men They Married

By Charlotte Hays

St. Martin's. 238 pp. $24.95

"The very rich are different from you and me," F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously said, and after reading this interminable-seeming book (which is only 215 pages of text, but seems 10 times longer), a self-respecting middle-class person can only utter a heartfelt "Thank God for the difference!"

However, "The Fortune Hunters," no matter how debilitating to read, is what could be called a provocative book in that it provokes the question: What comes over these women who take a look at an almost closed social hierarchy, size it up, decide to crash into it and become rich besides? It's a cult, of course, this idea of "society," as weird and arcane in its customs as the doings in the corridors of the Vatican, even as, paradoxically, its moves are dutifully made public by the likes of W and Vanity Fair at the high end of the spectrum and the Star or Page Six of the New York Post at the low end. Society! Life lived by socialites! Men get there because of extreme accomplishment or inherited wealth, but the conventional wisdom, as stated in this book, is that women get there by "fortune hunting."

It's such an old-fashioned idea, the concept of fortune hunting! Didn't it start -- at least in our collective consciousness -- in England some centuries ago, when women couldn't inherit property or money and had to rely on their good looks and charm to find a rich husband or else run the risk of ending up a governess? Their sole hope lay in making a "good marriage." Once provided for, once they attained prosperity, they set about creating and then maintaining a closed society -- because the whole point of being "in," and comparatively safe from the depredations of life, was to keep outsiders out. This system spread to America, as we all know, where it has been beautifully written about by people as different as Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton and Dominick Dunne. And now Charlotte Hays has taken a crack at it.

Hays used to be a gossip columnist, and perhaps it is journalistic custom that decrees that she keep the names of her sources a secret. Her informants, as she chronicles the lives of the fortune hunters she's chosen to write about, are generally "socialites," a "magazine," a "guest," a "family friend," a "friend," "someone who knew him" and "another." In other words, Hays couldn't get interviews with any of these women -- although she did exchange a few words with John Kennedy Jr. as he swung onto his bicycle, and a few with Arianna Huffington in a completely different context. But what man or woman in his or her right mind would agree to sit down and discuss the ins and outs of fortune hunting?

Admittedly, a good percentage of the women Hays writes about here are dead. Madame de Pompadour is certainly dead. Pamela Harriman is dead. Jackie Kennedy is dead. Carolyn Bessette, her daughter-in-law, dead. Princess Diana, dead. (And right here, even from this partial list, you might begin to see some flaws in logic, some frantic overreaching on the part of the author.) Should Princess Diana be classified as a fortune hunter because the Prince of Wales wanted to marry her? What should she have said to him? "I'm sorry, Your Highness, but my extreme sense of integrity keeps me from ever enlarging my bank account?" And poor Carolyn Bessette, who married John Kennedy Jr. -- can she legitimately be classed as a "fortune hunter" when her other main boyfriend was a man named Michael Bergin, who "attained fame as the Calvin Klein underwear model"?

I don't know; this book leaves me bamboozled. Besides the shakiness of the premise, you look for organization or structure in a book, and there just isn't any here. The Duchess of Windsor shows up on Page 99 and gets almost 20 pages about how she almost got to be queen, except that the king abdicated the throne so that he could marry her, but it's all material we've read a hundred times before, and, besides, mightn't it be legitimately argued that, sure, she wanted the money, but what she really wanted was to be queen and was bitterly disappointed for the rest of her life as it turned out?

That chapter on Wallis Warfield Simpson, "Gold-Plated Godmother," is followed immediately by a chapter called "Gold-Plated Godmothers," about Jackie Kennedy and Pamela Harriman, but even if they do fit the author's fuzzy profile of fortune hunters, what on God's earth do they have to do with each other? And it may make sense, in a way, to pair the first and second Mrs. Donald Trump (Ivana and Marla), except that the first was a competitive skier and a comparatively independent woman who rebuffed Trump's advances for quite a long time. So how does that make her a fortune hunter?

Arianna Huffington and Georgette Mosbacher are paired here for the profound reason that -- guess what? -- they're both redheads. And yes, they both married rich men. But before her marriage, Huffington went to Cambridge and wrote a couple of books. And after her marriage, Mosbacher became a cosmetics magnate in her own right. After Huffington's marriage failed, she went on to run for governor of California, where, despite the bullying and condescension of a field full of oafs, she managed to hold her own. She then set up what the author describes as "her much-ridiculed celebrity blog the Huffington Post, hailed by L.A. Weekly as 'such a bomb that it's the . . . equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven's Gate rolled into one.' " Despite this scurrilous quote, the blog is widely read and often respected. Whatever their flaws, both Huffington and Mosbacher must be defined as far more than "fortune hunters."