Your own cow in first-class? Now that's rich:...lol

Nouveau riche marble table in Kanye's house 

I'm always of the opinion that the rich people are actually not formed differently when considering their physical looks but one thing that distinguishes them from the poor is their thought patterns...I guess this article by Craig Brown explains it all.

By CRAIG BROWN

One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous lines comes from his short story The Rich Boy: ‘Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.’

I thought of this as I read an interview with the multi-millionaire rapper Kanye West in the New York Times. The piece was largely about Kanye West and his attempt to build, in his words, ‘the biggest apparel company in human history’.

His fashion label is called Yeezy. He is very bullish about it. Modesty is not Kanye West’s middle name. ‘It’s literally like, I know this is really harsh, but it’s like Before Yeezy and After Yeezy. This is the new Rome!’

But it was not Kanye West’s fashion plans that caught my eye; instead, it was a problem he had recently encountered vis-a-vis his home decoration.

‘I have this table in my new house,’ he complained to the reporter from the New York Times. ‘They put this table in without asking. It was some weird nouveau riche marble table and I hated it. But it was literally so heavy that it took a crane to move it. We would try to set up different things around it, but it never really worked.’

Not so modest: Kanye West recently complained in an interview about how a nouveau riche marble table which he 'hated' had been placed in his house without his permission

As I was saying, the rich are different from you and me. I have owned different houses at different times, but I struggle to remember any occasion when I arrived home to find that a brand new table had appeared without my permission.

‘They put this table in without asking,’ says West. Who exactly are ‘they’? He doesn’t say. Presumably, he is referring to interior decorators, who somehow forgot to obtain his say-so before off-loading a nouveau riche marble table slap-bang in the middle of his sitting room.

I can see it would come as a shock to arrive home to find a heavy marble table plonked in the middle of the room. 

But one should look on the bright side: it could have been worse. Here are five items favoured by fashionable interior decorators which I would dread being delivered to my house:

1. Tracey Emin’s bed, with accompanying detritus.

2. A wild animal, such as a tiger, elephant or boa constrictor.

3. A vast 30ft-high sculpture of a cartoon cat by Jeff Koons.

4. An aquarium, full of exotic fish, all of them with different feeding requirements.

5. Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, in full evening dress, ready to be entertained.

With wealth comes all sorts of problems, and these problems can only be solved by yet more wealth. 

This in turn creates problems of its own. A few years ago, Conrad Black’s wife Barbara spoke movingly of the downside of owning a private jet. ‘It’s always best to have two planes,’ she advised, ‘because however well one plans ahead, one always finds one is on the wrong continent.’

And, as with aeroplanes, so with servants. The more you have, the more you need. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Duke of Portland kept 90 servants, and the ten most senior had to have their own ten under-servants to wait on them. 

Lady Diana Cooper, who died in 1986, was brought up in Belvoir Castle, where they employed a ‘gong man’ whose sole job was to walk the corridors three times a day, sounding the gong for meals.

Meanwhile, Waldorf Astor liked to drink milk from his own cows, so whenever he went to Scotland he had to take a cow with him on the train.

Waldorf Astor liked to drink milk from his own cows, so whenever he went to Scotland he had to take a cow with him on the train

Closer to our own day, Salvador Dali beat any of today’s rock stars in the extravagance and loopiness of his demands. One of his shopping lists before a party included 1,000 live ants, four transvestites, 300 dead grasshoppers, four dwarfs, four giants and Joan of Arc’s suit of armour

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton somehow managed to spend $462 million, in today’s money, over the course of just ten years. 

Apart from any number of houses and jewels, they ended up with a fleet of Rolls-Royces, a twin-engined jet and a seven-bedroom yacht, not to mention paintings by Rembrandt, Picasso, Van Gogh and Monet. Burton alone employed an entourage of 42.

Yet rarely was there a more miserable couple. ‘I went mad, which ended up with Elizabeth smashing me around the head with her ringed fingers . . .We are fighting and have been fighting for over a year now over everything and anything,’ reads one of Burton’s diary entries.

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton somehow managed to spend $462 million, in today’s money, over the course of just ten years

I wonder where Kanye West’s unwanted marble table will end up. I'd guess that, even as I write this, his interior decorators, their heads bowed in shame, are busy winching it up with their crane and looking for somewhere handy to off-load it. But where? Personally, I will be locking all my windows and doors until the threat has passed, and I would strongly advise you to do the same.

Craig Brown is a columnist for the Daily Mail

Source: Daily Mail