Generation Deluxe: Consumerism and Philanthropy of the New Super-Rich

Index

Acknowledgements

Many people have contributed to this book in numerous ways, and I gratefully acknowledge all of them.

First, I would like to thank the Generation Deluxers I have interviewed who provided intimate details on their spending and philanthropy (many of whom preferred to remain unnamed) and the number of philanthropists and trustees of foundations who provided information on their important not-for-profit work. I express my thanks to: Nathan Gilbert, the Laidlaw Foundation; Garfield Mitchell, the W. Garfield Weston Foundation; Elois Yaxley, the David Suzuki Foundation; Joseph Pupello, Liz Heeden, and Roberta Green, the New York Restoration Project; Terry Nagel, the Skoll Foundation; Ben Jastatt, Turner Enterprises, Inc.; Christina LoNigro, Turner UN Foundation; Jane Lawton, Nature Conservancy of Canada; Kimberly Turner, the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy; the Asian Conservation Awareness Programme (ACAP); Sarah Miller-Davenport, Program Coordinator, Office of Communications, the Soros Open Society Institute; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and persons in foundations who asked that they not be named.

Also, I extend my thanks to representatives of the following organizations and institutions who provided important information and updates: John O’Leary, Frontier College; Bob Ross, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; Lisa Jones, Antiquorum Auctioneers New York; Katherine Adler, Christie’s New York; Ronald Dupuis, Dupuis Auctions Toronto; Sotheby’s New York; ACAP; Craig Benjamin, Amnesty International; and Anna Frangipani Campino, the United Nations Sanctions Branch, Department of Political Affairs.

I would also like to thank the following people who shared information and provided background in personal interviews by phone, fax, and e-mail: Elizabeth Acheson, feminist activist; Michael Auer, U.S. National Park Service; Dave Arnold, Class VI River Runners, West Virginia; Margaret Braun, New York; Michael Friedman, Christie’s New York; Nancy Ruth Jackman, Toronto; Stephen Lewis, Toronto; Malu, Bailey’s Antiques and Aloha Shirts, Hawaii; Tyler Markoff, Royal de Versailles Jewellers, Toronto; Rick Moonen, Restaurant RM, New York; Shonn Orbowski, Characters Restaurant, Edmonton; Anthony Pignataro, Orange County Weekly, California; Pax Prentiss, Passages rehabilitation centre, Malibu, California; Walter Ryan, All Sports Agents Directory; Gerald Schwartz, Toronto; Dale Sherrow, Seattle Caviar Company, Allan Slaight, Toronto; Charles, ninth Earl Spencer, England; Ivan Stone, Toronto; John Vandyk, Brampton, Ontario.

I also appreciate comments on my manuscript from Bob Burgener, Jean Burgener, and Gary Katz, and also those who commented on certain chapters: Donna Jean MacKinnon, John O’Leary, and Michael Power. As well, my thanks to researchers Shelagh Cartwright and Linda Gard. Also, thanks to the enthusiastic, supportive people at the Dundurn Group: publisher Kirk Howard, Tony Hawke, Barry Jowett, Beth Bruder, and Andrea Pruss.

While many people offered comments and made valuable suggestions to me on the manuscript, I take full responsibility for any errors of fact that may appear. It must be said that any wealth figure appearing here can be challenged and is factually inaccurate, to a greater or lesser extent, the moment the reader reads it, what with the volatility of changing currencies, economic conditions, and the incalculable, sudden events that affect fortunes. Sources are unable to report exact individual net worth, for example, in which case I have relied on the most reputable sources whose methodologies used to estimate wealth are generally accepted worldwide.

Introduction

The rich are not just rich anymore, they are super-rich. Three or four decades ago people worth $1 million were called millionaires and were largely thought of as rich, but by today’s standards they are baby millionaires. Starting at $100 million and ascending the golden ladder of wealth to the billions beyond is where you find the superrich demographic of this book.

Fortunes amassed since the mid-1980s technology boom and its myriad spinoffs have created an impact on both consumerism and philanthropy that is without historical precedent.

The extreme wealth of people in this class and their regard of the planet as one giant shopping mall filled with rare, costly goods results in a body of super-rich individuals in a frenzy of acquisition, extravagant beyond the average person’s conception — at times, surely, beyond even theirs.

As I began to uncover the opulence of this world, a dark underside emerged. It became clear that multi-million-dollar spending on mansions and vehicles and personal luxuries was causing serious environmental damage and threatening many forms of life, in addition to fuelling social conflicts in the world’s poorest countries.

The destruction has not gone unnoticed. A cause-and-effect link will be seen in these pages, where super-rich consumers now find themselves on a collision course with socially conscious philanthropists. This is a new development. Although the world’s wealthy throughout history have generously supported religious institutions, hospitals, universities, cultural endeavours, and essential community services, within the last couple of decades increasing numbers of super-rich have been redirecting their donations to environmental clean-ups of problems caused by consumerist excesses and to the alleviation of global problems of poverty, hunger, illiteracy, and the spread of disease.

These two classes, the super-rich consumers who are doing the damage and the super-rich philanthropists helping to make the world a better place, are what I define as Generation Deluxe.

The rich, like the poor, have always been with us, but over the past decade their numbers have expanded significantly at the multimillionaire and billionaire level.

According to Forbes, the number of billionaires in the world rose from 350 in 1992 to 551 during the halcyon, tech-boom days of 2000. Then from 476 billionaires in 2003, the number on the Forbes 2004 list increased to 587 billionaires worldwide.

American billionaires numbered 275, for a combined total of $909 billion (all figures are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted).

A strong euro added 22 new billionaires to Europe’s total of 164, up from 134 in 2003. Asia’s economic woes of 2003 cut its list of billionaires in half, to sixty-one, but this recovered in 2004 to seventy-eight billionaires. Russia’s oil prices helped eight new Russian billionaires gain entry into the club in 2004, for a total of twenty-five — an increase from zero in 2000.

The Sunday Times Rich 1,000 List of 2003 counts Britain and Ireland’s billionaires at fifty-one.

During the troubled times of 2001 and 2002, the confluence of events resulting from the technological collapse, terrorist attacks, SARS, a global economic downturn, and the Iraq war stormed against an unravelling tapestry of developing countries’ civil wars, poverty, and killer diseases. Economic gloom persisted. Then in the last quarter of 2003, Forbes announced, After two years of declining values, the rich finally got richer. And the 2004 list saw an uptick for just about everybody on the list.

Beautiful, we sighed.

So who exactly are these rich who are getting richer, these uptickers? For the tenth consecutive year, Bill Gates remains at the top of the Forbes billionaire list, with a net worth of $46.6 billion. Second is Warren Buffett at $42.9 billion. German supermarket magnate Karl Albrecht ranks third with $23 billion, followed by Saudi Arabia’s Price Alwaleed Alsaud at $21.5 billion. Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen, worth $21 billion, comes in fifth. The next five are individual members of the Walton family, of Wal-Mart fame, at $20 billion each.

The world’s billionaires’ total wealth rose to $1.9 trillion, up from $1.4 trillion in 2003, and the average billionaire is sixty-four years old, with only twenty-seven under the age of forty. The majority of them, 326 of the 587, are self-made entrepreneurs.

Most American billionaires, the new super-rich, amassed their first pile in the 1990s in the technology and communications sector, where twenty- and thirty-year-olds at computers in grotty warehouses were worth, overnight it seemed, as many millions as their age. Survivors of the economic meltdown with a couple of million tucked under the mattress rebuilt their fortunes in the same fields, or they diversified in 2002 and 2003 into lifestyle industries, defined as media, fashion, publishing, travel, retail, and gaming. Multi-millionaires with assets of $975 million down to $600 million made their millions largely through investments, banking, real estate, manufacturing, and as old money inheritors.

Topping the Sunday Times list of England and Ireland’s wealthiest one thousand, issued in April 2003, is the Duke of Westminster at £4.9 billion. The most startling surge on the list occurred in the British music industry, which produced fifty-one multi-millionaires, led by Sir Paul McCartney at £760 million. Author J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, films, and merchandising deals led to her debut on the Forbes 2004 billionaire list with a net worth of $1 billion.

Canadian Business magazine’s 2003 list of Canada’s one hundred wealthiest is headed by Kenneth Thomson, with a net worth of C$21.6 billion, followed by Galen Weston with C$9.2 billion. Combined, Canada’s top ten wealthiest assets are close to C$54 billion.¹

Possessors of massive wealth require that wads of it be spent, and here is how some Generation Deluxe extreme consumers indulge themselves.

They go on a two-year waiting list to buy a $1.2-million Patek Philippe watch, pay $25,000 for a wedding cake, lay out $33,000 per night at the President Wilson Hotel in Geneva, and drop $200,000 for a strand of Tahitian black pearls. And when the pleasure outpaces physical tolerance, they detox at a private clinic in Malibu for $39,000 a month, after which they give themselves a graduation present of a facelift and safari.

However, this is mere coin jingling in the chinos. Homes of Generation Deluxe have bypassed mansions and escalated straight to $25- or $50-million starter castles. Add three or four additional residences (a London townhouse, Caribbean retreat, and New York condo, averaging $15 million each), plus five or six vehicles, a private jet, and a yacht with twelve staterooms, and there is, conservatively, $600 million. And still not a flute of Dom Perignon quaffed or a caviar canapé scarfed. Clearly, a billion is needed.

Attach any adjective you choose to such consumerism, be it fascinating, overwhelming, titillating, or obscene (a common one), but there remains one more — destructive.

To build the requisitely palatial homes of Generation Deluxe, every day hundred-year-old rare trees are cut in Malaysia, the Amazon basin, several African countries, and Siberia. The homes’ vast acres encroach on wildlife habitats, forest preserves, and productive farmlands. Pool and lawn chemicals pollute nearby streams and rivers, and the water and power supplies consumed by these massive houses deplete local resources.

Multiple cars, boats, planes, and motorized toys compound already serious environmental impacts, and one wonders how anyone can be weaned from vehicular consumerism when a $3,000 pram is hyped as baby’s first car.

Jewellery is a display of highly conspicuous consumption, but, more than just a showcase of wealth, gold and diamonds are outright causes of environmental and human devastation.

An examination of the gold strikes in the mid-nineteenth century reveals mountains slashed apart and rivers and bays polluted, whose damage remains toxic to this day. Gold diggers’ lust caused the death of tens of thousands of American and Australian indigenous people, was complicit in Africa’s apartheid, and has imposed a new scourge on today’s African gold miners: AIDS. Forced to live in crowded camps at mine sites away from families, a situation that produces a brisk trade in prostitution, as many as 30 percent of mine workers are HIV positive or living with AIDS.

The super-rich who buy diamonds mined in certain African countries are contributing to civil wars by helping rebel forces purchase arms from the sale of diamonds, known as conflict or blood diamonds. Since the early 1990s, wars in diamond-rich African countries have killed tens of thousands of people.

Fortunately, growing numbers of super-rich Generation Deluxe philanthropists are helping to protect the environment and alleviate developing countries’ problems of killer diseases, poverty, and economic despair.

American financier George Soros, the world’s most generous philanthropist, has given away 70 percent of his $7 billion net wealth for education, disease prevention, and democratic reforms in Russia and Eastern European countries. Bill and Melinda Gates have committed more than half their foundation’s $7 billion assets, some $3.6 billion, for global health. Montrealer André Chagnon donated C$1.1 billion to help fight obesity and poverty and to support education programs in Quebec. Ted Turner preserves nearly 2 million acres of land he owns in the United States and South America, and has pledged a $1-billion gift to the United Nations.

Giving away money can be a lot of fun. Jimmy Pattison, the flamboyant Canadian billionaire (Forbes 2004 lists him with $4.6 billion), on one occasion had a cheque for $1 million dropped into the collection plate of a downtrodden church in his hometown of Vancouver.

Along with philanthropists, the role of super-rich celebrities is covered in these pages within a framework of influence, money, and social phenomenon. Stars receiving $30 million and upwards for a film and superstar athletes signing $200-million multi-year contracts are establishing a new normal, if you will. Take the case of LeBron James. When still a high school junior, James signed deals worth more than $100 million in product endorsements plus a four-year $19-million contact to play for the Cleveland Cavaliers. He is expected to provide an economic boost to the northeastern portion of Ohio as surely as would a new $119-million industry locating in the area — and staggeringly more. By the time James reaches twenty-five, he will be worth $200 million and, as Forbes estimated, will have generated $2 billion for his sponsors and the team.²

A-listers in film, television, music, and athletics, through personal appearances and fundraising, draw immense attention to issues of the day.

Harrison Ford, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Ted Danson, Mary Steenburgen, Sting, and Bette Midler stimulate immense media interest in their environmental causes of cleaning up the air and water and protecting nature preserves, rainforests, and wildlife. There would be far less recognition of and significantly less research funding for HIV/AIDS without the passion and personal force of U2’s Bono, Oprah Winfrey, Elizabeth Taylor, Elton John, and Diana, Princess of Wales.

Peace accords are next. Jason Alexander, known as George Costanza on Seinfeld, is participating in launching a grassroots Israeli-Palestinian organization that attempts to get ordinary citizens involved in helping revive the stalled peace process.

The question of why philanthropists give away their money has probably been asked since the first head man in a cave tossed a bone to a wanderer.

That people donate anything at all is fundamental to the time-honoured principle of noblesse oblige, in which the wealthy have a responsibility to provide for the less fortunate. Genetics, too, plays a part. If parents are altruistic, modestly or regally, the children donate their pennies and then their millions.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy magazine, in February 2004, listed sixty of America’s top donors of 2003, who had donated and/or pledged gifts valued at more than $25 million and up $1.9 billion. Extraordinary though these donations are, they do not, and cannot, fully reflect the generosity of philanthropists. There is no public record of funds given to relatives, employees, friends, or neighbours, nor of the private plane offered to fly a friend’s, or for that matter a total stranger’s, sick child to hospital. A dirt-poor baseball player, on receiving his rookie $500,000 paycheck, buys first himself a gold chain and then his mom a new house. And later, when he makes $10 million, he may follow in larger footprints, like those of National Basketball Association all-star Dikembe Mutombo, who, having a four-year, $68-million contract with the New Jersey Nets, donated $14.5 million to build a hospital in his native Democratic Republic of the Congo. Fans can reel off players’ stats in a snap, but chances are they have scant or no awareness at all of the person’s philanthropy.

American billionaire Alfred Mann’s story is typical of innate altruism. Growing up poor, Mann sold lemonade during the Great Depression, and after graduating with a master’s degree in physics he established biomedical companies. In 2001, he sold part of one company for $4.2 billion and now primarily funds medical research. My life is a fairy tale, he said, except it’s real.

The question, Why give? leaves the alternate question of what motivates enormous spending.

Today’s big spenders spend, they say, because they can. More aptly, because they are descendents of the Industrial Revolution, which produced a market economy that generated widespread distribution of wealth.

With consumer goods readily accessible worldwide, the continuum of acquisition is an obsession satisfied mainly, perhaps only, through acquiring more and more things. Yet the super-rich who make fortunes by their acumen place certain restrictions on themselves. Céline Dion and her husband, René Angélil, draw thousands of dollars a day for their allowance — she shops, he gambles — and trust fund kids may have to petition their trustees or family foundation members to buy a new car if the price exceeds their allowances. But when quantity palls, the consumerist quest shifts to quality, to acquiring the world’s finest, most expensive goods. And at this plateau, the super-rich enjoy the elite experience of buying perfection.

Little realized is the degree to which treasured objects represent ultimate security, ultimate consolation. Exquisite things do not disappoint, unlike a child, or a thoroughbred placing fourth in the Kentucky Derby. A Rembrandt portrait dwells gracefully in the mansion in a state of sheer perfection, just as South Sea pearls never lose their lustre. And there are those super-rich who, whether vaguely thought or fervently believed, side with the ancients by surrounding themselves with material goods to overcome the fear of death.

Certain super-rich, especially those who have known poverty, fret over losing all their money, mindful of the adage, From shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. Family members may squander millions, businesses could collapse, the economy can spiral downward at a fortune-crashing pace — although it is worth remembering that some reversals of fortune mean losing everything but about $15 million worth of property in Aspen, Colorado.

There is significantly more to million-dollar spending than acquiring consumer goods; the super-rich also pay millions for services.

Generations of aristocrats have retained small armies of servants to prepare feasts and organize balls and sporting events, just as today’s wealthy have caterers — Martha Stewart had her lunches catered to her in the courthouse during her February/March 2004 trial — personal fitness trainers, hairstylists, and manicurists who come to the home, as well as dozens of household staff — Arnold Schwarzenegger pays a man $100,000 a year just to wash his cars.

However, not available to yesterday’s aristocrats is the array of personal service providers that oil the daily grind for today’s super-rich. There are food coaches who plan meals to meet individual metabolisms (soon to program diets for individual DNA), sobriety coaches, divorce planners, pre- and post-nuptial consultants, media coaches, agents to seek placements on prestige boards and committees, speechwriters, bodyguards, prison consultants for white-collar inmates, duty counsellors to ease the newly super-rich into community service, wealth counsellor specialists in philanthropy — a how-to in giving away millions.

Research studies reveal that the rich, by virtue of their money, live healthier and longer lives than poor people. This is supported by science, but perhaps scientists are missing another contributing factor. Could be, the endorphin dance of making money boosts the super-rich to a state of grace, of luxuriating in the best fun there is. Better than sex because you can burst out laughing any time while you are doing it.

Human nature being what it is, generosity of the rich continues to arouse cynicism, largely on two fronts: that the rich make donations for a tax credit and that they simply want to see their names on buildings.

True enough, donors receive tax credits. Forbes reported that in 2003 the Internal Revenue Service reviewed tax returns of four hundred superrich Americans inspired by the Forbes 400 list, which is ranked by net worth whereas the IRS four hundred ranking is by reported income. The difference between tax bill from the IRS super-rich group, at $39 million, and the average net worth of the Forbes group, at $3 billion, led Forbes to report, based on circumstantial evidence, that the very rich forfeit barely 1 percent of their net worth to the U.S. Treasury every year.³

Tax laws enable the super-rich to claim million-dollar exemptions against their million-dollar earnings, a fact that inflames legitimate, angry debate. From the philanthropist’s perspective, he or she can be said to be eliminating the government middleman by donating taxes directly to the community. If, for example, a philanthropist donates earned income of $1 million to his or her private foundation, the tax benefit is applied immediately, subject to certain limits, and the foundation is then able to start making donations. Whereas, if the philanthropist did not make that donation, the $1 million would be taxed as income. Singer Gloria Estefan and her husband have donated directly to her foundation more than $500,000 in royalties from two songs, an amount for which they avoid paying tax as income. The singer said, If I were to make the donation after I paid taxes … it would be half the money. Her foundation supports children’s and religious charities, chiefly in Florida.

As for the donor’s name on the building, certain philanthropists derive immense pride from seeing their name on a hospital wing, a university building, or a performing arts centre — a named building idealizes the family legacy, and in some cases lasts longer than the family. Other philanthropists prefer anonymity; they are known as the stealth wealth class, largely conforming to a family tradition of privacy. Anonymous donations also help keep soliciting wolves away from the door.

Scant appreciation is extended to the work philanthropists do giving away their money, operating like any CEO running a billion-dollar enterprise. As in all good jobs, philanthropists take everlasting pride in their donations. Some say it is the best thing they do.

Numerous super-rich individuals I interviewed for this book requested anonymity with respect to their personal spending (not necessarily their philanthropy). Anticipating this reluctance in advance, I sought purveyors and service providers of the super-rich to relate dealings and consumerist habits of their super-rich clients. Some provided names, others did not.

Along with copious secondary sources, the primary source material I obtained from directors and members of charitable foundations, combined with my personal experience with certain superrich over the years and my 1996 book Women Who Give Away Millions: Portraits of Canadian Philanthropists, has helped me present an updated glimpse of how today’s super-rich spend and donate their millions.

The generosity of philanthropists exemplifies the innate goodness of the human spirit. It would please me to know that I have helped draw into the public spotlight philanthropists’ invaluable and often unsung contribution to society. And in the doing, perhaps I can persuade others to make whatever contribution they can to help the world become a better, safer, healthier place at home and continents away.

Iris Nowell

Toronto, May 2004

Chapter 1

The Super-rich Live It Up

Charity balls in history and today’s parties that raise multi-millions for charity

Glamorous balls, black ties, shimmering gowns, klieg light diamonds flashing around the room, caviar, champagne — these are the words that define the super-rich at play. In fact, if one were limited to a single, freeze-frame image of the super-rich, it would focus on partying. Attending balls and hosting two hundred guests at home, at the ranch, or on the yacht are obligatory functions of the super-rich. Parties reveal how they spend and donate their millions.

Ordinary people attend parties mainly to have fun, a concept distant from those who use parties to advance their social position and schmooze business contacts. As well, the super-rich and A-list celebrities attend parties, like them or not, to raise money for charity.

Charity Balls

In nineteenth-century England, charity balls evolved from the debutante ball. An established time period, the Season, opened in early spring when aristocrats journeyed from their country estates to their city mansions. The Season’s highest ranked ball was held to present debutantes at court, and thereafter deb balls swirled through London’s finest residences. Success was measured by the number of young women who found a husband in their first Season.

While the objective of the newly developing entrepreneurial class was to marry their daughters into the aristocratic class, the aristocrats, too, had ulterior motives. Their numbers were dwindling, and families who had intermarried for generations (with recurring imbecilic results) welcomed the infusion of fresh American maidens for their titled, dense sons. Moreover, many of the ruling classes were land rich and cash poor, while daughters of the parvenu Vanderbilts and du Ponts brought a substantial dowry to the marriage.

Debutante balls in America originated in 1748 when fifty-nine colonial Philadelphia families held Dancing Assemblies, strictly for the purpose of allowing the top-ranked members’ daughters to come out into ‘society.’

In New York, the social hostess is acknowledged to have had her origin in the eighteenth century with the elegant, beautiful Mrs. John Jay, whose 182 guests represented everyone with social standing. And then there was Alva Vanderbilt (wife of William K. Vanderbilt, grandson of the commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt), who achieved a solid society position despite having an arch-rival in the woman known chiefly as Mrs. Astor.

Competition for the crown of social queen came finally to rest on the rather plain head of Caroline Lina Astor. She inaugurated the glittering Astor Ball, an annual gala after which all other social events in New York dimmed to near oblivion. The ball also initiated the Four Hundred, Lina’s guest list, drawn on the three B’s — birth, background, and breeding. The list personified New York Society, the richest and most powerful people in the country.* The richest of them all was her husband, America’s first millionaire, John Jacob Astor. He left $20 million at his death in 1845, a princely sum then, with immense purchasing power. In 1810, for example, Astor bought eighty lots in Lower Manhattan for $8,000, whereas today a decent Park Avenue apartment would cost Astor his entire $20-million fortune.

In contrast to old-world aristocratic exclusivity, balls like the Astor Ball began opening up society. This change owed much to the political upheaval of the times when, following the Civil War, New York swarmed with migrant Southerners moving northward to make, preserve, or expand their fortunes. Within a decade or so their names graced Lina’s fabled Four Hundred list.

Lina Astor enjoyed a spectacular twenty-year reign up to 1892, the pinnacle of the Gilded Age. However, by the turn of the twentieth century, the ruling Four Hundred had admitted a few shoddies to their ranks.⁴

Though admitted to the balls, the shoddies were shut out of the old money private clubs, but instead of bashing down the barricades they created their own social clubs. They built jazzy downtown nightclubs and deluxe restaurants where they dined and danced and flashed their new jewellery, their glittery gowns, their tuxedos and top hats. And while gaining a rung on the social ladder of their own creation, they created Café Society.

The legacy of charity balls, British, American, and European, like some of their money, lives on.

A-list celebs a must at fundraising balls

The rule in California is you cannot have a successful charity ball, one that raises more than $1 million, without A-list stars on the ticket.

The Carousel of Hope Ball, the biennial event known as the biggest celebrity party in Los Angeles next to the Oscars, is the brainchild of Barbara and Marvin Davis. From its inaugural event in 1978 to the 2002 ball, the Carousel of Hope has raised more than $60 million for the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diseases at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. Davis provided the funds for construction in 1978. (Forbes’ 2003 rich list has Davis’s worth at $4.7 billion, amassed from buying and selling 20th Century Fox and from investments.) The couple’s youngest daughter developed insulin-dependent diabetes at age seven, which led the Davises to become major funders of juvenile diabetes causes.

Social guests love to see the big stars, just as ordinary people scramble for a place on the sidewalk at the Academy Awards to watch limo drivers offload their starry cargoes. Celebrity-watching proved to be a big attraction of the 2000 ball. According to New York gossip doyenne Liz Smith, this occurred with guests seeing Elizabeth Taylor in glamour red, covered with jewels, her hair in an enormous cloud of brunette cotton candy, arriving with Michael Jackson, heavily painted and oddly dressed in a beige military jacket. Smith reported that people surged in their direction. And some of the famous stood on chairs to get a glimpse of the twosome. People practically killed to get near them.

The October 2000 Carousel of Hope Ball raised $6.2 million, including a donation of $2 million from the Davises.

The 2002 Carousel of Hope Ball attracted star attendees Oprah Winfrey, Elizabeth Hurley, Halle Berry, Sydney Poitier, Kate Hudson, Rod Stewart, Raquel Welch, and Aaron, Candy, and Tori Spelling. The musical entertainment was led by Sir Elton John, with a little help from friends B.B. King and Sting. Like the previous one, the 2002 ball raised more than $6 million.

Another L.A. super-rich super fundraiser is Nancy Daly Riordan. Former wife of Warner Bros. chief Bob Daly, current wife of Mayor Richard Riordan, and founder of the United Friends of the Children in L.A. County, Nancy agrees, Involving a celebrity always raises your event a level, and it is especially important to the corporate sector. Millionaire businessmen like to be able to drop the line, I was talking to Dustin Hoffman last night and he said …, and they have the means to make a conspicuously large bid at the silent auction. They also like to be identified for their corporate social responsibility with a program listing of patron or sponsor at tiered levels ranging from $50,000 to more than $1 million.

Although A-listers stimulate ticket sales, there are stark exceptions to the rule. A 1999 fundraiser in Los Angeles for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was called glam-free, without celebrities, and raised $6 million. And not a dot of media coverage appeared in the Los Angeles Times.⁵

Toronto’s Brazilian Carnival Ball

Canada’s splashiest, sexiest fundraising social event, the Brazilian Carnival Ball, celebrated its thirty-eighth ball in May 2004. Founded by Toronto socialite Anna Maria de Souza, the Brazilian Ball is patterned on the famed Rio de Janeiro Carnival, a gala evening noted for its non-stop samba dancing, entertainers in extravagant costumes, and guests who get into the spirit with glamorous Carnival-themed gowns and masks.

A Toronto non-profit organization from the cultural, hospital, and university sectors is selected as beneficiary of the Brazilian Ball each year, and the event has raised more than $15 million since its founding. The 2002 ball raised $2 million for Mount Sinai Hospital’s Centre for Excellence in Critical Care.

Strictly Hollywood balls

Over the years, Hollywood studios have generously sponsored industry-driven fundraising dinners, celebrity golf and tennis tournaments, fashion shows, and film premieres to benefit charities. Some studios, however, are beginning to