Dirk Wittenborn - The Social Climbers Bible: A Book of Manners, Practical Tips, and Spiritual Advice for the Upwardly Mobile

A Book of Manners, Practical Tips,
and Spiritual Advice for the Upwardly Mobile

DIRK WITTENBORN

and JAZZ JOHNSON

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in Penguin Books 2014

Copyright 2014 by Dirk Wittenborn and Jazz Johnson

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wittenborn, Dirk, author.

The social climbers bible : a book of manners, practical tips, and spiritual advice for the upwardly mobile / Dirk Wittenborn, Jazz Johnson.

pages cm

ISBN: 978-0-698-14190-2

1. Etiquette. 2. Social mobility. I. Johnson, Jazz, author. II. Title.

BJ1853.W58 2014

158.2dc23

2014012089

Version_1

D irk Wittenborn and his niece Jazz Johnson have seen the best and worst social climbers of our age at work, watched them succeed and fail in their assault on the summits of high society, new money, old money, show business, downtown, uptown, New York, Los Angeles, Europe, and beyond: Between them, they have spent more than fifty years marveling at the skills, ambition, and nerve of those who have the moral fortitude to go for the gold. In the course of their research on climbing, the authors also made a startling personal discovery that has affected their own lifes journey: Social climbers were not only getting ahead of them, they were also having more fun. Their groundbreaking self-help manual, The Social Climbers Bible, offers two very different but uniquely revealing perspectives on upward mobility.

Ms. Johnson is a thirty-six-year-old Johnson & Johnson heiress. A former debutante and graduate of Barnard College, she has been photographed for Vogue and has created a line of her own jewelry. A distinguished horsewoman, Ms. Johnson has won in the American Hunter division at many top horse shows in the country. She manages her family estate, serves on Johnson & Johnsons board of charitable foundations, is master of the Essex Fox Hounds, and has named her four dogs after alcoholic beverages. Jazz is an insider in that rarefied world fans of Gossip Girl and Downton Abbey dream about and social climbers of all ages want to belong to.

Her fascination with the subject of Mountaineering was sparked at age seven when she asked her parents why her dashing billionaire grandfather, J. Seward Johnson Sr., former vice president of J & J, world-renowned yachtsman, philanthropist, and founder of the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, was no longer married to her elegant and sophisticated Bostonian grandmother. The answer: Grandpa had met and married an incredibly gifted social climber who, besides being a penniless Polish immigrant forty-one years Grandpas junior, also happened to be the upstairs maid.

Dirk Wittenborn, a novelist and screenwriter, is a producer of the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary Born Rich. His fiction has often explored the interplay of class and money in the American dream. Early in his career via a brief connection to Saturday Night Live, the highlight of which was being filmed teaching cats to swim, he picked up enough bad habits and celebrity friends to become a part of New York Citys downtown demimonde. It was edifying to Wittenborn to watch how quickly some of Gothams most prominent young social climbers befriended him in the mistaken belief that he might know someone who could help them; even more enlightening was observing the grace with which those disappointed Mountaineers quickly dropped him. Old enough to remember when sex was safe and cocaine wasnt addictive, Mr. Wittenborn was on the scene to witness that seminal moment in American history when, as he says, ass-kissing became networking.

In short, whereas Ms. Johnson belongs to the most exclusive clubs in the world, Mr. Wittenborn has been kicked out of them. Like those pioneering sex researchers of the sixties and seventies, Masters and Johnson, who dared to show the world that sex was nothing to be ashamed of, Wittenborn and Johnson have dared to offer an unbiased exploration of our present-day cultures final taboo, the last form of social intercourse the world still refuses to be candid aboutsocial climbing.

E very year the self-help industry inundates us with new books, blogs, and TV gurus offering advice about how to maximize your human potential with promises of surefire steps guaranteed to turn your life aroundsadly, those steps rarely lead you anywhere except to the depressing thought that you are the person you are, have the life you have, because that is all you deserve. That is, until now!

We have written this book because none of these guides to a brighter future has the honesty or common sense to mentionmuch less recommendwhat scientific research, our personal experience, and interviews with highly accomplished people in all walks of life have shown us to be inarguably true.

The surest, fastest, and most painless method of improving your position in this highly competitive world and giving yourself a chance to step into the winners circle is... SOCIAL CLIMBING.

Now, we know what youre thinking. You hate social climbers. Right? Thats what everybody says. But before dismissing our offer to change your life, ask yourself this one simple question: Would you cancel meeting up with your mother, sister, old friend from college, boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, child, or that nice old lady with the wooden leg who lives down the hall with her cats if you were invited to hang out with: Bono? Michelle Obama? George Clooney, Bill Gates, Kate Moss, Beyonc, the Pope, Derek Jeter, Lady Gaga, the Dalai Lama, Damien Hirst, David Bowie, Jerry Seinfeld, Prince William, or the Duchess of Cambridge? Sean Diddy Combs, Germanys Chancellor Angela Merkel, Grard Depardieu, Roger Federer, Stephen Hawking... ? Someone whose friendship could enrich your life and at the very least give you an experience to make your friends envious?

If your answers No, youre lying.

If your answers Yes, your qualms about becoming a social climber are irrelevant, because you already are one. Were not telling you what to want, just how to get it.

Are you brave enough to be honest about what you really desire? Willing to listen to what your inner child tells you youre entitled to? Do you have the courage to open your eyes to the importance of the superficial in postmodern life? If so, you already have the makings of a good social climber. And our book will make you a great one!