Dear readers,

When a friend forwarded some fresh ridiculous news about billionaires recently — you might have heard it’s a gangbusters time to be one — I scoffed the scoff of the comfortably righteous. Boo, hiss, the filthy feckless rich! Let them eat crypto, or whatever.

My reading preferences, though, tend to look a lot less proletarian. Tales of the 1 percent take up too many percentages of my personal library, a veritable Davos Forum of prosperity and privilege crammed into wonky Ikea bookshelves. Give me outrageous fortune in all its forms, fiction or non-: old money; new money; money so big it seems bottomless until in a dribble or a rush it’s gone, leaving a wash of disgraced tech moguls and shabby aristocrats in its wake.

All that abundance allows for endless subcategorization: The picks in this week’s newsletter were both published in the 1980s (didn’t they call it the Greed Decade?) but are set in the early years of the 20th century and were written by women who were, you could say, born to the material.

—Leah

“The Shooting Party,” by Isabel Colegate

Fiction, 1980

“The Shooting Party” opens on an English country manor, with a sprawling cast of characters and death on the mantel. But Colegate’s novel mostly swerves away from Agatha Christie territory; it’s not murder so much as class disparity and vast carelessness that snuff out a life in the last pages.

Along the way, Colegate introduces the many houseguests, residents and scurrying servants of Nettleby Park, a bucolic Northamptonshire estate that in the fall of 1913 contains only whispers of the war that will shortly upend the old world order still preserved there. Sir Randolph is hosting a hunt, and it takes a village to sustain the roundelay of white-tablecloth meals, shootable wildlife and social intrigue.

The pheasant body count is high, but most pursuits take place indoors: There is much covert coveting of other people’s partners and simmering rivalries among highborn men for whom day jobs are as foreign as dressing themselves for dinner. The service staff, from the scullery maids to the local laborers hired as “beaters” to bring out the game, have their own romances and resentments, and a lonely little boy spends a lot of time trying to track down his pet duck. Other odd birds emerge, including an earnest vegetarian schoolteacher eager to spread the gospel of animal equality to Nettleby.

Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey,” supposedly gleaned heavy inspiration from “The Shooting Party” (he wrote the introduction to a 2007 reissue). But Colegate has him beat for on-the-job training — her father was a knighted member of Parliament and her mother the daughter of a baronet. And her storytelling is drawn in finer ink than his gilded soap operas, even when the party turns to its final, fatal calamity.

Read if you like: Buckshot, in-depth descriptions of British flora, tasteful infidelity.
Available from: Penguin Modern Classics, or your favored local viscount.

“Once Upon a Time: A True Story,” by Gloria Vanderbilt

Nonfiction, 1985

The über alles of poor little rich girls, Vanderbilt lost her father, the industrialist heir Reginald Claypool Vanderbilt, before her first birthday. He was 45; her mother was 19 and not particularly bound to her husband’s social calendar. (On the night Reginald died at his Rhode Island estate, she was off at the theater in New York City with “a friend of the family,” Vanderbilt writes in “Once Upon a Time,” the second of six memoirs published before her death at 95 in 2019.)

Almost immediately, the custody of baby Gloria became a family power struggle and then a tabloid mainstay. Like the ongoing churn of nannies and chauffeurs she was largely parented by, it was all more or less normalized, though the battle dragged on long enough that her comprehension eventually caught up with the more sordid points of the case: “I tormented myself by imagining that the only clothes I wore were made of newspapers, and on each would be words in those black thick spider letters spelling out what I could no longer pretend not to read.”

Mostly, she pined for the barest crumbs from her mother (also named Gloria), a distant glamourpuss who slept past noon and regularly disappeared to London or Paris or Biarritz with some lover or another. Even when physically present, she was rarely there — taking a preteen Gloria for a promised meeting with her idol, Marlene Dietrich, for example, then ditching her in Dietrich’s driveway for hours while she slipped inside alone.

Vanderbilt recalls all this with the breathless prose of a bygone schoolgirl, crowding the page with whimsical nicknames (Big Elephant, Tootsie Eleanor, the Little Countess), and looping her most fervent words and phrases when she really means-means-means them. Still, it’s hard to resist her guileless takes on what passed for adolescent social events: weekends with William Randolph Hearst or the Prince of Wales; a “Wizard of Oz” premiere gala at the Waldorf Astoria (Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney never showed at the afterparty, nor a single munchkin, though Errol Flynn did).

And you know exactly what she means when she describes a boarding-school classmate as “cold-muffiny.” Vanderbilt was too warm for her world, a Dorothy who probably would have been happier in Kansas but learned to make Oz home.

Read if you like: Drinking soda pop at the Stork Club, vintage issues of Vogue, “scrambled eggs with brandied peaches and champagne” for breakfast.
Available from: Estate sales and eBay, generally.

Why don’t you …

• Shake the family tree further via Consuelo Vanderbilt’s rococo 1952 memoir “The Glitter and the Gold”?

• Dip into the preppy-handbook idyll of Will Vogt’s “These Americans”? Jay McInerney (naturally) wrote the foreword.

• Consider the cautionary tale of Leona Helmsley’s late Maltese, Trouble, the abiding lap-dog heiress of our times?

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Marie Winn, the author who chronicled the avian sensation Pale Male, a red-tailed hawk that took up residence on the overhang of an Upper East Side apartment building only to be evicted in 2004, sparking protests by birders who had been thrilled to watch him woo lovers with disemboweled rats, died on Dec. 25 in Manhattan. She was 88.

Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by her son Michael Miller.

After publishing several books in the 1970s and ’80s about the changing nature of childhood, Ms. Winn began writing a column on mother nature for The Wall Street Journal in 1989, a career turn that eventually put her at the center of an only-in-New-York-City melodrama.

It began in Central Park, where Ms. Winn started bird watching in 1991, the year an unusual-looking red-tailed hawk arrived from places unknown.

Instead of the dark brown features that typically mark red-tail hawks, this one had light-colored plumage. Ms. Winn named the curious fellow Pale Male. She and other bird watchers of Central Park — “the Regulars,” as Ms. Winn called them — followed him everywhere.

“Shortly after his arrival in Central Park,” she wrote in her book “Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park” (1998), “Pale Male had discovered a hunting ground that was to become his favorite: an area near the park entrance at Fifth Avenue and 79th Street — the killing corner, as the Regulars dubbed it.”

Every day, a man fed a flock of pigeons there. Pale Male watched from a chimney.

“Peering down intently, Pale Male would search out one that was imperceptibly slower, clumsier, stupider,” Ms. Winn wrote. “Then he would plummet down in that breathtaking dive falconers call a stoop. Bingo.”

Pale Male liked the neighborhood so much that he decided to settle at 927 Fifth Avenue, a 12-story luxury apartment building near the corner of East 74th Street. The building, which has a view of Central Park, was also home to the actress Mary Tyler Moore. Pale Male did most of his mating on the 12th-floor cornice. He also occasionally vacationed at a building nearby, on Woody Allen’s penthouse terrace.

Ms. Winn and “the Regulars” were consumed by Pale Male’s romantic life, naming his succession of girlfriends First Love, Chocolate and Blue. The birders sat on a bench outside the park with binoculars waiting for action, shouting, “They’re doing it!” when they were doing it.

There was heartbreak, too. First Love “ate a poisoned pigeon and died on a ledge of the Metropolitan Museum,” Ms. Winn wrote in The Wall Street Journal. Chocolate, she added, died in “a collision on the New Jersey Turnpike.”

But perhaps the most lamentable event in Pale Male’s life occurred in December 2004, when the co-op board at 927 Fifth Avenue, fed up with rat carcasses and bird droppings falling to the building’s front sidewalk, voted to remove Pale Male’s nest, upending his courtship of his new consort, Lola.

Protests outside the building attracted national media attention.

“I’m restraining myself, Margot, from being obscene,” Ms. Winn said on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” addressing the interviewer, Margot Adler. “I’m so angry about this.”

So was Mary Tyler Moore.

“These birds just kept coming back to the edge of the building, and people kept coming back to see them,” she told The New York Times, adding, “This was something we like to talk about: a kinder, gentler world, and now it’s gone.”

New York City residents expressed their dismay via the 2004 version of Twitter — letters to the editor.

The hawks were “all about location, location, location: what a view they had of the park, and what a view we had of them,” Matthew Wills of Brooklyn wrote to The Times. “Like those who destroy a landmark in the middle of the night, those responsible for destroying the nest at 927 Fifth Avenue have shown their contempt for the city they call home.”

A week later, in response to pressure from the National Audubon Society, the co-op board reversed its decision. On the morning of Dec. 28, workers removed an apparatus on the landing that had prevented the hawks from alighting.

“In no time at all Pale Male and Lola landed on the nest site,” Ms. Winn wrote. “Later that afternoon Lola was seen bringing a new twig to the nest.”

Marie Wienerova was born on Oct. 21, 1936, in Prague. Her father, Josef Wiener, was a doctor. Her mother, Hanna Taussigova, was a lawyer and later a broadcaster. After emigrating to New York City in 1939, her parents changed their names to Joseph and Joan Winn.

Marie Winn attended Radcliffe College and graduated from the University of Columbia School of General Studies in 1959. She became a freelance journalist, contributing articles to The Times and other publications.

She married Allan Miller, a filmmaker, in 1961.

As they started a family, Ms. Winn began publishing books for young readers, including “The Fireside Book of Children’s Songs” (1966), for which her husband wrote the musical arrangements; “The Man Who Made Fine Tops: A Story About Why People Do Different Kinds of Work” (1970); and “The Sick Book: Questions and Answers About Hiccups and Mumps, Sneezes and Bumps, and Other Things That Go Wrong with Us” (1976).

In 1977, Ms. Winn wrote “The Plug-in Drug: Television, Children and the Family,” a social critique about TV’s role in the home. The book was widely praised. Writing in The Times Book Review, the television critic Stephanie Harrington called it a “multiple warhead launched against the great American pacifier.”

Ms. Winn followed with “Children Without Childhood: Growing Up Too Fast in the World of Sex and Drugs” (1983) and “Unplugging the Plug-in Drug” (1987), a sequel to her earlier book.

She also translated works by Czech writers, including Vaclav Havel, the playwright and last president of Czechoslovakia.

Along with her son Michael, Ms. Winn is survived by her husband; another son, Steven; and four grandchildren. Her sister, The New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, died in 2021.

A red-tailed hawk believed to be Pale Male was found sick not far from 927 Fifth Avenue in 2023 and died a short time later.

Ms. Winn returned to nature writing in 2008 with “Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife,” writing delightfully, reviewers said, about moths, cicadas and screech owls. She also reflected on how Pale Male had became, in her opinion, “the first avian superstar.”

“Pale Male — the very name was a crucial ingredient in creating this hawk’s celebrity. It fell trippingly from the tongue,” she wrote. “People liked to say it — Pale Male.”