Authors: Dirk Wittenborn,Jazz Johnson
The Social Climber's Bible: A Book of Manners, Practical Tips, and Spiritual Advice forthe Upwardly Mobile
THE SOCIAL CLIMBER’S BIBLE
Dirk Wittenborn
is a novelist (
Fierce People, Pharmakon
), screenwriter, and the Emmy-nominated producer of the HBO documentary
Born Rich
. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and summers on the wrong side of the tracks in East Hampton, New York.
Jazz Johnson
is a graduate of Barnard College, manages her family estate, serves as Master of Fox Hounds, and raises heritage turkeys. She hopes that collaborating with her uncle, Dirk, on
The Social Climber’s Bible
does not get her kicked out of any of the clubs she belongs to.
A Book of Manners, Practical Tips,
and Spiritual Advice for the Upwardly Mobile
DIRK WITTENBORN
and
JAZZ JOHNSON
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Penguin Books 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Dirk Wittenborn and Jazz Johnson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wittenborn, Dirk, author.
The social climber’s 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
158.2—dc23
2014012089
Version_1
Chapter 1:
Why You Have What It Takes, Even if You Don’t
Chapter 2:
Does Being a Social Climber Mean I Have to Become a Phony?
Chapter 3:
The Wittenborn-Johnson Psychological Aptitude Test for Social Climbers
Chapter 4:
Do I Have to Ditch My Old Friends to Meet Glamorous and Exciting New People?
Chapter 5:
Test Your Social Climbing IQ
Chapter 6:
How to Get More Out of a Cocktail Party Than a Hangover
Chapter 7:
Sex and the Social Climber
Chapter 8:
The Secrets of Being a Great Guest
Chapter 9:
Basic Social Functions and How to Get the Most Out of Them
Chapter 10:
Handling Hormonally Charged Events: Engagement Parties and Weddings
Chapter 11:
What Am I Saying Yes To? Dating, Love, and Marriage
Chapter 13:
Networking: How to Win Friends, Influence People, and Use Them to Turn a Profit
Chapter 14:
The Family That Climbs Together Stays Together
Chapter 15:
Scenester Social Climbing
Chapter 16:
The AARP Climb: Why Climbing Gets Easier the Older You Get, Even if You Wear Depends
Chapter 17:
Riding Unicorns and Whales
Chapter 18:
Mountaineering with the One Percent
Chapter 19:
Climbing the Inner Mountain
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 life’s journey: Social climbers were not only getting ahead of them, they were also having more fun. Their groundbreaking self-help manual,
The Social Climber’s 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 & Johnson’s 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 Grandpa’s 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 City’s downtown demimonde. It was edifying to Wittenborn to watch how quickly some of Gotham’s 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 wasn’t 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 culture’s final taboo, the last form of social intercourse the world still refuses to be candid about—social 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 around—sadly, 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 mention—much less recommend—what 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 you’re thinking. You hate social climbers. Right? That’s 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, Beyoncé, 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, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, Gérard 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?