Survival of the richest

If he isn’t careful, Richard Conniff will become the next A-list party must-have, invited in the hopes that he will display his “gift,” like a spoon-bending psychic. Since the publication of his new book, “The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide,” a quasi-scientific analysis of the personality traits of the very rich, people have been asking him to do the most extraordinary things.

One took him to lunch at Four Seasons in New York and asked him to deconstruct the posture of nearby diner Ron Perelman; another wondered if he would provide an analytical commentary for a fashion spread -- what do certain clothes say about the ladder rung of the wearer.

“What I don’t understand,” says Conniff, “is when rich people want to talk to me about rich people. About themselves, about their friends. They want to know what it all means, what their behavior means.”

Personal primate-behavior consultant -- really, darling, you must get one.

The premise of Conniff’s book is that the rich are different from you and me. That the rich ($5 mil or more) form a cultural subspecies, different from the rest of humankind. And within that subcategory, their actions and affectations are as explainable, and predictable, as any group of baboons.

For years, Conniff has been both science writer, following Amazonian expeditions and baboon exploits in Botswana for Smithsonian and National Geographic, and style scribe for Architectural Digest. The book is chockfull of dope on the mating habits of the mayfly and the gender bending of stickleback fish. But mostly, it shows that traits of alpha males, and females, are pretty much the same if the animal in question is a squirrel monkey or Ted Turner.

With chapter titles like “Take this Gift, Dammit!: Dominance the Nice Way,” the book, for all its references to field studies and footnotes, is a fun read. And, as he makes very clear in his introduction, Conniff believes that the cross-species parallels he draws -- from grooming patterns (alphas get better hair care whether monkey or man) to family structures (power is maintained by producing few legitimate offspring) -- are genuine but limited.

People, even rich people, do not have an enormous amount in common with dance flies -- just the tendency to present a so-so gift in fabulous wrapping. “Males are supposed to present their mates with luscious bugs that they wrap in silk,” says Conniff of the flies. “But some suck the juice out first, and some find really old bugs and some just wrap up air. I call this the natural history of the Tiffany box.”

Although not in the book, the anecdote captures the book’s tone. “My intent,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “is to use the tool of evolutionary psychology with gleeful caution ... to provoke and entertain.”

‘Comfortable,’ not rich

And perhaps to reassure the hoi polloi that different isn’t always better even if it comes with six zeros attached. The rich according to Conniff are isolated, competitive, often quite unhappy and almost always self-deluded. In fact, he says, the first sign that a person is really rich is when he or she denies this. “Even if they’re billionaires, they’re never rich,” he said. “They’re always ‘comfortable.’ ”

He is sitting with his back to the rolling lawn of the Ritz-Carlton Huntington in Pasadena. The afternoon is fading into cool shade; there are few people out on the terrace and no one is asking him to explain this woman’s walk or that man’s glance, which is OK with him; he spent five years wealth-watching for the book, and two years more convincing himself he really had something to say about it.

He also knows that the popularity of the book has as much to do with the subject as his particular take on it. If the poor are always with us, so inevitably are the rich, and they have much better luggage. They do things like cover barstools with leather made of whale scrotum (Aristotle Onassis) and cut off each other’s yachts while vacationing in Capri (Larry Ellison and Paul Allen). The super rich fill magazine and newspaper pages, fuel a trickle-down economy and simultaneously spark envy and disdain among the middle class.

“We are always looking up the social ladder,” Conniff said. “That is what primates do. We look to the alphas because they will give things to us -- protection, food, other goodies -- and in this society, the alphas are rich people. These people control our lives, decide if we’re going to have a job.”

Tall and solid, with a professorial beard and tweed jacket, Conniff looks a bit like what he is -- a Connecticut-based writer. His previous books include “Spineless Wonders: Tales From the Invertebrate World” and “Every Creeping Thing: True Tales of Faintly Repulsive Wildlife,” so he’s used to traveling amid frightening fauna. Still, he says, there’s no place that beats L.A. in fear-factor terms. “Hollywood is the most nakedly vicious group of rich people I have ever seen,” he said. He is, perhaps, still stinging from the time when, during the course of his research, he tried to fake being rich in L.A. He rented a bright red Ferrari F355 Spider convertible and was shocked to find that no one was fooled -- no one deferred to him. “Maybe I had a blinking neon sign on my forehead that said ‘not Nouveau Riche, but Rental.’ ”

“L.A. is like the Serengeti,” he said. “You can sit and watch the wildebeests running by and the lions just sitting there picking them off. It’s quite amazing. New York, on the other hand, is like the rain forest -- they’re probably doing the exact same sort of thing, but they’re doing it way high up in the canopy where no one can see them.”

For the purposes of his book, Conniff did not include many celebrities or politicians in his survey group -- although there is quite a bit about the Churchills and European nobility in general -- because he wanted to examine cases in which money was the pure motivator and magnet.

‘This town is more vicious’

“More interesting to me than celebrity money are the producers or the screenwriters, the short, fat guys who didn’t make the basketball team or get crowned prom king,” he said. “I think that’s why the style in this town is more vicious. I have heard story after story of personal assistants constantly humiliated by the boss. It seems they’re just making up for years of rejection. And perpetrating a cycle of abuse -- they had to put up with it, and now you do too.”

“There is no model for ritual humiliation in the animal world that I know of,” he added. “Animals tend to simply dispatch the loser, either by killing him or banishing him.”

On the other hand, Conniff has seen many scenarios similar to the industry’s hand-washing attitude toward Robert Blake now that he’s in jail. It reminds him of a baboon field study that included a lone male baboon who had fallen from grace. “It’s really amazing,” he said. “An alpha male will have subordinates grooming him 10 times a day. This guy, no one would touch. He was completely on his own.”

Joy from celebrity woes

Celebrities, he says, are different from other rich people because, for the most part, they don’t get wealthy in an “aggressive, Bill Gates, alpha-male sort of way. So they’re easier to identify with.” The flip side of that familiarity is society’s endless need to see the celebrated brought down a few pegs. And lately, that gotcha attitude has extended out of Hollywood to the executive class. Conniff was amazed at how the crowd roared during the weeks of executive perp walks earlier this year.

“Part of it is schadenfreude, I suppose,” he said. “We always love to see the mighty brought low. And with someone like Jack Welch or Dennis Kozlowski, I suppose, it’s [a case of] when they’re up, and making us money, offering us protection, we’re more tolerant. When they’re down, we want revenge.” Because, of course, they took a lot of people down with them.

During his two-day stay in L.A., Conniff learned a little of the local posturing first-hand. He got a call from an industry heavyweight who was interested in his book and wanted to meet him. In telling this to a reporter, he mentioned the producer’s name, then said he should probably check and see if it was OK to print that name here. He called back to say he had talked to the producer’s assistant and it was not OK to use his name. Even though it had been a very nice meeting, even though no damage could be done by printing the name. It was a simple flexing of power.

Did Conniff recognize the irony that despite all his insight into the trappings of dominance, he was playing right along?

“Absolutely,” he said, laughing loudly. “Are you kidding? I’m a freelance writer. If I need to grovel, I grovel. I’m not kidding myself.”

Would Conniff like to be rich then, knowing all that he knows now, of the isolation and self-delusion?

“No,” he said, after a moment. “I’d like to say I would be different if I were rich, but I wouldn’t because that’s not how it works. Still, I’ve got two kids, so I’d like to be,” he pauses, then grins, “I’d like to be comfortable.”