Roots on Rodeo Drive

By William Hamilton
Buzz Magazine — May/June 1992

Imagine pointing out one of your ancestors on the wall of the National Portrait Gallery in London or Edinburgh – or a collateral cardinal in the gilded pasta of a renaissance frame behind a velvet rope in a Venetian palace. Such a distinguishing pleasure! Can you help it if your family has been on top for generations?

For a brief, as it turns out, highly fragile moment, this very sort of old-world thrill was not only mine, but mine right here in Los Angeles – a place so new that even its founding families are barely fumigated, let alone venerated.

The context was Polo Ralph Lauren in Beverly Hills, a haberdashery so old-waspily decorated, handsomely staffed, and tweedily furnished that it seems more like a swell house party with everybody’s surprisingly enormous wardrobe in the midst of being unpacked. There, in a signal place of honor, centered right over the stair landing, is a full-length portrait of a polo player whom I had recently been told was the late in-law of my own late first cousin once removed. While such a connection may not seem quite the same as a direct descendant looking up at a ducal Gainsborough in the Tate, it still felt exhilaratingly distinguishing.

“Go to the Ralph Lauren in Beverly Hills. Uncle Tommy’s on the wall. It’s that enormous posthumous picture of him in his polo stuff that Lucia took with her to Narragansett every summer,” my cousin’s niece had said to me in New York. And sure enough, there he was. I could see why Lucia moved the portrait with her and never remarried. Uncle Tommy looked like a virile sunrise.

I didn’t tell anybody of my personal, decorative connection to the sporty, old-money look of the store until I was leaving and found I could keep it to myself no longer. “That’s a relative of mine,” I said to a lovely young clerk, before I plunged out into the parking lot, from which I could imagine her expecting to hear a faint, genealogical “Hi yo, Silver, away!”

Personally braced by the glittering honor of a personal connection to the very paraphernalia with which Ralph Lauren customers are referred to older and better times, I nevertheless paused to consider Lucia rolling in her grave – her Tommy in a store, and one that sold things ready-made. Or would she: Lucia had a ballet company. She was no stranger to showmanship. And think about "Tommy” reigning at Ralph Lauren is better than moldering in an attic – and there were lots of other people’s sold-off ancestors and relatives hanging about for company, many of whom looked like they might have friends in common.

Before I could start casually dropping news of this amusing and not personally unenhancing family presence elevating the atmosphere at Ralph Lauren, I, thank the Lord, checked back for another look. Yes, I had developed a Deep Throat within the emporium who shockingly revealed to me that not only was the polo portrait not of Tommy, but it was not even of a real polo player.

“It’s a doctor friend of the store’s owner. I remember when they borrowed those old boots from somewhere for him to pose in. There’s the date right on it: ’87. Handsome, isn’t he?”

Further family fact-checking soon made it apparent that not only wasn’t Tommy in the Beverly Hills Polo, he wasn’t even in Costa Mesa. Reduced back to my original, raw, unrelated local social status, I had to face having claimed to that lovely young clerk that I was kin to what she either knew or quickly discovered was an ersatz composite, neither polo player nor relative. “Did I tell you about today’s nut?” I can hear her saying over margaritas at a mall after work. How excruciating. Why didn’t I keep it to myself?

Oh, well. I should have known all along that social climbing wasn’t going to be easy in a place that’s not only horizontal, but ever spreading.

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