Haven’t you heard? New York is in the middle of a private-club boom. I could wax poetic about why: the pandemic, which made this city a more insular one; iPhones, which robbed going out of its discretion; the reach of social media, which turned getting a reservation at even an average restaurant into the Hunger Games. And I could muse that if New York nightlife is becoming a place where cash matters more than cool, we might be losing a piece of the city’s soul in the process.
But I’m not going to do that. Because guess what—I joined two of them! I wrote my little application essays, name-dropped other members, sent in a picture of myself, and then handed over my Visa, which was then charged very promptly and expensively.
Why? The clubhouses, for starters. Many of them are beautiful spaces, housed in buildings by renowned architects and with interiors by famous designers. They offer world-class amenities—multiple restaurants! Omakase bars! Spas! Coworking spaces! Cinemas! Rooftops!—and have strict privacy policies. Casa Cipriani, for example, reportedly expelled three members after taking a photo of Taylor Swift. (She’s been spotted both there and at Chez Margaux.) Which leads me to the final selling point of the private clubs: exclusivity. More important than all those fancy rooms? The people in them.
So with that in mind, I decided to do something that’s a lot more fun than plumbing the changing societal tides: poke fun of myself—and the rest of my next-gen closed-door cohorts—with a story about the types of characters* you’ll find at New York’s private membership clubs. After all, we can laugh at ourselves, right? Right?
*Everyone described below is completely made up. No one sue me. All my money is tied up in membership fees.
Twelve people sent you a link to New York Magazine’s “It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl.” You responded “HAHA”—a “HA” short of normal. Secretly, you’re insulted. You don’t own an Aritizia puffer. You own a Prada one. And you’d never wait three hours in line for I Sodi. Obviously, you have their VIP number.
While waiting for your friend Emma at Chez Margaux, you pull up StreetEasy and search “Tribeca.” You find a two-bedroom apartment listed for four million dollars. Then you text it to your father: “Isn’t this cute???”
You are Eric Adams. Or you’re an “entrepreneur” who got this membership to “network”—even though no one knows what you do. (You’re a real-estate developer, thanks for asking.)
On a Friday night, you open Raya and swipe on the first girl whose profession is listed as model. “ZB tonight?” you say. “I’ll put you on the list.”
You are also a real-estate developer. Isabel, your 26-year-old girlfriend, told you this monogrammed Gucci polo looked good. Yet as you sit there, looking at a bunch of European guys in Italian-cut button-downs, you wonder if you just look…dumb.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Vittoria Ceretti walk by without acknowledging you. “I thought you said you knew them,” Isabel says, looking at you with disgust.
“I said a friend knew them,” you snap back. “Do you want to go to my place in Miami next weekend or not?”
You are a successful Hollywood executive, agent, actor, or creative who regularly travels between Los Angeles and New York. You use San Vicente—with its clubhouses in West Hollywood and the West Village—for power lunches, drinks, and dinners with other successful Hollywood executives, agents, actors, and creatives.
Or you’re the adult child of one of those people…who they kind of had to let in. Cue scene.
You get a phone call from the membership director. They want to talk.
Look, they’ve known you for a while. Your father. And they love having your father—and of course you too!—as part of the San Vicente community. But here’s the thing. This is supposed to be a social club. You cannot keep bothering members of the community about business opportunities. Especially the, uh, known ones.
You scoff. “They would be lucky to get in on what I’m working on—a digital-first series about a native Angeleno who ditches his life of privilege to become a DJ in the Tbilisi techno scene. It’s gonna be shot entirely on an iPhone. Like Tangerine. And Sean Baker just won a fucking Oscar.”
They pause. “I just think those types of discussions are best kept between agents.”
“I don’t work with WME anymore. They can go fuck themselves.”
“Maybe your dad’s agent can—”
“I don’t need my dad’s help for anything!” You hang up, throw on your matching Aviator Nation sweatsuit in your SoHo loft, and refresh your IMDB page to see if you’ve finally got that producer credit you requested for that time you shadowed Michael Bay for 12 hours on the set of Transformers. He’s a family friend. You bet he’ll approve it eventually. *
*San Vicente, I really enjoy your club. Please don’t kick me out.
Getting in was the easy part. Well, not for most people; most people will never see the inside of the Rifat Ozbek–designed interiors. But then again, most people don’t have the last name you do.
The hard part was paying for it. You liquidated the last of your stock portfolio to join—not like you had a financial advisor any longer to stop you. But it needed to be done. For you. For your family. For Penderwick.
The London circles knew too much. About Daddy’s gambling. About the bad investments. Plus, here’s the thing about primogeniture: All the money goes to the men. And you don’t need an heir. You need an heiress.
And America has a lot more of those.
You see her in a booth. She’s with her friends drinking a dirty martini, but you aren’t intimidated. Nor do you need a line. All you need is your English accent.
“Hello,” you say, impossibly smooth. Then you flash your signet ring.
Just as you predicted—she smiles.
You are prison pen pals with Samuel Bankman-Fried.
You are an 82-year-old woman named Eleanor. But your friends—and your favorite doorman at the Park Avenue co-op where you own a classic six—call you Cricket. Your husband, Henry, died 10 years ago. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, you and your adult children go to mass at Christ Church. You wear black and dab your eyes with a handkerchief. Your eldest, also named Henry, pats you on the back. It’s awkward for the both of you as you don’t really hug. (Except for that time he begged to leave boarding school. “Oh honey,” you said back. “The check’s already been cashed.”)
That night, you put on your best Chanel suit and sit in the Colony clubhouse. A waiter brings you three gin gimlets. You knock them back in quick succession. And then amid the Elsie de Wolfe interiors, you cackle with glee. If a heart attack didn’t kill that cheating motherfucker, you were going to.
You are a 52-year-old woman named Jennifer. Your mother-in-law, Eleanor (or Cricket, but she never lets you call her that), encouraged you to join. You did. And for the last 15 years, you’ve only come for Christmas brunch. Or a child’s birthday party.
So you ask your husband, Henry, if you should cancel your membership. He refuses. “My mother likes that we’re members,” he says. You push back: “I really don’t think she’d notice if we weren’t.”
He explodes. “You don’t need to tell me that my mother never fucking notices!”
You think about probing more, but you have Pilates private in 15 minutes. So you just grab your Goyard tote, head out the door, and let him work out whatever that hell that was.
You are a 52-year-old man named Henry. You are an executive at a publishing house. This pains you. You dreamed of being a Beat-style intellectual in the vein of Kerouac and Ginsberg—but your father saw to it that you found yourself in a C-suite. Meanwhile, your mother, Cricket, was too drunk to care what you did.
So you chose publishing. If you couldn’t be an artist, at least you could be close to them.
You entertain them now at the Century Club with disgust. Graydon Carter’s memoir? Mediocre! Ocean Vuong’s latest? Completely unreadable! Miranda July? Don’t even get me started.
“You know, it’s a lot easier to criticize than create,” an author says when you go on a rant one night. You throw a gin gimlet in his face.
Your family was named in the Panama Papers. Like, a lot. Yet no one seems to have noticed. An 11.2 million document dump will do that.
Your mother, from the chalet in Gstaad, says it’s a blessing; you can retain your privacy, your discretion. But as you sit high upon your office in Colette, waiting for your sushi to arrive from the coworking–slash–social club’s omakase bar, you finally admit what you’ve long tried to suppress.
You would have loved the attention.
You actually aren’t a member here. You just went for a fashion dinner once and posted it on your Instagram story.
It’s a Tuesday night, and you’re drinking vodka alone. You weren’t always like this; he used to be here, drinking vodka right along with you.
You’d drink together in a lot of places, actually. The Maldives. Montenegro. Sardinia. On the Adagio in international waters. But the yacht’s gone. He’s gone. It’s all gone.
You thought about reaching out. A friend of a friend, however, told you he changed his number. You’re hurt. Yet you understand. What must be done must be done.
So for tonight, you drink in his memory. As the table next to you laughs, you open Safari on your phone. And you google: “trump lifting sanctions on russia?”
