Millionaire Housekeeping

Under the guise of writing a handbook for the "elegant conduct" of a "millionaire philanthropist's" household, Mary-nicknamed Minette by the mistress's French maid-recounts her rise in one such New York establishment, from a fourteen-year-old dining hall maid in the 1930s to the superintending housekeeper by the 1960s. She's no Mrs. Hughes of "Downton Abbey," but fans of that show will see much that is familiar here: the author borrows extensively from the (real) 1903 handbook Millionaire Households and Their Domestic Economy.

Young Mary and the other "under servants" almost never see "the family," so they can only wonder what's really going on with them. What is the mysterious attraction of the ordinary-looking Miss Geraldine, who steals one husband after another-in the same family? How did the butler develop such an unseemly "tan"? Why does Miss Sylvaine starve herself and then gorge, and how fat was Miss Pinella, anyway?

Over the years, Mary has to give up her dream of a "Shangri-La" with the handsome but shallow footman Jack-that is, working in a millionaire household where the owners never come home. Instead, along with Jim the chauffeur, she cultivates a love of learning, as the two read voraciously through the master's library.

Still, she's bewildered by the new world of the countercultural 1960s. She can't make head nor tail of her foster son Leland's "art film," nor of his involvement in the appalling movie project of the scion of the millionaire family-one that pushes the idea of art to a shocking extreme and carelessly preys on desperate people.

In this mid-career novel, written around 1970, Ardyth Kennelly deftly satirizes the habits and preoccupations of the ultra-rich-while also illustrating how the old ideas about propriety were swept away in the 1960s, when scenes of violence filled movie and TV screens and viewers needed ever more sordid spectacles to get their kicks.

Millionaire Housekeeping also reminds us of a phenomenon of our own time: the unconscionable chasm between those with outlandish wealth and those just struggling to get by.