Those of us half-heartedly following the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills subplot about the travails of the sisters Richards and how Kyle was invited, then disinvited, then re-invited—albeit without her husband and two of her daughters—to the Kensington Palace wedding of her niece Nicky Hilton to James Rothschild, have a new piece of information to chew over: Nicky, the quieter, yet somehow crueler-seeming sister of Paris, is reportedly pregnant with the newest scion of the legendary Jewish banking dynasty.
Some months from now, the DNA of Mayer Amschel Rothschild—the Rothschild family patriarch who rose from the squalid Judengasse of 18th century Frankfurt to install each of his five sons in one of five great banking capitals of Europe, with strict exhortations never to marry outside the faith—will be mingled with that of Conrad Hilton, a confirmed anti-Semite, according the sublime memoir by his most famous ex-wife, Zsa-Zsa Gabor (of which I believe every word as gospel). Hilton’s contributions to the world include making sure you can feel like you’re in a 1950’s-era American suburb in any corner of the globe, and almost single-handedly siring the reality television revolution in the form of his myriad descendants. The merger will be truly complete.
Perhaps, however, that’s as it should be. The Rothschilds may be the closest thing the Jews of Europe have to a royal family—their aristocratic mystique lauded across classic Yiddish literature to the 21st century New York stage—but in their own time of greatest ascendency, the 19th century, they were thought of in quite a different way. Le Gout Rothschild, or the Rothschild taste, became synonymous with the gaudy, the overdone—basically, the way your bubbe would have chosen to decorate if she’d been a Victorian lady of leisure whose personal wealth equaled that of several smaller European nations: vast and fussy houses crowded with swirling cornices, elaborate wall sconces, and rooms and rooms stuffed full of every tschotschke imaginable.
That this aesthetic became the preferred look of the American nouveau riche until the art deco revolution of the 1920’s is instructive—as arrivistes, it looked good to them. The Rothschilds, for all their wealth and influence, were a breed apart, much like the Hiltons, who despite their wealth and influence seem never to have met a camera, a rhinestone, or a plastic surgery procedure they didn’t like. Both families have left a far greater mark on the world than their more tasteful historical counterparts. May Nicky and James’s new baby continue the tradition, and may we all look forward to seeing it do tacky things on whatever camera-like device we have in our space colony some 20 years from now.
Rachel Shukert is the author of the memoirs Have You No Shame? and Everything Is Going To Be Great,and the novel Starstruck. She is the creator of the Netflix show The Baby-Sitters Club, and a writer on such series as GLOW and Supergirl. Her Twitter feed is @rachelshukert.
