Counter-Currents
Preppy Handbooks,
or, The Hidden History of the P-Word
Margot Metroland
2,045 words
Lisa Birnbach, Ed.
The Official Preppy Handbook
New York: Workman Publishing, 1980
The Official Preppy Handbook was originally published in late 1980. It spawned many imitators and at least one quasi-sequel (True Prep, 2010), as well as various updated and deluxe editions. It also helped to launch a genre of humor books that mixed faux sociology and sartorial fun. I touched on that trend a year ago in my supercilious takedown of 1984’s The Yuppie Handbook.
But Preppy Handbook had much more influence and staying power than the other gag books. For a long while anti-hipsters took it seriously as a guide for living — a combo of Dress for Success and The Status Seekers. Clothing designers and retailers let the so-called “preppy” look dominate their product for years and years. In the 1980s, J. Crew appeared as a mail-order and shopping-mall chain, its whole purpose seemingly that of providing an endless, ready source of mid-priced “classic” clothing that you wouldn’t have to hunt around for in department stores.
The book itself wasn’t enormously funny, but its promotion was hilarious. The lead author/editor, Lisa Birnbach, was herself no “preppy” by education or background, being a product of an Ethical Culture (secular Jewish) day school in the Bronx, followed by Brown University. But someone at Workman Publishing decided she was close enough; and thus she was drafted “to hold the reigns [sic] of a book we see as The Preppy Catalogue.” In addition, she would play the morning talk-show circuit and explain “preppy” traditions and lifestyle.
And so there she was on The TODAY Show — early 1981, I think it was — promoting The Official Preppy Handbook, and explaining the style of Quality Folks to Bryant Gumbel. But she was a trouper, played it for laughs, and seemed to be enjoying it all. I don’t have a video of that TODAY segment, so like Captain Queeg I can only cover these things roughly, from memory.
I believe it was about 8 o’clock in the morning and I was getting dressed for work. But I was riveted by the high irony on the tube: A Sportscaster-of-Color (Gumbel) in suit and tie, interviewing a young Ms. Birnbach, who was all togged out in clothes that would have been perfectly at home in a 1964 advertisement for the Villager Collection in Seventeen magazine. Birnbach opened by explaining her own special “layered” outfit: Fair Isle sweater with Henley-neck collar, unbuttoned to show a single string of pearls worn over thin white turtleneck. That, she said, was “preppy.” Another “preppy” thing, supposedly, was anything in tartan or plaid design, like the red-blue-white cover pattern which the book tells us is supposed to be madras fabric. (Madras — truly? These writers thought madras was traditional and high-class? Old slides and snapshots tell me that madras was mainly for loud summer sportscoats and Bermuda shorts, circa 1964.)
In the book, affected dowdiness is the recommended fashion. The Talbots chain scored very high in the Preppy Handbook‘s estimation. In those days, at least, The Talbots specialized in overpriced, over-upholstered business suits and A-line dresses for suburban women in their fifties, not girls in secondary school and college. Preppy Handbook also informed us that the “duck motif” is a sacred emblem among preppy families. So aspiring preppy-wannabes should acquire plenty of duck-bedecked wastebaskets, keychains, toilet kits, weathervanes, etc., etc.
My takeaway from all this was that the class being described is actually just people who spend a lot of time at yard sales, thrift shops, and antique barns.
The book supplies lists of secondary schools — day and boarding — and universities where preppy style is best maintained, supposedly. It’s notable that most of the colleges are party schools, often in the South, with modest SAT needs. You are warned against setting your sights on MIT, Oberlin, Sarah Lawrence, University of Chicago, or Columbia, because they are too hard and/or too weird. When interviewed for secondary school, don’t wear a LaCoste shirt or sneakers (if you’re a boy) or a short skirt with platform shoes (if a girl). Boys at interviews should wear blue blazers; girls, plaid skirts. Loafers recommended for both. If you wish to dress weird, please wait until after you’re admitted.
As this suggests, the book often drags a bit and falls down in the humor department. Its half-dozen main contributors (there are also untold dozens of other friends and helpers listed in the Acknowledgements) all often seem to be going off in different directions. So the university listings are full of snark, while that prep-school interview advice leans toward earnest, helpful hints. Much of the book is padded with commemorations of debutantes and prep role models. Their relevance is elusive, other than being rich and/or famous. (1938 Debutante of the Year Brenda Frazier? Gloria Vanderbilt? Dick Cavett? Where did he prep?)
You can buy Tito Perdue’s The Smut Book here.
There are many paradoxes in this flummery, but the biggest is that the p-word was really a derogatory term. This goes unacknowledged today because in pop consciousness the word “preppy,” noun and adjective, is mainly associated with clothing style. Its earlier, sneering connotation has been lost to memory.
The origin of the term is touched on only obliquely in the Preppy Handbook. It’s unlikely to have begun as a direct reference to prep schools per se. Such institutions generally don’t call themselves that; they usually have names like “The Hill School” or “Milton Academy.” More likely, “preppy” was derived from the “prep shops” that one used to see in the better department stores or menswear retailers. Usually on the third floor for whatever reason, they involved displays of snooty-looking mannequins of teenage males, dressed in ties and blazers and polo shirts, occasionally even little snap-brim fedoras — though assuredly not all in combination. (There was no female prep shop; equivalent departments would be called something like “Young Misses,” or later on, “Juniors.” Female “preppies” would thus be a contradiction in terms, even after the leading schools went coed in the 1970s.)
Some people found the name and layout of prep shops distinctly irritating, particularly those who got suited out at Robert Hall or Barney’s Boys Town.
I recall the p-word entering popular parlance about 1970, beginning with a popular novelette called Love Story, which almost immediately became a treacly film with Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw. To be precise, Love Story had actually begun life as a movie script by a Yale classics teacher, Erich Segal. After Segal sold his script, he was asked to reprocess it into a little novel — a gift storybook for Valentine’s Day, 1970, and a smash bestseller for the rest of the year. Come Christmas season, the film version was out and about, with a ready-made fanbase. It was everywhere, along with its mawkish, meaningless tagline (“Love Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry”) and a theme song sung by Andy Williams and a million others.
Early in the film we have a blond, bland Ryan O’Neal (rich Harvard hockey player) going to the Radcliffe College library to find a laughably ubiquitous book.[1] He immediately runs into dark, snappish Ali MacGraw. It’s oil and water. She chews him out for poaching on the little Radcliffe library instead of Harvard’s much vaster collection. She sneers and calls him “Preppie” [sic] — a studied insult, though it later becomes an affectionate nickname. Her character was softened a little for the final movie script, but when we meet her in the book, she’s a nasty, argumentative piece of work:
“Wouldja please watch your profanity, Preppie?”
“What makes you so sure I went to prep school?”
“You look stupid and rich,” she said, removing her glasses.
“You’re wrong,” I protested. “I’m actually smart and poor.”
“Oh no, Preppie. I’m smart and poor.”[2]
Wow, meet cute!
Like Lisa Birnbach and author Erich Segal, this Ali MacGraw character was originally Jewish. Segal altered that, in book and movie, possibly because of concerns that a mixed marriage of an upper-class Yankee to a lowly Brooklyn Jew would offend a great many people. So he turned the character into Jenny Cavilleri, an “Italian” from Cranston, Rhode Island. We never see her do anything Italian, unless you count listening to classical music. Her father meanwhile is the very Jewish actor John Marley, lovingly remembered today for his 1972 role in The Godfather as Hollywood producer and horse fancier Jack Woltz.
At one point in the Love Story film, the Ryan O’Neal character, Oliver, refers to Jenny as “Catholic,” but the script is emphatic that Jenny is not and never was. (Religious distinctions are such minefields for scriptwriters!)[3] Unsurprisingly, Segal turns out to have based the character on a Jewish girlfriend of his who — we might safely infer — liked to sneer at “preppies.”
So was the p-word basically a slur used by Jews of a certain type to categorize and decry Heritage Americans of a particular caste? It would certainly seem that way. I was thinking of that a few years ago when I reviewed Steven Brill’s Tailspin (book excerpt here). Growing up lower-middle-class in Far Rockaway, Queens, and first reading about the world of “prep schools” when he was 14, young Steven decided this was an exotic world he wanted to rise to; and so he soon headed up to the Deerfield Academy on scholarship. Brill himself doesn’t use the p-word; that would be sneering at a club he feels lucky to have joined. If he’d learned about “prep schools” a few years later — say, when he got to college — the story might be different. If you can’t join ’em . . . you can always beat up on ’em!
Which puts me in mind of the late Éva Balogh, a Hungarian-Jewish refugee from 1956 who was a Professor of Central European history at Yale in the 1970s. For a while she was master of Morse College (a residential college, what is called a “house” at Harvard or Andover, or a “college” at Oxford or Cambridge). Eccentric, opinionated, and sharp-tongued, she was popular with many of her charges. One story about Éva was her denunciation of the “roommate preference” card, traditionally sent out to incoming freshmen in their matriculation packs. The idea with these was that you wrote down one or two names of secondary-school friends you wanted to share your freshman suite with. She wanted to get rid of the cards entirely. “Why are they still doing that? That stuff’s only for preppies.”
Voilà: naked animosity, slouching toward us on all fours. Éva didn’t want preppies, with their social traditions, old-school ties, and cliques of friends from St. Grottlesex. No, she wanted the admissions committee to replace them with a mass of atomized souls — scoured from state high schools hither and yon — ready to be inculcated into your favorite ideologies. You know . . . diversity! Which pretty much describes the continuing admissions scam of the last half-century and more.
So there you are. The p-word was/is a slur, a word of derision for well-born, “privileged” goyim, whom you are asked to hold in contempt. I don’t believe I ever heard an actual prep-school alumnus or student refer to himself, unironically or otherwise, as a preppy. Or herself — though as I said, the term was seldom applied to females. I sometimes saw the word preppish used to describe dress style or personal attitude (Gore Vidal used it on Jack Kennedy), but when “preppy/preppie” arrived on the scene it was clearly derogatory. Erich Segal himself admits as much in the Preppy Handbook. One of the book’s contributors asks him the etymology of the word. He says it’s short for — preposterous! And there we have it again, folks: an object of mockery, a figure of fun.
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Notes
[1] The book is The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga, originally published in the 1920s and readily available in any used-book store for 40 cents, or the Harvard Coop, or a dorm suite down the hall. The joke here is that a Harvard jock would journey over to the women’s college because he’s taking this big “gut” survey course in history and hasn’t touched the reading list, but now it’s late in the semester and he can’t find a copy anywhere.
[2] Erich Segal, Love Story (New York: Signet Books, 1970).
[3] Segal himself was said to be anti-Catholic, at least according to prospective Yale students and aspiring Classics majors he interviewed and rejected. But this might possibly reflect turf rivalries among Classics teachers.
13 comments
With this excellent review you have completed the trifecta, what we might call, with reference to the Reagan Era they typified, the original Star Wars Trilogy: The Yuppie Handbook, Paul Fussell’s Class, and now the mother of them all.
Fussell’s book seems to evince a kind of sibling rivalry or anxiety of influence regarding Birnbach’s book, but I think he hit the nail on the head with his observation that the appeal of the book was to insinuate that while one could not hope to rise to the level of the true upper class (in his anatomy of America’s class system), high-upper-middle class status could be achieved or at least simulated by buying ones wardrobe and furnishings from the Lands End or L.L. Bean catalogs. As you say, ” So aspiring preppy-wannabes should acquire plenty of duck-bedecked wastebaskets, keychains, toilet kits, weathervanes, etc., etc.”
Fussell’s nail, in turn, was hit by a review in The Atlantic (was it Wilfred Sheed?) who suggested that Fussell’s ideal, “Class X”, people who, you know, are too smart to be taken in by all this class business and therefore are really the aristos, leading worthwhile lives of quiet sophistication was an attempt to promote his own sorry group of academic dirtbags. Aspiring Class X-ers were advised to never praise the host’s food or wine, which Sheed attributed less to class than “the stone palates developed over years of student cafeteria food.” Ouch.
Prep offered a way to purchase such non-style style without years of graduate school: “affected dowdiness is the recommended fashion.”
But is that only American, and only in the Reagan Era? In 1975, in Series One, Episode One of Fawlty Towers (“A Touch of Class”) Basil is taken in by the con man claiming to be “Lord Melbury” in large part because of a cheap suitcase he asks to be stored for “safe keeping” (we will learn it is filled with bricks). Wife Sybil deplores it as “tat” and Basil responds “It’s only the true upper class that would have tat like that. It’s the whole point!”
In 1990s brought us five seasons of Keeping Up Appearances, in which Hyacinth Bucket (“It’s pronounced ‘bouquet’”) desperately tries to project an upper class image. Apart from everything else, the newness and expense of her acquisitions and hobbies exposes her again and again as an arriviste. In “Violet’s Country Cottage” she finally moves in to her dream house, and is dismayed to confront a dirty, homeless, barely articulate bum on her front door: he turns out to be the ultra-rich next door neighbor.
In William Burroughs’ 1970 Wild Boys, we find the rich expats of Tangier living “Le Gran Luxe” style, one element of which is clothing that at first glance seems to be beggars rags, but on closer inspection is custom made and woven with gold (literally) threads to produce the requisite shine of age and wear.
This has probably been going on in the USA for centuries, due to the lack of official or strict class barriers. Wokeness of course is the latest, again afflicting Fussell’s over-educated Class X.
The appeal of William F. Buckley to conservatives was his image of education and class, rather than dowdy old losers like Whittaker Chambers, who looked so bad next to Alger Hiss (or Nixon vs. JFK). He’s our Gore Vidal, but better!
And we must not forget the earlier hoo-hah over “U and Non-U”, where the idiolect of the Mitford clan (as Evelyn Waugh pointed out) became a set of class markers, and proles tried to memorize the right words to sound “posh.” How infra dig!
“And so there she was on The TODAY Show — early 1981, I think it was — promoting The Official Preppy Handbook, and explaining the style of Quality Folks to Bryant Gumbel.”
Gumbel and Birnbach, a black and a Jew explaining WASP culture to the masses. That’s America in a nutshell. Or “what we are” as the saying goes. (True Prep elevated the Obamas to the “Prep Hall of Fame”). Too bad Joe Pesci’s character from JFK (more prep!) didn’t break in with “You sound like it’s a remote experience in ancient history!”
Fussel is interesting, but I think there is a certain ethnic component to class in America that you have to be from or connected closely to by marriage to be truly upper class. Actually, it constitutes a nobility analogous to the old European, I would consider.
His X class is really a renunciation of class imho, much like a Buddhism with respect to the class structure. To have class, you have to feel the status competition and hierarchy in your gut. You have to be part of the class system. You must show some bling(but not too much). Dig subtly at people of lower status. Let them feel it. Make fun of economy cars.
Great article from Margot!
Your notes on Fawlty Towers, etc., are worth responding to at length, because American and British pop/political cultures often seem to jog along the same track. But I’d save that for something essay-length. (“Putting Down the Stuffed Shirts: TV Comedy of the 1970s.”)
1980-81, the Preppy Handbook era, was a watershed time in American culture, something easily forgotten today. I remember seeing Nancy Reagan on the cover of People, with a headline something like—”Nancy Reagan, She Will Return Taste & Style, Class & Elegance to the White House.” Subtext was of course, We’re finally getting out from under the incompetent, jumped-up, rabbit-shy peanut farmer and his wife in her J.C. Penney pantsuit outfits.
A hyperventilating Lefty friend of mine (gay devotee of Walter Benjamin) saw the People cover, went “Ugh!” and laughed hysterically.
Some people reveled in the change, others were horrified and made noises for years about how Cowboy Reagan was going to trigger a nuclear holocaust, and this is How the World Ends!
The Preppy book endorsed and signified that change, as did the increase in young people reading the WSJ and Barron’s and Forbes, and applying to MBA school. As did the popularity of those mail-order mainstays, Land’s End and L. L. Bean, which the Preppy book appropriated as part of its supposed culture.
I’m sure this is the main reason why people who read it back in the day remember it fondly. It seemed a big poke in the eye to that odoriferous, lingering counter-culture of SDS, Yippies, Woodward and Bernstein, bell-bottoms, and big kinky Afros worn by…let us say, non-black-peoples.
Dressing up was cool, having a serious job where you had to look smart (especially in finance) was cool, watching Lou Rukeyser on Wall Street Week was cool. Even Nixon, still only 68, was looking cool. Revenge was sweet.
Christopher Caldwell and Roger Devlin have expanded upon more sinister explanations of the era.
Does a Jew ever love anything worth loving in earnest? I ask in all sincerity.
At the risk of sounding like Señor Hyperbole, seemingly everything they talk about that isn’t The Jewish Holocaust is just a punchline. (Such is the face of sour grapes, I guess, but damn it gets old.)
I am so glad you wrote this article, Ms. Metroland. It filled in a lot of blanks that I was simply unaware of. I came across the book years back, before waking up, and admittedly had fun reading it. Like many things that are flawed, I was able to glean some good from it (e.g. information about apparel I liked).
I enjoyed it for what it was, so much so that I picked up the other book you mentioned (True Prep) when it showed up at my local library. What struck me most about that one was how some things implicitly incompatible with the preppy lifestyle were now unquestioningly embraced (for example, how Miffy now has a black husband, head of African American Studies, or whatever).
Finally, a fun piece of serendipity: In The Official Preppy Handbook, Birnbach declares the color purple to be quite unpreppy (likewise, if I recall correctly, oversized labeling). Years later, to promote True Prep, I saw her in an interview, decked out in a purple polo with a six-inch logo. Lol
Thank you. I too remembered the Preppy Handbook as being much better in hindsight. Probably because it was fresh in concept and, at that time, unique. Paul Fussell’s Class is still king of the hill of that particular genre, and holds up much better today even though it was partially inspired by the Preppy one and was likewise done as a humor book. For one thing, Class contained serious criticism along with its snootiness about prole hats.
I see Counter-Currents now recommends that potential contributors read “‘Speak, That I May See Thee,’ chapter 7 of Paul Fussell, Class…” I guess because it is a fine model of understated yet witty critical writing? https://bit.ly/3W6qWhy
As a child of the ‘80’s, the word “preppy” always reminds me of the not so nice nickname that A.C. Slater used to refer to Zach Morris on Saved By The Bell.
As soon as I read ‘preppy’ in the title I closed my eyes and made a bet it’d be Margot. ‘That’s a bingo!’
I remember The Preppy Handbook very well, but not a lot of what it said. I do recall a Preppy term calling a toilet the porcelain Honda. Amazing what stays in your mind. Also , a type to avoid was someone who was fond of German films…AVOID. But I don’t recall much else.
Fussell’s Class is a good book, although he claimed it was not to be taken seriously.
I noted race was never discussed in it, and sent him a note asking why he ignored race. No reply, but since he was a liberal, of course he wouldn’t reply. I think it’s a shame Fussell is known for Class while his other books are ignored, especially Wartime, his study of WWII on the popular mind. Very insightful, especially on the use of propaganda and the way literature and writers approached the war. Fussell was very bitter about the war, as his memoirs showed.
I think his class observations were fun and fairly well true. Also, Buckley, like Vidal, were both middle class who copied the upper class. As for class X…aren’t we all class X on Countercurrents?
Love Story…I remember that VERY well. It was, like trendy stuff, everywhere, then nowhere. I was at Woolworth’s and read it in a half-hour, showing its literary worth. I saw the movie, and it propelled Ryan O’Neal’s career, sorry to say. Ali McGraw as well, although she was already in Goodbye Columbus as a Jewish girl (which she is), and was pretty believable as a Jewish preppy of sorts, wooed by Richard Benjamin, definitely a class X. She was in everything…then nothing. Sic transit gloria Hollywood.
What I remember most about it was her character played harpsichord, and I bought the LP because I got to hear classical music, a couple of snatches in the film, and I was crazy to hear anything classical. My home town had no culture…a real prole universe, as Mr. Fussell would correctly observe…and I enjoyed hearing a movement from a flute sonata by Mozart, and Bach’s allegro assai from his violin concerto in E (arranged for keyboard). That’s what I owe to Love Story; loving Bach and Mozart instead of Ali McGraw. I made the right choice.
Ryan O’Neal, who escaped daytime soap operas by entering “the continuing story of Peyton Place” as the elder brother of Christopher Connelly (much cuter), was hereby propelled into roles where his dimwitted woodenness was precisely apt. I give you Barry Lyndon, one of Kubrick’s best, where O’Neal was perfectly cast. Then you have Paper Moon, which I’ve never understood.
Ali MacGraw’s Jewishness ebbs like the Solway and flows like its tide. She first put out the notion that she was part Jewish when cast in Goodbye, Columbus. For a long time she was a quarter-Jewish. Now you’ll read in Wiki that her mother was a Hungarian Jewess. Clearly she lied at the beginning and still lies now, and her mother may well have been a Magyar named O’Finnerty.
Ali was supposed to be featured in the “Gray Matter” episode of Breaking Bad, the cringey subplot where Walt gives Elliot Schwartz a package of ramen noodles for his big birthday bash….but her cameo was cut.
This brings back memories of books and ideas that were trending in the early 1980s. Do you remember from 1982 the book Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche by Bruce Feirstein? It poked fun at the trend of “sensitive” men brought about by feminism and the counter-culture. Real men don’t tolerate being henpecked by shrews. Real men don’t wear ponytails nor man buns. The beginning of the Reagan era was very anti-1960s. The public was ready for “morning in America”, a fresh start, a new beginning, a return to sanity.
Margot: Mentioning Ryan O’Neal to me is like the Three Stooges scene where mentioning “Niagara Falls”. makes one wild and savage. He’s such a clunk, and I have never watched Barry Lyndon again because I simply cannot stand him. Ugh.
I think he wound up in a lot of British films because they assumed he was the American ideal…there are English actors here who get parts in our films for the same reason. Same reason I never watched Paper Moon. Ever.
Kubrick had planned to make a film about Napoleon, but somehow it just never jelled and went beyond budget, so Barry Lyndon was made.
Angelo: I remember Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, or at least seeing it in bookstore racks then. Alas, much of the Reagan “morning” was more clouded than truly sunny, and the return to real men seemed to dim once Clinton came in. The trend to male ‘sensitivity’ was just too hard to buck, not to mention the juggernaut of feminism. When Clinton said Hilary would be his “co-president” that was a warning that the Reagan revolution, such as it was, was over.
I only ate quiche once in my life. I was in an Air Force hospital, and had an operation, and quiche was my first post-op meal. I threw it up. True man?
I wouldn’t refuse a quiche just to put on a macho act, though being health oriented I might refuse eating it due to it being too fattening to have on a regular basis. Like pizza, quiche is a treat.
You threw up your quiche? That might be a sign of temporary demonic possession. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0c6dmZq4iM
“Slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch…”
The Three Stooges’ “Niagara Falls” routine was a variant of an old vaudeville routine with many catchphrases. Abbott & Costello did it as “Susquehanna Hats.”
“Susquehanna Hats! Slowly I turned, step by step…”
Ryan O’Neal’s vapidness was perfect for Barry Lyndon, I thought. He’s just the guy to lose his horse and bag of gold to Captain Feeney.
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