Marty Cortland descended on the back page of D Magazine with the October 2007 issue, offering observations and grievances from life as part of Dallas’ upper crust. Immediately, readers loathed him.
In his debut column, titled “The Downside to Being Only a Little Rich,” Cortland explained why his family had to upgrade from a Lexus SUV to a $95,000 Range Rover. Put simply, he wasn’t wealthy enough to drive anything cheaper. When he proposed a Buick Enclave to his wife:
“My wife looked at me as if I had just suggested that we pack up and move to the M Streets.
“I’m not driving a Buick. There is no way I’m showing up at playgroup at Brook Hollow in a Buick.”
“ ‘But what about Ross Perot?’ I argued. ‘He drives a Crown Vic.’
“ ‘Ross Perot is a billionaire,’ she shrieked. ‘He can afford to drive anything he wants!’ ”
In other columns, Cortland expressed woe over not being wealthy enough to fly private and therefore having to travel uncomfortably close to the “steaming pile of humanity” in first class. He penned a play-by-play of his battle with an accountant regarding the number he owed the government. And he reported on the breathless clambering around the anointed artist of the moment at the TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art gala.
“We buy what we’re told to buy,” Cortland wrote, “and every year we’re told to buy someone else. It’s like fashion. You’re still wearing leather pants? You haven’t given your pashmina shawl to your maid yet? Same with art. That Ross Bleckner piece that you liked so much 10 years ago starts to look like the yellow power tie you used to wear to the Buffalo Club in the ’80s.”
Over the course of 12 back-page installments, Cortland lampooned everyone—those poorer than him, those richer, and certainly, not least, himself. He admitted, after all, to eagerly following all the other moneyed suckers off the cliff of contemporary art.
D Magazine’s blog posts at the time were flooded with commenters litigating whether Cortland was an actual person and whether the rich-guy bit was in any way humorous. Steve Blow wrote a column on the front page of the Dallas Morning News’ Metro section questioning whether Cortland was satire or just obnoxious.
Editor Tim Rogers was both amazed and amused that Cortland could be so misunderstood. “A lot of people just didn’t get that there was a wink and a nod,” Rogers says. “Because it was D Magazine, they just assumed we endorsed this viewpoint, that it’s hard to be rich. It was so arch.”
(Of course, it is also possible that some understood the joke, but their fancies were left untickled. “I don’t think it’s funny to read about women who compare designer shoes while lunching in Highland Park or families who moan about finding a good enough nanny and still have enough to pay for the rest of their ‘personal staff,’ ” wrote one reader, all the way from Missouri.)
The idea for Cortland’s column was hatched in the bar of Al Biernat’s, where Rogers regularly met buddies for an after-work drink. One member of this tippling squad happened to be a man of some means, and one afternoon he mentioned the exorbitant amount he’d paid an electrician to change the light bulbs in his home. While that conversation and the columns to follow twisted the gentleman’s affluent complaints into comedy, the germ of the idea was no joke. The human behind Cortland was, at moments, genuinely struck by his wealth and the life it afforded him. In a column titled “Pity Me. I’m So Rich That I Worry About My Children’s Future,” he came dangerously close to poignancy, writing about his humble Midwestern beginnings and his parents’ attitude toward money, having struggled through the Great Depression.
Rogers points out that Cortland never earned a cent from his columns. His by-the-word fee, around $10,000 for the entire run of the column, was donated to a children’s charity. (The name Marty Cortland, it should be noted, is a pseudonym that Rogers plucked from the Fred Astaire flick You’ll Never Get Rich.)
The series came to an abrupt conclusion after one year, in October 2008, due to, as Rogers briefly mentioned in a blog post, “three words: global economic crisis.” For the columnist’s haters, I am sorry to report that the Great Recession did not cause Cortland to lose his hat; he simply read the room. “The financial crash hit a lot more people than the recent one,” Cortland says today, “and it just didn’t seem funny anymore.” Cortland is wealthier than ever, by the way. “Just not enough,” he says. He spoke over the phone from a family trip on the East Coast. He flew commercial.
This story originally appeared in the August issue of D Magazine with the headline “Peak Obnoxiousness.” Write to holland@dmagazine.com.
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