U.S. author Birmingham chronicled celebrity and wealth
Stephen Birmingham, an author whose frothy books of social history, such as Our Crowd and The Rest of Us, were bestselling sagas of American aristocracy, often viewed through the lens of ethnic minorities, died Nov. 15 at his home in New York City. He was 86.
The cause was lung cancer, said his longtime partner, Edward Lahniers.
Birmingham began his literary career as a novelist, dissecting the manners of the prepschool class, before turning his attention to what he called New York’s “other society” — the German-Jewish dynasties that had dominated Manhattan’s banking and brokerage circles for a century.
Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York became a No. 1 bestseller in 1967, was made into a musical and launched a literary franchise for Birmingham as a chronicler of wealth and celebrity.
He wrote other non-fiction accounts of life among the upper echelons of Jewish, Irish, African-American and old-line Anglo-Saxon society. He also published biographies of first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and socialite Wallis Warfield Simpson, as well as several novels.
He chose his subjects for a simple reason: “I think rich people are more interesting than poor people,” he quipped in 1984. “You know, sometimes I feel rather sorry for the rich, because I’m practically the only one who’s paying any attention to them.”
Our Crowd, which focused on the little-known world of German Jewish families in New York, proved to be something a landmark and was hailed in Newsweek as a “sprightly, delightfully gossipy social history.”
Birmingham, who was of Irish and British ancestry and was not Jewish, had attended the exclusive Hotchkiss prep school in Connecticut with descendants of several families who controlled financial empires established in the 19th century.
He became fascinated with the idea of exploring the social and commercial lives of the Lehmans, Warburgs, Guggenheims, Schiffs and other families he called, correctly or not, “the closest thing to aristocracy that the city, and perhaps the country, had seen.”
He followed the same breezy formula in The Grandees: America’s Sephardic Elite (1971) and The Rest of Us: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews (1984), which looked at the rise of such 20th-century figures as movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn and gangster Meyer Lansky.
His best sources, Birmingham said, were elderly women who loved to talk about their friends and relatives.
“If you get an old lady with all her marbles and lots of time on her hands to pull out family scrapbooks, show the locks of baby hair, share all the memories,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1987, “it can be quite wonderful.”
Birmingham’s books flew off the shelves and made him something of a celebrity in his own right, with appearances on Johnny Carson’s and Merv Griffin’s talk shows.
When he turned to other social groups in Real Lace: America’s Irish Rich (1973) and Certain People: America’s Black Elite (1977), Birmingham began to lose his footing.
Certain People, in particular, met with hostile reviews as critics questioned Birmingham’s conclusions and the premise of a white man writing about the inner workings of black society.
“I’ve never wanted to write a scholarly tome bristling with footnotes, because I don’t like to read that sort of book for pleasure,” he told the Miami Herald in 1984. “I feel I’m in show business. I’m an entertainer who first wants to entertain myself. What’s wrong with that?”