Penney Dreadful

In five interminable installments of The Bag Lady Papers for The Daily Beast, Alexandra Penney recounts her experience as one of Bernard Madoff's victims. She chronicles the horrors of maintaining a rich woman's life, now beyond her means.

Some examples of her plight:

Ironing her own shirts
Fearing not traveling abroad
Eating at the Four Seasons on a developing nation's dime
Figuring out how to get to her friend's private jet, when she doesn't have the cab fare.

Even she acknowledges that her Marie Antoinette antics have provoked outrage, but the fact is, despite the initial knee-jerk reaction, her story, as she tells it, just isn't all that compelling.

It doesn't help that her writing is distractingly craptacular. It's an outpouring of pure id, a kind of Diary of a Mad White Woman. She has an unfortunate weakness for cutesy faux-French phrases ("J'Refuse to obsess about him") and insipid acronyms ("When you become a PORC (Person of Reduced Circumstances) with major bag-lady fears, you grab any freebie advice you can get"). Her thoughts exist in a binary state between unctuous shout-outs to her rich friends and anger at Madoff. A typical example:

Two nights ago, I was slurping Cristal—probably $200 a bottle—and having a fabuloso dinner with my seriously brilliant and dearest friend Richard, who is editor of a major magazine, and his marvelous wife Jennifer. Several years ago, he called and offered me a commercial-photography job—my first ever. We've been blood-close ever since. We talk or email at least once a day.

With writing this bad, it's hard not to judge. Penney is a former editor-in-chief of Self magazine, so one expects that the bar might be raised slightly higher than the average Adult Ed course. Ok, so Self isn't exactly Granta, but they couldn't find someone who could schmooze AND compose a decent paragraph about exercise or whatever?

As someone who's biggest gripe about losing her shirt, is figuring out who is now going to iron her shirts, Penney is inflamed by injustice only when it happens to her. If she still had her millions, would she really be calling the SEC "disgusting, cowardly, and arrogant"? Or disparaging Linda Thomsen for having a "weird crooked-mouth grin." No, she'd probably be toasting Cristal with them, just as she is now with the remaining jet-set friends she so desperately clings to. Who knows whom they've screwed over? As long as someone else is footing the bill, does she really care?

Penney is noteworthy not because of what Bernie Madoff did to her, but because she illustrates how someone can be professionally successful, taken seriously by media brahmins (lookin' at you, Tina Brown), hobnob with movers and shakers... and still be completely, mind-blowingly inane. We're not shocked that she fell, but that she ever rose at all. It's amazing how an abundant sense of entitlement, a total lack of self awareness and a penchant for kissing rich ass can so thoroughly compensate for absence of talent or substantive skill. She may be self-made, but in reality, she's just an isotope of the George W. Bush brand of plutocracy, and she's doing everything she can to clamber back on the bus. Or private jet.

If she makes it, good for her. The world has a place for strivers. But listening to her keen at full volume, one wonders if Madoff wasn't exacting a kind of moral justice by preying upon some of the people who kinda sorta deserved it.

Read it here, if you must.

[Daily Beast]