Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
When the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman was dreaming up his doomed utopian city, The Line, he’d sometimes bring an entourage of up to 50 people to inspect designs. They would follow him in silence until he praised something. Then, a city planner recalled to the FT, the entourage would chorus: “Love it.”
It’s a vignette of the current boom in the flattery industry. Somebody’s job title might be luxury hotel concierge, personal trainer, wealth manager, Elon Musk “loyalist” or cabinet secretary, but the actual job is often flatterer.
It’s possibly the oldest profession. The first flatterers were courtiers, and the job is constantly permutating. In PG Wodehouse’s 1935 short story The Nodder, a Hollywood studio employs a “senior Yes-Man”, “Vice-Yesser”, “junior Yes-Man”, and a tier below, “Nodders”, who nod wordlessly when the boss speaks.
But never before have there been so many rich people requiring flattery. The number of “everyday millionaires”, with assets between $1mn and $5mn, has more than quadrupled since 2000 to about 52mn, estimates UBS.
Meanwhile, bosses today need more flattery because they have greater autonomy. Companies now tend to stay private rather than float. Ever more states are becoming autocracies. In fact, the spheres of autocracy, luxury and wealth management are merging.
The flattery industry remains old-fashioned, its work not yet disintermediated by tech. The wealthiest people can afford to surround themselves with actual bodies, who supply live flattery. Brooke Harrington writes in Capital without Borders, her study of wealth managers and their relationships with the super-rich, that some practitioners even attend their clients’ deathbeds. In flattery jobs, people skills usually trump technical competence.
Those of us unable to afford flattery rarely see the industry at work. Hence the widespread astonishment when it’s glimpsed, often at Donald Trump’s court. Take his cabinet meeting in August, when Labor secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer invited him to admire his “big, beautiful face” on a banner hung outside her department. Special envoy Steve Witkoff rather unimaginatively said Trump should get the Nobel Peace Prize, while agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins thanked the president for “saving college football”.
These people know the etiquette of flattery, because they often receive it themselves. In their world, grovelling is a form of politeness. The tableau of adoring courtiers surrounding Trump resembles a tableau of art advisers surrounding a billionaire collector.
The recipient often understands that the flattery is insincere. That doesn’t matter. It’s a tribute to their status. It’s a recognition that contrary to modern dogma, human relationships are unequal.
The more ludicrous the self-abasement, the greater the proof of loyalty. In her book, Harrington tells the story of a client phoning Eleanor, a wealth manager in Geneva: “I’m outside a restaurant in London and I just lost a bracelet. I need you to find it.” Eleanor found it.
Another favourite technique of the flattery industry is to offer exclusive access. Willem Baars, a veteran Dutch art dealer, says that at 1990s art fairs, “VIP openings” were marginal affairs; these days, three tiers of VIP opening parties are common. Expensive private schools are exclusive-access clubs, often including flattery of children by teachers.
The job of flatterer can be surprisingly high status. Flatterers enjoy vicarious self-identification with clients. Wednesday Martin, in Primates of Park Avenue, her 2015 memoir of New York’s rich, notes “the tendency of brokers, architects and nannies on the Upper East Side to act as though their status and that of their clients or bosses were one and the same”.
And a few flatterers leverage their proximity to join society’s highest ranks. Art advisers and dealers marry famous actors and singers. Several of Trump’s personal lawyers now occupy the US’s highest legal offices. In Russia, Yevgeny Prigozhin rose from presidential caterer, a classic flatterer’s role, to warlord.
Prigozhin’s mistake was launching a coup. Never diss the client. See also Saudi Arabia’s dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, recently shrugged off by Trump. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman,” the president remarked, as MBS sat impassively beside him. Journalists are expected to be flatterers too.
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram
Credit: Source link
