Land of Iron Giants: It's all About the Closets

Rich people, I've decided, have very neat closets. They have cleaning ladies, personal assistants, personal shoppers, housekeepers, nannies. I doubt they have anything to do with the state of their clothing, but a well-organized closet is a thing of beauty. The only one we have of any consequential size is the black hole of Calcutta and I can't seem to get a handle on it no matter how much I toss out and rearrange.

Several years ago I was friends with a rich kid. He was my roommate in a house I lived in for a while, a big place with a pool up off Laurel Canyon. I was just subletting, a temporary crash pad between relationships. It was me and two guys - the rich trust-fund kid, and a screenwriter who was about to be nominated for an Oscar, making way too much money to be living in the bachelor squalor we called home.

They had a lot of parties, the kind where people showed up because they'd heard about it on the Strip at one of the many clubs. Even the pizza delivery guy, who came one night to my poker game, stood at the doorway with the pie, looked at the living room and said, 'hey, this is the place with all the cool parties.' My poker buddies were impressed, but they'd never tried to get rid of the black-fingernail and chain-through-the nose gang who arrived at midnight, sucked up the last of the beer, and lounged in our bedrooms until daybreak. The only way we could get rid of them was by playing "Ebony and Ivory" over and over really loud until they hissed like vampires spying a patch of sun and found some other place to crash.

But to an in-betweener like me, the parties were a welcome distraction, and when you have rich roommates, they usually have one or two equally rich friends. Food and drink were plentiful, locations tended to be large acreage abodes with lots of toys.

Mark*, the trust-fund guy, (now a semi-famous music reviewer for a major newspaper) liked to have parties at his parent's BelAir spread when they were at their Malibu weekend place. We went there too, to ride horses, but I preferred the town gatherings because I didn't have to keep up with his parents, experienced horse people who liked to take their mounts into steep canyons and up even steeper hills. To me, that's not riding, that's holding on for dear life.

Mark's family home off the curvy end of Sunset Blvd. was a huge place, owned at different times by movie stars and music moguls. The main house was built to look like a French chateau, and the California modern guest house had four bedrooms and a great view of the ocean. There were two pools, (one for the guests) a tennis court, and so many different gardens, I never did explore them all.

The focus of this large estate was the water feature. This wasn't your ordinary pool, but a large and elaborate man-made lake complex complete with bridges, waterfalls to jump off, hidden coves, step-in warm spots (sort of invisible hot tubs), swim-up bar, and rope swings. It was crazy-sick, and we spent many days doing nothing but living in bikinis, eating Mark's parents' food, drinking their booze, and generally living higher on the hog than any of us had a right to do.

While we had free reign of the property during these playdates, the house always seemed forbiddingly cold and uninviting. It had that 'parent-space' feel to it, and even though we were all well over 30, being in the house made you feel like you were still in high school. No-one really ventured past the well-stocked kitchen, but you could see many rooms in shuttered darkness, every piece of furniture and drapery chosen by a decorator who's name was Otto.

One day, I decided to venture up the grand, curving staircase. I'm not sure why, and certainly had no business poking around in the parent space. Architecturally it was of no interest - predictable, despite the attempts to infuse some European flavor into what was essentially an expensive version of a tract home. The top floor was also in semi-darkness, quiet underfoot with thick carpeting.

In the master wing, I found his parents room, a cavernous space done to death in the soon-to-be out-of style of the day, lots of tropical-themed heavy cherry pieces, Tommy Bahama prints, damask-pillowed furnishings arranged artfully and never used. Ensuite his and her bathrooms of course, sunken tubs, lots of marble, chrome, thick terry towels on heated racks, walk-in steam room and showers with pans the size of dinner plates. I passed through all these public spaces and headed straight for the closets.

This room was the high point of my tour. The size and scope of all the organizational woodwork inside them was not the main event, though the number, shape, and size of the drawers, hanging spaces, and cubbyholes was impressive. I spent little time with the mother's predictable, bejewelled collection of gowns and shoes. No, it was the father's closet that fascinated. Before me was a long row of suits that stretched for at least 30 feet at mid-chest height. More suits than you'd see in Gucci on a good day. Or Men's Suit Warehouse, for that matter, if they had the kind of thousand-dollar bespoke labels Mark's dad, a financial broker, preferred.

Despite the grand scale living I'd been cavorting in all summer, this is where I realized that rich people really did live differently than the rest of us. The suits told all: They were each beautifully pressed and hung exactly 6 inches apart on heavy wooden hangers, organized by color and shade, going from the deepest black, through every shade of the black/greys, and on into light summer wools of smoke, twilight, and fawn. At the far end, there were even a couple of crisp, white linen numbers that Tom Wolfe would have given his fedora for.

The intimacy of the man's collection of perfectly and lovingly organized power wear finally jarred me out of my looky-loo reverence. With a guilty start, I crept back out, certain I had disturbed something in this pristine environment and I would be found out as the voyeur I was. There wasn't a dust mote to be seen, a hair out of place, and the temperature-controlled air smelled like a spring day in a cedar forest.

When I try to make sense of the unholy mess that our sad version of a walk-in closet is, I think about that dark, cool, room, with everything neatly in its place, as remote and foreign to my experience as the ease with which men like him squandered my 401K and moved on. He was entitled to 200 suits, and my life savings helped pay for it.

Truth be told, I didn't really like the house. Or the pool. I'll take a real Ontario lake over that overblown monstrosity any day.

* name changed to protect the innocent rich guy