Richard Stengel, The Talk of the Town, “Trust Funding
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Richard Stengel, The Talk of the Town, “Trust Funding,” The New Yorker, July 17, 1995, p. 23
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- ABSTRACT: Signed Talk story about a trust-funding chain letter written by Orphanage Trust currently circulating around Hollywood. Some names of charitable donors are chiselled in marble, others glide out of the fax machine like a press release. "Dear--: I have been asked to take part in an exercise to raise at least $250,000 to help the Romanian Orphanage Trust." This letter, which arrived last week, asks for three dollars--"no more," it warns--to help a British charity support Romanian families willing to offer homes to Romanian orphans. It then asks for one more thing: "Please retype this letter on your own letterhead and send it to ten individuals." Demi Moore did. So did Kate Capshaw. Ditto Kevin Kline and Mary Ellen Zemeckis (wife of Robert). As with the self-conscious chain letter that seeped out of Hollywood several years ago promising good luck to those who passed it on and bad luck to those who didn't, photocopied lists of recipients are enclosed in each new appeal. The lists are prime examples of the nineties phenomenon of celebrity friendship--the ethos of "I'm not a celebrity myself, but some of my best friends are," which has made introductions such as the following routine: "You know Jill, don't you? She's a friend of Barbra Streisand's." Thomas Aquinas declared charity the root of all virtue, the Latin caritas being the translation of the Greek word agape, which signified the reciprocal spiritual love between God and man. But charity today is rarely spiritual, and, since three dollars is not a great deal of money, the Orphanage Trust is depending not on the quantity of the donation but on the quantity of donors. The Orphanage Trust letter is actually an altruistic Ponzi scheme, a benign pyramid where the money--more than two hundred thousand dollars in the last two years--goes directly to the beneficiaries. "The letter is by far the most efficient fund-raising we do," says Don McCready, the chief executive of the charity. "Because it's free."
1995 Jul 17