Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time
How Mamie Fish, Queen of the Gilded Age, Partied Her Way to Power
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From the author of Madame Restell and Get Well Soon, a biography of Mamie Fish that explores how women used parties and social gatherings to gain power and prestige.
Marion Graves Anthon Fish, known by the nicknames “Mamie” and “The Fun-Maker,” threw the most epic parties in American history. This Gilded Age icon brought it all: lavish decor; A-list invitees; booze; pranks; and large animal guest stars. If you were a member of New York high society in the Peak Age of Innocence Era, you simply had to be on Mamie Fish’s guest list. Mamie Fish understood that people didn’t just need the formality of prior generations — they needed wit and whimsy.
Make no mistake, however: Mamie Fish’s story is about so much more than partying. In Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time, readers will learn all about how Fish and her friends shaped the line of history, exerting their influence on business, politics, family relationships, and social change through elaborate social gatherings. In a time when women couldn’t even own property, let alone run for office, if women wanted any of the things men got outside the home—glory, money, attention, social networking, leadership roles—they had to do it by throwing a decadent soiree or chairing a cotillion.
To ensure people would hear and remember what she had to say, Mamie Fish lived her whole life at Volume 10, becoming famous not by playing the part of a saintly helpmeet, but by letting her demanding, bitchy, hilarious, dramatic freak flag fly. It's time to let modern readers in on the fun, the fabulousness, and the absolute ferocity that is Ms. Stuyvesant Fish—and her inimitable legacy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Wright (Madaem Restell) offers a jaunty biography of the wealthy Gilded Age matron known as "The Fun-Maker." Before Mamie Fish (1853–1915) broke onto the East Coast scene, high society was run by fearsome old-money scions like Caroline Astor; it was stiff, snobbish, and often caused people to break down in tears for fear of being snubbed. Mamie found it all terribly boring. Wielding a "pile of gold" from her husband, railroad president Stuyvesant Fish, Mamie threw parties that became the talk of the town (and country): donkeys with gold-painted hooves carrying party favors, a ballroom decked out as a "Satanic Flower Garden." She loved mayhem, and once intentionally released white mice at a party just to see her guests scream. She was mean and biting (she once ran over a man three times with a car; he lived), and she loudly aligned herself with the anti-suffrage movement. Wright often draws comparisons to the modern day: at times these make Mamie's social scene feel zingily relevant, but other times the comparisons yank the reader out of the era with references to Instagram and trad wives. The book is least convincing when Wright insinuates that Mamie's partying carries significant weight to this day, given that even Mamie herself was dissatisfied with the "triviality in which she drowned her time." Still, it's a breezy, easy look at a colorful Gilded Age impresario.
