Snobs’ Old Rules? Sniff.

According to the man who wrote the book on snobbery, Los Angeles has recently become an address one can announce with the quiet arrogance so long reserved for the denizens of a few bergs on the Eastern Seaboard. “It’s still not exactly Florence, mind you, “ says Joseph Epstein, an essayist and author of the recently published “Snobbery: the American Version,” (Houghton Mifflin) “but if that’s what hell looks like, I don’t think I’ll mind it a bit. And that’s hard for a snobographer like myself to admit.”

That L.A. is a city of power and prestige is just one of the things Epstein finds himself admitting. Quite early in his treatise, he explains the roots of his own snobbery, which is a very wise decision. Because if you’re going to write a 251-page book in which you define a snob by quoting Balzac and Proust (though mercifully not in the original French) and chastise name-droppers while offhandedly quoting everyone from Mao Tse-tung to Mike Nichols, if you’re going to include a bio reminding everyone that you were, for two decades, the editor of the American Scholar whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s, then it is a good idea to cop to your own blind spots right up front.

“The great thing is to recognize snobbery and be amused by it,” he says from his home outside Chicago. “But I still have to be on guard all the time. For instance, it pleases me to write for the New Yorker. But I have to ask myself, ‘Is the pleasure genuine or is it a snobbish thing?’ Is it because saying, ‘I write for the New Yorker’ impresses some people? You would think all my years writing about all this would have freed me from this baloney,” he says, whittling his professorial voice into a petulant whine, “but it doesn’t always.”

The main point of what is a very amusing and insightful book is that snobbery is alive and well, but all the rules have changed. The age of the WASP, Epstein argues, is over (Someone should probably cc: Ralph Lauren, Tom Wolfe and the folks at Restoration Hardware) and in its place a new social caste system has risen, one based more on image than breeding.

After quickly working his way through a history of snobbery in America, Epstein gets down to the modern categories--including education, politics, fashion, fame--and by the time he is through, many of our modern sacred cows--from Susan Sontag and the New York Review of Books to the new hipness of middle age--have been reduced from icons to snob fetishes.

“When the style pages replaced the society pages,” says Epstein, “then we knew the world was now a different place.”

A place where one’s car, one’s profession, one’s nearness to celebrity, even one’s choice of balsamic vinegar can carry more social weight than one’s family tree. In this new world, almost anything goes. Previous political disenfranchisement--Epstein uses gays and Jews as his examples--now conveys status. A new breed of “virtucrats” manages to trump any real understanding of political theory with sentimentality for the often ill-defined masses. And where once most Americans were happy just to send their children through college, now even the lower middle class yearns to utter a sentence that includes the words “my daughter, who’s at Stanford, you know....”

The fact that there is a hierarchy of water--not of water rights but bottled water--reveals a society at once highly stratified and hopelessly flailing. The modern snob often seems to be making it up as he goes along, desperately hoping that Vanity Fair or Maxim notices in time.

Of course, none of this will come as a surprise to Angelenos.

Old money in this town is anything that predates the latest Viacom merger, and the fact that there is still a Los Angeles Blue Book would come as a surprise to most citizens (including many of those listed in it). This city was, and continues to be, a sanctuary from the repressive traditions of the East, a place where fortunes are made, not inherited, where the A-list is so elastic that one can be on it one month and off the next and the only thing that’s changed is a decimal point at the box office.

If the new currency in social stature is image, then Los Angeles is Fort Knox. From baby strollers to colonics, from literature to video games, every industry has its hierarchy and if one is not available, a good snob will arbitrarily choose “the best.”

“Personal trainers, stylists, hair colorists, plastic surgeons, chefs--everyone has ‘their’ person, and their person is the best,” says Merle Ginsberg who, as entertainment editor of W and Women’s Wear Daily, divides her time between L.A. and New York. “Usually because they also work for the big stars. Which makes sense because they, in turn, are going to have access to the very best things--first pick of the designers, first look at the new art. Whatever.”

The current secession crisis is really the result of decades-long snobbery. Oh, supporters say they are irate over inequitable distribution of resources, but we know they’re just tired of all the Valley jokes.

The fickle heart of L.A. snobbery is, of course, Hollywood. “There is as much of a food chain in L.A. as there is in Washington,” says Graydon Carter, editor in chief of Vanity Fair. “Because these are essentially one-industry towns.” A reliable shorthand to Hollywood’s social structure is the demarcation between the “above the line” talent--actors, directors, producers and, if one is being generous or speaking of Tom Stoppard, screenwriters--and “below the line,” which is everyone else.

“Producers think it’s beneath them to have dinner with screenwriters unless they’re Steve Gagin. This year,” says Carter. “And it isn’t about money, because some of the richest people in town are television writers, and they seem to eat at pizza parlors, mostly. I would say the hierarchy goes: movies, music, television.”

Epstein calls name-dropping “social-climbing on the cheap,” but in this town, one’s car or condiments matter not if it is possible to say with any sort of plausibility: “Sorry, I couldn’t get back to you yesterday. I was over at Tom and Rita’s.”

There is a mild irony in this. “Back in the old days, the Blue Ribbon ladies looked down on what they called show-biz,” says Wanda McDaniel, a former society editor and now a PR rep for Armani. Still, Hollywood-based snobbery is hard to pin down because Hollywood is one of those tantalizing, moth-murdering lights that allows Americans to believe they live in a classless society. Overnight, the mythology goes, one’s fortune can change if only one is in the right place at the right time. Hence, Epstein says, a real snob must have constant reassurance that she or he is getting the right invitations, sitting at the right tables or shopping at the right stores (as if briefly sharing Barneys shoe department with Julia Roberts denotes a relationship).

An invitation to the Vanity Fair Oscar party is one of L.A.’s golden tickets. Yet Carter claims it is a very democratic party--once you’re in, there’s no VIP area. Because, of course, the whole thing is a VIP area. In using the word “democratic” to describe an exclusive event, Carter is straddling the narrow border between elitism and snobbery. With the exception of Dominick Dunne, most real snobs know that to claim snobbery is tacky. Elizabeth Familian, who publishes the L.A. Masterplanner, the social calendar of the city’s elite, says there is no snobbery in L.A. because “anyone who is willing to roll up their sleeves and work can get onto the A-list.”

Even Epstein agrees that not everyone on the A-list is a snob. Everyone is entitled to elitism--the idea that certain things are superior to others. But a snob finds it necessary to make those who don’t have, don’t know, or weren’t invited feel bad about it.

On the way up the social ladder, says Carter, snobbery is seeking out certain people for all the wrong reasons. “And once you’re established, snubbing certain people for the same wrong reasons.”

Youth and beauty have long been the most helpful tools when climbing that ladder, and that remains true, especially in Los Angeles. “I have to remember never to eat bread when I’m in L.A.,” says Ginsberg. “People look down on you if you’re a woman and you eat bread. I swear they do.”

Other key accouterments include airplanes, East Coast architects and paintings, says Carter. “Paintings clean up a lot of things. Thirty years ago it was books, but now most Angelenos just use them for coasters.”

Comments like that are constant reminders of L.A.’s long history of being on the receiving end of snobbery, especially New York snobbery, (although Carter is quick to assure that New Yorkers spend hardly any time thinking about Angelenos, so obsessed are they with themselves). But as Epstein points out, all snobbery is at some level defensive, and indefensible.

The man who defines himself by his new BMW is doomed to be deflated the moment a Bentley pulls up beside him. Which may explain why in L.A., where almost every luxury or sports car will inevitably be snickered at by a parking attendant who has just put away the newer Titanium model, the new status car is the electric hybrid. “It is quite amazing,” says Arianna Huffington, who neatly traverses several of L.A.’s inner circles. “All these people who could afford the most luxurious cars are driving these things. It’s a sort of ‘greener than thou’ attitude.”

Many Angelenos have developed a busier-than-thou snobbery as well. For the elite, there is simply not enough time in the day, and so on the ninth day, God created cell phones and other gadgets--proof of one’s indispensability to the universe. Which then allows free time to be seen as the next status symbol. Golf, for example, has long been the sport of the elite, mainly because it involved a lot of expense--equipment, lessons, country club membership, etc. But now it’s the time required that’s the real currency. “Having four free hours to devote to a game of golf is the ultimate symbol of being ahead of the game,” says Bill Higgins, a reporter at Variety.

Vacations are also planned and evaluated for maximum image-building. Educational trips, whether a long weekend at the Sun Valley Writer’s conference or a two-week excursion to the Galapagos, have replaced cruises to the Caribbean, says Armani’s McDaniel. “Anywhere you can reach by commercial airline is out now,” says Carter. “Further away, harder to get to, places that require chartering a plane or hiring a guide, those are the high-powered vacations now.”

Although McDaniel admits there is still a lot of cachet in having “the good Armani, the Armani that never hits the floor,” she says she is seeing an almost anti-snobbery becoming the new snobbery. With millionaires and outlet malls flourishing at about the same rate, anyone can have more, so now people want less. Sort of.

“It used to be what you drove; now people want to be around other people whose values line up with theirs.” Rather than have a huge blowout in some hot restaurant, she says, “the cool thing is to have a low-key birthday party where every seat is filled by a real friend.”

Of course, if one of those real friends happens to be Tom Hanks, well, so much the better.