Curse of the Nepo Baby

It’s tough living up to a legacy you never earned.

Laid up with Covid last week, I was bed-rotting and doom-scrolling when the algo served up another deranged himbo dispatch from Jack Schlossberg, only grandson of JFK. If you missed it—or wisely avoid Instagram—here’s the gist: he is bravely boycotting this year’s Met Gala.

“I love to party and I’ve been to the Met Gala before. I had a great time,” Jack informs us. “But this year, with so much happening around the world, and at home, I cannot in good conscience go to the Met Gala…”

Good to know, right? We were all wondering.

In case he’s flown under your radar, here’s a quick rundown on Jack Schlossberg: son of multi-millionaires Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, double grad from Harvard and Yale, and once hyped by mainstream media for his enviable hair reminiscent of his hunky late uncle, John F. Kennedy Jr. For a while, he was even floated as a future star of the floundering Democrat Party—but that buzz has cooled, likely thanks to his increasingly oddball TikTok rants. Here he is, for example, swearing off restaurants. Trenchant stuff.

After watching him swear off Anna Wintour’s annual freak show—which now feels more like a zombie parade passing through a wake for Western civilization—I had two thoughts:

1) Wintour must regret naming young Schlossberg a Vogue special political correspondent in the run-up to last year’s election. Then again, that kind of appointment is par for the course at Condé Nast, where overworked editors are routinely tasked with turning the ramblings of pedigreed mediocrities into something vaguely readable.

2) Young Jack is an example of a familiar archetype, one of endless morbid fascination: the Nitwit Nepo Baby.

Throughout history, in fiction and real life, Nitwit Nepo Baby barges into the frame. A mix of inherited power and personal ineptitude, he personifies the underbelly of dynasty and the pitfalls of unearned privilege. Where would we ever be without him?

I mean that sincerely.

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Spoiled, ineffectual heirs—real or fictional—scratch a deep psychological itch. Part of it is schadenfreude: we take pleasure in seeing the unworthy fumble their power and privilege. But it’s a guilty pleasure watching the inevitable spiral—where will they land? How messy will it get?

Modern-era TV showrunners love spoilt nepo-disasters. Jesse Armstrong wrote four of them into his hit series Succession, all flailing magnificently under the weight of legacy, especially Connor, a man so painfully out of touch, he thinks he has a shot at the White House.

Now airing on Paramount is the excellent MobLand. It features an evil little oik named Eddie Harrigan. Cut from the same cloth as Joffrey Baratheon of Game of Thrones, young Eddie sulks around his gangster granddad’s Cotswold estate, complaining to his grandmother how “everyone thinks I’m a c***.” (He’s not wrong). If there was a BAFTA category for “Character with the Most Punchable Face,” actor Anson Boon would be shoo-in…

Like GoT’s Joffrey, we already know young Eddy will meet a violent end—à la Fredo Corleone in The Godfather. There’s an unwritten rule in drama: petulant, entitled punks must be punished.

Shakespeare had an eye for dynastic decay. He wrote many such characters into his plays, either as tragic or comic, but always weakened rather than strengthened by legacy. No shortage in the history of Europe’s royals either: Carlos II of Spain, grotesquely inbred and barely functional; Ludwig II of Bavaria, a man-child who bankrupted his kingdom building fairy-tale castles before being quietly removed (and possibly drowned); and George IV of the UK, remembered less for governing than for his gluttony and vanity.

Today, we can add Pitiful Prince Harry and his uncle, Prince Andrew, to the list of nepo-dimwits. Both are members of a uniquely British category of the genre: “the upper-class twit.” Andrew lost all remaining shreds of dignity and respect when he told the world a war injury prevented him from sweating. Poor Harry just lost a battle to have British taxpayers furnish his security detail while visiting the UK, overlooking the fact that nobody in the UK wants him to visit. Harry and Andrew descend from the OG Nepo Nitwit and ultimate upper-class twit—Edward VIII. While Churchill battled to save the free world, Edward sulked over china patterns and Wallis’s wardrobe.

In America, there’s ex-crackhead and affluenza victim Hunter Biden—a man handed every conceivable opportunity who spent eye-watering sums on hookers and once snorted parmesan cheese; who took up with his late brother’s widow, addicted her to crack and convinced his family to pretend all this was normal.

Poor Hunter almost gets a pass—tragic childhood, losing his mother and sister in a car crash, dad remarrying the nanny, then spending years on the road chasing the presidency. Add a golden-boy older brother who dies of brain cancer and you have a textbook Ordinary People setup—IE: the burden of survivor’s guilt and fear that the wrong one died.

Then again, there’s always someone willing to carry water for Nitwit Nepo Baby, for whom a well-placed connection to a plum job is always at hand. No expense—or institution—was spared to shield Hunter from consequences. The G-men, high-paid lawyers and, finally, a presidential pardon cleaned up all his messes. To help pay his bills, money moved discreetly through the art world, with the help of a gallerist happy to crown Hunter “one of the most consequential artists of this century.” OK. Sure. **wink**

As the old Chinese saying goes, many rush to prop up a falling wall.

That said, I don’t envy Nitwit Nepo Baby. Inborn advantage and what you do with it versus overcoming childhood hell is the chiaroscuro of American life. Curiously, nothing turns Jack Schlossberg into a tempestuous toddler like JD Vance. His spittle-flecked TikTok rants against the Vice President, which the media calls ‘expert trolling,” hint at the psychic shame of inborn privilege.

If only young Jack had some rough seas to hone his sailing skills, like his hero grandfather and namesake. After his boat was sunk by an enemy ship, John F. Kennedy swam for hours through enemy waters, towing a wounded crewmate by a life jacket strap clenched between his teeth. If only grandson Jack—who spends his days firing off snarky Instagram posts—could have been so lucky.