Foreword
It is with a great deal of pride that the publishers offer The Hungry Debutante to the reading public, a literary achievement that has been described by advance reviews as "the most important commentary on the ever-changing class war since Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities."
The Hungry Debutante author Cory Randolph, widely read San Francisco society columnist, drew from his first-hand experiences from many years of covering the fables and foibles of the so-called upper crust. Without taking a biased editorial view on the seldom talked-about caste system that exists in the United States, Mr. Randolph skillfully and with subtlety demonstrates vividly what F. Scott Fitzgerald first touched on in his acclaimed novel The Great Gatsby when he wrote, "The rich are very different than you and me."
The Hungry Debutante will make many readers wonder if the privileged members of American society consciously perpetrate a serf system in which the lesser fortunates toil as virtual slaves to unfeeling masters.
When agreeing that this indeed is the case, the reader readily will understand how the events drawn by the author, a symbolic uprising of the oppressed against the offspring of their oppressors, should naturally come to pass.
Author Randolph, replying to critics who have accused him of being unfair for singling out two beautiful young rich girls and making them the targets for the pent-up hatreds and frustrations of the men who serve them, argues that in every war it is the helpless and innocent non-combatants who suffer the harshest treatment.
It is the skillfully drawn Grayson who best illustrates the underdog forces in the never-ending conflict between the haves and have-nots. Employed as a maintenance man at the country club, Grayson has the ideal platform from which to view the milieu of the privileged. He resents the fact that while all men are created equal, the rich are created a little more so. Being a functionary in the pleasure dome of the wealthy, Grayson is unable to deliver the decisive frontal blow to The Establishment; instead he must conduct a guerrilla attack, singling out a token representative from the foe's fortress.
The unfortunate victim is Kathy Carlson, beautiful and virtuous daughter of a prominent professional man. It is hardly a fair contest, but there are no Geneva Convention articles that govern the timeless battle to erase social barriers.
From his years of deprivation and servitude to others, Grayson has developed an animal cunning that has enabled him to survive-with his burning hatred intact. This fundamental instinct, keeping the species alive, has often made Grayson a companion to humiliation and degradation, and it is from cruel lessons in his own experience that he is able to mete out mental anguish to Kathy with methodical precision.
As Grayson represents one level of status, the opposite layer is personified in two persons: Jean, Kathy's best friend, and Craig, Kathy's fiance. With a delicate handling of nuance, author Randolph employs dialogue of revealment and flashback scenes that make the "beautiful people"-as chroniclers of the Jet Set have felt free to not altogether accurately categorize the rich and youthful -come to life on the pages. It may be somewhat shocking for readers to learn that the rich are not free of pettiness, base motives and the other malaises we are prepared to concede to persons who already have more than their share, greed. Nor does this caste that Jean and Craig represent lack in the passions of the flesh, but these two characters are shown to practice their sexual prerogatives with twisted savagery born of prior emotional experiences, Jean with an unwanted fetus in her womb and Craig with his haunting memory of a "woman of the streets."
We commend this valuable human study to the readers. It is a novel of social importance that you will feel compelled to refer to time and time again as some of the social conditions capsuled in these pages begin to take on global implications.
-The Publishers