Oliver Booth dreams of becoming one of the beautiful people of Palm Beach, but with his arrogant personality, his garish wardrobe, and his incompetent stewardship of an antique shop stuffed with gilded Mexican reproductions of classic French designs, there is nothing beautiful about him. Thus it is luck rather than merit that leads Oliver to hire Bernard Dauphin, a young French waiter at a tony Palm Beach club, to serve as his clerk, and Margaret Van Buren, a wealthy society doyenne, to recognize Bernard's skills and send them both to Paris to shop for furniture for her estate. Follow Oliver as he travels with Bernard from Palm Beach to Paris and back again, crossing paths with wealthy layabouts, trophy wives, arrogant interior decorators, and many other bizarre yet all too real members of Palm Beach and Parisian society and experiencing a series of humiliating yet comical misadventures along the way.