The Right Places

U.S.A.: The Dwindling Pleasures of the Rich

Those not blessed with wealth or lofty social position often presume that when the rich and well-placed entertain they do so both effortlessly and faultlessly, with perfect ease and taste, unhampered by the work and cares that beset the ordinary host and hostess when they undertake a party. Alas, like so many illusions about the other half and how they live, this one turns out to be no more than that—nowadays, at least. In fact, as the new moneyed American middle class has been turning its attention to culture, travel, education, and other accoutrements of gracious living, they have also discovered the joys—and the importance—of entertaining well, of serving good food and wine in attractive surroundings. The social rich, in the meantime, have been letting down the side badly. In other words, while the new rich have been learning how to do it, the old rich have been forgetting.

In Philadelphia, for example, when the John Ingersolls have friends in for cocktails (it is said in Philadelphia that when a Biddle is drunk he thinks he’s an Ingersoll), it works this way: Mr. Ingersoll takes a bottle of inexpensive domestic gin, empties a little into a cup, and then pours a corresponding amount of inexpensive domestic vermouth into the gin bottle. He then shakes the resulting mixture vigorously, and splashes his concoction—at room temperature—into his guests’ glasses. This procedure, which would horrify not only connoisseurs of the martini but most ordinary mortals as well, is standard procedure here where, after all, Ingersolls are Ingersolls and always have been, and there is little more that need be said.

In New York, meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Wyatt Cooper—she is the former Gloria Vanderbilt—are among the town’s most elegant couples. Mrs. Cooper is not only rich and beautiful, with a model’s figure and a collection of antique dresses and costumes to go with it, along with drawerfuls of jewelry, much of which she has designed herself, but she is also a celebrated painter in her own right. Mrs. Cooper has decorated her East Side town house in a fantasy style so that when guests step inside the door they will have, as she puts it, “a feeling of entering a total collage.” (One bedroom is completely upholstered—walls, floor, ceiling—with a collection of old patchwork quilts.) Gloria Cooper also cares about the way her house smells, and when she has a party, she lights dozens of scented candles (imported from France at twenty-five dollars apiece) and places them in nooks and crannies throughout the house. They are intended to suffuse the air with sweetness and give the place a fairyland glow.

Now all these exotic and costly touches might be delightful to behold—if they always worked. But they don’t. At a recent Cooper party, a seated dinner for twenty-six—with five courses from poached trout to mousse au chocolat, and three wines—all would have been well if it had not been, of all things, for the weather. New York had been having, for early spring, an unseasonably hot night—with the kind of heavy, sticky heat for which New York is infamous. The Cooper house is not air-conditioned, and cannot be: tall French windows throughout prevent the installation of individual units. Though windows were thrown open, not a trace of a breeze stirred in the city, and all the lighted candles seemed merely to add to the heat’s sullen oppressiveness. “I really thought I was going to have to call the party off, it was so uncomfortable,” Mrs. Cooper said. But then she had an idea. She sent out for a number of large industrial-type electric fans, and had these placed as unobtrusively as possible in the corners of the various rooms.

As the Coopers’ guests crowded in, their bodily presences added to the evening’s heat even more and, when it was time for her perspiring friends to be seated at the table, Gloria Cooper whispered to a servant to turn on the fans. The fans came on, with a noise approximating that of a jet takeoff and with a wind that immediately blew out all the candles, plunging the evening’s proceedings into semidarkness and, at the same time, dislodging wigs, hairpieces, and even one pair of false eyelashes. It became a question of breathless heat or windy, noisy darkness. The guests, with wind-tossed hair but cooling brows, reluctantly voted for the latter.

Back in Philadelphia, guests have not forgotten the debutante party of not too many years ago when, as part of the decor, thousands of exotic white butterflies—flown in live from Hawaii—were to be prettily released from a huge satin balloon suspended from the ballroom ceiling. At the scheduled moment, the balloon was opened, and the butterflies came cascading down—all dead, killed by the fire-preventive spray with which the room had been treated.

In Washington, party-giving capital of the country, Mrs. George Bunker, wife of the president of the giant Martin Marietta Company, recently gave a large seated dinner that included, as a first course, Strasbourg pâté. In the kitchen, Mrs. Bunker’s Portuguese-speaking cook apparently confused the tins of costly pâté with some cans containing food for the Bunker cats. By the time the hostess noticed what had happened, her guests were already delightedly exclaiming over the cat food—which had arrived in iced bowls, decorated with watercress and truffles—and so she decided, probably wisely, to let the incident pass without comment. In Westchester County, New York, a hostess in a similar plight was required to use considerably more ingenuity when she saw, to her horror, that her guests, instead of the macédoine of brandied fruits she had ordered, had been served as dessert the combination macaroni-tuna-cheese casserole, left over from a supper that had been fixed for the children several nights before. The guests politely did their best to deal with the chilly and gluey substance, and finally someone asked, “My dear, what is this extraordinary dessert?” The hostess, taking a deep breath, replied, “It’s a niçoise country pudding I discovered in the South of France.”

Obviously, when one entertains on a large scale, things can go wrong in a big way. The Edgar Bronfmans—he is the liquor tycoon—can seat fifty comfortably for dinner in the dining room of their country place, but when Mr. Bronfman wants to attract his wife’s attention on the other side of the room, he must resort to lobbing peanuts at her. On the other hand, not all the rich entertain elaborately or at great expense, and a number of them regularly cut corners in ways that verge on the miserly.

In Washington it has long been the rule in the household of Wiley T. Buchanan, former U.S. Chief of Protocol under President Eisenhower, that only guests who are of national prominence may be served their drinks in the Buchanans’ expensive Steuben crystal. Less important guests drink their cocktails in less costly glassware. The practice seems to have something to do with the fact that many of the Buchanan parties are semiofficial entertainments, with press photographers present. The sort of people who get their pictures in the paper, therefore, are photographed at the Buchanans’ sipping from Steuben. The Anchor-Hocking group consists of those about whom the press could not care less.

Washington is a city where entertaining is done for show as well as for business—the business, usually, being politics. Mrs. Perle Mesta, the city’s famous hostess and the inspiration for the musical comedy Call Me Madam, keeps an apartment these days at the Sheraton-Park Hotel—where, according to a persistent rumor in this persistently rumor-ridden city, she is given a nominal rate in return for the phenomenal publicity her parties bring to the place. The Sheraton-Park is certainly very nice to Mrs. Mesta. It performs such extra services, for instance, as opening up any vacant rooms and suites surrounding the Mesta suite when Mrs. Mesta entertains, so that her apartment, actually not all that large, will look larger.

Now, when they are entertained, are the rich dispensers of elaborate hostess presents, or even thank-you notes? It is not so much that they are rude, but, after all, when one goes out so much—there just isn’t enough time in the day to write bread-and-butter letters. At best, a quick telephone call will have to suffice. The same reluctance to spend much time, or money, or even very much thought can be noticed when it comes to such things as wedding presents. At the wedding of Joan Pillsbury, a flour and baking-products heiress, to Jeffery Dupree, it was therefore no surprise to see that one of her mother’s friends had sent her a set of a dozen plastic glasses “for the pool.” An observer also noticed that the wedding gifts included no fewer than eight copies of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

In “dining-out” cities, such as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco (as opposed to eating-at-home cities, such as Boston, Philadelphia, and Detroit), it is possible for the rich to entertain very cheaply simply by going to the most fashionable restaurants. Odd though this sounds, it is much easier to sign an imposing dinner check at a restaurant such as New York’s elegant Le Pavilion than it is to pay cash. The ensuing bill can then be ignored for months—sometimes for years. The richer one is, the longer one can put off paying bills like these. The fancy restaurant (unlike the plumber or even the dentist) would not dream of suing to collect a bill from a rich or famous customer. If it did, it would mean losing that customer’s prestigious, decorative, and publicity-valuable trade. Stuart Levin, the usually unflappable owner of Le Pavilion, merely rolls his eyes and groans when asked about the frequency with which his wealthiest—and most regular—customers pay for their meals and parties.

It is also possible for the rich to entertain in certain restaurants, and never get any sort of bill at all. This is particularly true in New York, a city which has become restaurant-poor, with more expensive dining-out places than it really seems to need. All one needs to give a lavish party for nothing is determination, a certain amount of chutzpah—and an ability to sniff out the right restaurant. Ideally, it should either be a new and therefore struggling place, or one that is older and having trouble clinging to the prestige it enjoyed in an earlier day. Truman Capote’s celebrated party at the Plaza Hotel is an example of the latter sort and, though those who were not on Mr. Capote’s guest list were offering bribes for invitations, the great bash itself cost the author rather little. The publicity the affair engendered helped reestablish the old ballroom as New York’s best address for public functions, and the hotel, in gratitude, picked up most of the tab.

Truman Capote, you say—of course, a famous author; he could get away with it, but what about an ordinary person? Well, what about Mrs. Edwin I. Hilson? Hers was not exactly a name to conjure with, but she did get the late Duke of Windsor and his Duchess to agree to come to a party and, led by the Duke and Duchess, all sorts of other famous and social people fell into line. The Four Seasons restaurant was happy to provide the place and the party—no charge. If, in other words, you are not a famous person yourself, all you need is a famous friend to use for social leverage.

If you happen to be the least bit shy, in New York, about operating this way (it requires, after all, telephoning restaurants and laying your cards on the table, and restaurant owners are generally a hardboiled lot), you can always hire a publicist to do the below-stairs work for you. Your friendly publicist, who will work for a mere five hundred dollars a month, will not only help you put together free and near-free parties, but will also see to it that you get “on the list” for all the other free and near-free parties. Considered the grande dame of haute publicité in Manhattan is a pretty, vivacious blonde named Marianne Strong. No one knows quite how “Mimi” Strong does it, but when she issues a casting call, out from the woodwork come the old guard, the new guard, and “hot” new actors and actresses, best-selling authors, rich people, beautiful people, right people, and just enough of the wrong people to reassure all the others of their vast superiority. Mrs. Strong’s specialty is finding new, offbeat—and therefore fun—places to have parties. She was the first, for example, to toss a party at the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin, a public marina operated by New York’s Recreation Department—which charges only a trifling sum to people who want to have parties there.

New Yorkers have become so blasé about the dozens of free parties that are available on any given evening that they hardly give the matter any thought. One night at the Grenadier Restaurant—a slightly newer and more hungry one—one could have spotted Patricia Kennedy Lawford, Keir Dullea, Tammy Grimes, Maureen Stapleton, Joan Bennett, Patricia Neal, and some twenty-five other people, all sitting down to a dinner that had started with unlimited cocktails, and that had a menu headed by filet de boeuf Wellington and two wines. No one was under any illusions that this was anything but a party that no one was giving—except the promoters of the restaurant—nor did anyone care. Next day, a paragraph in Women’s Wear Daily made it a success.

In Philadelphia, meanwhile, which is not at all a dining-out sort of town, things are somewhat different and, at the same time, somewhat the same in that they prove that the rich, when they entertain, operate under different rules and get away with more—up to, if not including, murder. In the bosky exurbs around Unionville, an area heavily favored by members of the du Pont family, a du Pont hostess announced to recent house guests that she thought it would be fun to cook dinner herself, since her cook had taken to her bed with a cold. “I can do either spaghetti or chop suey,” the hostess announced. The vote, after some discussion, was for chop suey.

The hostess departed for her kitchen and emerged, several hours later, looking weary but happy, and bearing a large serving dish which contained a very strange-looking, dry, and lumpy concoction. Eagerly—since they were by now quite hungry—the guests dove in. But soon there were expressions of concern. “This doesn’t taste like most chop suey,” someone said. “Well,” the hostess explained cheerfully, “I telephoned the grocer and asked him to send over everything that goes into chop suey. He did, and I put it all in a frying pan and heated it through.” After several throat-clearings, another guest said, “It seems to need—more moisture.” “Oh,” the hostess exclaimed, “that must be what this is for—” and she hurried to her kitchen and returned with a bottle of soy sauce.

In glamorous Hollywood, meanwhile, entertaining is done with perhaps even less glamour and more dispatch. Several years ago, Elizabeth Taylor discovered the chili served at Chasen’s restaurant in Beverly Hills. She became addicted to Chasen’s chili, and even had it flown to her, frozen, while she worked on Cleopatra in Rome. Eventually she wangled the recipe out of Chasen’s chef. Today, it is the dish the Richard Burtons serve most often when entertaining. Here is the recipe for Elizabeth Taylor Burton’s chili, as passed along to the author:

½ pound pinto beans	2½ pounds chili grind beef
5 cups canned tomatoes	¼ cup chili powder
1 pound chopped sweet peppers	½ cup chopped parsley
1½ tablespoons salad oil	2 tablespoons salt
1½ pounds chopped onions	1½ teaspoons black pepper
2 cloves garlic chopped fine	1½ teaspoons cumin
1 pound ground lean pork	1½ tablespoons monosodium glutamate

Wash beans. Soak overnight. Simmer until tender in soaking water. Add tomatoes and simmer for 5 minutes. Sauté peppers in salad oil. Add onions and cook until tender. Add garlic and parsley. Sauté meat 5 minutes. Add to pepper mixture. Add chili powder and cook for 10 minutes. Add beans and spices. Simmer covered for 1 hour. Uncover and simmer 30 minutes. Skim off fat.

The above recipe, Mrs. Burton says, will serve eight handily, and can be put together for under ten dollars at most supermarket prices.

And so it would seem that the rich do have it better than the rest of us when they entertain. Not that they give better parties, but they’re privileged with more freedom from troubles. They are either, like the du Ponts and the Ingersolls, too confident and secure in their positions to worry about how to do it, or even to take the time considering which fork to use. Or else they are like jet-setty New Yorkers, too cynical and aware of what’s in their publicity-oriented world to mind that much of the entertaining that goes on is commercial, or ego-centered, or meretricious. It’s all a part of the scene. Pauline Trigère, the enormously successful designer of expensive dresses, was being picked up by her escort at her Park Avenue apartment the other day. After a drink at the apartment, Miss Trigère and escort headed for a taxi; and, in the taxi, Miss Trigère stifled a yawn and asked, “By the way, who’s giving this party, anyway?” Her escort, stifling another yawn, replied, “I really don’t know. It’s probably just another freebie. If you like, when we get there, I can ask.”