High life
Swansong
Taki
Not since Truman Capote's 1966 New York bash for '1000 of my closest friends' has there been such a brouhaha among the jet-set over a party.
Back then it was the diminutive writer's sorting of the Beautiful Peoples' list that caused the uproar. Although it was billed as the definitive get together of who's who, many socialites disagreed with the subjective way the guest list was drawn up.
Of course here in London things are different. Nevertheless the uproar over the Spectator's ball is real and threatening to get out of hadd.The whole mess began when the Spectator's Fuhrer chose the Lyceum as venue of the anniversary celebration. It immediately caught the jet-set's attention. Here was something old and quaint.
The Lyceum's elegantly demo& tone, its bordello mauve, nineteenth century rococo is a masterpiece of shabbiness. It screams of good times gone by and of class. Word circulated that it was the party to be seen at.
Even more exciting was the-rumour that the shindig was going to be attended by thinking people. And since a whiff of intellectuality has recently been upgraded into a status symbol, the craving of jetsetters for an invitation took on addict-like proportions.
Mark and Lola Winters began preparing for the ball three months in advance. They rang Marisa in Los Angeles and Diane in New York. 'You simply got to Concorde over for it, darling, everyone who is anyone will be there including writers.' Fortunately, Jack and Anjelica were already in London although Bianca was feeling unwell. The trouble was, however, that although the Fuhrer handed out invitations as if they were going out of style, his largesse was limited to a small circle of seedy men, non-dopers, bad dancers, with shoes that turn up at the front and white stuff all over their collars. Most of them work at a place called El Vino's, known to be anathema to jet-setters.
The lucky ones among the BPs to be invited lived to regret it. The ball turned out a terrible bore. None of the guests had pasty-white faces, sooty eyes or pins through their noses. Worse, heterosexuals were in the majority.
Clito Silversmith, a much suicided jetsetter who is a master of the invoked accident for attention-getting purposes, suffered the cruellest fate. She threw a trayful of champagne on her sister and various friends but to no avail. The strange moonlike creatures swooning on the dance floor did not even bother to open their eyes. Although the party lasted until dawn, the jet set's agony was not over yet. The papers continued to rub salt into their wounds. The gossip columnists were the worst, the cruellest offenders. For two successive days they wrote only about those unknown creatures at the party. They even ran their pictures. It was too much. There had to be a backlash. The jet-set got together and wrote the hedonist Horst Wessel, a military march to avenge their humiliation: The jet-set's not speaking to Keswick He broke the first rule of the rich The jet set's not speaking to Keswick That plutocrat son of a bitch They thought he could never betray them With his taste for Havana cigars For his jock-strap is lined with chinchilla And his drawers are the envy of the stars But his ball was for hundreds of eggheads And was said to cost thousands of pounds It provided no coke and no uppers No Mick, no Bianca, no clowns.
The jet-set's not speaking to Keswick He failed to flatter the rich He cow-towed to the writers and critics — Intellectual son of a bitch.
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