1940s Archive

Along the Boulevards

Originally Published June 1947

Probably the last New York hostess who can and regularly does command the presence of guests at her home in the conventional tail coat and white linen of tradition instead of the equivocal dinner jacket, is Mrs. George Schlee, the fabulous Madame Valentina of the dress-designing world, and, when the occasion arises, a hostess in the very grand manner indeed. The annual occasion which brings more royalty and titled nobility and attendant formality than any similar rout in the Manhattan year to Valentina's cream-and-gold drawing room is Russian Easter, usually celebrated a week or two after the conventional Roman Easter. With the passing of time, it has become an established fact that an invitation to this levee is something to rank any other event in the New York social calendar. Because of the very choosy list of Valentina's guests as well as the hospitality, incredibly spacious for these straitened times, her parties make even the aged Mrs. Vanderbilt's entertainments, with their raffish train of opportunists and social camp followers, look very second best indeed. In a generation when the most recognized social technique is accomplished by compressing a very limited number of super-top-drawer names into small compass under circumstances of superlatively mannered lux, Valentina is a consummate practitioner at getting together a staggering list of celebrities and deluging them with Niagaras of vintage champagne in a midst of minuscule, but altogether imperial, grandeur.

Valentina's party this year turned out to be glittering evidence of just how far a photogenic hostess with a sense of pictorial values will go to achieve perfection, since every last guest was specifically instructed in the attire he or she was to wear, and all the women and most of the gentlemen clove to her fiat as they might to a Supreme Court injunction. Robert Sherwood, for instance, at the last moment found he couldn't unearth a white evening waistcoat and appeared in the generally outlawed dinner jacket which was prescribed only for older and less sightly men, and Clifton Webb and John Gielgud got their signals mixed and turned up in identical evening jackets of fireman's red and spent the evening glowering at each other from opposite corners of the drawing room like a brace of fashionable women who had experienced the misfortune of turning up at El Morocco in models of the same dress. But Mrs. Vincent Astor, Lynn Fontaine, Mrs. Gilbert Miller, and Lady Mendl wore precisely what they were told, as did Gladys Swarthout, Greta Garbo, and a few dozen other professional names of the first magnificence, with the result that everyone appeared at their stunning best for Jerry Zerbe, who was present in his old accustomed capacity as Life's tail-coated cameraman, attended by the socially impeccable J. J. O'Donohue IV as bulb boy. Valentina knows to the last brocaded evening dress and diamond tiara the precise contents of almost every first-rate feminine wardrobe in the city, since she designed the first of these items and, in nine cases out of ten, had the second of them fabricated to accompany it.

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