As she herself remarked to Chuck Clegg in the champagne bar in the corner of the dining room, which was inevitably presided over by Marco from the Colony Restaurant, Valentina is a woman of lovely disposition, “except when something vexes me and then I scream very loud.” Everyone in New York is at great pains not to vex Valentina.
Valenina's parties appeal to men because they are fast-moving, luxurious, and possessed of minor overtones of bitchiness which not even fellows as rugged as Stanton Griffis or Prince Serge Obolensky can resist; and women regard them as probably the most eye-popping fashion parade of all the fashionable year with the whole staff of Vogue on the scene and the off-chance that a celebrated actor's playgirl mother may choose the bannisters to make her exit instead of the more conventional stairs, as happened last year. Valentina's drawing room this season was the scene of the tryout of a new hairdo by Garbo, a new three-strand pearl necklace by Mrs. William Rhinelander Stewart, and a new vodka arrangement by Marco which had Robert Sherwood speaking fluent Russian before Valentina herself got around to cutting the ceremonial Easter pashka, even though he has never been near Russia or even Berlitz.
Whatever else may happen to the tradition of New York's great hostesses, there will never be a shortage of photogenic sarabands so long as Valentina can call up Mrs. Cornelius Dresselhuys and command: “Nothing elaborate in the way of jewelry this year, just the emerald and diamond bracelet, the diamond and emerald choker, the plain diamond earrings, and a really small tiara.” Simplicity to Valentina, who made history with the remark, “Meenk, it is for football games,” is the very breath of life.
It is a circumstance not entirely divorced from irony that the only book about New York society in recent years that is at once authentic, hilarious, and acutely readable should have been written, not by its greatest modern chronicler and arbiter, but about him. Certainly, had he lived longer, Maury Paul, the fabulous Cholly Knickerbocker of the Journal American, would have written his own apologia and, equally certainly, it would have been quite as much concerned with Maury Henry Biddle Paul as is Eve Brown's Champagne Cholly (E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.), but there is doubt in this department's mind whether it would have been any more revealing or half so enchanting reading.
Formal society was far too important a matter to Paul for him ever to have achieved Miss Brown's Happy Hooligan approach and, while he was realistic enough where he himself was concerned and not averse to making jape of his own person, he still regarded himself in too messianic a light ever to be really impertinent to Maury Paul. As his biographer, therefore, Miss Brown, who was his secretary and assistant and who, for a time after his death, took over the society page of the Journal American, is very nearly ideal.
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