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.
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.
For Maury was the last of the great society editors and newspaper arbiters of the formal world of wealth and fashion. Indeed, the function of society reporter practically perished with him. Neither he nor his “Cholly Knicker-bocker” column nor his incredible authority has any least counterpart in the modern scene. The great society editors have all vanished from the picture: Frank Leslie Baker, the amiable autocrat of the New York Times, (he used to be known as “Free Lunch” Baker to the impertinent, and rumor held that he had rubber pockets sewn in his tail coats to facilitate taking home food from bountiful affairs) is gone, and so is Charles Alexander, austere arbiter of the old and also vanished Boston Evening Transcript, and Howard White of the Herald Tribune is virtually in retirement. Indeed, the Herald Tribune itself has undergone a sea change toward the class of New Yorkers which gives it its best excuse for publication. Its “Personal Intelligence” column, once accounted the most valuable space in proportion to its size in any paper in the world, has been suppressed (only to be snapped up by the not-so-dumb New York Times simply as “Notes”), and the Tribune, on its society pages at least, is bravely skirmishing with the enemy in the Second World War, so that social identification is established for young ladies who “organized dinner dances to aid Poland” or otherwise contributed mightily to the war effort.
And with these curiosa toward in the rest of the newspaper world, Maury's own space on the Journal American is maintained precariously by a friend of the younger Mrs. Hearst and devoted largely to names which few readers have ever before encountered, let alone their persons.
In the light of these changes, none of which is for the better so far as the gusto of the New York scene is concerned, Miss Brown's chronicle of Paul's feuds, favorites, successes, failures, and pretensions, most of them preposterous, all of them hilarious, is a breath of the old times of only ten years ago. Miss Brown pulls no punches; she frankly admits that Paul's editorial and personal allegiance (they were the same thing) could be persuaded by sheer overwhelming expenditures of money and effrontery, as in the case of Mrs. Luara Corrigan, or that he was not above needling social characters into improbable antics for his own news beats, as in the case of the elopement of Charlotte Demerest and the Count Zichy, whom he encountered in the restaurant of the Plaza, personally escorted to City Hall, and afterward kept under secret wraps for twenty-four hours until he had set the town by the ears with his own exclusive story of their marriage. Nor does Miss Brown pull her own personal punches as when, and with every justification under heaven, she refers to “the ill-mannered Howard Shelly of the Daily Mirror, or touches upon the person and attainments of Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh as even the invincible Earl Wilson might well hesitate to do.
That Paul was first of all a newspaperman and reporter who through the agency of almost limitless industry contrived to impress his concept of society on reluctant managing editors and the cliff-dwellers of Manhattan alike, is also admirably delineated by Miss Brown. Paul was in the habit of making his notes in a gold-backed notebook with a platinum pencil mounted in cabochon rubies, but his facts were as well authenticated and painfully come by as the notes of any district reporter scribbled in Municipal Court on a sheaf of rumpled copy paper.
Perhaps it is as well that the mold was broken after God made Maury Paul. His successors and imitators have demonstrated him to be unique and beyond the pale of successful duplication. The foreign phonies of spurious pretensions now on the town would have dismayed him.
In any event, Miss Brown has done proud by the Master. With her own good sense as a reporter, she has mentioned everyone of account in uppercase society by name, and the better names several times, indexed them copiously, and added a generous amount of pillage and insult to her copy. It constitutes the only reliable, full-dress chronicle of the bon ton follies of our times, and it's a safe bet that if a name doesn't appear in the index of Champagne Cholly, it never appeared in the columns of Maury Paul and, on that basis, is of no slightest importance whatsoever.
Boulevard Memorand:
- Reliable reports indicate that part of the Elbridge Gerry Estate collection of Madeiras, many of them dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and collector's items of Button Gwinnett proportions, is about to be available to connoisseurs, a wine note which would be comparable to, say, the announcement of the public sale of the British crown jewels. The last great private cellar of Madeiras included the combined treasures of J. P. Morgan and Mrs. Henry Walters, and was sold by Greig, Lawrence, and Hoyt with splendid promotional fanfare during the recent wars.
- Amateurs of New York institutions, as well as dudes like Roy Howard and Louis Sobol who like a brave and boisterous shirt on their back, will rejoice to learn that Walter McCrory, the mad shirt carpenter of Forty-sixth Street and for years shirtmaker to such notables as Winston Churchill and the late Odd McIntyre, is back in business again at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-sixth a few yards from the old stand. Friends and individualists feared, when he was moved from his former premises a few months ago by a rent raise, that he might retire for keeps.
- A few weeks ago a local newspaper paragrapher remarked, in hyperbole, that the barber shop at the Ritz Tower was getting so exclusive that it practically required letters of introduction from new patrons before it would give them a haircut or beard trim. Imagine the surprise of John, the head barber, when two delegates to the United Nations turned up with letters of identification from their ambassadors in Washington!
- Raymond Andrieux, former proprietor of the Caviar, is this year running Cobb's Mill Inn (“by the water-fall”) at Weston, Connecticut, and old friends are driving out for his celebrated chow which includes special délices de foie gras, homard à l'américaine and escargots bourguignonne. Raymond also has twelve bedrooms for overnight guests, and there are tennis and swimming.
- The annual opera festival at Central City, Colorado, will open this year on the Fourth of July, and for four weeks all roads will lead to Denver for this classic combination of bon ton life and frontier hurrah in the West's most glamorous ghost town.
- A number of unfamiliar horse cabs, some of them painted in bright and fetching color designs for summer trade, are turning up on the Plaza cab rank at Central Park. Investigation reveals they are old-time New York carriages which, with the advent of the motorcar, went to Bermuda, and which, with the invasion of Bermuda by auto-taxis and the tremendous revival of the vogue for horse cabs in New York, have returned to the city of their origin many decades ago.