A Season When Big Benefits Are in Style
Poufs and frills, bustles and bows are in. The sturdy black taffeta is getting a run from slinky satins, dallying damasks, flouncy failles. It all means that the benefit fashion show is a major deal right now. The Pasadena Junior League is expecting 1,000 Saturday for its I. Magnin Center Stage daylight benefit style extravaganza headed by Susan Chandler at the Bonaventure, 700 more that evening for the black-tie repeat.
Then, the Joffrey Ballet season gets decked out with mimosas and sweets Tuesday at Saks Fifth Avenue, Beverly Hills, when Saks honors the ballet’s special friends, patrons and supporters with a fashion preview of all they’ll desire for April ballet evenings, formal and otherwise. Director of Couture Vincent Knoll will present the SFA International Collection, featuring the best of American and European designers.
Saks Fifth Avenue has definitely gone to the retail forefront of culture: It has just become a Music Center Benefactor with its donation of $100,000 to the Music Center Unified Fund.
In fact, patrons’ letters--1,500 of them--are in the mail for a special event to precede a special event--the SFA/USA, a fashion gala benefit to be presented by the Music Center and Saks Fifth Avenue at the Mark Taper Forum on June 1.
Those who opt to be patrons will be wined and dined May 31 by Arpad and Kati Domyan at The Bistro.
According to Mrs. Thomas R. Vreeland, SFA/USA chair, the Domyan soiree is only the prologue (the prelude, the overture) to what will be “one of the Music Center’s most glamorous evenings.” And the duo affairs are on Sunday and Monday evenings, proving Los Angeles never rests.
FASHION RUSH: Designer David Hayes’ latest in spring is promised for the St. Joseph Medical Center Guild’s fashion gala Wednesday at the Warner Center Marriott in Woodland Hills. The affair is led by the mother-daughter team of Mary Greaney and Debbie Parker. They’re calling it “Color Me Spring.” . . .
The fifth annual “Best of Beverly Hills” fashion show, commentated by Steve Edwards and Patty Duke, is presenting Saint Laurent, Mila Schon, Claude Montana, Torie Steele--and arrays from numerous BH boutiques including Giorgio, Suite 101, Elizabeth Arden--Tuesday at the Beverly Hilton International Ballroom to benefit ERAS Center. That’s the nonprofit educational center for the learning disabled.
IRISH TREASURES: A flurry of excitement has surrounded the visits of the Hon. Desmond Guinness, president of the Irish Georgian Society, and the 29th Knight of Glin, Desmond Fitz-Gerald and Mme. Fitz-Gerald. They’ve been in town to talk about Irish houses, castles and the decorative arts, especially to meet those who will be traveling with Carol Bramhall on a tour of Irish cultural treasures in May. Adelaide and Alec Hixon were hosts to the visitors at Annandale Golf Club, including the Toby Wilcoxes, the Robert Mortons and the Arthur Crowes. Douglas Campbell entertained at home, black-tie, and Carol was a supper hostess after the reception at the Valley Hunt Club for the John Culhanes, the James D. Fullertons, Dr. and Mrs. Arnold Mulder, the Richard Stevers, Dr. and Mrs. George Lancaster and Estelle Schlueter.
CORO KUDOS: Richard B. Lippin, Coro Foundation chairman, is revealing the names of winners of the 11th annual public affairs awards. They’ll be presented April 9 at the Century Plaza Hotel dinner headed by Keenan Berle and Virgil Roberts. Sanford C. Sigoloff is honorary chairman.
Recipients will be Betty Anderson, president, Friends of School Volunteer Program of Los Angeles; Roy Anderson, chairman of the executive committee, Lockheed Corp.; Eli Broad, chairman and CEO of Kaufman and Broad Inc., and Jill Halverson, founder/director, Downtown Women’s Center.
Tickets are $250. The net will support Coro’s leadership training programs, which have provided 2,200 future leaders with intensive, firsthand exposure to individuals and institutions that set the public agenda.
LIKE FATHER: Following in the footsteps of her late father, Vincente Minnelli, Liza Minnelli was decorated with the distinguished Comandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et Lettres in Paris’s Ministry of Culture by the Minister of Culture Francois Leotard. Liza, we hear, was smashing later at the elegant black-tie supper at Maxim’s, wearing Chanel’s short black velvet gown, dancing with composer Michel LeGrande, and surrounded by friends including Baron Guy de Rothschild, Caron Alexis de Rede with Princess Ghislaine de Polignac, Princess Ira Von Furstenberg, Lee Minnelli (in Bill Blass’s black slinky silk), Countess Anne d’Ornano, Bernard Meyill Lavin, pretty Gisele Gallante (Olivia de Havilland’s daughter), Monsier et Madame Jean Pierre Cassell and popular ballet star Patrick du Pont (Paris Opera in Rudolf Nureyev’s “Cinderella”).
MILLION LAUGHS: There wasn’t a dry eye at the Ides of March V dinner at the Beverly Wilshire honoring former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. They laughed so hard, they cried. The group that staged the USC School of Public Administration affair, including dinner chairman John Argue, Dean Ross Clayton and steering committee members such as Dennis Alfieri, were blatantly happy.
Kissinger, not known for humility, accepted his Julius Award during the roast, with a chortle exactly like that of the caricature of him on programs and the matchbooks (with smoking ordinances, aren’t these becoming collectors’ items?).
It was one funny line after another: “I have heard it said that I am presidential material--I have said it myself; that’s probably where I heard it!”
Kissinger, however, was all but upstaged by former Ambassador to Mexico John Gavin. The Hon. Mr. Gavin impersonated Kissinger’s German accent with anecdotal forays into diplomacy, both state and romantic. Dick Cavett dealt with Kissinger’s “God complex.” “He’s developing a tendency in the night to call Oral Roberts and say, ‘I am calling you home.’ ” And another: “It is not enough merely to succeed: One’s friends must fail.”
Russian-born comedian Yakov Smirnoff also roasted Kissinger, calling him “America’s country doctor.” And Johnny Grant, KTLA vice president, set the jolly tone as master of ceremonies.
Such roasts are desirable because they burn a hole right through the pockets of the big donors who underwrite the costs for a cause. In this case, William Keck II was the major underwriter bringing Kissinger as speaker (he was flying back to Washington on the Keck plane).
Keck joined a host of major patrons at a pre-party in the hotel’s Champagne Room. Among the coterie being greeted by Dean and Mrs. Clayton and USC President and Mrs. James Zumberge were newlyweds the Hon. Leonard K. Firestone and Caroline Firestone, who came up from the desert and were staying in Corwin Denny’s suite at the hotel; Paul and Marjory Miller (he’s head of Pacific Lighting Corp.), Pamela K. Anderson and Dr. Fred W. Wasserman, Margaret Martin Brock, Lod and Carole Cook, Edie and Lew Wasserman, the Ray Watts, the James Miscolls, the Jack Needlemans and the Robert Docksons.
More in that illustrious crowd were John and Pamela King, Andrea Van de Kamp, the Herbert Kleins, Fred and Millie O’Green, Dr. Cornelius and Marjorie Pings, the John Attwoods, the James Appletons, Roger Olson and Dr. and Mrs. Eli Glogow.
At one table with Harold Randall, Samantha Eggar (Kissinger left the head table to give her a big Hollywood hug), Rick and Paulette Katzenbach, Bob Barrett and Gabriella Davis and John Kay, the chat on politics and media was sizzling.
ABOUT PRESIDENTS: Just when the presidency once again is being criticized, Prof. Thomas E. Cronin, author of “The State of the Presidency” and the new McHugh Family Distinguished Chair in American Institutions and Leadership at Colorado College, has been in town. At a dinner hosted by Harry W. Colmery Jr., Dr. Allen W. Mathies and Richard J. Riordan, Cronin told a coterie, “We are tough on our presidents: We usually fire at them; 10% we have shot--the rest we have shot at.” He’s worried America may not be developing future leaders: “Leadership is a performing art. . . . It requires contagious self-confidence and unwarranted optimism.” And, he said, it involves those who understand that “Conflict is sometimes a needed mechanism . . . those who would bring about progress have to realize that conflict is inevitable.”
PAST PERFECT: Art and Julie Pizzinat flew in from Mauna Kea, tanned and rested, just in time to host a big party for soon-to-weds Janine Eberle and Bill Myers Jr. It was a mixed-generation crowd with the tilt to the young-at-heart. Victoria Pizzinat flew down from University of California, Berkeley. More of the young crowd: Michelle Eberle and Andy Peplow, Amanda Zimmerman, Joan Griffith, Brooke Wilkins, Mary and Christopher Morphy, Skip Short, Dean Jensen, Bill Odell and Clarissa Ravelo.
VIEWPOINTS: The Southern California Population Crisis Committee, headed by Marilyn Brant Stuart, has invited guests for a reception next Thursday evening at the home of Mrs. Dwight Whiting to honor the Hon. Marshall Green, former ambassador to Australia and Indonesia. He will speak on “The World Viewpoint” in relation to overpopulation as being “at the root of every known problem to humankind.” The committee is affiliated with the international committee in Washington co-chaired by Robin Chandler Duke, Joseph D. Tydings and Robert B. Wallace. New members attending will include Mrs. George Barrie IV, Willilam W. Banks, the Gerald Oppenheimers, Robin French. Other members of the newly formed committee include the Stephen Krantzes, the John Forsythes, the John Hotchkises, the Glen Holdens, the Stuart Ketchums, the Donald Petronis and Mrs. Harry Wetzel.
UPCOMING: Ambassador of the Arab Republic of Egypt El Sayed Abdel Raouf El Reedy will be the first senior Egyptian to address the Los Angeles World Affairs Council in recent years when he speaks March 27 at the Los Angeles Hilton.
