Monday, Oct. 21, 1957

Juvenile Deliquescence

To the rock-'n'-roll set of London's lesser nobility, there is no more dashing, madcap wag than the Hon. Antony Patrick Andrew Cairnes Berkeley Moynihan. Last year 20-year-old Tony Moynihan left his cult of juvenile admirers behind, departed for Australia where he said he would take up sheep farming.

With Tony gone, things were pretty dull. Without the Moynihan flair, his merry circle of Mayfair friends were reduced to such joyless pleasures as dropping Coke bottles from party windows and wishing wanly that Tony would return. Last week Tony indeed came back.

To celebrate the event, and to exploit its publicity potentialities, the management of Soho's Le Condor nightclub thought up a special kind of party. The management called it "The Confidential Ball--dressed for exposure," sent out invitations to some 300 of Tony's friends, most of whom accepted. They arrived dressed according to instructions--in pajamas, bathing suits or just their underwear. Among the guests: Lady Jane Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 25, the sister of Lord Londonderry, Sir Hugo Sebright, 26, Daphne Pattine, a cousin of the Duke of Norfolk, one Count Gerhard von Goerl, and a sprinkling of models and party girls.

For a while the scantily clad guests danced, drank and listened to calypso. Then Tony Moynihan was put on "trial," found guilty of deserting his friends for Australia, and sentenced to a dunking in the fountain at Trafalgar Square.

Tony and about half the guests at Le Condor piled into their cars and roared off to see the sentence passed out. After first making sure that a press photographer was on hand, Tony was ducked, one girl jumped in all by herself, and everyone had a simply hilarious time until the police arrived and the deliquescent juveniles retreated to Le Condor for a nightcap. Tony promised that more was to come. "Everything has been as dead as a duck while I've been away," said he, "but that's all over now."

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