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The young girls' faces were pert, their clothes chic, their hair saucily teased. The boys were two-buttoned, stripe-tied, and fit. Their names on the Pan Am flight list could be taken from any U.S. school or college roster--Paine, Prentice, Chrysler,Cushing, Welch. Their fathers were businessmen, and about half could be found in the Social Register. Where were they going? To a coming out party at Britain's ancient Blenheim Palace for an American friend, Serena Russell, who also happens to be the granddaughter of the tenth Duke of Marlborough.
The vast old palace, where Winston Churchill was born, was floodlit for the occasion, and along the terraces, braziers glowed to light up the path of strolling couples or warm them when the night turned chill. Some 1,100 guests ate in the grand saloon and danced the twist in the long library. Henry Ford's daughters, Charlotte and Anne, were there, as was Richard Pershing, grandson of the rigid old soldier.
Serena is the daughter of Edwin F. Russell, 48, a newspaper executive from Elizabeth, N.J., who met Lady Sarah Consuelo Spencer-Churchill, during the war, when he was in the U.S. Navy and she was working as a lathe assistant. Since then, Russell has moved up in the publishing empire run by the son of a Russian immigrant, Sam Newhouse, who recently made him publisher of Vogue.
The Blenheim party also celebrated the coming of age of Serena's uncle, Lord Charles George William Colin Spencer-Churchill, who is also studying in the U.S. Thus Serena and her school friends from Foxcroft, and Lord Charles' college friends rubbed shoulders with most of Debrett, led by Princess Margaret and her husband Lord Snowdon (who was recently just a photographer), the Marquess of Blandford (heir to the dukedom) and his Greek wife Tina (who was recently Mrs. Aristotle Onassis). and Princess d'Arenberg (who was recently Peggy Bancroft of New York).
The Bastions. U.S. papers gave the party a big play. It was the week's demonstration that Society is, as always, news and that today it is a New Society.
It is an open-end one, energetic, and international-minded. Its members jet to Gstaad for the skiing, Venice for the film festival, Paris for the spring collections. The Old Guard still occupies its citadels in the big cities and small resorts. It still takes "old" money and some kind of bloodlines to make Boston's Somerset Club, the Philadelphia Club or the St. Louis Country Club. But around such bastions flows a different and more stimulating social stream of people with more education and more to talk about, who want their friends to be intelligent, active and amusing (one of their favorite words).
Slurs & Accolades. It is a Society to which the Kennedys have given considerable impetus, although it was in the making well before Jack went to the White House. Rockbound in their huge old houses behind the iron gates, the Old Guard seldom went anywhere, never saw anybody but one another, and hardly ever worked except as trust officers for the family estate. In the New Society, the term self-made man is not a slur but an accolade, and the New Society is willing to accept anyone with the requisite qualifications.
For the men, this necessarily means a reasonable amount of money, but in this context money also connotes ability--if the man concerned had not made it him self, he would already be an In. A second requirement is a decent respect for manners and taste, of which the Old Guard remain the tacit custodians.
For the women it means beauty, and not too cool; if not beauty, wealth; if not wealth, intelligence; if not intelligence, a sure sense of fashion; if not fashion, good works in the form of executive ability in charitable and educational projects. As one hostess summarized it: "You can be either very rich, very aristocratic, very talented, or very famous." To this, the Kennedys, with their glittering evenings for Nobel laureates and French cultural arbiters, have added another significant category--"powerful."
Blueblood & Showbiz. It is the nature of this New Society that it should have no single queen. But a handful of women stand out, by virtue of their wealth, beauty and energy. They are not arbiters--they are pacesetters, and probably the best-known of them is Mrs. Winston Frederick Guest.
On her father's side. "Ceezee" Guest (the nickname is her sister's childhood mispronunciation of "sister") is Boston Old Guard--and nothing is older or more guarded than that. Her husband is New York Old Guard--charming, handsome and rich. Their stables are among the nation's best, and their Long Island estate would be one of the nation's showplaces if it were ever on show. But Ceezee's mother was a New York actress, and Ceezee herself once shook a leg as a show girl.
Therefore it is hardly surprising that she is equally at ease with Elsa Maxwell and Madame de Gaulle. And when the World Wildlife Fund set up the most glittering fund-raising dinner of the year in Manhattan last month, it enlisted Prince Philip of Britain and Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands, and asked Ceezee to be cochairman. She is so secure a member of International Society that she can afford to stay home, as she is doing this summer, simply because she feels like it. "For Ceezee there's no such thing as missing a party," said Vogue Editor Diana Vreeland recently. "Either she's there, or for her it doesn't exist."
A Retinue of Dogs. At Templeton, the Guest 150-acre estate in Roslyn. L.I., Ceezee and her husband are relaxing with the ease that the totally confident permit themselves. There are picnics by the pool with her friends, or the friends of her two stepsons, Winston Jr., 26, and Frederick, 24, by Winston's first marriage to Woolworth Heiress Helena McCann. There are jaunts in the pony cart with Ceezee's seven-year-old son Alexander (who thinks nothing of splitting a sentence between French and English). There are casually elegant buffet lunches and small dinner parties--seldom for more than 24--at which the guest list might include the Windsors, Henry Ford II and Salvador Dali, Italy's Donna Marella Agnelli and Truman Capote. Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the Maharajah of Jaipur, Noel Coward and Senator Jacob Javits.
Toward the end of October, Ceezee moves into the Guests' Manhattan apartment on Sutton Place (TIME. April 13) to take up her role as hostess and leader of fashion in this entertainment and fashion center of the world. For the past 14 years she has bought all her clothes at Mainbocher, with the exception of a dress or two she may pick up in Paris. Mainbocher, the classicist of simple lines and uncluttered elegance at stratospheric prices, and Ceezee were made for each other; her bright coloring and trim figure flatter his clothes, while their understated chic expresses Ceezee inside as well as outside.
"In New York I don't go in much for these little female lunches at the Colony and the Cote Basque," says Ceezee. "And I hate cocktail parties. We usually have people in or go out in the evening--to a dinner or a benefit or a ball. I'm not a great nightclubber, but of course I turn up at El Morocco from time to time. Last winter it was Le Club, I thought it was loads of fun."
Lady on Horseback. One of Ceezee's basic interests in life is riding. Every morning when the Guests are in Manhattan, she drives up to White Plains to take lessons from Coach Gordon Wright on the details of ringmanship--feet, hands, and placement for the jumps. From time to time throughout the year, the Guests spend a few days at Middleburg. Va.. where they have a small cottage on the estate of a Phiops cousin. There Ceezee and Jacqueline Kennedy have known each other on the hunting field for years (though Ceezee knew Jack Kennedy slightly when he was at Harvard, they have never moved in the same social circles).
After Christmas, the Guests usually spend two or three months in Palm Beach. This is Winston's legal residence; his family arrived there soon after World War 1. Though they have given much of their land holdings to the city for parks and the like, the family still owns sizable quantities of Florida real estate, which they bought when Worth Avenue was pure boondocks. But Ceezee and Winston live simply in Palm Beach in a four-room apartment over a converted garage, occasionally entertaining small groups of friends in restaurants. Between times, when the mood seizes them, they take off for Paris, London or, as they did last winter, Egypt. There a bedazzled pasha presented Ceezee with a greyhound, which she gratefully accepted as a welcome addition to her traveling retinue of dogs (two Labrador retrievers, a miniature schnauzer, a toy poodle).
Plenty of Gasoline. It is a life Ceezee's mother could scarcely have envisioned for any daughter of hers when she made her own debut at 17--into show business. The daughter of a New York voice coach. Vivian Wessell began with a small part in a Lehar operetta, and ended her theatrical career some five years later after she met wealthy, well-born Boston Clubman Alexander Lynde Cochrane.
Bachelor Lynde Cochrane, 45, was descended from the fifth Earl of Douglas and from Scotland's hero, Robert Bruce. He married Vivian in a sneak ceremony on Aug. 12, 1917, and "immediately took off," said the Boston Globe, "in a high-powered automobile with clear weather and plenty of gasoline to take them to Newport on their way to a Maine hunting lodge." The second of their five children was Ceezee-- christened Lucy Douglas Cochrane. Cochrane died in 1928, and in 1930 Vivian married another rich, blue-blooded Boston bachelor. Attorney Dudley L. Pickman Jr. He moved the whole family into a big granite Stanford White mansion on Commonwealth Avenue, with 40 rooms (five servants), where Ceezee grew up and the Pickmans still live.
Paris on Commonwealth Avenue. Ceezee took to school like a cat to water; she could get through it, but would much rather not. Her report cards indicate that as a ten-year-old she was inclined to be noisy and inattentive. She "needs to be very busy or she will gain superficial social superiority," was the comment on one of them, adding that "at heart she is kindly." Ceezee ended her academic career at Fermata, a very social, now defunct girls' school at Aiken, S.C., where she did best at French and Latin, worst at cooking and sewing, and admits: "I spent most of my time riding."
By the standards of staid old Boston, Ceezee was a bumptious debutante. She and her one-year-older sister Nancy, another high-spirited and conspicuously pretty blonde, were always making news, and Mrs. Pickman was kept busy berating the newspapers for printing pictures of them. Both were avid rooters for the Bruins hockey team; they knew all the players' names, and it was even rumored that on occasion Ceezee varied her diet of Harvard boys to go out with some of the squad. "She was always very democratic," recalls a contemporary.
Ceezee's coming-out party was just about the biggest event of the 1937-38 season. The first floor of the Common wealth Avenue house was decked with awnings and posters to create an atmosphere of Parisian streets; the guests danced till dawn to two orchestras in the drawing room banked with white flowers.
Without Clothes. Ceezee came by her high-spirited independence from her mother. Refusing to be intimidated by the Old Guard's instinctive distrust of a some time actress, Mrs. Pickman shook up Boston society by giving parties that stirred together Brahmins with Broadway, jazz musicians with longhairs such as Conductor Serge Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony and Composer Igor Stravinsky. It would have been surprising if a pretty and independent girl like Ceezee had not set her sights beyond Back Bay.
In 1942, with three other post-debs (including her sister Nancy), Ceezee appeared in a cabaret show at the Ritz roof garden as part of an act called "Boston's American Beauties." Her theatrical ambitions were doubtless enhanced by her heavy beau of that time, Movie Actor Victor Mature, who was stationed in Boston in the Coast Guard. In 1944, when she was 24, Lee Shubert gave her a job as show girl in the Broadway revival of the Ziegfeld Follies. One night at a party she met Darryl Zanuck, who arranged a screen test on the basis of which 20th Century-Fox signed her for a seven-year contract. Ceezee did not bowl over Hollywood. After nine months of coaching and study, but no screen credits, she went back to Boston. But Ceezee was not to be completely without an audience. On a trip to Mexico in 1945, she met Diego Rivera, who immediately wanted to paint her--in the nude. Ceezee didn't wince, and when the painting was later hung in Giro's Bar in the Hotel Reforma, she didn't think it was anything to get excited about.
Not so Winston Frederick Churchill Guest, who had first been smitten by Ceezee when he saw a picture of her and wangled himself an introduction. Before their marriage in 1947, at the Havana plantation of his longtime hunting pal Ernest Hemingway, Guest bought Ceezee's picture out of the barroom, for a mere 15,000 pesos ($3,075).
Gentle Giant. If Ceezee Guest's father and stepfather represent one kind of American society--or even aristocracy--her husband represents another. For Winston Guest's mother was a Phipps, and the Phippses are a dynastic family--a ruling house represented by a trust, which takes care of all the family finances down to their bills for shoes and ships and sealing wax.
The family fortune was founded, like many U.S. fortunes, about 100 years ago. Henry Phipps, the mild-mannered, warmhearted son of a shoemaker in Allegheny, Pa., found himself in the steel business with one of his neighbors, a weaver's son named Andrew Carnegie. His daughter Amy, a remarkable woman of good looks and terrifying energy (she was shooting lions in her 60s), went to England and married Captain Frederick Edward Guest, polo-playing first cousin of Winston Churchill (who became godfather to her son Winston) and Secretary of State for Air in Lloyd George's Cabinet.
Schooled both in England and the U.S., Winston opted for U.S. citizenship when he was 21. A handsome, gentle giant (6 ft. 4 in.), Winston became one of the world's top polo stars; he had a ten-goal rating (the maximum) and starred for the U.S. in international matches.
New Mechanism. As Mrs. Winston Guest, the gay, impudent, restless Ceezee settled down to being a woman in the kind of life she was cut out for just as the social scene in which she moved was acquiring its most important postwar emphasis: the charity ball. For three years--1959-1961--she headed the most elegant and profitable of the balls--the April in Paris, which raised over $200,000 under her chairmanship for French charities.
Charity has long been a broad, well-traveled bridge over which the Outs have made their way toward the Ins. For one thing, a Good Cause helps adjust the American conscience to the sin of pleasure; Boston's Old Guard ladies still meet to gossip in "Sewing Circles," though the original pretense, sewing for the poor, has long since been abandoned. There are more modern advantages in having an eleemosynary excuse for an enchanted evening: 1) costs are tax-exempt contributions, and 2) the socially ambitious will write big checks and work furiously for the chance to rub elbows with those who have arrived. Credit-by-association is used as a negotiable commodity by many of the Old Guard to do good in the world. "The very social Mrs. Lytle Hull," observes Society Photographer Jerome Zerbe, "is so obsessed by her pet charity, the Musicians' Emergency Fund, that she'd be photographed with anybody, even a bearded lady, if it would help the cause."
Charity balls have changed the pattern of Manhattan social life. There are still some private dances and private dinners, but today Society goes to these public functions because, as New York Hostess Drue Heinz says, "everybody else does. It's an enormous system into which Society has got swept up." Last year there were some 300 charity balls in New York City between October and May--an average of almost ten a week.
Ideally, the charity ball provides a useful social ladder for the rising and able newcomer to enter Society. If the parvenus seldom wangle invitations for the intimate little dinners of the inner circle, it scarcely matters; their daughters will be asked to the right deb parties and meet the right boys. And when they are married, they can give intimate little dinners of their own.
Real Gossip. Less attractively, the charity ball has spawned the Society Public Relations Agent. Manhattan's leading agents are Count Lanfranco Rasponi and Marianne (Mrs. Stephen van Rensselaer) Strong. Each also has restaurant and hotel accounts, and some "personal" accounts--Outs who want In badly enough to pay retainers ranging from $500 to $1,000 a month.
Society P.R. people maintain a symbiotic relationship with another type of pro that has burgeoned during the postwar years--the Society gossip columnist. In Manhattan there is hardly any real gossip in the daily flow of words from golf-playing Igor ("Cholly Knickerbocker") Cassini, in the Journal American, or good-natured Joseph X. Dever in the World-Telegram, or bland Nancy Randolph in the Daily News, or even the entertainingly abrasive "Suzy" (Aileen Mehle) in the Mirror. The fascinating intelligence that Mercedes de Footwork had lunch at the Purple Tulip is good for a line any time. No one may have heard of either Mercedes or the Tulip, but after both have been mentioned a dozen times and absorbed with faithful mindlessness by the people who read "the columns," Mercedes may get some invitations and the Tulip some customers.
Charity balls and gossip columnists help keep U.S. Society--especially New York Society--an open-end one. Even writers, painters and actors turn up among the guests these days. Says Drue Heinz: "These people are now accepted by Society even though they never belong to it, and this is a wonderful improvement. You are not nearly so likely to get stuck at dinner between two scions of famous families who tell their golf scores or that they've given up drink. Now you have a good chance of being seated next to an author or artist or lecturer who is there because he has something to offer Society."
The rise of the open-end international Society has naturally meant the decline of the Social Register as an index of who really "belongs." It is still important to the New Guard, for whom a listing is almost the only way left to know one is better than one's neighbors. Those who are knocking at the Register's door no longer have to contend with the studied inconsistencies of Bertha Eastmond, the train conductor's daughter who presided over the contents of the little black and orange book for nearly 40 years until her death in 1960. But the mysterious tribunal that sits in judgment in her stead is still impossible to outguess--even in terms of getting one's listing switched from one of the eleven other regional editions to the New York book. It may take years, or it may never happen. (Neither Serena Russell nor her parents are in the Register.)
The Old Guard still finds the Register useful as a place to find people's summer phone numbers and to look up who married Mildred's boy, but it has been too diluted with "just anybody" for it to "mean anything" any more. And as far as the chic international crowd is concerned, too few of them are listed for them to think about it one way or another.
Over to Venice. Rich people have always traveled, and the upper crust has always been basically international. But the jet plane has raised the mobility of the well-heeled to the point where national boundaries blur, distances telescope, and the only trouble is trying to figure out what time it is. Just getting around is a kind of admission ticket to the International Set. "The main thing is to be seen in enough right places often enough," said Photographer Zerbe over his shoulder as he hopped a jet in Paris for Rome. "If you're seen at St.-Moritz for the skiing in February, on the beach at St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Paris during the season (although there really wasn't any Paris season this year), if you're in London at the end of July for Ascot, and Dublin the beginning of August for the horse show, people are very likely to forget they never met you."
In fact, the dedicated International Setter develops a sixth sense about places to be and when to be there. Old-line internationals like the Guests stay at the Ritz in Paris, but according to one observer, too many of the wrong people began to follow the right people there, so the right people had to start going to the Plaza-Athenee, the Lancaster and the Meurice. According to the same kind of Gresham's law, resorts, and even countries, suddenly are Out.
Spain's Costa Brava, In five years ago, is Out now, though the Costa del Sol is still O.K. Out are St.-Tropez and Jamaica. In are Barbados, the Greek islands, and Sardinia, where the Aga Khan (very In) is building a resort. Southampton is In; Newport is coming back In fast, partly because of the Kennedys, who were married there at Jackie's mother's shorefront house.
Among Manhattan restaurants, Le Pavilion is Out, the Cote Basque, Colony and Caravelle are In; "21" hasn't been In for years. After the 15th of June, the right thing is to slip over to Venice for a couple of weeks. There, of course, it would be best to have one's own palazzo--President Kennedy's friends, the Charles Wrights-mans, do. Countess Natalie Volpi's pied a terre is a good example of style in Venice. The countess usually spends about a fortnight there in June; then off to Rome and other In spots until September, when Venice is Right again, for a while. Tethered outside when she is in residence is her silver-trimmed gondola, and four luxuriously appointed motorboats. The artist who designed the villa's furniture was paid an extra sum, equal to the royalties he would get for a given number of years from selling the designs commercially.
When the time limit is up, the countess will have some new furniture designed. The Most with the Money. Continental Europe, home of the lightly taxed rich, does not yet know the Society P.R. Man or the charity ball; old-line aristocracies stage their own parties, and the climbing offers fewer hand and toe holds than in the U.S. In Rome, Count Aspreno Colonna gives an annual reception in his palazzo, whose splendors no U.S. citizen could match. Queen Elizabeth II once told the count: "After seeing your palace, I feel quite reluctant to invite you to Buckingham."
French aristocrats, such as Prince Michel de Bourbon de Panne and Comte Jean de Beaumont, father of one of the International Set's standout beauties, Vi-comtesse Jacqueline de Ribes, set the pace for French elegance. One of the biggest wigs among the bourgeois is Paul-Louis Weiller, who has some 15 houses, which he very generously lends.
Britain's aristocracy, heavily taxed and kept in its place by the democratic practice of conferring titles on union leaders, newspaper owners and even photographers, has never been highly exclusive, and for the most part amiably accepts the swirling new International Set. And despite death duties, a duke can still manage quite a bash, as witness this week's party in Blenheim Palace.
Ultimately, the "leaders" of the International Set are those with money who do the most with it. Among the most conspicuous: Baroness Heinrich von Thyssen (nee Fiona Campbell-Walter); Rosita Winston, one of the world's best-dressed women and a part Cherokee Indian; Donna Marella Agnelli of Turin, whose husband's grandfather founded the Fiat automobile company; Rosie Warburton Gaynor Chisholm, whose grandparents were Old Guard Philadelphians, and whose mother married William K. Vanderbilt.
The Game. The freewheeling International Set is helping to erode the ancient New England notion that the golden doors to Society are labeled WHITE PROTESTANTS ONLY. Anti-Semitism, less virulent in European social circles than in the U.S., increased in America around the turn of the century (probably as a result of the waves of immigration from central Europe), and not many Jews have rooted themselves as solidly in the Old Guard as August Belmont (1853-1924), whose name is a Franco-Anglicization of Schoenberg. Roman Catholics are solidly Old Guard in such Catholic-settled cities as New Or leans, St. Louis and Baltimore, but in heavily Catholic Boston they--and therefore the Kennedys--have been far more Out than In.
The open-end Society shows no signs of reverting to the closed, bloodline formalities of the past--urbanization and the high mobility of jet-age living will keep it open, just as water in constant motion does not freeze. This is not completely to the good; the old landed families, for all their stuffiness, produced standards and had the authority to enforce them. It will be the responsibility of America's New Guard, busily working up on charities and civic enterprises and into the Social Register, to nurture an elite of service to counterbalance the merely rich, chic and amusing internationals whom Vogue calls "the Beautiful People," and Women's Wear Daily calls "the Arrogants and Elegants."
Ultimately, Society is a game in which the established are always challenging the newcomers to prove themselves. Their authority is largely that they got there first and therefore make the rules. It is also a game at which anyone can choose not to play--and some do so choose. But as long as there is room at the top and flow from below, Society is a yeasty tonic for democracy. Said 19th century Novelist William Dean Howells: "Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself."
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