Kidding the Social Setup

From Park Avenue to Park Lane, the social season is coming to life again, and so is Hearst Society Columnist Suzy Knickerbocker. She has snapped out of her summer doldrums, and once more is writing wittily, tartly and occasionally tenderly about socialites as they close up their chateaux in Biarritz and their villas in Majorca to return to the comforts of London and New York. Suzy knows how to catch them on the run. "Princess Peggy d'Arenberg will be arriving from Paris to dip into the New York social season," she noted. "You all remember Traveling Peggy. If she stays any place for more than a week, she gets nervous. And all her suitcases start to shake."

The wonder is that Suzy is not shaking too. She never rests; she takes as many as 50 phone calls a day, goes to as many as six parties an evening, all in the interest of turning out six columns a week for 60 newspapers. Her fame has been growing ever since 1963, when she moved from the defunct New York Daily Mirror to the New York Journal-American, where she replaced Cholly Knickerbocker, who had been indicted by the U.S. for failing to register as an agent of the Dominican Republic.

Bathtub Arrival. With her small hands and feet, widely admired bosom and spikelike false eyelashes, Suzy has the look of a pouter pigeon. The twice-divorced and now unmarried Texan, whose real name is Aileen Mehle, stands out at any party. She never misses a thing, she boasts, because of her powers of total recall. "I have the fastest eye in the house." But she never takes what she sees very seriously. "Social ites," she says, "kid each other, their way of life, their friends; and I kid the whole setup."

She reported the White Elephant Ball in Newport, at which some "dear girls in black leotards and black stocking caps" showed up in an "ancient bathtub, carried on the sturdy shoulders of Alan Pryce-Jones, who criticizes books, and Bobby Huertematte, who works in a Washington bank. Simple pleasures are the best, after all, aren't they?" She noted that "John McHugh and Trumbull Barton, whose Staten Island party for Margot and Rudy last spring made history, have gone off to Venice to visit an 87-year-old girl chum. They swear she's still fascinating. Maybe it's the canals." Trish Hilton's mother, Mrs. Horace Schmidlapp, said Suzy, turned up at her own party in "some red-hot Galitzine pajamas with no neck at all. There was an awful lot of Mummy showing because, holy mackerel, when that Galitzine gets those scissors out, she cuts out all the backs and all the fronts of everything. Oh well, it was a hot night, and Mummy looked dreamy."

Bing-Bang. Everywhere, Suzy sees a life that is frantic with movement. And even as a crowd of proper names comes home for the fall, there are others who must be watched as they pack their bags and take off. Mr. and Mrs. Robert Everett, for example, "more informally, Bob and Chiquita. They'll be in New York shortly for two or three weeks, then hurry back to Madrid for the shooting. Well, bang-bang. Or, as Truman Capote would say, bing-bing.

"Mr. and Mrs. F. Warren Pershing (that's Momo and Persh) left yesterday for Paris, Copenhagen, Athens and Istanbul. You realize now is when the really chic people go to Europe. Heaven forbid they should be part of that gauche Summer swarm who think because they have money they have everything, the innocents."

The compulsion of the crowd she writes about, says Suzy, "is to keep moving. When you sit still you THINK."

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