The first rule of garden parties is that they really ought to be held inside. The second rule is that if you start them outside they more often than not end up inside anyway, for there is no social occasion better calculated to invite disaster, natural and otherwise.
Modern-day garden parties, of course, are all cheap copies of The Garden Party, which is to say, the four royal garden parties Queen Elizabeth throws every warm season for a select few guests. The select few, 8,000 to a party, are allowed to mill about the Buckingham Palace gardens for an hour, after which the Royal Family finally totters out behind a wedge of colorfully garbed Beefeater guards. After a few hurried pleasant exchanges with a select few of the select few, the RF then disappears into the Tea Tent.
Disasters are absolutely forbidden at royal garden parties, but one loomed at last year`s anyway because le tout London had just gone abuzz with the revelation that the father of Royal Cousin Princess Michael of Kent had been a Nazi. Worse (remember that much of London`s West End was kind of keen on the brownshirts in the 1930s), the princess was rumored to be consorting with American tycoon Ward Hunt, a (gasp) Texan.
But the princess was exiled to a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, where she reportedly took up deck games with a 60-year-old Argentine millionaire
(no, not Martin Borman), and the royal garden do proceeded as planned. The garden chatter overheard by the royals ran to such scandalous stuff as
”Philip is looking fit, isn`t he?,” and everything was all tickety-boo, as Lord Mountbatten loved to say.
WHEN PLANS WENT `TILT`
Garden parties are ostentatious, and unless you have a wedge of Beefeater guards, that can get you into trouble. Back in the 1950s, there was in my village in New York`s Upper Westchester County a rich family I shall call Tilt, because that was their name. They threw a garden party for their daughter`s coming out that featured more tents than Grant had at Shiloh, one of the very best outdoor society orchestras and virtually the entire local police force–hired as car parkers. And, instead of providing their seeming thousands of guests from New York, Connecticut and New Jersey with directions and a map, they had signs posted at every intersection for miles and miles around that proclaimed ”Tilt” with an arrow showing which way to turn.
Wouldn`t you know it? Some envious, rascally youths lifted the driveway sign from the Tilts` front lawn, redeposited it on the lawn of a dark, gloomy old mansion five miles away and changed all the direction signs accordingly. All night, tanned sweet young things in white dresses and smiling preppies in dinner jackets kept pulling up at what they thought was the Tilts`, only to find they were at a theological seminary for rabbinical students.
What dooms most garden parties is not Nazis, rich Texans or rascally youths but the weather, which is why they`re often called ”Gone With the Wind” parties during Washington`s monsoon season.
There are some who say that every party thrown by Sondra Gotlieb, the Canadian ambassador`s wife who won global fame earlier this year by slapping her social secretary, has been at least a qualified disaster, but the one that comes most readily to mind was a garden soiree a few years ago in which a howling typhoon chased her horde of power elite guests into a tent already crowded with tables and chairs.
The result was the ultimate in cocktail party no-no`s–an assemblage so jammed together that no one could mix! Former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, this correspondent and a small, overdressed woman found themselves squished into a permanent threesome.
TENTS MOMENTS
”Who are you?” said the not always courtly Schlesinger to the woman.
”I am the wife of the French ambassador,” she said, with great dignity. ”Oh,” said Schlesinger, as though she had said ”I am the Grand Kazoo of West Whoopee,” turning his back to her and leaving her to talk to the tent.
The same thing happened last summer at John Kenneth Galbraith`s annual garden party in Boston, when a downpour drove such guests as philanthropist Thomas Cabot, poet David McCord, columnist Anthony Lewis, economist Martin Feldstein, novelist Anne Bernays, Nobel laureate Krister Stendahl and architect Ivan Chermayeff into a tent, creating what must have been history`s single most insufferable conversation.
At a recent garden bash former White House social secretary Muffie Brandon threw for her British correspondent husband Henry, the wild weather not only kept guests under a tent but collapsed the tent on them during dessert. They scrambled into Muffie`s house and made merry until 2:30 a.m., having as much fun as people do at bring-your-own-booze bashes in Chicago. Most Washington parties–especially disasters–end at 10 p.m. or 11 p.m.
Social chronicler Diana McLellan tells of a legendary Washington garden wedding reception in which guests probably hoped for a downpour after it was discovered the tent had been erected over a badly maintained septic tank.
One problem with garden parties is that they require valets for the parking, and these miscreants can bang up a lot of cars if they get into the drinks. They are notorious for getting into the food. According to legend, Washington hostess and former broadcast heavy Nancy Dickerson once knocked an eggroll out of a car parker`s hand and made him spit out the bite already in his mouth.
Sometimes the guests steal. My aristocratic friend Margaret the Smith Girl recalls that the garden parties in her toney hometown of Cazenovia, N.Y., were frequented by an elderly and socially prominent guest who never considered the occasion complete unless he had purloined a jug of the bubbly. Scrupulous hostesses who wanted to avoid disaster made a point of not noticing the heists, though a magnum of Dom Perignon in the hip pocket is hard to hide. ALMOST ARRIVING LATE
Sometimes it`s best if certain guests do not come. Celebrated Chicago socialite and Republican lady Mary McDonald had a big birthday bash thrown for her in her own sumptuous North Shore garden and a good time was had by all
–except for one poor fellow who had a heart attack and died. But he had the decency not to do it in the garden. As though McDonald`s canapes were not sufficient, he stopped at a neighborhood McDonald`s afterwards and succumbed there.
The grim reaper also showed up as a guest at what must stand as the most disastrous garden party on record–the one Czar Nicholas threw for 500,000 Russian common people to celebrate his coronation in 1896. Free food and hundreds of barrels of free beer were set up in a military training field outside Moscow. Someone started a rumor that there wasn`t enough beer to go around, and in the ensuing stampede for the suds several hundred peasants were trampled to death, and thousands were maimed and injured.
Which brings us to rule No. 3 about garden parties: Be particular about whom you invite. —
