This week I received in the [mail an invitation to a book party. I hesitate to go, for, you see, I was a book partygoer in the glory days, back when going to a book party meant something — namely that you were going to have to squeeze by Norman Mailer if you were going to make it to the bar.
This was in the 1980s, when publishing houses were still serving shrimp cocktails as an hors d’oeuvre, not crummy cheese pastries like today. In my day, New York book parties were held at glamorous nightclubs like Nell’s or MK or at specially rented rooms in the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Frick. If you were a book reviewer, you could go to four a week. The locations changed. Only Fran Leibowitz’s wardrobe remained the same.
I was at the Donald Trump book party, on the same escalator with Ruth Westheimer, Phyllis George, and Leon Spinks — all at the same time! That was the famous dessert party with waiters shoving chocolate confections at you all night. It didn’t start till 10, and thousands were in attendance, the crowd studded with second-tier celebrities. Trump’s buddies in the construction business could be seen hugging the walls and looking nervous, as if the Park Avenue Gestapo might swoop in suddenly and deport anybody found having too much hair on his back. Leon Spinks danced without his teeth.
I was at a book party at the Hard Rock Cafe and was nearly beaten up by one of Patrick Swayze’s female bodyguards. That one was for a book by Roy Orbison, and they had an impersonator standing in for Roy (not only was the book ghostwritten, the party was ghost-hosted). I was at a party in the East Village with a roomful of people involved in various scandals that had been featured in the New York Post. “Not indicted, not invited,” the Post’s Eric Breindel noted. I was at a book party given by Armand Hammer in the Armor Room at the Metropolitan. They handed out his massive memoirs for free. As my wife and I walked away down Fifth Avenue, we noticed that some of the other guests had given up lugging their copies home and had simply abandoned them on fire hydrants or windowsills.
We learned to find the choke points that hots d’oeuvre-carrying waiters would have to traverse between the kitchen and the room. We were newlyweds then, so these parties were like dates and the food was dinner. I learned how to grab a napkin off a waiter’s tray, select a toothpick, stab a chicken shard, dip it in mustard sauce, and bring it to my mouth all without spilling my drink or getting mustard on my tie. The worst parties had buffet tables, which inevitably drew huge crowds. There were a lot of short people present; Darwinian selection meant that tall people, who couldn’t worm their way up to the buffet table, starved and so could not reproduce.
We rarely knew anybody, so we’d just look out over the room. Most of the people were drawn from New York’s ranks of Tame Young Bohemians. These were editorial assistants at magazines and publishing houses, carrying invitations passed down by their more famous bosses. If a bomb had gone off at any of these parties, glossy magazines across the continent would have been riven with typos for months, and Conde Nast bigwigs would have gone to their favorite restaurants without lunch reservations.
The men from the fashion magazines wore army boots and Italian suits. If they were from Spy or Esquire or Vanity Fair, they sported the latest in Ironic Wear. One fellow wore a wacky day-glo bow tie, another a kilt, another red canvas high-tops with a tuxedo. Many wore rat-tails, the string-like four-inch ponytails that were fashionable at the time. It was enough to make a statement, but not so much as to endanger your employment prospects at an advertising agency. The women could not afford ritualistic mockery since they were in such surplus. They wore black miniskirts, black stockings, and expressions of chilly anxiety. These people were the backbone of the American contraception industry.
Their conversation consisted mostly of ambition anxiety; though making it themselves, they were terrified that vulgar people would end up beating them to the top. An entire magazine, Spy, was based on the idea that people more successful than you are hopelessly vulgar.
Toward the end of the era, we noticed that the parties were drawing an older crowd. Health clubs were coming into vogue so it was no longer fashionable to get sick and die. One of the nicer parties was held in the Washington Square townhouse that was once Edith Wharton’s. We actually knew people, and chatted with, among others, the fabled editor Erwin Glikes. As we were walking home, we noticed Glikes sitting in a restaurant at a window-side table. He was eating alone, some pasta dish. He was reading a book, and he looked perfectly content.
DAVID BROOKS
