Society Darlings

think socialites are stuffy? check out this debutante party

When most of us think of society girls, we conjure up images of wealth and aloofness. Lang Phipps, a grandnephew of Lady Astor and author of the New York magazine cover story "Confessions of a Young WASP," grew up with them, as did photographer George Whipple. In words and pictures on these pages, they reminisce about debutante balls and introduce us to eight stunning women who aren't the least bit standoffish. Here's to the high-society version of coming out.

When I was 15, my older sister snuck me into the Gold and Silver Ball at the Plaza in New York. I fell in love fifty times that night before floating home in a state of aesthetic intoxication. There was, and is, something poignant to me about the debutante at her coming-out ball. All the girls there are at their peak this night--the pretty ones are not of this world, the plainer ones are looking better than you've ever seen them, their hair piled up regally, aglow with their mothers' jewels. This acceptance and efflorescence of being a girl, as opposed to a boy, is tremendously romantic. For that one night, we all participate in a sort of play in which the boys in black tie portray leading men and the girls in form-fitting gowns and bared shoulders are unabashedly girlish. But there has always been a decidedly practical aspect to the debutante ball from its 17th Century beginnings in European courts through the earliest American example, Philadelphia's Assembly, which has been going strong since 1748. It's an aspect that (text continued on page 157)Society Darlings(continued from page 129) flushes my romantic drivel straight down the toilet. The ball was designed, in essence, as a glorified meat market: a chance to display before society the talents, beauty and grace of your daughter, the sooner to get her out of the house and into the hoped-for status of nobleman's chattel. And so she had her moment in the light, dancing a charming minuet or gavotte, reciting verse, playing the pianoforte or violin and generally carrying on in as winsome a way as was required to lure a husband.

Today, one's child, wealth and taste are on display during the at-home coming-out party, an affair thrown--usually in July or August--to honor a daughter in her 18th year. Although it is supposedly her night, the deb is sometimes upstaged by the decor. I remember one such party in Southampton during the prodigal Eighties for which a star decorator was hired to do the tent's interior in a profusion of extravagant effects. The bill was rumored to be $60,000--just for the tent, mind you; forget about the music, food and booze. The unfortunate deb was hardly remembered.

I always saw these parties as revels. I recall one at which, when champagne, scrambled eggs and bacon were served at dawn, people literally came crawling out of bushes in varying states of dishabille to see what the commotion was about. I remember as well lots of orgiastic swimming in pools at four in the morning, sometimes in full evening regalia, sometimes in nothing at all.

The summer deb party was once a starchy, chaperoned event attended by beaux hand-picked by Mother and Father. No one, certainly no one below the legal imbibing age, got drunk; this party, after all, was one of the sturdy traditions of the Protestant ruling classes in a most conservative country. Sons and daughters went home with their parents when the party ended, well before midnight.

All that changed in the early Sixties, when a party that is now legend took place. In a sense, that party set the tone for all those I knew while I was growing up. It was given in Southampton for the heiress to the Wanamaker department-store fortune, Fernanda Wanamaker Wetherill. The single male guests stayed in Dune Castle, an enormous rented house at the beach. The party was a smash, though some were put off by the band that followed the traditional orchestra from Philadelphia. It featured electrically amplified music played loudly by black people; rock and roll had made its debut at a society soiree. After the tent party folded, the guests kidnaped band members and took them to Dune Castle, where they played into the dawn. A chimpanzee was reported loose and swinging from the chandeliers.

It was fun while it lasted; later on in the Sixties, the debutante phenomenon fell out of favor. For progressive youth, it carried too much establishment baggage; feminists rejected it as a sexist anachronism. After limping through the Seventies, however, it experienced an almost complete restoration during the reign of Reagan and continues to flourish in the elitist conservatism of the Bush Presidency. The big metropolitan balls--the Gold and Silver, the Assembly, the Cotillion, in such cities as New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Atlanta--are once again well subscribed to, though more tightly governed than in my day, when it was de rigueur to get hammered at Trader Vic's during balls at the Plaza. And there's another difference: A deb no longer feels obligated to end her season with a ring on her finger.

My own great aunts were famous Virginia debs known as the Langhorne sisters. Irene Langhorne, who married Charles Dana Gibson, inspired the wasp-waisted Gibson girl, an icon of the deb aesthetic. Her sister Nancy married Waldorf Astor and became the first female member of the House of Commons. These ambitious women used their beauty to get what they desired from life.

A century later, women are again picking up on the idea of trading on their sexual gifts. It has become smart to be a little cheesecakey, not only for Madonna but for "nice" girls who've gone to the right schools, girls who'd be at home at any debutante ball. Today, they can choose to be sex objects and still be self-determining. Here's to them.