Legendary Parties 1922-1972 (1987)

Money and glamour are two very different concepts, often confused in a society where success is primordial. Groaning buffets, three orchestras in a tent decorated with fields of flowers, and guests arriving by helicopters may create a memorable evening but not a legendary party. For that, an impresario of pleasure is needed—someone who can marshal within a splendid setting the very gratin of international society, who can inspire his guests to engage the finest dressmakers to create fabulous costumes for a single night.

Anticipated for months and discussed for decades, a legendary party brings together every manner of extraordinary talent—composers, stage designers, choreographers, photographers—and heightens all the sensibilities of those fortunate enough to be invited. It also creates deadly enemies of those who do not receive the summons.

Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, known to friends around the world as Johnny, has always been at the center of the glittering, intersecting worlds of art and society. A grand seigneur of Proustian proportions, this aristocrat of the old order has assembled many never-before-published photographs of the notable bals masqués he attended—and gave—for over half a century, beginning in the 1920s. He has also written delightful descriptions of such fabled hosts and hostesses as Étienne and Édith de Beaumont, Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, Carlos de Beistegui, and the Rothschilds.

With flair, taste, and a passionate devotion to the art of giving pleasure, these people combined the graphic gifts of Cocteau, Bérard, and Picasso with the costume genius of Chanel, Poiret, Dior, and Saint Laurent. Balanchine and Lifar choreographed entrances to music specially composed for the occasion by Poulenc and Auric, while such artist-photographers as Man Ray, Horst, Hoyningen-Huene, and Beaton captured the evenings’ evanescence on film.

This beguiling book, with its biographical index of the participants, is a photographic “Who’s Who” of international society in the 20th century. Brooke Astor, New York’s leading philanthropist and a sharply perceptive observer of the international social scene, has written a revealing Foreword that explains what the masqueurs’ creative festivity meant in the midst of a troubled century.

Condition: some ligt wear to dust-wrapper’s edges.