The vanity fair oscar party--7/7/25

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Today's selection-- from When the Going Was Good by Graydon Carter. Editor Graydon Carter and the Vanity Fair staff made their party at the Academy Awards the most coveted invitation in town:

“During the first couple of years of hosting the Oscar party, an advance team would go out a month before the awards to chase up stars we wanted to invite. By about the fourth year, we had more or less seen off our competitors. But we faced a new problem: who not to invite. I'd usually come out two weeks beforehand. I'd bring my entire family and stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel or the Bel-Air. The phone in my room—in those days before cell phones—would never stop ringing. In desperation, I had the hotel screen the calls, so when they'd announce who was on the line, I could either take the call or have the operator say that I wasn't in. I was astounded by the number of people who happened to be out there that weekend and knew where I was staying and wondered if they could get an invitation. A few years in, it got to the point where if you hadn't been invited to the Vanity Fair Oscar party, it was best to be studiously out of town.

“We had to go to great lengths to keep the numbers down. After two years of Oscar dinners, we'd outgrown Mortons. Our solution was to increase its size overnight by knocking out the back wall of the restaurant and building a passageway with latticework and topiary on the walls out into the parking lot, where we constructed a big marquee tent structure. This had carpeting, sofas, and more lattice­ work and topiary. We'd rebuild the back wall of Mortons the following day. None of the add-on bits looked temporary. Even the bathrooms were exemplary. Despite the fact that Los Angeles is a big no-smoking city, and that it was forbidden indoors by the Beverly Hills fire marshal, a big hit each night were the cigarette girls. We outfitted them with costumes like those worn in nightclubs in 1930s movies. They roamed the premises with boxlike trays hung from their necks, passing out packs of cigarettes.

“We also had Vanity Fair ashtrays and Zippo lighters—all of which were gone by the end of the night. One year we flew in a Cuban orchestra from Havana to liven the after-party up a bit. But Hollywood,I discovered, doesn't really dance. Why dance like a fool when you could be networking with someone who could say yes to your next movie? I like to dance, and at one point was out on the dance floor with Madonna, if you can believe it. I was a bit dismayed when her brother Christopher cut in. I was even more dismayed when I realized he cut in because he wanted to dance with me.

Carter in a publicity shot for Vanity Fair

“A word about seating. Male-female-male-female-yes, obviously. But there are different rules depending on geography. In Los Angeles, for instance, husbands and wives sit together. In New York, husbands and wives sit at the same table but not together. In Europe, husbands and wives sit at different tables—all the better, apparently, for post-dinner gossip picked up during the meal. You try to avoid putting people with a potentially antagonistic relationship too close to one another. This could mean a writer who gave another writer a bad review. Or two people who'd once had an affair. Or in the case of Hollywood, two actors who had been up for the same role and one of whom got it. There were times when we got the seating way off. Two writers who'd had an affair were seated beside each other at the Oscar dinner one year. With their new partners also at the table. Not good. Emilia Clarke, the charming young actress with the dragons in HBO's Game if Thrones, was seated in the vicinity of Brett Ratner and James Toback at one Oscar dinner. Their offensively florid behavior caused her to plead with Sara to change her seat. Which she did. When both Ratner and Toback were later corralled in the #MeToo roundup of sexual suspects, it didn't surprise any of us—least of all, Emilia.

“The Oscars are a long night, often running to four hours. So when we were doing the seating, we wanted guests to be surrounded by compatible tablemates. The dinners were generally made up of fifteen tables of ten. My thought was to treat each one as a separate dinner party so that regardless of the dreariness of what was going on at the awards, the people at each table would have a good time. We built them around table leaders. The Jerry Weintraub table, for instance. Jerry Jones and his wife, Gene, were regulars at that one. Or the Hanks table. This is where we regularly sat Tom Ford and his husband, Richard Buckley, Martin Short, Jimmy and Jane Buffett, Tom Freston, and Eric and Lisa Eisner. My own table varied only slightly from year to year: Barry and Diane, Mitch and Kelly, Mick, Fran, Ronald Perelman and his then wife, Ellen Barkin, and a surprise, guest or two. This could be Larry David, or Johnny Pigozzi, or Colin Firth and his then wife, Livia.

“To get to the actual arrangements as to who would go where, we had a series of seating meetings in the days leading up to the big night. These were attended by close to a dozen staff members, all with their own areas of expertise. Seating meetings might sound like civilized tea-and-watercress-sandwiches sorts of afternoons. They were anything but. Each combatant had their favorites and fought for their table and placement. If the participant was in charge of a table, like Reinaldo, Bob Colacello, or Wendy, the negotiations got downright cranky. With Reinaldo and Bob, whose regions of social influence overlapped dramatically, there was especially heated discussion over who would get senior Hollywood chatelaines like Nancy Reagan, Betsy Bloomingdale, Connie Wald, or Denise Hale.

“For the party afterward, the fire and safety officials had a maximum number of people they judged would be safe to have in the room. A fire marshal at the entrance would keep track of the number with a hand clicker, and stop anyone from coming in once capacity was reached. No one could enter until somebody else left. We didn't want a line of people with Oscars in their hands standing outside. So anybody with an Academy Award got in immediately—there was a speed lane for them. Because that was the job that night: to get as many of those Oscar winners as possible into our room. The rest of it—the control, the security, the knife-edge diplomacy—was planned and supervised down to the most minute detail by Sara. She was also the brick wall at which all attempts to cross the border without a pass—absurd and bizarre as some were, or just plain aggressive and threatening-were calmly repelled. She did brick wall very well.

“We'd start out with a list of 500 potential dinner guests and then spend three months whittling it down to about 150. Various editors on the magazine got involved and everybody had their favored guests. The fashion editors—including, at various stages, Elizabeth Saltzman, Michael Roberts, and Jessica Diehl—were always colorful inclusions in these scrums. Once the invitations went out, the pleas flowed in from those not invited. I hate hurting anyone's feelings and was considered too soft a touch by the staff. A number of them­ chiefly Sara-would redirect outside calls to their rooms so they had the chance to say no before I could say yes.

“Sara was the object of bribery, threats, and even abuse. Gift after gift would arrive in her office, and she would write ‘Return to sender’ on each one. There was once a five-figure offer from a Saudi prince. People would say to her, in the face of a refusal, ‘Do you know who I am?’ and she would say calmly that she knew perfectly well who they were. I got a message once asking me if l had any pull with Sara. My kids found this really funny.”

author:	Graydon Carter
title:	When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines
publisher:	Penguin Press
pages:	235-239