The New Elegants

Once they were called the beautiful people and were presumed to have titles. Others knew them better as the idle rich. But today there are few titles among them, they are not that rich, nor are they idle. Less grand than the grandest of an older generation, but also less ostentatious, they might be called the New Elegants. And they are not a numbered set revolving around a few Manhattan town houses and Newport mansions but a relaxed confraternity that extends the length and breadth of the land.

They are dedicated wives (generally to high-powered men who dabble equally in politics and the arts, wear dinner jackets and parkas with identical ease) and devoted mothers (generally to no more than four picture-book children with fanciful names like Chloe and Sabrina, Tared and Clive). Somehow they find time for charity work, church functions, community projects and college alumnae drives. They are enthusiastic music lovers (with a predilection for baroque quartets, German lieder and early Dixieland, an antipathy for anything atonal) and zealous art collectors (with a penchant for abstract expressionists, pre-Columbian sculpture and 18th century French furniture, a marked aversion to teak and leatherette).

They prefer concerts and auctions to canasta and golf, are likely to spend the time their mothers relegated to ladies' luncheons to tracking down a Directoire commode for the foyer, just the right bronze for the living-room mantle. If not elaborately educated in the mechanics of cooking, the New Elegants are nonetheless possessed of a sophisticated palate favoring simple Continental cuisine--everything light in body and definite in flavor, including the wines.

Sit Down at Home. But it is as hostesses, often to as many as 40 guests at as many as three sittings a week, that they are most practiced and most properly celebrated. Skilled in every facet of party giving, from the arrangement of flowers to the decision (reluctant but mandatory) to hire an extra couple to take coats and pass drinks, they have the energy to perform a well-worn role as if it were the choice part -in a first-run play, the ingenuity to plan a guest list with an eye toward a lively, varied pattern (putting banker next to deep-sea diver, Senator between pop artist and prima ballerina), and the social status sufficient to commandeer acceptances all around.

Lately, moreover, they have dismissed the short cuts--the vast cocktail party and the buffet supper--for the older, more elegant sit-down dinner.

Gone today from the boards that count are the stacks of plates and flatware wrapped in napkins; vanished, like the overhead light, are the women in sensible, street-length silks. More and more, the discriminating tables across the land are set with ornate silver on cloths of heirloom lace. And, gleaming in the dim, expensive light of tall candles, sit some of the handsomest people in some of the handsomest dresses that the age provides. The New Elegants have rediscovered the pleasure of dressing up.

Art after Dinner. The trend can be documented in economic statistics.

Sales of evening gowns have more than doubled in the past four years; the dinner-jacket market has zoomed in cities across the country. Some credit the U.S.'s widening affluence, others the infectious sense of style radiated by the Kennedys. The new elegance has also resulted in a change in locale. In Manhattan, for instance, big-time restaurants and nightclubs are no longer the vogue for any but the column-happy or expense-account crowds. Instead, private dances and sit-down dinners (the favorite guest list accommodates twelve, with luck includes at least one artistic "Success of the Moment")-- are ordinary, every-other-weekday affairs for most fashionables.

Discotheques are largely the province of the young unmarrieds. Hotels and supper clubs are useful for receptions, cotillions and balls--although the choicest site of all is a museum, as was demonstrated by last week's Party of the Year mounted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute amidst the soaring pillars and brooding statuary of the museum itself. And, replacing conversation (a tedious business if ever there was one) as the going after-dinner sport is the opening (any opening) of an art gallery (any art gallery). Says one smart-setter: "It is too exciting. An opening is just like a battlefield! Really, there are so many people you never do get to see the paintings." Whether they are true-blueblooded New Yorkers (whose names, like Vanderbilt, are shared by streets, hotels and public monuments) or newer, no less blue bloods from Los Angeles and Detroit, the New Elegants have a common bond--sometimes called money in the bank. It permits them to study languages and cooking, art and music, spend weekends in the country, holidays on the ski slopes, and summers in Europe. It allows them to work either for fun (generally on the staffs of fashion magazines) or completely for free (at hospitals or for charities). "The first thing you're asked at parties," says Mrs. Robin Butler, recently named publicity director for Dior of New York, "is 'What do you do?' And you'd better be doing something, because it's bad form if you're not." Pucci & Kangaroo. In dress, the stress is on flair and fabric, not feather and furbelow. European couturiers like Dior and Pucci are smart-set favorites in the U.S.; Sarmi is the name that counts on an evening gown; but American designers are coming up fast and, as frugal Mrs. Stanley Rumbough Jr.

(Actress Dina Merrill) is quick to point out, "Why spend $800 for a Paris suit when you can get a Bill Blass for $200?" Young Mrs. Frederick Guest agrees.

The former Stephanie Wanger, 21, daughter of Hollywood Producer Walter Wanger and Actress Joan Bennett, she is now the wife of an heir to the vast Woolworth fortune and, therefore, feeling conscientiously practical. She spends her days furnishing their five-room honeymoon pad, learning how to cook and working for Irvington House, a charity for children with rheumatic fever and allied diseases. She buys most of her clothes at department stores, has occasional copies run up by a little dressmaker she has discovered, owns only one fur coat. Picked up in Australia on her recent round-the-world, one-year wedding trip, it is soft, sleek and 100% kangaroo.

Charlotte Ford, 23, prefers better-known quality goods--mink, for instance--to kangaroo, makes no bones about the money she spends on clothes (mostly by Courreges, Guy Laroche and Givenchy). An outdoors sort, she thinks "the ski life has it all over the Palm Beach life--much healthier." Currently between jobs (she worked for two years in interior decoration), she entertains at occasional formal dinners, invites two or three friends for lunch every day because "it's so much more relaxing than going out." Countess John Palffy likes to have twelve friends to a black-tie dinner party, then asks from 30 to 60 more "for a nightcap" afterwards. The late comers provide "the new blood" that "keeps the dinner guests from drooping." An added aid is a small Hungarian band imported for the dance-minded. Elizabeth Oxenberg, 26, is a genuine--though deposed--Princess of Yugoslavia who eloped four years ago with Seventh Avenue Manufacturer Howard Oxenberg, still lends an air of royalty to the social circuit. But most titled ladies are simple American girls who married romantic foreigners. Spain's Countess Quintanilla, for instance, was plain Mary Aline Griffith, daughter of a Pearl River, N.Y., insurance salesman.

Jax & Old Orange Mink. "The important thing," says Robin Butler, "is simplicity and ingenuity." To that end, she tucks an apron around her Dior and cooks her own meals. Felicia Sarnoff, 37, second wife of the board chairman of NBC and mother of two small children, buys her clothes at Jax, Saks and Lord & Taylor, scorns "the group that thinks it's chic to whip over to Paris, sit around in hot, stuffy rooms and have 80 fittings." She is pleased with the trend to more and more formal dinners, which she prefers to "those mad mob scenes at cocktail parties," but is none too happy about the resultant need for a closetful of evening dresses that have to be originals and can only be worn once or twice. "I think it would be great to be able to rent them," she says wistfully.

The impulse to elegance is not confined to Manhattan but has had a different impact in different areas. Boston, where patrician families have been dressing up for years, takes it in stride.

"Here," sniffs one Brahmin observer, "clothes are not status symbols," a fact sustained by the regular appearance on well-bred shoulders of the old orange mink. Atlantans, on the other hand, greet the new elegance with antebellum ardor, consider it out of the question to appear anywhere but at a cocktail party in anything but formal, full-length dress.

In St. Louis, dressing up is still considered a bit of a lark and centers on occasions like the Veiled Prophet Ball, where above-elbow white gloves are de rigueur for wives and the soberest businessmen get wildly trigged out as bearded warriors.

Chanel & Shower Curtains. Chicago society has been dressing up for years, but New and Old Guard alike have welcomed the new sanction with delight. Mrs. Edward Byron Smith, whose family is among Chicago's oldest, still shops in small, exclusive local stores, is so socially secure that she found it "quite amusing" to encounter another woman wearing the identical gown at a recent ball. Mrs. Michael Butler, 31, third wife to her second husband, a millionaire sportsman (Manhattan's Robin Butler was his second) keeps busy with two daughters (by No. 1) and a ten-month-old son.

Born in Oklahoma and only a two-year resident of suburban Oak Brook, Mrs. Butler claims to be delighted with Chicago ("It's like a pregnant woman, just beginning to be recognized"). She makes frequent trips to town, adores an evening at the opera or dinner at a favorite restaurant like Maxim's ("We love it," she says, "although the one in Paris is really a bit better"). A crack shot, capable equestrienne and "dear friend of Coco Chanel's," Mrs. Butler has a passion for Paris clothes, wears long hostess gowns or pants suits for quiet evenings at home. In fact, evening pants, designed and priced high by Pucci, Chanel and imitators, are almost intimidatingly chic in salons from San Francisco to New York, where no one sets them off with more distinction than Mrs. Denise Bouche, former Vogue editor and widow of Painter Rene Bouche.

The James Goffs belong neither to the Old Guard nor to the flashy new set but to a special stratum in between, a sort of nouveau niche. Mr. Goff is a lawyer, Mrs. Goff his first wife. Instead of an old-style town house or suburban estate, they have a wood-paneled-duplex city apartment. Like Mrs. Butler, Mrs. Goff, 33, is partial to Chanel, makes do at local shops and "the boutiques in New York, when it works out" between annual trips to Europe.

Currently concerned with furnishing her new apartment, Mrs. Goff keeps a wary eye out for French antique furniture, has even gone so far as to rent a sewing machine so that she can run up bathroom and shower curtains "to see whether I could do it." She finds time for almost daily tennis in the summer, almost nightly opera in the winter, and part-time volunteer hospital work when her schedule permits. She does her own cooking, arranges her own flowers, and does her own hair (though, until recently, she used to have to fly to an expert in New York to have it cut).

Norell & a French Chateau. In San Francisco, as elsewhere, elegance is the order of the day. Mrs. John Rosekrans Jr. welcomes it, even though her own life has never been much different ("Except," she admits, "for the war, when people were reluctant to display wealth, it being, after all, such a very sad time"). As with most of the Bay area's elite, Mrs. Rosekrans is devoted to the at-home dinner party, points with pride to the increased use of fish knives and finger bowls as table appointments. For clothes, she depends on Balenciaga and Simonetta & Fabiani for staples (gathered in the average three to six weeks every other year she spends on a European tour of salons), prefers Galanos and Norell among American designers. Mrs. Jose Cebrian, 32, is no less addicted to small, sit-down dinners held in her Nob Hill apartment, but she unbends once a year when she asks 200 guests (among them always a sprinkling of "creative people") to the Napa Valley family home for a casual afternoon of swimming and games, a formal dinner dance at night.

Like Mrs. Rosekrans, Mrs. Christian de Guigne III cites World War II as the only period in her life when things were any less elegant than today. Certain facets, in fact, have not changed a whit: her servants have been with her for close to 25 years; her San Mateo home is the one she moved into as a bride; the French chateau the family visit every year has been theirs for a century. Mrs. de Guigne shops both here and abroad, finds European stores "more fun" but "has a ball" Christmas shopping in Macy's. Dior, Balenciaga and Saint Laurent are her best-loved designers, but her wardrobe is catholic enough to include frontier pants for gardening, simple hostess skirts for dinners with the family.

With a staff that includes a butler, an upstairs maid, a personal maid, a cook, two gardeners, a chauffeur and a part-time secretary, someone is almost always on duty. Thursday nights, however, Mrs. de Guigne does the cooking. "I love it," she says. "After all, I love my home, and why shouldn't I? I'm a housewife!"

So are they all. But increasingly across the U.S. they are getting harder and harder to tell from the celebrities.

-- Among current eligibles are Director Mike Nichols, Author Terry Southern, Pop Artist Andy Warhol, and (always a catch) Leonard Bernstein.

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