> i guess i was asking: what was so important about the party that someone
> ought to write a tom wolfe-like novel about it? just the > Talk mag
thing?
I guess it's just how perfectly that party summarized the prevailing zeitgeist of that moment. Empty celebrity, easy money, expensive everything, bad cultural product.
An interesting counterpoint would be Truman Capote's black-and-white ball, which was at the Plaza in 1966. I've asked Lewis Lapham about that party, and that era, many times. He was there. It was a similar moment in a few superficial ways - easy money, bubbly times, a feeling of go-go-ness.
But it was also completely different. To give you one small example, Lewis was then a staff writer for the Saturday Evening Post. He says he made a salary of $80,000 a year, not adjusting for inflation. The Post had a circulation of 9 million (compared to Time's 3 or 4 million). And his colleagues included writers like Joan Didion.
So you had a national magazine with an enormous audience employing talented, contrarian writers, paying them excellent money, letting them write about whatever they want.
By contrast, today magazines have no staff writers. There are no magazines with such circulation. No brilliant writers are published in major national outlets. And everyone has to churn out the celebrity or diet or consumer story of the day.
As for the Capote's party, no one was there to cover it. They were simply there to attend and enjoy themselves. By contrast, the Talk party was held for one sole reason: so that other outlets would write about it.
Seth