Bacchanalia gets branded
ON a recent Friday at about 1 a.m., as I stood in a Hollywood Hills mansion rented out by Flaunt magazine, sipping a Patron cocktail near a mannequin outfitted in Hugo Boss, thinking about the untouched Jaguar sitting behind velvet ropes in the driveway, I asked myself whether that most venerable of Los Angeles civic institutions, the extravagant mansion party, had lost its soul.
But then I saw Luis Barajas, Flaunt's jovial publisher and editor, greeting grateful-looking guests whom he'd never met, ushering them into a house the likes of which they'd probably never seen and laughing his loud, hoarse Venezuelan laugh, and it occurred to me that, in some sense, this privatization trend in mansion parties could be a positive development for the average partygoers of L.A.
I had what you might call a Republican Nightlife Moment.
First some over-sentimentalized history.
Extravagant mansion parties in L.A. used to mean something very specific. There were Louis B. Mayer's romps at his Hollywood Hills estate; the all-night jazz jams at Artie Shaw's house in Coldwater Canyon (so beloved an address he wrote a song about it, "Summit Ridge Drive"); the Playboy Mansion, of course.
More recently David Geffen has had some legendary do's, and Robert Evans' Beverly Hills hideaway has become a proverbial den of iniquity.
What made these places and parties good, aside from dented bumpers and nude lawn sprints, was their organic quality. These were Bacchanalia presided over by self-invented Bacchuses, in stately pleasure domes of their own decree; tableaux, if you will, of the city itself. Egos abounded, but no one was trying to sell anything, except perhaps some Bolivian marching powder in the bathroom.
Lately, however, Hollywood power has grown more corporate, more cautious. The mansion-party-throwing class has fallen prey to the Fifth Estate, viz. the publicists. There are still the sought after fetes like Brian Lourd's and Patrick Whitesell's Oscar parties (even the latter was put on by Brent Bolthouse), but mansion parties tend more and more to be Mansion McParties.
Remember the days when you drove for an hour trying to find 34253 1/3 Chita Rivera Lane, guided only by the sound of the canyon-rattling bass, and then had to talk your way past a vigilant houseboy, all to share a bottle of warm champagne with Robert Downey Jr.? Now that's a party, people! These days it's all about shuttle vans, designer T-shirt swag bags, celebrity DJs and scrums at the bar for the newest hideous boutique vodka concoction.
