Make-Work Project

"Le Marquis awaits you," cried the flunkeys at the gates, holding their torches aloft in welcome. The queues of costumed party guests, who had been carefully screened by attendants assigned to bar gatecrashers, filed in. Biarritz' Chiberta Country Club was in ornate fancy dress for the occasion, made up in false front by New York decorator Valerian Rybar to look like an iSth century chateau. The 2,000-odd guests, including some 50 princes, 20 dukes, 95 counts, 35 marquesses and one sad and shopworn King (Peter of Yugoslavia), were all supposed to dress in the same (circa 1750) style, but many seemed as vague about their century as they did about their host, Ballet Impresario George de Cuevas, Marquis de Piedrablanca de Guana, who was spending a cool $75,000 to entertain them. Elsa Maxwell, who came only a couple of centuries too early in a red wig as Don Quixote's donkey-riding Sancho Panza, called him "that wonderful Italian who is doing so much for Biarritz . . . and Biarritz is France!"

In point of fact, Host Cuevas, whose right to a Spanish title seems to be questioned only in Spain, is part Chilean, part Danish. The one thing all his guests knew for sure about him is that he is married to a granddaughter of the late John D. Rockefeller. The marquise, 61, spends most of her time these days lying abed and munching chocolates, leaving her husband the marquis, 68, to his parties, his ballet and his eleven white (unhousebroken) Pekingese.

"You Look Black." All but one of the Pekes were left home last week, but the marquis' ballet dancers were on hand to entertain his guests with a performance of Swan Lake. For a while real swans were considered, but the marquis felt they might fly away inopportunely. To make sure nothing else flew away, he had 200-odd private policemen on hand to watch his guests and their estimated $9,000,000 worth of jewels. The cops were impeccably clad as 18th century plainclothesmen, but not all the guests were so socially correct. Washington Socialite Gwendolyn Cafritz burst in, looking very modern, with an apology: "I had Schiaparelli whip this up only yesterday; I had simply no time to find anything 18th century," Screen Star "Zizi" Jeanmaire (Hans Christian Andersen) turned up in a few strategically placed sequins, riding what might or might not have been an 18th century camel. Another girl came as a white rabbit, with neither explanation nor apology. Host Cuevas himself received his guests as a timeless "God of Nature" in cloth of gold, a scarlet cape and a headdress of gilded grapes and ostrich plumes in the full beam of a glaring spotlight. "I can't see you; oh, this light is terrible," he cried to one couple as his own limelight blinded him. "You look completely black to me." The couple whispered an explanation : they were dressed in skintight black. Guest after guest fell into deep curtsies before the marquis. One old lady in a crinoline was so moved that she had to be helped to her feet. When the last curtsy was dropped, the marquis flung his cloak off to preside in a gold union suit at the presentation of 21 "tableaux," which were watched with considerable interest, if only because of the fact that nobody was allowed to eat or drink until they were over.

Veblen out of Marie Antoinette. When the last Watteau shepherdess had traipsed across the stage some time after midnight, the company dove for the buffet and polished off all the tiny hams and suckling pigs' feet. They were still thirsty after washing them down with some 800 bottles of champagne. All that was left, said a workman next morning, "were cigarette butts and a few cucumbers."

The plain folk of Biarritz, who were allowed to watch the goings-on from a safe distance across the lake, went home early. The party itself broke up around 5 a.m. The International Set agreed that it had been the maddest, gayest thing since Don Carlos de Beistegui's party in Venice two years ago (TIME, Sept. 17, 1951). And, though it may have seemed to the cynical a creation by Thorstein Veblen out of Marie Antoinette, it appeared that the party had a noble purpose after all. "The party," explained Actress Merle Oberon, who turned Hearst columnist just for the occasion, "was given to revive interest in Biarritz and ... to give employment to as many as possible."

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