Upper East Side Story

Many of the 90 guests who gathered in Leonard Bernstein's fashionable Park Avenue apartment had the iridescence of Beautiful People. They came not to gabble, not to glitter, but to listen. Settling down on folding chairs, they attended the guest of honor: Donald Cox, field marshal of the Black Panther Party.

For twelve minutes, Cox, in the Panther regalia of goatee and black turtleneck, preached a party rhetoric mellowed only slightly for the occasion --there were no promises to "kill the pigs." If full employment is not available. Cox explained, "then we must take the means of production and put them in the hands of the people." By "we," Cox did not mean the moneyed liberals in his audience. One of the ladies gasped her dismay that her head might be among the first to roll when the revolution came. "Oh, no," the wife of another Panther reassured her. "You sound as if you're afraid. There's no reason for that."

Elegant Slumming. The salon seminar was the inspiration of a liberal committee organized to defend 21 Black Panthers indicted last April for plotting to kill policemen and dynamite a police station, department stores and a railroad right-of-way. Ten of the suspects are being held in $100,000 bond each. The Panthers note angrily that only one of the three whites arrested for actually setting dynamite charges in Manhattan office buildings in November has bail set that high. The maestro and his wife Felicia, who have long been concerned with civil liberties, agreed to allow friends who were interested to gather at their apartment to hear the Panthers' case. It was not exactly a jury of the Panthers' peers, however. Among the guests were such social notables as the Peter Duchins, Heiress Cynthia Phipps, Mrs. August Heckscher and Mrs. Sidney Lumet.

The New York Times's Charlotte Curtis, whose typewriter can deliver deft malice, was also in the crowd. Next morning she published some ludicrous exchanges--which Bernstein denies--between the field marshal of the pig-baiters and the aesthetic doge of the Upper East Side.

Cox: The resistance put up against us dictates [our] strategy.

Bernstein (lounging in an armchair in tartan slacks): You mean you've got to wing it. . .I dig absolutely.

Old-Fashioned. Before the evening was over, guests scribbled out $3,000 in checks and pledges as contributions to the defense of the Panther 21. Producer-Director Otto Preminger recoiled when Cox called the U.S. "the most oppressive country in the world," yet he came through with $1,000, and Bernstein offered the fee for his next concert--a sum he expects to be well into four figures--for the defense cause.

As if the Charlotte Curtis piece were not enough, the Times then published an editorial that accused the "politico-cultural jet set" of indulging in what it called "elegant slumming" and "guilt-relieving fun spiked with social consciousness." Said the Times: "Responsible black leadership is not likely to cheer as the Beautiful People create a new myth that Black Panther is Beautiful."

That sourness missed at least part of the point. Said Bernstein: "Our meeting was for an extremely serious purpose that has nothing to do with the Panthers. The people at the party cared about civil liberties. People wrote checks because the Panthers' civil liberties were violated." Said Preminger: "I believe in this country and I would fight the Panthers if they tried to destroy it. But if there was discrimination in determining bail, then the people who believe in this country ought to correct the injustice. The New York Times is very old-fashioned--you can quote me."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.