People’s Parties

Not Dee Dee — a truer story this week

My parents owned a horse farm in central Kentucky, and for years they held a party each July, timed to coincide with the thoroughbred yearling auctions at Keeneland and Fasig Tipton. Irish bloodstock agents, trainers from Chantilly, sheiks from the UAE, Hollywood types, fashion people, a wolfish Aga Khan, a dissolute late-stage Bunker Hunt, Newmarket and Sao Paolo and Athens and Hong Kong, West Coast self-styled cowboys in reflective aviators — these disparate characters convened in the yard around our house, where my mother set up little cocktail tables with gingham cloths and baskets of bright mums under the trees. Deep eighties. Suzy era. Likely just beer and wine served along with the soft drinks — my parents weren’t really drinkers, so I don’t remember the parties getting wild in any kind of nefarious way, at least from a child’s point of view. Of course, the amount of wild varied in proportion to the guest; one year a woman stumbled backward into our pool, after which we hung her sopping, poufy, glittery cocktail dress in my parents’ bathroom to dry while she partied in my mom’s robe for the remainder of the night. Her name might be familiar to some but I wouldn’t write it because she gifted me a personal subscription to Elle magazine the day after that party as thanks for waiting outside the bathroom with her wine glass while she changed, and I was bound to her for life.

I think about it now, and am in awe of my parents. They were in their mid-thirties, having fun and somehow managing to remain fully themselves while entertaining these relative kooks and swells from around the world. It was a heady time for many, a go-go era of cultural excess: we know from movies and Suzy and Tom Wolfe and Reaganomics and Falcon Crest that little within a certain thinly oxygenated strata — either legit or aspirational — was normal, but they were. We were. That was the great part about the whole thing.

My mother was an air force brat and former girl scout whose tiny closet had no back so she could part the clothes and crawl through it to get to my room in case I cried in the night as a baby; she’d engineered that solution and then just kept her closet that way; my friends still remember trampling over her shoes in a hard crouch as a shortcut to the rest of the upstairs when they slept over. They loved the Stir N’ Frost brownies in paper tins she served for dessert, and the junk food drawer she kept stocked for us with powdered mini donuts and Little Debbie snack cakes. My father saw my mother’s girl scout and raised it to eagle scout. He grew up in a Capra-sweet small town near the foot of the Appalachian mountains — fishing, being the quarterback, drinking Ale-8s and rolling up to screenings at the local drive-in (started by my grandfather) in his prized Mustang. Mom and Dad met serving as members of the student council at William and Mary, planned their own wedding in the un-air conditioned college chapel shortly after their graduation, harmonized after dinner each night with my brother and I while my father strummed his acoustic guitar, von Trapp style, singing Tom Dooley and Fox on the Run in place of Edelweiss…and I challenge you to make any average titled Euro playboy or Harrow-educated racing tycoon understand ONE THING that I just said.

But!

These good American kids, these grown scouts with a son (my brother) in soccer cleats and a daughter (me) obsessively into Free to Be You and Me, an obese chocolate lab (Bandit) and a rescue German shepherd (Smokey — yep, from the Burt Reynolds movie) ambling among the guests and filching ham biscuits off trays — they — we — were as exotic to the hoi polloi as the hoi polloi was to us. It turned out that we were interesting to many of them precisely because of our ordinariness, our remove from an affected chic and privilege they complained about facing constantly in their usual lives. “So you guys are close?” my pool-soaked new friend asked my mother and me as we helped her pull her gown over her head, handing her towels redolent of Tide detergent and Bounce dryer sheets. When we nodded she said strangely, just to me: “And you go to school?” She seemed bewitched by my account of riding in a carpool with my brother, and asked follow up questions about what third grade was like, what subjects I took and what activities I did in the afternoons. I learned later that the woman’s father had been married five times, two of his wives had died from barbiturate overdoses, and that she’d been educated by private tutor in St. Moritz. Presumably no need for carpool. She was so sweet and vulnerable and hungry to connect it still breaks my heart a little to think of her standing there, dripping on the tile.

The funny thing about the horse business is that buyers gather in Kentucky for one reason only: the limestone under the ground there fertilizes the grass horses eat, and makes them strong. 250 years ago an industry grew up around that Kindergarten-simple fact: a community of farms to support the livestock, a community of horseman who know equine pedigree and can spot what makes a foal likely to run fast. None of this has anything to do with pedigreed people. Those come from elsewhere; they’re the customers. Sure, lots breed their own stock in other parts of the world — England, Ireland, Australia, Japan — but something about bluegrass country, that verdant, New Jersey-sized patch of land where the farms are, makes it an ultimate sweet spot for growing these animals. So people come, and the resulting mix of cultures is like nothing in luxury trade; imagine the audience at a Sotheby’s auction convening on the Florida panhandle, or couture mavens taking their seats for a runway show in a warehouse in Little Rock, or a yacht commission getting christened on a pond in Maryland, and you sort of get the idea.

The contrast between our regular lives and the periods of jet-set influx most people central Kentucky experienced at auction time made us rather proud of our normalcy, like flamingos in a zoo might seem proud of their plumage while strutting around their enclosures. I think I got more performative of my normal kid-ness as time went by: practically posing with my Nancy Drew book in a tree while wearing my favorite outfit of Lee jeans, Mork from Ork suspenders and a turtleneck with the phrase “Stable Bum” ironed across it in patchwork letters, waiting for the notice of a charmed audience below. My posture was meant to suggest that my book was more absorbing than any party, but it really suggested: look at me. Take in my lucky life, my happy childhood that is rooted here as I sense yours was not, not anywhere. Maybe there was a weird superiority in the way I arranged my Barbies in the garden while waiters stepped around me, or spread out my homework in the front hall as if I could concentrate over the din. I was acting out conventional youth for strangers to appreciate, understanding maybe that conventionality was the hottest ticket at this party, the cutest, most covetable, hard-to-replicate thing. Which made me no different from the strivers at the cocktail tables, if you think about it — just shorter, and flaunting a different trophy.

At a certain point I’d get my fill of cherry Cokes and head up to my room. One night, as was my wont during those years, I lay down on my bed and put my Annie cast album on the turntable. It was either going to be Annie, Cats, The Bee Gees Spirits Having Flown double album or Free to Be You and Me during that stretch of years. On this night it was Annie, and I was twelve. How do I know this for sure, you ask? Because as I spaced out to the chorus of “I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here,” Daddy Warbucks — from the movie version, which came out that year, in 1982, and which I had just seen twice in a row on consecutive days at the South Park theatre — ducked his head around the jamb of my open bedroom door. He had a lustrous head of hair and wore a red windbreaker and khakis, but it was definitely Daddy Warbucks from the movie, and I was either dreaming or hallucinating or dead because those were the only explanations for what I was seeing.

He opened his mouth and, speaking exactly like Daddy Warbucks, said:

“Do my ears deceive me?”

Sort of like the Big Bad Wolf — who has kind of a similar cheeky, hyper-masculine power-charisma vibe to Daddy Warbucks’s — like the Big Bad Wolf saying “All the better to hear you with, my dear.” A booming baritone. The booming-est.

I stared.

“Annie,” he said, smiling. “You’re listing to the cast recording. That’s Reid Shelton embarrassing himself. Wanker can’t fucking sing.”

Then he laughed the kind of laugh that is impossible not to join even if you are dreaming or dead. The most infectious laugh I’ve ever heard. And he asked me where the guest room might be because he’d flown in on the Concorde to Cincinnati and driven the hour and a half here and was too knackered to stand and my lovely parents had generously asked him to spend the night and he was going straight to bed because he was SPENDING THE NIGHT.

I loved Annie for the same reasons every girl loves Annie: because it’s a love story about being found and about home, and because I pictured myself as Annie. The girl with something special, the girl the staff bustles around praying she’s gonna like it here, the star of the show, the one who belts “Tomorrow” to rapturous standing o’s, the one whose fondest wish is to be chosen, to belong, to be placed. I was a longing, unformed fantasist, overly prideful, defensive of my territory, capable of whatever ruthlessness and judgement would be required if someone dared threaten my Perfect American Childhood, the kind Annie wanted, the kind whose value I could see and was so sure I had in the bag that I performed it like a schtick. It was real, and I made myth with it: both things were true. An operator in knee socks, Annie was. Playing her cards.

“If you sing,” I said, totally bowling myself over. The operator shocking the innocent, both inside the same Stable Bum turtleneck. “If you sing something I’ll tell you where the guest room is.”

And that’s how I got serenaded with Happy Birthday by Albert Finney, son of a bookmaker and member of the Royal Shakespeare company who, it turned out, had gotten talked in to a racing syndicate by friends and flown to Kentucky for the horse sales and gotten invited to this party, and sang with exaggerated, tearful vibrato right over the recorded voice of the actor who’d originated the Warbucks role on Broadway, really getting into it and bringing down the appreciative house of one. It wasn’t my birthday, but it was, it was.

I clapped and pointed down the hall. And he bowed and growled “G’night kid.” Swear to God.

I guess this is the end of this story, though the story went on and still gets told: that time the French wine family came for dinner and brought a case of their own stuff because they didn’t want to drink inferior Pinot Noir. That time the Washington owners of a Triple Crown Winner moved in without asking and ordered their own microwave for our kitchen and stayed for six months.

Some people did that, stayed and stayed, long after the horse sales ended. I was convinced it was so they could enjoy being part of a normal family, and maybe it was because they were narcissists who’d never been told no, or maybe I was right. And maybe no one at the parties was any different from us, or anybody, and I was wrong to ogle or show off for them or think them exotic. Because who doesn’t want a family? To feel normal and special at once, on ground that makes you strong and fast?

But don’t run, I want to tell the twelve year old, who already knows. Stay. Listen from upstairs until the last guest leaves, safe because you haven’t been anywhere yet, haven’t needed to; the world’s coming to you and throwing everything that makes you lucky into high, unchallenged relief. They’re unusual, these nights, and so is the fact that you might have pancakes with Daddy Warbucks in the morning. None of that can last forever or will ever make sense, nobody deserves their good or bad fortune, the bizarro ‘eighties are ticking forward and out. But you bet DW’s never tasted silver dollar Bisquicks like your Dad makes them. And you’re confident, with all the bravado a provincial kid is capable of, that he’s gonna like it here.