CONFESSIONS OF A SOCIETY WRITER

ONE NIGHT AT THE CRYSTAL CHAR-ity Ball, which is an indisputable Place To Be if you know anything about the Dallas society scene, a young security guard stopped me as I was about to enter the Chantilly Ballroom of the Loews Anatole Hotel.

“Excuse me,” the guard said. “Who are those people in there?”

I said: “Oh. I guess they’re real estate developers, oil people.” The guard said: “What’d they have to do to get inside?”

1 looked at the guard as he stretched his shaven neck to see who entered and exited the ballroom. Then I shrugged and left him on the Oriental carpet. Inside, guests who had paid $300 a plate were buttering hard rolls, biting into them, and setting them very carefully back upon those plates.

After spending two years writing about the rich and alluring people of Dallas’s society set. I still find myself asking that question: who were those people anyway? And how’d they get in?

While writing “Heard and Overheard,” as my Dallas Morning News column was called, I was in more places that were the places to be than most people will ever see in their entire lives.

Envied by many, I attended breakfasts, brunches, luncheons, cocktail parties, polo parties, debutante parties, dinner parties, pre-opening-night parties, post-opening-night parties, cafe openings, boutique openings, and the openings of boutiques within boutiques. “Do you just love it?” people used to ask me. Challis print donned, notepad ready, I went to the Neiman Marcus Fortnight Gala, the March of Dimes Gourmet Gala, the Cattle Baron’s Ball, the Beaux Arts Ball, the Mayor’s International Ball, the TACA Custom Auction and Ball, the Toyland Ball, and hundreds more soirees. On any given day or night you could have found me with a glass of ginger ale or wine in my hand, standing against the walls of some of Texas’s finest ballrooms, ranches, and homes, mingling with the guests as my editors had asked me to do, or just watching them, as I was wont to do.

I don’t know who they all were, but I can tell you this: they weren’t all rich. Many were, but certainly not all. Now I’m not saying it was exactly democratic, since not everyone in Dallas can afford a tuxedo rental and a $300 dinner plate. It’s just that you did not have to run any corporations to be involved. Yes, some of the people I saw at the gala charity balls and the other festive affairs were the CEOs you’ve read about: the people who endow charity foundations, universities, museums, and other quality of life institutions with thousands and thousands of their own dollars, the people whose families have hospital wings and freeways named after them. At the dinner parties and balls, they found each other and conversed, their gold cuff links glinting in the chandelier light, their bow ties perfectly straight. Often, I was too timid to interrupt their discourse. So I’d chat with the people who had nothing named after them, the types more on their way up than established. When they weren’t watching me, I watched them scan the ballrooms and reception rooms for the contacts they could make besides me-though I was an important contact myself, being a member of the Press and all. I never had much trouble getting material for my column. People would utter a quip, glance at my notepad, then say invitingly: “Don’t you dare print that.”

No, you don’t have to be filthy rich to be part of the Dallas society scene, but that is not to say there weren’t plenty of folks who were, or who at the very least created that impression. What an aura it was. I knew people who listed the “servants’ quarters” under their names in the phone books, who spent holiday on safari in Africa and had birthday parties in the Bahamas, who yawningly flitted up to Manhattan to have their mink coats specially cleaned, and who often found time to tell society columnists about it. You could hear them (and they wanted you to hear them) as they leaned over the chafing dishes and mentioned “our driver” and “our house in the Hamptons.” Some specialized in their grandeur: the woman with one of the world’s largest closets, the man with goldfish the size of cats in his backyard pond, the people with forests for lawns and swans for pets.

But if all the People To Be and their proteges were wiped off the face of the earth by some unforeseen natural disaster, it would not be a good thing, contrary to what the tone of this memoir may suggest. For one thing, the people who never go home would have no place to go. But there’s another reason: Dallas charities would suffer if the society people went away.

After the 1986 Crystal Charity Ball, $513,750 was donated toward a permanent children’s exhibit at Fair Park’s Science Place museum, and $658,750 went to children’s services and activities at The Family Place shelter for abused women and children. As a result of the 1987 ball, Parkland Hospital will apply its Crystal Charity Ball proceeds of $619,800 toward construction costs and capital expenses for pediatric care at a primary care clinic in southern Dallas. The I Have a Dream Foundation-Dallas got 5569,800 toward its scholarship program for youngsters from low-income families in South and West Dallas. And since the 1988 ball, equal awards of $587,100 have been donated to Arts Magnet High School and the Letot Center of the Dallas Coun ty Juvenile Department. The people who buttered those hard rolls and put them back atop those expensive plates in the Anatole’s Chantilly Ballroom did so, in the end. for some very good causes.

WHAT’S IN



Victor Costa parly dresses

Jeep Wagoneers and Cadillacs

Classic baby names. Sarah. Anne, Margaret

Texas Republican connections

Canyon Ranch

Lunch at Pomodoro

Big, classic deb parties

Brooks Brothers

Antiques from Lady Primrose’s Shopping English Countryside

Cash

Big Hair (regrettably)



Dangerous Liaisons jewelry

Aspen

Croquet on the lawn

Parties at home

Celebrity chefs

Pepper Stolichnaya

Montessori School of Park Cities

Champagne and chocolate at Fair Park

Petting zoos for birthday

parties

Texas baroeques in D.C.



Ball’s Hamburgers

Big, elegant church weddings

George W. Bush

Execs from JCPenney on your guest list

Pearls (Even if they’re fake)

Caviar

Simon David on Inwood



Facsimile machines

Family photographs

Whits Out



Laura Ashley frocks

Station wagons



Names from the soaps: Krystle, Alexis. Erica

John Tower



The Greenhouse

Lunch at Sam’s Cale

Big engagement parlies

Catalogue shopping

Antiques tram Forney



Gold car

Hair bows (but bows on shoes are in)

Little earrings



South Padre Island

A box at Texas Stadium

Parlies at the ranch

Sports celebrities

Bellinis

Mother’s Day Out at First United Methodist

Wine and cheese at the Arboretum

Birthday parties at Brook Hollow

Texas barbeques in Dallas

Showbiz Pica

Wedding ceremonies at hotels

Ed Cox Jr.

Execs tram Southmark



Pear-shaped diamonds



Free range chicken

Tom Thumb/Simon David on Abrams

Answering services

Celebrity autographed photographs