The new student power on college campuses has also been shrewdly put to use by certain less-than-scrupulous lecture bureaus. Today undergraduate managers and student committee members have complete and final control of “special events” at the great majority of colleges and universities. Only on a few campuses must students refer their choice of speakers to officials for approval, and though the students do their best, they are often unprepared for some of the more “sophisticated” selling methods of the lecture agencies. For example, a familiar way to offer lecturers to colleges is in a series, and nearly every lecture series has at least one star. Let us say, then, that college X has decided to buy a ten-lecture series, the capstone of which will be an address—to take a ridiculous example—by Queen Elizabeth II. We assume that the Queen does not know that she has been offered. The other nine lecturers are a prize-winning electroplater from Detroit, a world’s-record-breaking speed typist, and so on, but it was the Queen, really, who sold the series, for it is her opinions on pot and black militancy that everybody at college X wants to hear. The lecture bureau has told the students that the cost of the ten lectures will be five thousand dollars—five hundred dollars apiece, which is modest enough—and has piously added that, in the event that any of the speakers fails to make his engagement, the five hundred dollars for that speaker’s date will be cheerfully refunded. It is all put in writing and a contract is signed—all legally holeproof. Alas; on the day the Queen is expected she is stricken with laryngitis and has taken to her bed. For her nonappearance, five hundred dollars is promptly sent back to the college. The lecture bureau has made forty-five hundred dollars for nine mediocre speakers, and a campusful of unwitting students has been gulled. Unfortunately, practices like this are too common to be funny and are extremely difficult to detect.
But lecture agents have headaches to put up with, the commonest of which are the clients who—in order to avoid paying the commission, which can run anywhere from twenty to thirty-five per cent of the fee—accept speaking engagements on their own without telling the bureau. When he finds out about it all the lecture agent can do is scold. If he fires his client the client will simply trot off to another agent who will be glad to have him—such is the demand today for anyone with the slightest gift of gab. And clients have peculiar quirks that must be catered to. The popular Emily Kimbrough, for instance, dislikes flying, and her tours must be slowly and tortuously routed over railroad tracks.
Beginning lecturers, initially entranced at the heady thought of money to be made, occasionally have agonized second thoughts. This happened in the case of Andy Warhol, who agreed to a schedule of fifty college bookings for the American Program Bureau—or as it later turned out, the APB agreed to deliver Andy Warhol to fifty colleges before actually asking Andy Warhol how he felt about it, just assuming that, like most people, he would be delighted. He wasn’t. Well, the APB argued, why couldn’t he go along and show the colleges some footage from his underground films? Warhol agreed to this, but at the last minute, overwhelmed by stage fright, he sent a “double” with hair dyed silver (like Warhol’s) and some of Warhol’s clothes. The double toured in Missouri, Montana and Oregon and was quite a success. “That boy was more what the kids really wanted,” Warhol says. “They liked him better. He smiled prettier. He was friendlier. He was a flower child.” Nonetheless, when the deception was discovered, a red-faced APB was forced to return many fat fees. Since then Warhol has kept his in-person dates, but he goes accompanied not only by film footage but also by two cohorts, Viva Superstar and Paul Morissey. They answer questions for him. He merely stands there, rigid and mute, thus becoming the gab circuit’s first non-speaking speaker.
And even the old pros have lapses now and then. Vincent Sheean, normally a popular and reliable platform performer, once spent a few bibulous hours with friends before a California lecture date. At some point during the cocktails Sheean apparently forgot whether he was supposed to deliver a lecture or attend one. When he got to the auditorium he paid a dollar for his ticket and took a seat in the audience. When he looked at the program and saw that he was the speaker he took his ticket back, collected his dollar, and took his place at the podium. Those who heard him testify that he was never in better form.
This was not the case with another speaker who had undergone a somewhat more alcoholic encounter prior to his lecture. After being introduced he rose, a bit unsteadily, to the lectern, gazed for a long moment at his notes, then said, “Thank you very much,” and sat down.
The pitfalls of lecturers abound. When a certain novelist, who must be nameless, heard that a critic whom he particularly hated had taken to the lecture circuit, the novelist chose a brilliantly cruel, if expensive, mode of revenge. Using a false name, he engaged the critic as a lecturer, hired a hall, and appeared as an audience of one. When the critic stepped onto the bare stage to face an empty house, the novelist sat back comfortably in his seat, smiled, and said, “Okay, let’s hear you do your stuff.”
There is also a danger which I, in my own somewhat limited experience as a lecturer, have named the Mrs. Oppenheim Syndrome. The Mrs. Oppenheim Syndrome is most likely to be experienced in smaller cities, where warring social factions may exist within the community or within the sponsoring organization itself. I first met up with it in Scranton or Wilkes-Barre. It doesn’t matter which; the two Pennsylvania cities, near each other and sharing an airport, hate each other. Each thinks the other is its social and physical inferior and rarely do the two see eye to eye on anything. Following my talk at the “after-party”—a formidable part of the engagement in itself—I was cornered by a Mrs. Oppenheim of Scranton (or Wilkes-Barre) and a female ally presumably from the same place, was pressed between them into the corner of a triangular banquette table, and then engaged in heavy conversation. After half an hour or so, unable to move, I became aware of a heightening mood of tension in the room. The opposing Wilkes-Barre (or Scranton) part of the gathering was beginning to feel that I was dividing my time unfairly, possibly committing the unpardonable sin of snubbing the Sponsoring Organization. But, trapped as I was by Mrs. Oppenheim and her friend, I felt there was nothing I could do short of crawling across one of the ladies’ laps. Twenty minutes later it was too late. From the corner of my eye I watched as the offended Wilkes-Barre (?) group stood up as if by a signal and, with marvelous precision, marched to the door, faces frozen and noses in the air, and left the party.
I have also been the victim of the overindulgent, or backhanded, compliment—another commonplace lecturing hazard. It goes like this: You are approached by an effusive woman who says, “You know, you have me to thank that you’re our lecturer tonight. That’s right. Nobody else in the whole organization wanted you. But I went to bat and I fought and fought and fought for you, and I finally won!”
A lecturer friend tops this by reporting that when she was thanked following her lecture she was told: “That was simply a wonderful talk. We loved it. Of course we also have really important lecturers come to us to talk about really important things—but you were simply swell.” Compared with these, the tight plane schedules, the airless hotel rooms with clanking radiator pipes and all the other familiar details of a lecturer’s life seem as nothing at all.
In the industry itself, the harshest critics of the lecture business complain of “high-pressure, strongarm selling techniques” used to sell lecturers of inferior quality with little of value to say. Most heavily under attack for investing the business with Hollywood show-biz flackery have been such relative newcomers as Richard Fulton and Robert Walker of the APB. Walker, who likens his clients to an “intellectual smorgasbord,” and has offered in the past, in addition to Andy Warhol and Dr. Timothy Leary—who opened his lectures by crying into a microphone, “Am I turned on?”—such colorful figures as “our ghost-catcher, Hans Holzer; Sybil Leek, our séance lady and witch; our word man, James McConnell, our yoga woman, Marcia Moore; and our tremendous fish person, Roger Conklin.”
The more staid, resp
ectable, old-guard bureaus are more selective. They regard theirs as a high calling, and they conscientiously avoid anything that might be interpreted as pressure selling or sharp practices. They plan their clients’ schedules to their clients’ preferences. Some lecturers prefer to go out on grueling six- or eight-week tours once a year and have it over with. Others, like Art Buchwald, prefer to go out for no more than a day or two at a time, yet don’t mind making one of these short trips every week. Good lecture agents warn their clients of the hazards of lecturing. Author-explorer Peter Freuchen, for example, on a lecture tour, ran up a flight of stairs with his suitcase and died on the landing of heart failure. Other hazards are social, for local hostesses in small cities will stop at nothing to get visiting celebrities to their dinner tables. Art Buchwald was once met at an airport and whisked off to what he was assured was “the official prelecture party.” When he got to the lecture he was greeted by a roomful of icy faces. The real official party, where he had been expected, had been held elsewhere. He had been the victim of a simple kidnapping.
The more staid and conservative bureaus will not sell a lecture series at a blanket price but will instead price each lecturer in the series at his established worth. Colston Leigh, furthermore, insists on the signature of at least one college official on every college lecture contract. The student organizers grumble about this but, if they wish to engage a Colston Leigh client, they comply.
W. Colston Leigh, an easygoing crew-cropped man in his sixties, who has been in the lecture-bureau business for over forty years, says: “I’m extremely good, but I’m not a genius. There’s a lot of room for exploitation in this business, but I don’t believe in exploitation. I think of this business as a service. People want to be informed and they want to be entertained. We serve this need with our speakers. We establish a market price for a speaker and we stick to it, and we keep track of how much money various organizations have to spend. We wouldn’t try to sell a thousand-dollar speaker to an organization with a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar budget. We also keep track of what our audiences think of our speakers. We ask for comments. If the comments are bad we pass them right along to the speaker with a suggestion that he shape up. Yes, the answer to this business is service—service to the public—and we won’t send out speakers who won’t deliver this kind of service.” With a twinkle in his eye Mr. Leigh adds, “Oh, there’s a lot to this business, believe me. If you’ve got time, I’ll deliver a whole lecture on it.”
Part Four
HOW NOT TO DO IT
Photo by Elliott Erwitt © 1968 Magnum Photos
Truman Capote greets some of his guests
at his celebrated New York party
14
U.S.A.: The Dwindling Pleasures of the Rich
Those not blessed with wealth or lofty social position often presume that when the rich and well-placed entertain they do so both effortlessly and faultlessly, with perfect ease and taste, unhampered by the work and cares that beset the ordinary host and hostess when they undertake a party. Alas, like so many illusions about the other half and how they live, this one turns out to be no more than that—nowadays, at least. In fact, as the new moneyed American middle class has been turning its attention to culture, travel, education, and other accoutrements of gracious living, they have also discovered the joys—and the importance—of entertaining well, of serving good food and wine in attractive surroundings. The social rich, in the meantime, have been letting down the side badly. In other words, while the new rich have been learning how to do it, the old rich have been forgetting.
In Philadelphia, for example, when the John Ingersolls have friends in for cocktails (it is said in Philadelphia that when a Biddle is drunk he thinks he’s an Ingersoll), it works this way: Mr. Ingersoll takes a bottle of inexpensive domestic gin, empties a little into a cup, and then pours a corresponding amount of inexpensive domestic vermouth into the gin bottle. He then shakes the resulting mixture vigorously, and splashes his concoction—at room temperature—into his guests’ glasses. This procedure, which would horrify not only connoisseurs of the martini but most ordinary mortals as well, is standard procedure here where, after all, Ingersolls are Ingersolls and always have been, and there is little more that need be said.
In New York, meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Wyatt Cooper—she is the former Gloria Vanderbilt—are among the town’s most elegant couples. Mrs. Cooper is not only rich and beautiful, with a model’s figure and a collection of antique dresses and costumes to go with it, along with drawerfuls of jewelry, much of which she has designed herself, but she is also a celebrated painter in her own right. Mrs. Cooper has decorated her East Side town house in a fantasy style so that when guests step inside the door they will have, as she puts it, “a feeling of entering a total collage.” (One bedroom is completely upholstered—walls, floor, ceiling—with a collection of old patchwork quilts.) Gloria Cooper also cares about the way her house smells, and when she has a party, she lights dozens of scented candles (imported from France at twenty-five dollars apiece) and places them in nooks and crannies throughout the house. They are intended to suffuse the air with sweetness and give the place a fairyland glow.
Now all these exotic and costly touches might be delightful to behold—if they always worked. But they don’t. At a recent Cooper party, a seated dinner for twenty-six—with five courses from poached trout to mousse au chocolat, and three wines—all would have been well if it had not been, of all things, for the weather. New York had been having, for early spring, an unseasonably hot night—with the kind of heavy, sticky heat for which New York is infamous. The Cooper house is not air-conditioned, and cannot be: tall French windows throughout prevent the installation of individual units. Though windows were thrown open, not a trace of a breeze stirred in the city, and all the lighted candles seemed merely to add to the heat’s sullen oppressiveness. “I really thought I was going to have to call the party off, it was so uncomfortable,” Mrs. Cooper said. But then she had an idea. She sent out for a number of large industrial-type electric fans, and had these placed as unobtrusively as possible in the corners of the various rooms.
As the Coopers’ guests crowded in, their bodily presences added to the evening’s heat even more and, when it was time for her perspiring friends to be seated at the table, Gloria Cooper whispered to a servant to turn on the fans. The fans came on, with a noise approximating that of a jet takeoff and with a wind that immediately blew out all the candles, plunging the evening’s proceedings into semidarkness and, at the same time, dislodging wigs, hairpieces, and even one pair of false eyelashes. It became a question of breathless heat or windy, noisy darkness. The guests, with wind-tossed hair but cooling brows, reluctantly voted for the latter.
Back in Philadelphia, guests have not forgotten the debutante party of not too many years ago when, as part of the decor, thousands of exotic white butterflies—flown in live from Hawaii—were to be prettily released from a huge satin balloon suspended from the ballroom ceiling. At the scheduled moment, the balloon was opened, and the butterflies came cascading down—all dead, killed by the fire-preventive spray with which the room had been treated.
In Washington, party-giving capital of the country, Mrs. George Bunker, wife of the president of the giant Martin Marietta Company, recently gave a large seated dinner that included, as a first course, Strasbourg pâté. In the kitchen, Mrs. Bunker’s Portuguese-speaking cook apparently confused the tins of costly pâté with some cans containing food for the Bunker cats. By the time the hostess noticed what had happened, her guests were already delightedly exclaiming over the cat food—which had arrived in iced bowls, decorated with watercress and truffles—and so she decided, probably wisely, to let the incident pass without comment. In Westchester County, New York, a hostess in a similar plight was required to use considerably more ingenuity when she saw, to her horror, that her guests, instead of the macédoine of brandied fruits she had ordered, had been served as dessert the combination macaroni-tuna-cheese casserole, lef
t over from a supper that had been fixed for the children several nights before. The guests politely did their best to deal with the chilly and gluey substance, and finally someone asked, “My dear, what is this extraordinary dessert?” The hostess, taking a deep breath, replied, “It’s a niçoise country pudding I discovered in the South of France.”
Obviously, when one entertains on a large scale, things can go wrong in a big way. The Edgar Bronfmans—he is the liquor tycoon—can seat fifty comfortably for dinner in the dining room of their country place, but when Mr. Bronfman wants to attract his wife’s attention on the other side of the room, he must resort to lobbing peanuts at her. On the other hand, not all the rich entertain elaborately or at great expense, and a number of them regularly cut corners in ways that verge on the miserly.
In Washington it has long been the rule in the household of Wiley T. Buchanan, former U.S. Chief of Protocol under President Eisenhower, that only guests who are of national prominence may be served their drinks in the Buchanans’ expensive Steuben crystal. Less important guests drink their cocktails in less costly glassware. The practice seems to have something to do with the fact that many of the Buchanan parties are semiofficial entertainments, with press photographers present. The sort of people who get their pictures in the paper, therefore, are photographed at the Buchanans’ sipping from Steuben. The Anchor-Hocking group consists of those about whom the press could not care less.
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