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Out of Cocoons. Last week for example, Elsa Maxwell materialized on the dance floor and performed something that somebody identified as something rather resembling The Twist. Author Norman Mailer, neither naked nor dead, but soaked in perspiration, danced dazedly with Lady Jeanne Campbell, granddaughter of British Press Lord Beaverbrook. Mrs. Robert Sarnoff, wife of the NBC board chairman, cut up a little, while Artist René Bouché, in shirtsleeves, watched from his table. Britain's Marquess and Marchioness of Tavistock shared in the general joy that erupted from such lyrics as Oh, We're Going Up, Yeah, Yeah, and We're Coming Down, and The Closest to the Bone, the Sweetest the Meat. Even Greta Garbo hauled herself out of her myth-lined cocoon and appeared, lank-haired and bone-pale, to snap her fingers and smile.
Now and then, the aristocrats got up to try The Twist; a few bashful ones tested it first at tableside. But mostly they just watched. A vacant-faced girl in black pants, long black hair and black glasses, writhed hysterically to the raucous fast beat of the music. A sweet-faced, sweet-suited miss (Vassar? Smith?) unbuttoned her jacket, rolled her eyes at her clean-cut boyfriend (Yale? Princeton?). A lad in a double-breasted, pinstriped suit pummeled the air; a mascara-splotched hoyden tried to shake loose from a dress that was tighter than wallpaper; a Negro exhibited his ball-bearing hips. Bang-bang, whomp-whomp, hi-de-hi and ugh-ugh, they grimaced and they groveled, they ground and they groaned in the dim light till they were spent.
And the slummers slipped off to their sedate apartments overlooking the river on the East Side.