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The young girls' faces were pert, their clothes chic, their hair saucily teased. The boys were two-buttoned, stripe-tied, and fit. Their names on the Pan Am flight list could be taken from any U.S. school or college roster—Paine, Prentice, Chrysler,Cushing, Welch. Their fathers were businessmen, and about half could be found in the Social Register. Where were they going? To a coming out party at Britain's ancient Blenheim Palace for an American friend, Serena Russell, who also happens to be the granddaughter of the tenth Duke of Marlborough.
The vast old palace, where Winston Churchill was born, was floodlit for the occasion, and along the terraces, braziers glowed to light up the path of strolling couples or warm them when the night turned chill. Some 1,100 guests ate in the grand saloon and danced the twist in the long library. Henry Ford's daughters, Charlotte and Anne, were there, as was Richard Pershing, grandson of the rigid old soldier.
Serena is the daughter of Edwin F. Russell, 48, a newspaper executive from Elizabeth, N.J., who met Lady Sarah Consuelo Spencer-Churchill, during the war, when he was in the U.S. Navy and she was working as a lathe assistant. Since then, Russell has moved up in the publishing empire run by the son of a Russian immigrant, Sam Newhouse, who recently made him publisher of Vogue.
The Blenheim party also celebrated the coming of age of Serena's uncle, Lord Charles George William Colin Spencer-Churchill, who is also studying in the U.S. Thus Serena and her school friends from Foxcroft, and Lord Charles' college friends rubbed shoulders with most of Debrett, led by Princess Margaret and her husband Lord Snowdon (who was recently just a photographer), the Marquess of Blandford (heir to the dukedom) and his Greek wife Tina (who was recently Mrs. Aristotle Onassis). and Princess d'Arenberg (who was recently Peggy Bancroft of New York).
The Bastions. U.S. papers gave the party a big play. It was the week's demonstration that Society is, as always, news and that today it is a New Society.
It is an open-end one, energetic, and international-minded. Its members jet to Gstaad for the skiing, Venice for the film festival, Paris for the spring collections. The Old Guard still occupies its citadels in the big cities and small resorts. It still takes "old" money and some kind of bloodlines to make Boston's Somerset Club, the Philadelphia Club or the St. Louis Country Club. But around such bastions flows a different and more stimulating social stream of people with more education and more to talk about, who want their friends to be intelligent, active and amusing (one of their favorite words).
Slurs & Accolades. It is a Society to which the Kennedys have given considerable impetus, although it was in the making well before Jack went to the White House. Rockbound in their huge old houses behind the iron gates, the Old Guard seldom went anywhere, never saw anybody but one another, and hardly ever worked except as trust officers for the family estate. In the New Society, the term self-made man is not a slur but an accolade, and the New Society is willing to accept anyone with the requisite qualifications.