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Charity balls and gossip columnists help keep U.S. Society—especially New York Society—an open-end one. Even writers, painters and actors turn up among the guests these days. Says Drue Heinz: "These people are now accepted by Society even though they never belong to it, and this is a wonderful improvement. You are not nearly so likely to get stuck at dinner between two scions of famous families who tell their golf scores or that they've given up drink. Now you have a good chance of being seated next to an author or artist or lecturer who is there because he has something to offer Society."
The rise of the open-end international Society has naturally meant the decline of the Social Register as an index of who really "belongs." It is still important to the New Guard, for whom a listing is almost the only way left to know one is better than one's neighbors. Those who are knocking at the Register's door no longer have to contend with the studied inconsistencies of Bertha Eastmond, the train conductor's daughter who presided over the contents of the little black and orange book for nearly 40 years until her death in 1960. But the mysterious tribunal that sits in judgment in her stead is still impossible to outguess—even in terms of getting one's listing switched from one of the eleven other regional editions to the New York book. It may take years, or it may never happen. (Neither Serena Russell nor her parents are in the Register.)
The Old Guard still finds the Register useful as a place to find people's summer phone numbers and to look up who married Mildred's boy, but it has been too diluted with "just anybody" for it to "mean anything" any more. And as far as the chic international crowd is concerned, too few of them are listed for them to think about it one way or another.
Over to Venice. Rich people have always traveled, and the upper crust has always been basically international. But the jet plane has raised the mobility of the well-heeled to the point where national boundaries blur, distances telescope, and the only trouble is trying to figure out what time it is. Just getting around is a kind of admission ticket to the International Set. "The main thing is to be seen in enough right places often enough," said Photographer Zerbe over his shoulder as he hopped a jet in Paris for Rome. "If you're seen at St.-Moritz for the skiing in February, on the beach at St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Paris during the season (although there really wasn't any Paris season this year), if you're in London at the end of July for Ascot, and Dublin the beginning of August for the horse show, people are very likely to forget they never met you."
In fact, the dedicated International Setter develops a sixth sense about places to be and when to be there. Old-line internationals like the Guests stay at the Ritz in Paris, but according to one observer, too many of the wrong people began to follow the right people there, so the right people had to start going to the Plaza-Athenee, the Lancaster and the Meurice. According to the same kind of Gresham's law, resorts, and even countries, suddenly are Out.