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Thus, in addition to the debacle at the Bernsteins', Radical Chic brought on the party that Assemblyman Andrew Stein gave for a few striking Mexican-American grape workers on his father's estate in Southampton. The select "all stood there in their Pucci dresses, Gucci shoes. Capucci scarves. The wind had come up off the ocean and it was wrecking everybody's hair. People were standing there with their hands pressed against their heads as if the place had been struck by a brain-piercing ray from the Purple Dimension." And in Wolfe's view, it is Radical Chic that prompts the Carter Burdens "to groove, as they say, with the Young Lords and other pet primitives from Harlem and Spanish Harlem and at the same time fit into all the old main line events such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 100th anniversary gala and be photographed doing the new boogaloo."
Wolfe notes not only the rise of the in-vite-a-Panther-to-cocktails phase of Radical Chic, but what is probably its fall. The party at Lenny's was followed by a scathing editorial in the New York Times. Slander would be preferable to Wolfe's compassion for the traumatized Bernsteins. "It was unbelievable," he writes of Lenny's reaction to the post-party furor. "Cultivated people, intellectuals, were characterizing him as 'a masochist' and—and this was the really cruel part—as 'the David Susskind of American Music.' "