The winter light is already dim, and in a Manhattan cafe the blond girl is squirming in her seat, dying for a smoke. The cigarette machine is broken. "This is like a joke," she says, annoyed, and leaves her plate of eggs Benedict to bum a Marlboro from one of the other diners. Smoking happily at last, she gives a quick account of herself, sounding bored beyond her years. She dropped out of high school four years ago, at 15, and has no job and no firm idea of what she will do next. She likes to stay up until all hours of the night in this or that nightspot, especially Xenon, a voguish discotheque off Times Square. If she seems jumpy this afternoon, it is because tonight she is going to Xenon not to dance or just mingle but to sing, in front of hundreds of paying customers.
This is a glamour girl in the coyote fur coat, an American aristocrat, the goddaughter of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Cornelia Cochrane Churchill Guest, 19, the youngest child of a socially prominent family, grew up on Long Island and in Palm Beach and New York City. She spent 1982 as a debutante, and all year long the New York gossip journalists mentioned her in print, often dusting off a quaint epithet: deb of the year. "I don't get tired of it," she says, having finished her eggs and her Tab and three more cigarettes cadged from a waiter. "I'm honored. It's fun. It's wonderful. I'm having a wonderful year."
Why her? Why now? Not because she is the prettiest or cleverest or most accomplished of her debutante crop. She admits that she was deemed ultra-deb partly by default: while her peers went off to college, Cornelia stayed in New York City and spent her time at stylish parties, wearing couture dresses. "Reading books for four years is an excuse not to work," she hazards, "unless you're going to be a plastic surgeon or something." Cornelia earned her high school diploma at home, by mail. "I have an education," she says. "I can add and subtract and read."
She is learned enough, anyway, to understand that her debutante splash would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. But these days it is once again fashionable to flaunt the traditional, frivolous perquisites of wealth and class. Fortunately for Cornelia, the Zeitgeist turned conservative just as she came of age. "Debutantes ..." she sighs. "It's a wonderful tradition. I'm glad it's coming back more and more now, not Like in the '60s." Cornelia was born on Thanksgiving Day 1963, six days after President Kennedy was killed. "During the '60s, there were all those revolutions and things, and I guess that now people want to dress up and feel good about themselves. And look good and go out to nice parties and eat good food and have nice things to drink and look pretty and be attractive, instead of having long hair and blue jeans and all that." She is aware of some of the cyclical ironies. "It's funny that all throughout history, every time debutantes have made a comeback, it's been when the country has been in recessions." Guest is thinking, in fact, of the final years of the Depression, when her mother, the former Lucy ("C.Z.") Cochrane, now 62, made her extravagant debut in Boston.