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A year after C.Z. came out, Brenda Frazier became "America's No. 1 Glamour Deb." Her name and photograph were everywhere during 1938, including the cover of LIFE, and there was a backlash: people would sometimes hiss when she walked into a restaurant. Frazier died last May—after a nervous breakdown, two marriages and a notoriously messy liaison with a titled Italian playboy—still bitter about her overwhelming deb year. "Brenda Frazier was my parents' friend," Cornelia says. "So sad. But I don't want to read about her until I get older."
It was also during the 1930s that debutantes began making larky plunges into show business. Between her debut and her marriage in 1947, Cornelia's mother was briefly a Ziegfeld Girl and a Hollywood starlet with a studio contract. In New York City, cafe society was paying to hear debs sing at the Waldorf-Astoria and Plaza hotels, as well as at a West Side nightclub called La Place Pigalle.
Xenon, chic and slightly battered, is Cornelia's latter-day West Side joint. One of her six best friends, Howard Stein, 40, runs the place. The other five best pals: her mother, brother, one of her two agents—Cornelia hopes to model and endorse cosmetics—a movie producer, and Stein's wife, Tawn, 32. This afternoon Stein is explaining how to sing "these soulful songs with percussive interludes." Tonight is to be Cornelia's second public performance as a rock-'n'-roll singer. Last fall she stood up and sang a tune or two at a Xenon party ("People begged me not to go on"), but this will be a full-fledged set, a "Rock-'n'-Roll Christmas Concert." Cornelia even has a crib sheet written out in pencil and propped up near the microphone in case she forgets how to sing her rock rendition of Frosty the Snowman: "Thumpety thump-thump, thum-pety thump-thump, there goes Frosty!"
Onstage with her will be a handsome group of other young Xenon habitues.
Several are foreigners, and Stein, who brought them together, provides some background: Julio Santo Domingo is a Colombian "whose father runs Avianca Airlines," Giora Rachminov is an Israeli "who does diamonds," and Mimmo Ferretti is the son of a Milanese clothing manufacturer. Ferretti is a last-minute replacement for Baron Roger de Cabrol, who is sick. "We wanted to call the band Euro-trash," Stein says, "but, instead, they're called the Greencards." He is grinning: a green card is the Government document issued to resident aliens.
The hullabaloo is more than just fun, by Cornelia's reckoning. "I think it shows such an accomplishment that kids like us can get up and do this," she declares. "Everyone says, 'All they do is party all night.' Well, this will prove we can get up and pull ourselves together and perform and do something that people can be proud of and enjoy."
Watching her final rehearsal is Roberto Riva, Cornelia's boyfriend of a year. Riva, 42, is a dapper real estate speculator whose Italian parents raised him in Peru. I think she is great, fantastic," Riva says, snapping photo after photo of Cornelia in her silver jacket and leather pants. 'Very fantastic. We have a vanguard, you enow?"