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The crowd descends in taxis and limousines after 11 p.m., some 1,000 at $12 apiece. They are very young, quite a few under 1 8, but most of the boys are in black tie and the girls are in gowns: the Gold and Silver Ball, an annual gala for the New York prep school set, is just breaking up a few blocks east.
Backstage, Cornelia's principal co-star swings in: Maura Moynihan, 25, a Harvard graduate and only daughter of New York's Democratic Senator.
Maura has pursued a rock-music career with some seriousness, and works full time at Rupert Murdoch's New York Post as a gossip reporter. Both girls are swaddled in red. Out front, Cornelia's mother C.Z. has arrived, dressed in black. C.Z. is a gardening columnist for the Post.
The show begins shortly after midnight and lasts half an hour. Cornelia's syrupy voice might, with training, resemble Teresa Brewer's. The band sounds terrific. That is, the four professional mu sicians (two guitarists, drummer and pianist) Stein hired to play in the shadows downstage sound terrific. Two of Cornelia's friends strum soundless guitars at center stage, faking the struts and grimaces of rock stars. Cornelia seems like a bashful cheerleader, smirky and proud and a little unsure. The last of the eight songs is Satisfaction, which Cornelia's friend Mick Jagger recorded with the Rolling Stones in 1965, when she was an infant. "Wasn't it a great moment?" says Stein of the finale.
Afterward, Maura Moynihan, in her leather miniskirt and cowboy boots, scrambles straightway to the top of an 8-ft.-high pedestal and works off her postperformance nervous energy by go-go dancing. Cornelia, all smiles, steps off the stage to be kissed and congratulated by her mother and brother, by Roberto, by Fashion Photographer Francesco Scavullo, by one of her agents and by half a dozen trim, middle-aged men in business suits who have been buzzing around C.Z.
For the next couple of hours Cornelia sits up high on the back of the banquette that she and her friends always occupy at Xenon, scanning the crowd. She drinks champagne (Moet & Chandon) and flicks Marlboro ashes from her pretty taffeta dress (Fabrice). Some time after 3 a.m., she leaves with Roberto for another discotheque, Studio 54, and stays there until 4.
A day later, there is a photograph of Cornelia in the Post, with a caption certifying again that she is "deb of the year."
But that night at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, 77 new girls were presented to society at the 47th annual Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball. Reading of them, the deb of the year must have felt an end-of-the-ball shiver. "If the press and everybody stop paying attention to me, I'll roll with the punches," Cornelia says. "If they stop," she adds with a giggle, "I'll just say, 'Well, I'm boring now.' " — By Kurt Andersen