10

Count Etienne de Beaumont’s 1924
Automotive Ball
Beaumont and his Edith were renowned throughout Europe and
North America for throwing some of the greatest parties ever
seen. Their masquerade ball was celebrated at their mansion
on Rue Duroc in Paris every summer. Their 1924 party may not
have been any more extravagant than their others, but it
featured possibly the most outlandish theme—all guests had to
dress up as a car . Photos of Sara and Gerald Murphy, who were
good friends of the Beaumonts, in their costumes are still
around to this day.
The food was lavish French cuisine, of course, with plenty of
wine and champagne. Guest Raymond Radiguet was so
exhilarated by the Beaumonts’ annual parties that he wrote a
novel about them , Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel . Throughout the
banquet, costumed performers would run in making automotive
sounds and act out vignettes about various vehicles. Perhaps
the only Beaumont part wilder than this was another hosted in
the 1920s in which every guest was required to leave exposed
the part of his or her anatomy he or she deemed the most
interesting.


9

The Papal Conclaves Of 1644 And
1667
When a pope dies, Italy goes into deep mourning. If the
subsequent conclave takes a long time to elect a successor, the
country very quickly loses its temper. The conclave of 1644
lasted from August 9–September 15, 1644, delayed by the
previous pope, Urban VIII, appointing three members of his own
family to cardinals. Two of these men were brothers Antonio
and Francesco Barberini, who bickered with each other like
Regan and Goneril in King Lear , and for the same reason.
Finally, after several bribes from France and Spain, Giovanni
Battista Pamphili was elected and chose the amusing regnal
Innocent X. The entire Catholic world rejoiced, but nowhere was
the celebration more bacchanalian than in Rome.
This conclave and the next, which lasted from January–April
1655, were still fresh in a lot of memories when 1667′s 18-day
conclave came about in June. Eighteen days was still found to
be far longer than any Catholic wanted to wait, and when Giulio
Rospigliosi was elected Clement IX, Rome rejoiced in the same
manner as in 1644.
The city of Rome decided to celebrate these elections at La
Fontana dei Leoni—the Lions’ Fountain—at the foot of the
Cordonata in Piazza Ara Coeli, leading up to Piazza del
Campidoglio at the top of the Capitoline Hill. The Cordonata is a
giant, wide staircase designed by Michelangelo that allows
cavalry to ascend to Campidoglio without dismounting. There is
a lion of black basalt on either side of the Cordonata that spew
water into a huge vase, and at dusk on the day after each
election, the water from these fountains was replaced with wine
and dispensed to revelers free of charge. The jubilant thronged
Ara Coeli, the Cordonata, and up into Campidoglio throughout
the night, dipping their goblets in the vases and drinking all they
wanted.

8

The Premiere Of Les Noces
Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Les Noces (The Wedding) premiered at
the Théâtre de la Gaîté in Paris on June 13, 1923 to great
acclaim. Sara and Gerald Murphy—those friends of the
Beaumonts from earlier—decided to throw a lavish party for
Stravinsky and a host of the intellectual elite. Rather than rush
an impromptu reception for that night, they announced
throughout Paris that the party would be on July 1, on a barge
on the Seine River.
With this much time to prepare and a lot of money, they went all
out on food, drink, and decor. Five-star French chefs were hired
to cook on-site and the champagne never ran out. Even more
important than the food were the guests, all personal friends of
the Murphys: Stravinsky, Impresario Sergei Diaghilev,
choreographer Bronislav Nijinska, the entire troupe of the Ballet
Russes, Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, poet Tristan Tzara,
risque novelist Raymond Radiguet, Cole Porter, and Jean
Cocteau.
Sara Murphy wanted to decorate the barge with flowers, but the
florists were closed on Sunday, so she bought a hoard of toys,
fire trucks, dolls, clowns, stuffed animals, and toy trains.
Picasso quickly decided these deserved to be a car wreck and
piled them all together , topping it off with a cow on a fire truck
ladder. This may have inspired Picasso’s sculpture of a
monkey’s head from one of his son’s toy cars. The party lasted
all night—artist Natalia Goncharova read palms, Cocteau kept
terrifying people by screaming that the ship was sinking, and by
dawn, conductor Ernest Ansermet took down the Murphy’s huge
laurel wreath and a very drunk Stravinsky jumped through it. He
called it the greatest night of his life.

What about People's Democratic Party

7

Truman Capote’s Black And White
Ball
Capote was not one to be modest. He loved to remind people
that one day he would be rich and famous and would throw all
his friends a party they would never forget. When his novel In
Cold Blood became a huge success in 1966, he found himself in
the money and spent the next three months planning a
masquerade ball. He chose New York City’s sumptuous Plaza
Hotel and intended to decorate everything in stark black and
white. The ball may have inspired Stanley Kubrick’s use of
black and white sets in subsequent movies like 2001: A Space
Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange.
Capote invited only the choicest of his friends, along with some
celebrities he admired, including politicians, actors, and mostly
writers. There was a strict dress code of only black or white,
and everyone would be outfitted with a black or white mask if
they did not bring one. Some wore elaborate unicorn head
masks, while others wore cat-shaped masks. Capote countered
the black and white decorum with shockingly crimson
tablecloths, gold candelabras, and smilax vines with bright red
berries.
The bill of fare consisted of several of Capote’s favorite dishes:
sausage, scrambled eggs, biscuits, spaghetti and meatballs,
chicken hash, and chocolate and fruit dessert pastries. The
beverages were water and 450 bottles of Taittinger champagne.
The guest of honor was Katharine Graham, the president of The
Washington Post , who claimed that Capote only needed her as
a prop. Guests included Henry Ford, Jr.; Prince Stanislaw
Radziwill and his Princess, sister of the late John Kennedy;
actress Candice Bergen, who wore a white rabbit mask;
Norman Mailer; John Steinbeck; Phillip Roth; Irving Berlin;
Vivien Leigh; and Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow. It is
understood that Sinatra’s departure heralded the official end of
the party, since reporters were allowed to field questions
outside the hotel and everyone knew Sinatra was there. When
he finally tired and left at 2:45 in the morning, Capote pleaded
for him to stay, since many of the partiers would follow Sinatra
to Jilly’s Bar.
The party has been called the last great moment in New York
City’s social history.

6

Nero’s Domus Aurea
The Golden House was a luxury party manor Nero had built for
his and his guests’ wanton prodigality, and he used it almost
every day for four years. Scholars cannot yet agree on just how
gigantic it was, but it covered at least 100 acres of the center of
Rome, across the Palatine, Caelian, and Esquiline Hills. Today,
it is buried under subsequent development and currently being
excavated. New rooms are discovered all the time, with original
frescoes and architecture untouched since Nero’s day.
It was well-known from history but had been condemned after
Nero’s suicide and filled in and over with dirt. The opulence
Nero had built for it is beyond belief, and the Golden House was
one of the primary reasons for the final revolt that drove him
from Rome. The Roman people were starving while Nero merrily
ignored them, entertaining his rich friends and political
acquaintances. The Domus may have covered 300 acres at its
maximum, including an artificial lake, cattle pastures, and vast,
manicured groves. These were the gardens through which Nero
walked at night and had Christians tied to stakes, smeared with
wax, and set on fire to light his path.
The main building included a giant dome and all the exterior
walls were gold-plated. The interior walls and floors were stone
overlaid with solid marble, trimmed with elephant ivory, and
encrusted with diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and other precious
stones. Nero commissioned a massive bronze statue to himself,
the Colossus Neronis, which stood some 35 meters (116 ft) tall
and was placed just outside the main entrance, inside a covered
portico at the end of the Appian Way. There were 300 rooms in
the Domus, and none of them were bedchambers.
The building was used for one thing only: partying. Incense was
kept burning strongly throughout, and the central dining room
was set on stone balls that could rotate the whole room with
guests dining in it, in time with the changing of the sky’s color.
Suetonius wrote that “all the dining rooms had ceilings of fretted
ivory, the panels of which could slide back and let a rain of
flowers, or of perfume from hidden sprinklers, fall on his
guests.” The floors of the rooms were shaped in such a way that
one room would capture the sunlight and the next would radiate
it. There is very little information on any specific party that Nero
threw in the Domus, but this is probably because there was a
party every night. It is not overreaching to surmise that with
feasts and alcohol came Roman sex orgies as well.

5

Belshazzar’s Feast
If for no other reason, you have to admire the Old Testament for
how incredibly entertaining it is. Where else does God himself
spoil the party? This feast occurred on the last night of
Belshazzar’s reign over Babylon and ended with the Persian
and Median conquest of the Babylonian capital and
Belshazzar’s assassination in his sleep. The Book of Daniel is
the only account of Belshazzar, but his existence has been
corroborated in a few other texts or on artifacts.
Belshazzar, like so many other absolute rulers, has no concern
whatever for humility, and he wines and dines 1,000 of his
lordly friends. Once the party has been going well and everyone
is already drunk, he orders the gold and silver goblets and
bowls of the Jewish temple of Jerusalem to be brought in so his
guests may drink beer from them . Why? For the same reason
that people order the $25,000 sundae at Serendipity in New
York City—it’s fun to indulge ourselves to excess when we have
the luxury. What better way to enjoy abundant wine than by
drinking from 24 karat gold? These vessels were meant for
sacraments in the temple, the glorification of the Hebrew God.
They became Babylon’s spoils after it conquered Jerusalem in
587 BC and razed Solomon’s Temple to the ground. Not only
does gold look attractive and make us think the food will taste
better, but it’s fun to thumb the nose at the conquered.
Belshazzar’s bill of fare for his guests was copious, to say the
least, and consisted of unleavened barley bread, watermelons,
cantaloupe (called “the Persian melon”), dates, almonds,
pecans, and poultry, mutton, pork, beef, fish, and probably
locusts for meat. Garlic and onions were, and still are, plentiful
in the area and were used for seasoning. The Babylonians did
not drink much wine, since grapes were difficult to cultivate in
that area, so they drank barley beer. Drinking from some foreign
god’s chalices was sure to make Belshazzar’s guests feel like
gods themselves—then the hand of God showed up and ruined
everything. Belshazzar’s kingdom was taken that very night
and he himself killed by Cyrus the Great of Persia, whom Daniel
may name Darius the Mede.

4
Paul Poiret’s Thousand And Second
Night
Poiret was the Lady Gaga of his day. He was a Parisian fashion
designer who took France by storm with his modern dress
designs when he eliminated the woman’s need to wear a corset
in order to enhance her figure. He emphasized drapery instead
of tightly tailoring the clothing to woman. On 24 June 1911, he
finally debuted a new fragrance line, Parfums de Rosine, named
after his daughter, and he had hyped this revelation for months
by preparing the most elaborate party Paris would see in a very
long time.
Held at his own villa in Paris, the theme was Persia—all 300
guests, men and women, were required to dress in florid Persian
style. Think of Disney’s Aladdin and you’ve got a very good
idea of the costumes. Those who could not supply their own
were given one free of charge, but those who would not conform
were forced to leave. There were live tropical birds of every
color a feast fit for Belshazzar, complemented with red and
white wine and champagne. Poiret greeted his guests wearing a
fur-trimmed, ankle-length overdress and bejeweled turban.
Poiret decorated his house like a sultan’s harem, with palm
trees, huge tents housing the food, and lots of gold—Poiret’s
favorite color—everywhere. Poiret’s wife Denise basked on an
overstuffed divan inside a gold cage, where she laughed
riotously now and then at the patrons.



3
Alexander At Persepolis
This was not merely a party. It was a rampage of hubristic
debauchery of an intensity and scale that has not been seen
since in the history of our species— murder, rape, unbridled
drunkenness, and the looting of the entire city, culminating in
Alexander’s personal and maniacally inebriated order to torch
the Royal Palace.
In September 480 BC, a few weeks after Leonidas and his brave
300 (and about 7,000 others) died holding off Xerxes’s army of
some 200,000, the victorious Persians marched on Athens and
found it undefended and deserted. Athens then burned to the
ground, and scholars will never agree on why. It may have been
an accident when the Greeks were evacuating, or the Greeks
may have done it themselves to deprive the Persians of
supplies, or Xerxes may have done it in a rage. Greek
propaganda persisted for a long time that Xerxes burned Athens
down deliberately. By Alexander’s time, the Greeks wanted
revenge, and Alexander may have knowingly given the order to
burn down the palace out of a desire to placate his army of
about 15,000. They were far from home and had been gone for
five years, and he was always mindful of an atmosphere of
mutiny.
Or it might simply have been the result of an atmosphere of
alcoholic excess. It might have seemed to Alexander just a fun
thing to do at the time. The Persian populace in the city had
been thoroughly subjugated following the Battle at the Persian
Gate. There, the Persians blocked Alexander’s invasion in a
very narrow mountain pass, just as Leonidas at Thermopylae.
Greek losses were heavy. This had not been another easy
victory for history’s greatest general and his men now saw the
Persians as playthings. Even though Persepolis surrendered
and obeyed Alexander, he finally gave his men leave to butcher
the Persian men, gang-rape and enslave the women, and
ransack all buildings for Persepolis’s hoard of gold and gems
that May.
Finally, Alexander ordered the central citadel—at the core of
which stood Darius’s palace—razed to the ground. Much of it
was stone, but enough of its foundation was wood for it to
collapse. The only thing left standing of the palace and
reception galleries where Darius entertained thousands of
guests at a time were about forty stone pillars, still there today.


2
St. Petersburg, Russia, February 11–
13, 1903
In the annals of merriment, no soiree was more convivial than
the extravaganza Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra
threw for their noble friends to celebrate being wealthy. At the
time, the majority of the Russian people were starving and
freezing to death throughout the country, and the ball was a
major contributor to the revolution 14 years later. It was held in
the monarchs’ official residence, the Winter Palace in St.
Petersburg, and the theme was the 17th Century: Everyone was
required to dress in the flamboyantly opulent costumes of
Europe in the 1600s. Some dressed as Russian, German, and
French kings and queens, and others as musketeers, complete
with real rapiers.
Diamonds, precious stones, and priceless artifacts of the time
period were brought from the Kremlin solely for the party-goers
to enjoy wearing them. Nicholas and his wife dressed as Tsar
Alexis I and Tsaritsa Maria Miloslavskaya. It is difficult to
imagine the amount of luxury Nicholas could heap on his more
than 200 guests when we consider that he was said to be worth
a nominal $20 billion when he took the throne in 1894, but
many sources claim a modern estimate of $290 to $300 billion
in today’s US dollars. Nicholas was, more or less, worth Russia
until the Russians got sick of what they viewed as his “let them
eat cake” attitude.
The centerpiece of the first night’s festivities was a concert in
the Hermitage theater inside the Palace, during which
Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov was performed with Feodor
Chaliapin himself in the lead, followed by Minkus’s La Bayadere
and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake . The guests were then treated to
a Russian dance and a dinner so large it had to be held in three
rooms —the Italian, Spanish, and Flemish rooms—where the
food served corresponded to their respective cultures. Several
bars throughout the palace served liquor, and tea and wine were
present on every table. The court orchestra played Baroque
music from all over Europe from behind a golden fence. Formal
photographs were taken and this was the last time all the
nobility of Russia was present for them.
Two nights later, the ball was celebrated again just as lavishly.
Everyone feasted and danced until 1:00 AM, when the empress
judged a costume contest. Russia has not seen this degree of
splendor since.

1 La Sagra Dell’Uva
Every year on the first Sunday of October since 1924, the city of
Marino, Italy has celebrated the arrival of Marcantonio Colonna,
the admiral who defeated the Ottoman armada in the Gulf Of
Corinth in 1571. Some 400 of the Marino townsfolk dress in the
Renaissance garb of Colonna’s sailors, there is a jousting
tournament, and every balcony, doorway, and terrace is strung
with flower garlands. All the fountains are bedecked with vines
of ripe grapes and you may eat as many of them as you like. If
you want an actual meal, you need only browse the town and
sample as you please—it’s all free.
The festival lasts from dawn to well into the dark of the next
morning, but the highlight of the party comes at dusk. Just as
the sun hits the horizon, the water is drained from the main
fountain in the center of town, La Fontana dei Quattro Mori (“the
Fountain of the Four Moors”), and sweet white wine is
dispensed freely for everyone to drink as much as they want.
The city spends about $250,000 on the wine alone. You are
advised, however, to drink your fill and then lay low, because
the crowd does get out of hand.
A week later, on the second Sunday, they celebrate their annual
doughnut festival. The doughnuts are a local delicacy,
ciambella al mosto , which are baked buns with raisins, rolled in
sugar and “must” or pressed wine skins.

if it ain't orgy then it. ain't the best party