It is 8 o’clock on a chilly Tuesdsay evening at the Whitney Museum, where the Italian fashion powerhouse Max Mara is staging an intimate dinner for 74 to celebrate the first anniversary of the museum’s building (as well as that of the Max Mara Whitney Bag designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop), and people are talking.
What are they talking about? Cornelia Guest, the one-time socialite and entrepreneur is telling Linda Wells, the former editor of the beauty bible Allure, about a group of abandoned equines she recently rescued at a New Jersey livestock auction from their almost certain fate as dog food.
“There are two mini horses I named Daisy and Petal, a pony named Snooks and a donkey named Elvis, who is a real stud, though not for long,” Ms. Guest is saying, making a scissor gesture with her fingers.
“When I got them home to the farm, I gave them bubble baths,” adds Ms. Guest, a vegan author and animal rights activist, who at 52 remains as striking as when she was named Deb of the Year over three decades ago. Ever the beauty professional, Ms. Wells is chiming in with a probing question: “What product did you use?”
Away in another part of a room — converted for the evening with fuchsia peonies and anemones and pale candles from the museum’s eighth floor cafe into an intimate dining hall — the actress Sally Field is deep in conversation with the museum’s director, Adam Weinberg. And Tommy Tune, the performer for whom the adjective “ageless” might as well have been coined, is chatting with Deeda Blair, whose significance as a figure on the neurobiological research scene is sometimes overshadowed by her perennially elegant appearance on the New York social one.
And Maria Giulia Prezioso Maramotti, the American retail director for Max Mara, the firm founded by her grandfather, is causing her mother’s eyebrows to arch in consternation as she shows a new acquaintance the tattoo inside her left wrist and explains its significance.
“I’m obsessed with the blues,” says Ms. Maramotti, whose company sponsored the evening and — unusually for an Italian company at a time when industrialists in Italy are under intense pressure to support their own cultural heritage — provides significant underwriting to this museum of American art.
Written in blue cursive, Ms. Maramotti’s new tattoo is the single word “Crossroads,” a reference to the intersection of Highways 1 and 8 in Rosedale, Miss., where, according to legend, the bluesman Robert Johnson sold the devil his soul. Well, we all make our own deals.
Darting about the room clutching a glass of Franciacorta Ca’Del Bosco is the artist K8 Hardy, whose yellow-dyed hair has a streak of bright red at the center part, lending her some resemblance to a fertilized egg. And the theater designer William Ivey Long is regaling a small group that includes the Vanity Fair correspondent Amy Fine Collins with tales of his latest project, a Fox revival of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” for which the casting of Tim Curry had just been confirmed, though not in his original indelible role as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, of course. (At 70 Mr. Curry may be a bit mature for a bustier.) And the artist Deborah Kass is explaining to someone how, when she was offered a Max Mara dress to wear for the evening (as were many of the special guests, Ms. Field, Blythe Danner and Amy Adams, among them) she demurred in favor of a Max Mara dress she already owned.
Meantime, Stefano Tonchi, the W editor, is running down a list of Asian cities on the grueling itinerary of his husband, the art dealer David Maupin, one of those people for whom it is nothing to fly to Seoul for a day. And Jessica Diehl, the Vanity Fair stylist best known for rendering Caitlyn Jenner as a smoldering 1950s-style bombshell, is interrupting a conversation with Mellie Grant, the “Scandal” actress, to explain to this reporter that the most challenging part of dressing the world’s most famous transgender person for her debut as a woman was finding a pair of size 14 shoes that did not make Ms. Jenner look as though it were pole dancing for which she medaled at the 1976 Olympics.
And Mr. Weinberg is remarking to a dinner neighbor that he had recently returned from his first trip to Africa, where he visited his 25-year-old daughter, Zoe, an international banker involved in microcredit lending. “Nairobi is not an easy city,” Mr. Weinberg is saying. “But I was so excited by the energy I want to go back.” And Flora Irving, great-great-granddaughter of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the museum’s founder, is explaining to a dinner partner that, her ethereal appearance this evening notwithstanding, she is not a particularly girly girl.
“I really like not carrying a purse and just putting things in my pocket and heading out,” she is saying. And as if to prove her point, a friend drops by the table and opens up her own purse, inside which Ms. Irving has stashed her all-important eyelash curler.
“I always have to take it when I go out,” she is saying. “Otherwise I’ll droop.”
