MHR
If the job were on offer, the ad might read like this:Supremeorganizer with wacky imagination, charm, substantial private means - preference to titled applicants.
But La Baronne de Rothschild - Marie-Hélène, as she is universally known - is not about to relinquish her role as the most influential mover, shaker and fixer in the social universe, even taking into account the redoubtable Brooke Astor.
At the soirée she gave last week in Paris, the baronne proved a far bigger draw than the queen of England, who had been on a four-day state visit to France. Those paying homage to the slight figure in black and white lace at the bottom of the grand staircase at the Opéra-Comique included royalty and aristocrats - the former Empress Farah of Iran, Prince and Princess Michel of Greece, Princess Michael of Kent and too many counts to count; the politicos - Edouard Balladur, the ex-finance minister, and Bernadette Chirac, the Paris mayor's wife and the baronne's confidante; intellectuals such as her pet philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, and artists from Claude and François Xavier Lalanne to the high-profile decorator Jacques Grange. Only Foreign Minister Roland Dumas failed to show.
Then there were the international socialites who had come to see the brief Rossini operetta and eat dinner in an Italianate setting of verdant topiary tracing gilded arches, trails of ivy round the painted ceiling, drapes from peach through nectarine fluttering at the windows, and table-settings of miniature cypresses clustered round a pond in which swam real goldfish. As the couturier Marc Bohan says: Marie-Hélène has "le sens de la fête," or knows how to give a party.
"She has given Paris another cultural dimension with this opera house," claimed Marie-Christine of Kent, striking in a slender white dress by Gianfranco Ferré, who was also a guest.
"And she's very brave to do it - it's not easy for any theater," said Lacroix-dressed Marina de Brantes, whose own Rossini event the previous evening at the Palais Garnier had been called off because of a strike.
"She is outstanding, everything is perfection," said São Schlumberger, whose Paris home offers mild rivalry to Marie-Hélène's salon at the Hôtel Lambert on the Ile Saint-Louis. Like her hostess, Schlumberger was wearing a vintage black Givenchy - with rubies once owned by the Duchess of Windsor to Marie-Hélène's turquoise and diamonds.
Yet another Givenchy dress was worn by Lynn Wyatt, who summed up the mood of the evening."I came just for this all the way from Texas - and I knew it would be worth every mile," she said.
Baron Guy de Rothschild claims that it is ridiculous to call his wife the social queen of Paris. But how else to describe the role that Marie-Hélène has played on the social stage since she married into the famous family in 1957 and became, in her husband's words, "more Rothschild than me"?
"I was very young - the youngest of the Rothschilds, I wanted to learn and I opened my eyes wide," said the baronne over a quiet dinner at Ferrières, in the modest chalet - but still decorated with sumptuous coziness - looking out on an ornamental pond. This country pad was built by Baron Guy in the woods surrounding the Château of Ferrières, his childhood home, which was turned over to the state in 1975.Marie-Hélène had brought the château magnificently back to life after the German occupation and held the first of her famous balls in 1959, when the Sleeping Beauty of a castle was covered in silvery spiderwebs and a ghostly galleon floated on the lake.
"It will never happen again - it's a different time," she says of those costume parties - to celebrate the centenary of Marcel Proust in 1971 and the following year the Surrealist ball with its mink-covered plates, its table settings inspired by de Chirico, Magritte and Dalí - who arrived at the ball in a wheelchair.
"It's a very healthy thing to give parties, don't you think?" she inquires. "But people don't know how to dress any more - it breaks my heart. People have even lost the taste for perfumes. Nothing is done now for good taste or for the beauty of things, but to appeal to people's lowest instincts."
Each party is envisaged with the help of her good friends Comte Etienne de Monpezat and the Baron Alexis de Redé, tenant of the Hôtel Lambert before the Rothschilds took over in 1975. Marie-Hélène describes de Redé's Bal Oriental of 1969 as the role model - and the one she enjoyed the most "because I didn't do it."
Her "magic circle" - which includes Gregory Peck and his wife Véronique, Rudolf Nureyev and Elizabeth Taylor, especially when she was with Richard Burton - now party at the Hôtel Lambert. Dinner in the Labors of Hercules gallery under Le Brun's painted ceiling means buffets piled with a sophisticated mix of lobster and pasta, caviar with potatoes or the baked potatoes with truffles that "everyone talked about for weeks." When the party is reduced like a fine sauce to 6 or 10, the hostess's "ball of anxiety" finally unwinds.
"I have terrible stage fright," she admits. "I enjoy myself from three in the morning."
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