No one wants a photographer, wandering unleashed among the beautiful people. : Marvin and Mark and Me

Nipper’s, which is a club in Beverly Hills where the rich and famous go to dance and drink champagne, was opened to the press last week for a party to introduce a new mineral water from France.

As you might imagine, Nipper’s is not a place normally frequented by journalists, whose tastes run more to bars that serve gin and peanuts rather than Dom Perignon and foie de canard. But it was free, so many of us dropped by.

I thought you might like to know what went on, since I doubt that a lot of you have ever been to a press party. I know you’ve never been to Nipper’s by the way you handle the English language in letters-to-the-columnist.

No one who writes, “The man what you mentioned in your column don’t know nothing about what he’s talking . . . “ will ever be allowed into Nipper’s.

Anyhow, I was impressed, first of all, by the size of the press packet issued for the evening. It contained 36 pages of information and nine photographs relating to Vittel mineral water.

This was quite obviously more than any of us cared to know about water, but we accepted the packets at the door as the price of admission and dumped them later in order to free our hands to eat and drink.

Nipper’s is part of the Rodeo Collection, which is a Beverly Hills term to describe a cluster of retail establishments in one large building. In Santa Monica it would be called a mall and in Culver City, a shopping center, but this was Beverly Hills, and the point of view is different there.

There was food in abundance for the 300 or so guests, in addition to music, aerobics, dancing girls and several bars that served rivers of champagne and, of course, mineral water.

Strings of lighted red, white and blue balloons towered over the festivities, which spilled out of Nipper’s and into an inner courtyard of the building.

The boundaries of the party were defined by ropes and security personnel--more, I suspect, to keep the press in than to keep party-crashers out. No one wants a photographer, for example, wandering unleashed among the beautiful people who shop the Collection.

The champagne that was served to the press, by the way, was not the $790-a-bottle Dom Perignon 1961 offered to paying Nipper’s customers, nor was the pate Beluga caviar, which sells for $90 for 125 grams.

We drank a more modest Nicholas Feuillatte and nibbled at the social equivalent of fish sticks, but for a crowd accustomed to beer and French bread, it really doesn’t matter, does it?

Many of us spent a good part of the evening searching for the celebrities who, according to the invitation, were expected to attend. Public relations agencies that handle this kind of party feel that without celebrities, journalists would stay away.

I didn’t find anyone famous, though I was assured later that Marvin Braude and Mark C. Bloome had been present. You probably already know that Mark C. Bloome sells tires but may be ignorant of the fact that Marvin Braude is on the Los Angeles City Council.

It didn’t surprise me to hear that Braude was there, since council members will go anywhere to attract attention, but I can’t figure out why Bloome was invited.

The young lady for the PR agency who gave me their names seemed sincerely impressed, however, that they had attended. I thought it was a joke at first, but quickly realized that it wasn’t when she began reeling off the names of other celebrities whose names were not even vaguely familiar.

Well, maybe there were a few names I might have recognized, but none of them belonged to the sex queens of America. I was expecting to see the place filled with celebrities whose bust sizes equaled the upper limits of their IQ’s, if for no other reason than to have something to look at. Marvin Braude and Mark C. Bloome did not, alas, qualify.

I learned from the lady press agent that the party cost Vittel $20,000. When I asked if the money had been well spent, she replied proudly that one radio station, a British news agency, a local wire service and me were writing or speaking about America’s newest mineral water.

“Everyone,” she added cheerfully, “had a wonderful time!”

Twenty thousand? By that measure, they spent $5,000 simply for me to snipe at a party I didn’t have to attend in the first place.

I don’t mean to be ungrateful. Perhaps it is simply that I have attended too many press parties over the years, and while the majority of them have been in American Legion halls and not at Nipper’s, they are all essentially the same.

Notwithstanding my inability to function in a social environment, however, I want to thank Vittel and the government of France, however shaky it may be at the moment, for inviting me to their soiree.

I will probably never drink their water but, what the hell, I don’t drink our water either, so it doesn’t really matter.

Perhaps the letter-writer was correct in his assessment of me as a man what don’t know nothin’ about what he’s talking.

I’ll even drink to that, if you’ll make it Beefeater’s and hold the olive. Set ‘em up for Marvin and Mark too. On me.