Joffrey Ballet Plans to Encore Benefit Dinner Series

As fund-raisers go there were some lulus this year. High on that list was the Night of a Hundred Dinners, the inventive fund-raising marathon for the Joffrey Ballet.

If you missed dining with some of this town’s best hosts and hostesses, don’t fret. The 1985 series of dinners was such a successful fund-raising event, it’s coming back in 1986. Bigger and better.

The series, which will take place over a three-day period beginning March 20, has a new name, too. For the New Year it’s been dubbed “The Joffrey Dinners . . . Act II.” It really tells the tale well.

This time around Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly will act as honorary co-chairs. (If only they would dance just once more time.) And because nothing this big gets done without a lot of work, there’s a large and powerful committee involved, all of them Joffrey board members. Headed by Patricia Skouras, they include Sandy Ausman, Terri Childs, Maude Ferry, Dona Kendall (as last year’s chairman she’s acting as adviser), Patricia Kennedy, Keith Kieschnick, Ruth Shannon, Noelle Siart, Catherine Sugarman, Felisa Vanoff and Maggie Wetzel. Just goes to prove, if you want something done well you ask the busiest ladies in the city.

There are all sorts of ways to celebrate the holidays. Huzzah.

Doris Finley, Fred Gibbons and Kathy and Chris Matsumoto are ringing in the New Year with a splashy black-tie soiree at Jimmy’s. Suzy and Frank Cross are giving their party at the Bel-Air Country Club and joining them will be Dale and Chuck Snodgrass. Berny and Ellen Byrens and daughter Bambi sent out lollipop-shaped invitations to their New Year’s Eve open house. Henny and Jim Backus are opening the door to their pack of celebrity friends for the umpteenth time. Nancy and Tim Vreeland were looking for a change of scenery so they headed for San Francisco. Betty and Kurt Niklas, Millie Katleman, First Hairdresser Julius Bengtsson, Wally Cedar are all off to Acapulco, where the Baron and Baroness di Portanova are scheduled to host another of their dazzling New Year’s Eve extravaganzas at their showplace home.

New Yorker Clint Wade will be in London with the witty and urbane Hardy Amies. London is also where the Music Center’s Claire and Maurice Segal are spending the holidays. Terry and Dennis Stanfill are in Jackson Hole, Wyo., with daughter Francesca and her husband, New York attorney Peter Tufo, and their baby daughter. Maggie and Harry Wetzel are in Aspen, as are Jackie Applebaum and daughter Libby. As soon as Toni Zellerbach Haber welcomes the New Year in Malibu she takes off for India.

Lucy Zahran and husband, Dr. Jim Bonorris, plan to take a breather. They’ll celebrate the New Year with their friends Jan. 13. What a break.

Les Dames de Champagne will do their big entertaining on Twelfth Night, comme d’habitude. On Jan. 6 they’ll be at the newly revamped Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel dining and dancing in a setting reminiscent of the first Academy Awards at the hotel in 1929. Mrs. Glen Wills and her co-chairman, Buddy Rogers, are making all the nostalgic plans.

And Loyola-Marymount’s Father Maurice Chase had an early Christmas dinner with Irene Dunne and her family and then spent the rest of the day giving out Christmas cards and dollar bills to the men of Skid Row.

The Pavilion at the Bistro Garden never looked prettier. For the dinner-dance hosted by Zena and Rusty Hoffman and Chantal and Martin Stern, Flower Fashions created an archway of tiny lights and decorated the room in silver and peach. Peach chrysanthemums rimmed the dance floor and covered the tall trees that stood behind Rudy Varone’s bandstand. Silver cloths covered tables that held silver accoutrements and bouquets of Sonia roses. And the ceiling was a mass of silver and peach balloons.

It was a dancing crowd. George Burns, still limber and daring at almost 90, chose as his partners the tallest women in the room. Joanna Carson, who arrived with Jean-Yves Mastey, was one of George’s favorites. More on the dance floor--the Henry Plitts, Marilyn and Harry Lewis, Barry Mirkin, Kati and Arpad Domyan, Jean Kerkorian Bullins and her husband Andrew, Valerie and Erwin Sobel, Hassah and Michaal Adham, Henri Mastey with Catherine Bloom, Nina and Ron Leif, the Merrill Lowells, the Berny Byrens, Bill and Dione Fenning, Contessa Cohn with Terry Leone, Judy and Don Tallarico, Marilyn and Joe Wolf, the Sid Kleins, Barry and Carol Kaye, Patricia Kennedy, and some more who were so carried away by the holiday spirit they partied until 3 a.m.

The arrival of Ambassador to Belgium Geoffrey Swaebe and his wife, Mary, set off a round of parties. Just as we predicted it would. First in line were Dee and Stuart Cramer, who gave the Swaebes a grand welcome with a dinner-dance at the Bistro Garden Pavillion. There were orchids everywhere and Joe Marino’s quartet played very danceable tunes.

Juli and Herbert Hutner followed with a black-tie dinner at their home. There were carolers, a pianist, Christmas trees and stockings hung by the fireplace. All good cheer here.

And since both Geoffrey and Mary are great movie buffs Jayne and Henry Berger wound up the social saga with a casual hot dogs, hamburgers, chili buffet and a screening of “Once Bitten.”

Seen at one, two or all three of these sterling events were: Frances Bergen, back from New York and another visit with granddaughter Chloe; Marilyn and Glen McDaniel; Eva Gabor and Merv Griffin (at the Hutners); Ginny and Hank Mancini (they arrived at the Hutners in time for demitasse after having dined at Fred Hayman’s); Ross Hunter; Jacque Mapes; Virginia and Si Ramo; Georgia and Dom Frontiere; Lois and Art Linkletter; Marcie Adams; Pascal and James Regan; Audrey and Philip Reed; Franklin and Elsie Pollock; Myles Lowell; June and Gordon Walker; Jerry and Virginia Oppenheimer (the Swaebes are their house guests); Cyd and Tony Martin; Erlenne and Norman Sprague; Wallis Annenberg with Dr. John Gerace; Diane and Harold Keith; Mary and Bradley Jones; Caroline and Henry Singleton; Eric and Frances Skipsey; Giney Milner with Bob Forward; Lee and Cliff Witte; Ann and Donald Petroni; Gwen Hornburg with John Hessel; Patty and Francis McComb; Louise and John Good; Jean Trousdale; Dr. Harvey Ross; Midge and Bob Clark.

The Holiday Social Scramble: Philip Salet and Jessica Vitti took over the Westwood Marquis’ Erte Room for a festive holiday dinner that included Sedge and Henry Plitt; Berny and Ellen Byrens; Sid and Frances Klein; Happy and Frances Franklin; Sachi and Larry Irwin; Suzanne and Dr. Joseph Marx; publisher Walter Harris and his wife, Peggy; Marty and Sue Harwick; Tony and Kathy Reyes; Father Maurice Chase; Jacques Camus; and Ruth and Alan Berliner.

This holiday season Stan Bromley, the very efficient and mischievous general manager of San Francisco’s Four Seasons Clift Hotel, sent a limo to the airport with Santa Claus in the driver’s seat to pick up VIP guests. It’s just one of those little touches that makes the Clift different. Like the pitchers of cold milk and plates of cookies that await guests when they return from late-night parties. All this, and quite a bit more, has earned the Clift one of the American Automobile Assn.’s 1986 Five Diamond Awards. (The other S.F. winners are the Fairmont and the Westin St. Francis.)

Dick and Helen Wolford, who flew in from Maui to spend the holidays with offspring in Washington and San Francisco, made a pit stop in Los Angeles and were spotted dining with King and Sylvia Wu and their sons, George and Patrick, and Patrick’s fiancee, Rosanne Wong, at Madame Wu’s Garden; and in the restaurant’s VIP Room beauty maven Aida Grey was hosting a company Christmas party.

This has been a very difficult column to write because it’s my last. After 14 1/2 wonderful years as society editor for The Times, I’ve opted for an early retirement so I can get a few novels written. (I hope.) Since arriving here from London I’ve had a chance to renew old friendships, make many new ones. Along the way I’ve lost some cherished ones. As they say, that’s life.

It’s been exciting, rewarding and fun working for The Times and reporting on your activities. Which is why it’s so hard to say goodby. Perhaps our paths will cross again. Meanwhile I wish you all a happy, peaceful, healthy New Year. You deserve it.