Samplings From the After-Oscar Party

The very best agents have a knack for knowing when to be somewhere. When Cher slipped away from the Governors Ball to the Oscar press room Monday night, her Creative Artists agent, Ron Meyer, surprised her in a little-known side doorway at the Shrine Auditorium. Almost nobody knew about that escape route from the ballroom to the press rooms.

A moment before meeting the press, Cher’s manager, Bill Sammeth, held the Oscar just as somebody asked Cher, “Do you need a mirror?” The question was rhetorical. Cher can fix her face without a mirror.

Just inside the ballroom Cher’s mother, Georgia Holt, stood holding a just-printed copy of her new Simon & Schuster book, “Star Mothers.”

“It arrived from the publisher today at noon,” said Holt. The awe-struck tall blond woman originally had the Marilyn Monroe role in “Asphalt Jungle” until M.M. appeared one week into shooting.

“I had to put a Federal Express tracer on it,” Holt said, clutching her book, “because today was the day I needed it.”

Nodding in understanding were straw-haired grandson Elijah Blue and sequin-clad granddaughter Chastity Bono. Cher’s sister Georgeanne La Piere marveled at her own timing: “I was planning to return East. It’s a fluke I’m here.”

What was flukier was how well the Governors Ball worked--against all odds. At Monday noon Regal Rents’ Mike Stern worried that “nobody’s ever had a sit-down dinner for 1,560 people. Not in this town.”

Maybe not. The Governors Ball is perennially (and boringly) held at the 1,200-seat International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton.

The increase of 400 people assuaged no Hollywood egos, however. The idea of simply “stopping by” the ball didn’t work, because this was the year of the Hollywood throwback: Good manners meant you came to the ball and you stayed at the ball. At midnight, the dance floor was still spinning.

In the throng: Audrey Hepburn (wearing extraordinary crystal earrings and lighting her own cigarette a la Holly Golightly), Kevin Costner (the only male in the room who got away with taking off his jacket), David Byrne, Alan Ladd Jr., Sherry Lansing, Olympia Dukakis, Billy Crystal, Grant Tinker, Jon Voight, Ann Sothern, Dawn Steel (in Armani’s tuxedo, and taking congratulations for her own Oscar party the night before) and--talking and laughing in a trio--Meryl (Mary Louise) Streep, reclusive producer Robert Evans and (without dark glasses) Jack Nicholson.

A sense of Hollywood past also came out of the room. In certain cases the seating was worthy of Darryl Zanuck. (Or George Cukor’s “A Star Is Born,” 1954.) Putting Gregory Peck, for example, next to Celeste Holm, his “Gentleman’s Agreement” co-star, made a livelier table. For a centerpiece, art director Jerry Wunderlich created a smoky ‘30s Art Deco ambiance: 24-foot Oscars revolved on a turntable with a combo playing torch songs like “Lush Life” and “Stars Fell on Alabama.”

Among the complaints: Some diners missed the second course, a minted rack of lamb, primarily “because of table hopping,” according to Lisa Rosenblum of the catering firm Ambrosia. Other diners complained of late service.

Mostly it was a Hollywood night that delivered: Would-be stars wore gold lame neckties and waited on tables. And there was even tinsel on the floor. Not to mention some fox-trotting well after midnight. (If you get to be old enough, as George Burns put it, you get to be new again.)