Jewel Ball Regal in Concept and Majestic in Execution
One suspects that when Dotti Howe completed her plans for Saturday’s Jewel Ball, she thought, “Apres moi , le deluge .” The quote comes from Louis XIV, and it translates loosely as “I’m going to be a hard act to follow.”
Louis, who dubbed himself the “Sun King,” was a rather grand king, as kings go, and as kings go, he went the limit. So did Howe with “Stars,” as she styled the 42nd annual Jewel Ball, a party that was regal in concept and virtually majestic in execution.
Its style was more lese majeste than noblesse oblige, and God help the bourgeoisie.
The Jewel Ball is venerable enough and traditional enough and generally dandy enough to make it rank as La Jolla’s hottest ticket of the year; one may as well go all the way and name it tops among San Diego’s annual parties.
The outdoors setting in a lavish, fancifully constructed ballroom built on the tennis courts of the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club has plenty to do with this, to be sure, but more important is the continuity of mood from year to year.
At the Jewel Ball, one feels not so much present at the moment as part of an ongoing event that for its participants never really ends. Conceptualize this as a kind of convivial time warp and you’ve got the idea.
Thus the themes, although they change from year to year, seem like threads about to be woven into a multicolored skein. Howe did score a coup by naming her ball “Stars,” though, because it’s the one name that will be etched more or less eternally in the skies. Any time the clouds part and draw a former attendee’s gaze up at the two Dippers and Orion’s flashy belt, there will be an occasion to think: “Oh yeah, Stars. I was there, and it was kind of a neat party. Had a lot to do with Versailles and stuff like that.”
9 Months Painting Set
It had, in fact, plenty to do with Versailles, a fact not lost upon either the 50 members of the sponsoring Las Patronas organization, or upon the 900 guests in attendance. One constant of the Jewel Ball is that the members spend nine months in a rented warehouse painting the theater-like set that will surround and define the party, and this year, the set gave guests the impression that they were in the ballroom of the Grand Trianon palace at Versailles, gazing out at the fountains and formal gardens that made this country place such an idyllic retreat from the gridlock and sloppy zoning of 17th-Century Paris.
It was grand enough for a whole family of Louies, in fact, from the stage, designed as an exact copy of the stage upon which Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette tied the knot, to the golden chandeliers that floated from the lighting poles, and the Italian tapestry cloths that covered the tables (the French imported their table tapestries from Italy). The centerpieces were sensational, massive candelabras that sprouted whole gardens from their upper regions and held them, spreading, high above the guests’ heads.
The whole program was kicky enough that it attracted not only scores of the usual “I-wouldn’t-miss-it” local guests but also assorted Texans, actor Burgess Meredith, Gayle Wilson (Senator Pete Wilson sent his regrets), and Vice Adm. Jack Fetterman, who is commander of the Pacific Naval Surface Fleet. The trendiest name on the list was New Zealander Michael Fay, who, with his wife Sarah, took a top-priced table and spent the evening looking like a man to whom winning the upcoming America’s Cup race is but a mere bagatelle.
One of the more unusual gentlemen present was Louis XIV himself, or at least a short-panted, periwigged, preening imposter who pranced about the premises importuning guests to have a thoroughly jolly time. He was part of a larger cadre of performers designed to set a mood, including the Fanfares d’Elegance trumpeters who greeted new arrivals with startling blasts, two chamber music ensembles that provided the sort of mannered cocktail music Louie and his nobles might have enjoyed at garden parties, and a whole covey of “living statues” who posed at strategic points around the pool, site of the cocktail reception.
The statues, all covered in white makeup and dressed to look like classical figures from Greek mythology, watched silently as guests washed down cargoes of shellfish and other hors d’oeuvres with seas of champagne. They were motionless figures at the feast, but they all went scurrying off when the traditional 10 p.m. fireworks burst above La Jolla Cove and sent the guests packing to the ballroom for the dinner of chateaubriand de boeuf a la marseillaise and frozen orange souffles.
Steve Carr’s Hollywood Studio Orchestra traveled down to play for dancing and to back up the stage show, led by singer Johnny Talon and featuring the Margo Tembey Dancers, who brought a Lido de Paris type of production to the stage in a flurry of feathers and sequins. The end of the show gave guests a chance to get out and dance, among them Annette and Dick Ford and Carolyn and Cliff Colwell (Annette and Carolyn were Howe’s co-chairmen), and an energetic and shoeless Bertrand Hug with his wife, Denise. The music and fancy footwork continued until 2 a.m., the ball’s traditional closing hour.
Jewel Ball themes have been drawn from every realm of fact and fancy, but Stars was a unique amalgam of Howe’s desire to capture some of the mood of her childhood home (a 40-room French chateau in suburban Chicago), and combine it with a salute to the friends, fellow Las Patronas and ball supporters she considers to be the “stars” of the community. Howe said that she has been fascinated by stars since kindergarten, when her father taught her to draw them on shirt cardboards.
The quest for the look of the theme led Howe and ball designer Margy West first to Chicago, and then to Versailles, where the two took photos and made sketches of the palace and gardens. One Versailles-inspired decor item, for example, was the grouping of boy-on-dolphin fountains that gently sprayed water into the Beach Club pool. Even the table favors, small Limoges perfume bottles, were found in a shop in the village of Versailles.
West studied the star motifs present in Versailles furnishings and incorporated them in the ball decor, and even spent much of the winter building an exact model of the Beach and Tennis Club in order to scale the decorations properly.
“I did it so that guests would have a very special, precious memory of something elegant and wonderful,” West said. “This isn’t a life that any of us lead, but for this one evening, it’s a fairy tale.”
‘A World of Good’
Tricia Kellogg, a Las Patronas member and wife of Beach Club principal Bill Kellogg, served as arrangements chair. Bill is part of the family that has been in a kind of partnership with Las Patronas through its 42 years of fund-raisers, during which more than $3.2 million has been contributed to San Diego County cultural, health and charitable institutions.
“This ball does the community a world of good, so we’re proud to be a part of it,” said Bill Kellogg. “Overall, the community is much better off for the Jewel Ball--you can’t argue that point.”
The major beneficiaries of “Stars” will be the Alzheimer’s Family Center, the Old Globe Theatre, The San Diego County Council of the Boy Scouts of America, The San Diego County Library and the UC-San Diego Eye Center. An additional 50 minor beneficiaries will share in proceeds, expected to exceed $300,000. “Our philosophy is that any monies we make are something that we can give to the community that it didn’t have before,” Howe said.
Among guests were U.S. Ambassador to Morocco Tom Nassif and his wife, Zanetta; the Tawfiq Khourys; the Gordon Luces; the Chuck Matthiesens; the Tom Selfs; the Dennis Buckos; the Robert Traylors; the Joseph Hibbens; the Maurice Kaplans; the Patrick Haggertys; the Donald Shileys; the Jack Mondays; the Irby Cobbs; the Mike Cavanaughs; the Richard Cramers; the Hap Chandlers; the Doug Allreds; the Larry Coxes; the Kim Fletchers, the Bruce Hazards, and Robert and Gail Lichter. Gail will chair the 1989 Jewel Ball.
