Having a Ball: Diener Leads Mozart Party

Jennifer Diener has two major qualifications for co-chairing both the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s 20th Anniversary Founders Ball, “A Celebration of Mozart,” April 22 at the Regent Beverly Wilshire and the preview party Saturday evening at the home of Richard Colburn in Beverly Hills. She’s a graduate of the Harvard Business School and she’s been taking cello lessons for more than two years.

With business and musical prowess, she did a walk-through this week at Colburn’s home, showing Colburn’s music room and its 18th-Century decor and strolling the pavilion and gardens where preview party guests will get the scoop on the wonderful auction items at the Mozart benefit--a $50,000 Avanti, a five-day stay at the Schloss Monchstein in Salzburg (“surfeited with glory and opera tickets”), a trip in February to Vienna for the Opera Ball (“with snitzy parties and royalty”) and chamber musicales with cuisine, weekends at La Quinta and Montecito. Preview guests will also sample gourmet selections from Joachim and Christine Splichal’s newest restaurant, Patina, which debuts in the spring in Hancock Park at the site of the former Le St. Germain.

To date, 36 of the 70 benefit tables are sold, and reservations are already in from Lisa and Ernest Auerbach, Lynn and Stanley Beyer, Kay Brown and Webster Phillips, Catherine and Vicki Hearst, Fred and Joan Nicholas, Dorothy and Leonard Straus and Norman and Susie Barker.

Sitting at luncheon around Colburn’s monk’s table, dining on his chef’s gazpacho, chicken wrapped around mandarin oranges and pimientos and sipping the Sonoma-Cutrer Winery chardonnay supplied by Warner Henry (to be served at the ball), chairman Diener, chamber musical director Iona Brown, executive director Deborah Rutter, Fran Rosen (who is curator of Colburn’s large collection of rare string instruments, which are loaned to outstanding students) and Jan Kepler chatted about the Chamber Orchestra.

Said Diener: “The group began as music lovers who loved to play and hear music and gathered for small dinners in private homes to hear chamber orchestras.” The 20th anniversary honors five founders: Colburn, Joan Palevsky, James Arkatov, Joseph Troy and the late Rose (Mrs. Buddy) Sperry. The chamber now has a $2.8 million budget and plays 30 concerts a year.

“And our supporters are wedded to us emotionally,” Diener added.

TRUE DREAMS: Twenty-five years ago, the late Angeleno Don Belding dreamed of a Freedoms Foundation headquarters at Valley Forge where young people might go in the summer for heritage/citizenship inspiration and where adults could meet for seminars. E. F. Hutton gave 20,000 acres. Volunteer Jeanne McDonald called 53 women leaders together to organize Freedoms Foundation chapters. Jeanne eventually organized 10 of the chapters that now number 42 nationally.

Mamie Eisenhower, Bob Hope and Walt and Lillian Disney have all been honored at Los Angeles chapter balls. Today the chapter sends 249 students annually to Valley Forge.

Thus, Jeanne McDonald was getting amazing kudos at the Los Angeles chapter’s recent luncheon at Jimmy’s. Good friends Appellate Justice Mildred Lillie, Ruth Tullis and Dorothy Dumke joined Jeanne and her daughter, Jeanne Ede, at her center table. The audience was filled with former chapter presidents including super fund-raiser Patricia Bell Hearst who became teary about the occasion and noted, “You’re only as good as the group you work with.” More in the crowd were current prexy Joann Koll and former presidents Lee Jack, Dorothy Rage, Lindy Klugman and Cecille Shellenberger.

SPRINTING: It was not exactly accidental that Bullock’s Westwood and the UCLA charity Sprint got the first West Coast showing of the Anne Klein and Company spring collection (a homage to Gauguin) and a personal appearance of the New Yorker who designs Anne Klein--the handsome Louis Dell’Olio.

Said Bullock’s Westwood general manager, Malcolm Reuben, standing with his wife, Vinnie, “We’re the No. 1 store in Anne Klein in Bullock’s.”

Sprint, which provides treatment and research on birth defects, will have a new facility on the UCLA campus.

Dell’Olio limits such major shows to three or four a year. And, of course, he was the center of attention, being introduced about by Bullock’s chairman and CEO Robert Friedman and Sprint President Nina Leif and co-chair Ilona Sherman (who both appeared in the same Anne Klein black) and dining on Parties Plus pasta and yellow tail tuna under a white tent.

For Nina Leif, the evening was maxy nice: Marissa, Nina and Ronnie Leif’s daughter, who was at the party, had been accepted at Westlake School the day before.

HOPE FOR SUN: Those benefit days at the races are always fun. There are at least two Saturday. Edna and Richard Campbell, Joan and Keith Renken and Betty and Robert Strub host the Hugh O’Brian Youth Foundation Associates at 11:30 a.m. in the Seabiscuit Court at Santa Anita. A crowd including Helene and Richard Irvin will be among those lunching and watching the ponies.

The same day, Friends of Hillsides Home for Children and their guests gather in Clockers’ Corner to raise funds for battered children. Cindy and Mel Trousdale head the committee.

KUDOS: USC’s Journalism Alumni Assn. and the USC School of Journalism celebrate the 29th annual Distinguished Achievement in Journalism Awards Dinner tonight at the Biltmore Bowl. The evening awardees will be: Robert C. Maynard, owner of the Oakland Tribune and the first black in America to own a controlling interest in a general-circulation city daily; Linda Ellerbee, broadcast journalist and columnist,; and Newsday (publisher Robert M. Johnson will accept for the paper).

NOVEL: Find your tables by the names of famous gardens when garden designer and author Penelope Hobhouse comes from her historic garden in Somerset, England on Wednesday. She’ll speak at a luncheon at the Four Seasons Hotel for La Coterie of The Friends of French Art Foundation and talk about the most beautiful gardens in the world.

Elin Vanderlip of Villa Narcissa at Portuguese Bend says funds will be used to send two American students to France for study at the French Institute of Art Conservation in Paris, to Chateau of Bizy (across the Seine from Monet’s garden, Giverny) to restore work and to the Boston Museum of Fine Art to conserve French drawings.

PLAUDITS: To Padrino John Bowles, honored at a surprise party at La Golondrina by the Merchants of Olvera Street. . . .

To the Assistance League of Southern California, which has opened its newly decorated Thrift Shop.

APOLOGIES: The opening parties and previews this week surrounding “Contemporary Mexican Artists” have been at the Fisher Gallery on the USC campus. The exhibition continues through Feb. 18 at the gallery.