Family-Style Benefit Helps a Family Issue
Mary Lou Retton taught Roger Rabbit how to jump on the balance beam, Ronald Reagan tossed a football through a tire and Debbie Allen spun the Wheel of Fortune while Cathy Guisewite worked her way through a ream of paper drawing “Cathy” cartoons.
As one guest put it, “This is so much better than the chicken dish thing that we’re all so used to.”
There was no chicken dish thing in sight when Ted and Susie Field opened the back yard of their Beverly Hills Greenacres mansion for a Sunday afternoon benefit for the Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Under a huge white tent guests and their families roamed among carnival booths staffed by celebrities who looked happy to be there.
Maybe it was because they could come in their scruffiest clothes. Major entertainment industry execs wore shorts revealing skinned knees, actresses had no makeup on and everyone seemed relieved at not having to wear black-tie.
“Anything do with AIDS I want to be involved with,” said singer Elton John minutes before he was to man the Super Strike booth. “I’ll keep going until a cure is found. I was supposed to be back in England today, but how could I miss this? If you turn this sort of thing down, there’s not much worth going home for.”
“I think everyone is having a good time,” said Elizabeth Glaser, co-founder (along with Susan De Laurentis and Susan Zeegen), of the Pediatric AIDS Foundation. “It’s great for me to see people getting to see friends they haven’t seen for a long time.”
Glaser started the foundation in 1988 to fund pediatric AIDS research as well as educate the public and provide emergency assistance to hospitals around the country.
“Pediatric AIDS is now a family issue,” she said. “Because if the child is infected, usually the mother is infected, and the father, too. We wanted to have an event that was for the whole family.”
At this party the celebs had donned neon-bright caps that read “Hero” to run booths such as Super Hero Bean Bag Toss, Blast Off, Fish Pond and Quarterback Scramble.
There were Paula Abdul, Fred Savage, Martin Short, Sugar Ray Leonard, Mel Harris, Sandy Koufax, Amy Irving, Cybill Shepherd, Robin Leach, Joe Namath, Dana Delany, Norm Nixon, Mariel Hemingway, Billy Crystal, Bart Connor, Michael Keaton, Ted Danson, Keanu Reeves, Henry Winkler, Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, Ali McGraw, Nadia Comaneci, Jamaal Wilkes, NBC entertainment chief Brandon and Lilly Tartikoff and Nancy and Ronald Reagan--and children, where applicable.
The Fields underwrote the party, which raised $900,000 for the foundation.
Added Elizabeth Glaser, “People can’t be complacent because we haven’t won the war yet.”
