RSVP : Official Mayoral House Gets Ready for Face Lift

Nancy Daly is to the Los Angeles mayor’s Getty House what Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was to the White House. Similarly, she gives wonderful parties.

With Daly at the microphone, there was spontaneous combustion Tuesday evening on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills at the Palladian estate of Lynda and Stewart Resnick (owners of the Franklin Mint).

Under an arbor of red bougainvillea were 13 antiques and special packages, such as new kitchen cabinets, needed for the Getty House Restoration Foundation in its efforts to spiff up Mayor Richard Riordan’s official Hancock Park residence. (He won’t live there, but city entertaining will take place there.)

Fewer than 250 guests had spectacular fun setting up consortia to buy the items offered wholesale from cooperative antiquarians and designers. Things started slowly. Then the Resnicks signed their name to the Sheraton bench that will go in the garden sitting room. The message was relayed to the crowd, sipping champagne and nibbling hors d’oeuvres from silver trays. The action was on.

As Chris Lewis put it, “I put the muscle on Leonard Straus,” and Pat Haden joined as the trio signed for the Georgian secretary for the living room. Beth Lowe pondered signing for the Regency table to grace the front hallway. “Bob’s out of town, if he doesn’t know and maybe with some creative banking . . . “ She did it.

Shirlee Fonda and Chris and Dick Newman created a “politics makes interesting bedfellows” group with Michael and Lori Milkin, Sheila Allen and Debby and Tom Tellefson to syndicate purchase of the mahogany bureau circa 1810. Verna Harrah and Leonard Rainowitz put dibs on the chinoiserie dining-room cabinet. With husbands again absent, Jane Eisner, Libby Doheny, Judy Angelo and Carolyn Cleator splurged to purchase the California Rinaldo Cuneo painting “Desert Hills” for the mayor’s study.

The real panic set in as the $20,000 kitchen cabinetry was unclaimed toward the end. Janet and Bruce Karatz, Dick and Chris Newman and John and Jeanie Cushman enticed, “Want to go in with us?” Ron Burkle, Bill and Nadine Tilly, Jerry and Sharon Katell, and who knows who else, did. Said Cushman, the real-estate magnate, “The kitchen is the most important room in a house.”

After they bought, each syndicate was photographed with Riordan and received bronze Getty House medallions. Now, the work looms. Designers will decorate room by room to execute the color palate of “Getty green,” claret red and parchment chosen by Susan McConaghy. Work begins Sept. 10.

Everyone was saying it was one of the best parties of the year. The Resnicks’ chef, Dennis Starks, created Towers of Pisa rice, beet and carrot mousses, chicken legs and rare beef, consumed while the palms swayed and the chitchat billowed under white umbrellas. Then, Daly told all to move into the Versailles-like Resnick living room where Christy’s Christopher Burge sent vibrations through the chandeliers, goading generous bidders in a live auction.

Margie Petersen bid $5,500 to lunch with Riordan, Charles Elkins picked up two seats for “The Three Tenors” concert July 16, and Jay Grodin snagged six World Cup tickets.

The evening still on a high, the crowd circulated through the Resnicks’ music room, marveling at the period beaux-arts furniture before consuming a dome of chocolate mouse, rice pudding and blackberry tarts in the dining room.

The engraved crystal gavel presented to the Resnicks said it all, “A million thank-yous.”