RSVP : Huntington Gala Blossoms

The setting was straight out of a 17th-Century painting. Besides the three dance floors, 100 dinner tables and more than 1,000 guests on the lawn of Henry E. and Arabella Huntington’s 130-acre back yard, in clear view were the Huntingtons’ illuminated beaux-arts mansion and 28 17th-Century garden statues on the North Vista, site of Saturday night’s gala.

Lilies, roses, delphinium and ivy spilled out of urns on candle-lit tables covered with ivory satin.

“This is the ball,” said Renee Segerstrom, who, with her husband, Henry, first stopped to admire the Huntingtons’ most famous possession, Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait, “The Blue Boy.”

The Blue Boy posed on the cover of the engraved, four-page invitation to the Blue Boy Ball, celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. The plume of his hat adorned the menu and place cards.

The nonprofit institution--beacon to both scholars and garden enthusiasts--was established by the late Henry and Arabella Huntington with a trust indenture in 1919.

“On your 75th, you have to go for broke,” said Huntington Overseer Maria Grant, as she sat down to the three-course dinner following cocktails on the mansion’s south terrace. Timed with the pouring of Acacia Brut, 1988, Robert Erburu, chairman of the Huntington’s Board of Trustees and chairman of the Times Mirror Co., led a toast that was followed by a pyrotechnic program that one wag said was “better than Dodger Stadium.”

Not only was the main house aglow from the show in the sky behind it, but a facsimile of the Blue Boy shot up dramatically in flaming blue lights.

Equally dazzling was the announcement that the event surpassed its fund-raising goal of $250,000, earmarked for the conservation of the Italian garden statues, by an additional $500,000. The extra money will be used to establish a fund for conservation of the Huntington Botanical Gardens.

“I think we had Henry looking down from above,” said Boyd Smith, co-chairman of the gala with William Steele, who added: “I had never seen such an outpouring of support from some big name people in my life.”

The event was sponsored by Tiffany & Co., J. P. Morgan and the Times Mirror Co., parent company of The Los Angeles Times.

After the funding was promised, Huntington’s historians discovered some “fun facts,” as Tiffany’s Western regional vice president John Petterson put it, including the address of Henry and Arabella Huntington’s New York mansion. Their home at 727 5th Ave. is now Tiffany’s flagship store.

In another anecdote, “Old J. P. Morgan” and Henry Huntington bid against each other for books when they were building their respective libraries, said Dennis Weatherstone, J. P. Morgan chairman and CEO.

Among the guests were Mayor Richard Riordan and Nancy Daly, Alice O’Neill Avery, Lloyd Cotsen, Alice and Joe Coulombe, Jean Smith and Ross Barrett, Frances Brody and Peter Paanakker, Nancy and Leo Denlea, Andrea Van de Kamp and Marc Selwyn, Judi and Gordon Davidson, Cynthia and Henry Yost (who underwrote a patron reception for large contributors), Joyce and Kent Kresa, Louise Taper, Anne and Robert Wycoff, Huntington president Robert A. Skotheim and his wife Nadine, Anne and Michael Armstrong, Suzanne and Fred Rheinstein, and 75th anniversary committee chairman Mary Lou and George Boone.