Answering a family calling
My wife and I were sitting on the patio at the Polo Lounge -- or the famed Polo Lounge, as it has been called -- when we noticed a man at the next table making a lot of calls to invite people to his Christmas party. He was coughing miserably between invitations.
“Hi, this is Jason Davis,” he’d say with an exhausted flatness. “I want to invite you to a Christmas event I’m having. It’s on Thursday. It’s at Chopard on Rodeo Drive, from 6:30 to 9:30. You should have gotten an invitation, but it looks like some people didn’t. They got lost in the mail or something.”
Sometimes he promised: “It’ll be fun. There will be a Santa, carolers, all that stuff.”
References to his family -- “It’s for my mom’s foundation for multiple sclerosis; you know, she has MS” -- suggested where at least some of his motivation came from. He felt rotten, he confessed to someone. “I should be in bed.”
His companion spoke into a cellphone with a salesman’s eagerness: “Hi, this is Brian Quintana. I’m sitting here with Jason Davis and we’re inviting you to join Jason and the whole Davis clan at Chopard. It will be the first event Jason is hosting. It will be red-carpet, purely A-list, star-studded.”
Some of the names the two mentioned -- Paris, Lindsay, Mischa -- winked into view like diamonds in the dark.
“Lindsay Lohan,” Mary guessed. “Mischa Barton.”
Jason was large. The edges of his body blended with the shadows so that the outline of him was lost. His squarish face looked soft and pale beneath an unruly flop of dark hair. I had no idea who he was, but learned later at my laptop that he was the 20-year-old grandson of the late Marvin Davis, the larger-than-life (6 feet, 4 inches, 300 pounds) tycoon who’d amassed his fortune in oil and real estate, then made himself a big Hollywood presence by buying 20th Century Fox. Upon his death in September, he was said to have been the wealthiest person in Los Angeles for decades, and among the wealthiest in the U.S. His wife, Barbara, and their daughter, Nancy, Jason’s mother, remain fixtures on the social scene with their star-studded, A-list, red-carpet charity events. If Jason seemed at home planning his debut at the Beverly Hills Hotel, it was probably because his grandfather once owned it.
Now, it seemed, family expectations were coalescing around Jason’s debut in charitable Hollywood. The billionaire’s grandson had another project in the works, a reality-TV show about a billionaire’s grandson striving to fulfill his family’s destiny. He’d start as a car-parker, say, and work his way up the greasy pole of American success until he was a self-made billionaire’s grandson. “The Simple Life” meets “The Apprentice.”
But if Jason meant to challenge Paris Hilton’s command of rich-kid Olympus, he was certainly being friendly about it. He’d invited her to his party, along with a list that drew from the ranks of Nicki Hilton, Lance Bass, Rick Fox, Jack Osbourne, Thora Birch, Tom Arnold, Frankie Muniz, and, of course, Kato Kaelin.
Lindsay turned out to be a misheard murmur.
Inside the glitter dome
CHOPARD, the party’s setting, is a watch-and-jewelry boutique with a luxurious-looking front of marble and glass, illuminated by one of 20 Baccarat chandeliers dripping their crystal overhead as part of Rodeo Drive’s holiday opulence.
On the night of the party, a trio of carolers stood at one end of the red carpet and a man in a red Santa suit wore a diamond and sapphire pendant worth $56,000 around his neck.
Jason strolled out of the store. He wore a waist-length, black leather coat, a long shimmering white scarf and sunglasses. His black hair was slicked back, Elvis style. Around his neck a small, jewel-encrusted teddy bear hung from a glittering chain. He kidded with Santa for photographers. “Hey there, Santa,” he crooned, loud enough for all to hear. “I’m Jewish, but I looove Christmas.”
As various men and women emerged from luxury cars and made their way into the store, a self-described “personal celebrity photographer” named Clinton Wallace (“I’ve shot Paris Hilton hundreds of times!”) rattled off their names. “That’s Stavros,” Wallace said as a lanky man-boy with scraggly blondish hair emerged from a vehicle. “He’s like a Greek model. Stavros!” he called. “Go on the carpet, Stavros. I’ll take your picture!”
“That’s Alicia Arden,” Wallace said. “She’s been on ‘General Hospital’ and has a new movie coming out.”
Arden had her picture taken with Jason’s arm around her.
But no sign yet of Paris or Rod Stewart, Paula Abdul or Sugar Ray Leonard.
“There’s Nikki Haskell,” Wallace called out. “She’s a socialite.”
“I’ve known Jason since he was a baby,” said Haskell, a petite woman in an elegant slate-colored suit with gray fur welling up around the collar.
“Was he a good baby?” I asked.
“Nooooo, he was not a good baby,” she stressed. “But he wasn’t like any other baby. He was really quite precocious. He was always creative.”
An older woman in a spangled black suit, with what looked like very large pearls and neat swoops of whitish hair, appeared on the red carpet. “Grandma, I love you,” Jason said to her quietly. It was Marvin’s widow, Barbara. She beamed and waved. Soon, Nancy Davis appeared and posed with her son.
Chopard was by now jammed with well-dressed people sipping Champagne and shopping for a good cause -- a percentage of sales would be donated to charity. I introduced myself to Jason, who seemed unbothered by having been overheard at the Polo Lounge. When I asked what this evening meant to him, he launched into a speech.
“I’m a strong supporter of any charity,” he said. “I hope we find a cure to MS. I hope we find cures to all diseases. MS, AIDS, cancer and heart disease. ... Forget about shopping, forget about money. If you don’t have your health, you have got nothing.”
Moments later, he gave a similar short speech to his guests, finishing with a flourish about how “it is time to let the younger generation know that charity is a very good thing.”
If the best-known people on the list hadn’t arrived, Jason wasn’t revealing any disappointment. Wallace noted that a few better-known people were starting to appear. “We’ve moved up from C-list to B-minus,” Clint said. “That’s pretty good. Do you know how hard it is even to get a C-star to your event?”
At the end of the red carpet, past the carolers, stood a table covered with glossy black-paper favor bags. One of them rose in the grip of a smallish woman with expertly coiffed white hair, a stylish black jacket and unusually large blue eyes. She’d been to a lot of Davis events, she said, and she was watching Jason with interest. “He’s big like his grandfather,” she said, “but does he have his grandfather’s brains? That’s the question. It’s just too early to tell.”
She glanced at her bag: “If anything in here is any good,” she said, “I’ll give it to my maid for Christmas.”
