A book party! My first, a thrill for a rookie copyeditor. The epicenter of the host’s loft was a ping-pong table with silver buckets of bottled vodka and iced bowls of caviar, crème fraiche, and chopped egg. Unsure what to do, I mimicked the editor-in-chief, who heaped three tiny blini with some of each. Like him, I washed them down with a chilled cylinder of vodka, and then I reached for another when he did.

As the author spoke, praising my work on the book, I giggled until his celebrated editor squeezed my hand. Then she said, “Join us for dinner!”--meaning the editor-in- chief, herself, and her famous husband--at O. Henry’s. In the early 1980s, the place was a cool literary landmark, at least to a recent fugitive from the Midwest.

At the restaurant, the bigshots ordered a round of Gibsons for the table, cheering as I tried my first cocktail onion. That onion (onions?) was the only food that I remember. Soon I was headed home, wedged in the middle of a cab’s back seat. As it accelerated, I yelled, “Stop!” and bellyflopped across the editor-in-chief’s knees. He shoved open the door and, luckily, I managed to puke into the street.

When I woke at ten, I was still clutching the editor-in-chief’s damp handkerchief. Sick and ashamed, I called my boss to say, “I better quit!”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “When you can, come in.”

By the time I did, the entire office had heard the story. The editor-in-chief had left a vase of bodega flowers on my desk.

I had been inducted into the bohemian glamour of book publishing.

“Fucking Americans,” D said. A famous English literary agent, he was tweedy and rakishly appealing. “So dour now, drinking white wine. These parties are work, not fun. I had to get P”—our host, in this venerable, wood-wainscoted office—“to break out his private bottle and pour me a proper drink.”

As he swirled his glass of golden booze, I laughed. Five years had passed; I’d learned a bit about temperance (not enough?); and liquor was less popular than spritzers and cocaine.

“It’s not funny,” he insisted. “Last year at this party I woke up under the piano. I was asking a girl I’d just met to have my baby.”

“What happened?”

“I went home with her, of course. I feel sorry for you younger people. Now the business has gone to shit. It’s all tight-ass and corporate. There’s no more romance, no sense of adventure.”

Still, drunk and druggy male authors attracted flocks of groupies. A magazine friend was allowed to commission a piece from Hunter Thompson provided that she could ensure he didn’t trash his hotel room. A gay male editor, in those pre-AIDS days, spoke of exuberant sex with colleagues, drawing the line only at those with whom he had active business dealings. Company parties often ended in nightclubs (the World, the Mudd Club, Area, and the Palladium, to name a few) or were actually held there, like my own firm’s bashes at the Tunnel and Limelight (with music by Run DMC). After kissing several guys in the shadows at Limelight, I chose to go home with the one standing closest to the door.

Most of my publishing friends attended these and similar parties in the 1980s but, when pressed for anecdotes today—unsurprisingly--can’t remember any.

Perhaps the ultimate scandalous party was held in 1992 for Madonna’s photo book Sex. The New York Post marked its thirtieth anniversary by tut-tutting: “The BDSM-themed bash — which turned Industria Superstudio in the Meatpacking District into a den of debauchery — had everything from naked women suspended in the air by chains and lowered into big tubs of popcorn to people masturbating and having sex behind different doors. Meanwhile, Madonna presided over the whole affair as her dominatrix alter ego Dita wearing a Little Bo Peep costume that was more naughty than nursery.”

Was it the end of an era? Who could top that?

In the twenty-first century, I gave a book party for a friend. There was no booze, but all the guests brought wine. I served actual food--shrimp-wrapped-in-prosciutto, leg of lamb, and a veg entrée-- for the fifty or sixty guests who trooped through the apartment. When most of them left, I surveyed the scene with a colleague. A few smashed (rented) glasses and the shower curtain heaped in the tub, torn from its railing. We laughed, and I said, “Seems like old times.”

“Yeah. Some guys put on the lipstick you left on your desk. Women [he named two, both married to men] were making out. And some drunk got stuck on the toilet and yanked down the shower curtain. That’s how you know—this was a great publishing party!”

ELISA PETRINI

At most magazine companies, communal Christmas parties were always dreary affairs to escape minutes after you showed your face. But not Hearst, and not if you were Helen Gurley Brown. It was worth sticking around just to rubberneck her royal Mouseburger boogying with the boys from the mailroom.

Hearst treated its top editors well. I was there long enough in the ‘90s to enjoy a lavish lunch at Daniel where I was seated across from Gayle King, then of O the Oprah Magazine, who spoke of how much she and her BFF loved bread and as a party favor, receive snow-white Uggs I promptly sold on eBay. But undoubtedly, the best parties of my magazine career took place in the 1970s hosted by the late, great Mademoiselle. Before 620 Sixth Avenue turned into a hit parade of big box stores it was urban Siberia and a fashion photographer by the name of George Barkintin opened his 18,000 square foot studio to welcome the year’s Guest Editors and—it seemed—every twenty-something in Manhattan. The loft seemed to go on forever and I remember it as having a second story. Now, whenever I hit Bed, Bath & Beyond, I wonder if back in their day, Sylvia Plath, Ali McGraw, and others who came before me, partied as hard as I did, feeling that they’d officially arrived in Manhattan, and this would be only the beginning of a glamorous ride.

SALLY KOSLOW

Literary Parties, Pt. 2

Dinner with David Letterman

Aha Or Oy Vey