Four Seasons Restaurant is the setting for a formal social dinner whose small rituals of hospitality sit alongside sharper calculations of money, status, and company. In the diary, cocktails, perfume samples, and live music give way to a seating dispute and a strained evening, making the restaurant a stop in a larger circuit of New York social life rather than a scene of uncomplicated glamour.

Arrival and Dinner

The party went to Four Seasons Restaurant after an event at the American Folk Art Museum. The journey there had already supplied an awkward contrast in appearances: Doc Cox’s Rolls-Royce had broken down, so he arrived in a taxi. Photographers at the museum made the cab seem a poor entrance, a reversal that colored the evening before dinner began.

At the restaurant, cocktails were served in the lobby before dinner. The narrator sat between Sandra Weidenfeld and Estée Lauder; Lauder offered perfume samples on the table, while Peter Duchin’s orchestra played. These concrete signs of a carefully staged dinner establish the venue’s polished social atmosphere without erasing the unease among its guests.

Seating and Social Tension

Marina Schiano disliked her place at the end of the table. She wanted to be seated with Fred Hughes, Diana Vreeland, and Diane de Beauvau, and complained that a dinner costing $100 should entitle her to sit beside her husband. Schiano and Hughes had been married for a few years, though they kept separate residences; her insistence on being seated with him therefore sharpened the evening’s tension between formal arrangement and personal expectation.

Schiano went to Bob Colacello, who was at another table and having a miserable time, and announced that she was going home. At 10:15, she asked him to pick her up for the Studio 54 party in about an hour. She also said she could have spent the evening with Marvin Gaye instead. The episode presents the dinner not as a seamless display of privilege but as a gathering where the price of admission failed to guarantee the company or place a guest wanted.

The Evening’s Aftermath

The narrator also found the dinner unpleasant for a more personal reason: while signing things for friends, there was difficulty remembering the names of people known for twenty years, including people who had provided the narrator’s first job. That lapse made the formal social encounter feel distancing even among long-standing acquaintances.

Afterward, the narrator went to Alana Hamilton’s birthday party for Mick Flick at Studio 54 and felt happy to trade the dinner for a big, fun party. The diary’s shift from the restaurant to the nightclub gives Four Seasons Restaurant a distinct narrative role: it is the evening’s formal, uncomfortable gathering, against which the later party becomes a welcome release.