Vintage Event Was Staged by Museum

SAN DIEGO — The wine flowed at the President’s Circle dinner-dance July 1 at the San Diego Museum of Art.

But the vino wasn’t any ordinary plonk, as the English would say. The 360 guests gulped down such vintages as a white 1984 Mouton Cadet, an ’83 Chateau Mouton Baronne Philippe and a ’79 Chateau Mouton Rothschild. (Nor was the menu that accompanied it beneath the notice of the more fastidious sort of gourmet.)

Not a bad night’s work, you might say, but hardly out of the ordinary considering the wine-bringer and guest of honor, the Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, member of one of the most celebrated aristocratic families of Europe, and daughter of one of the premier vintners of Bordeaux, itself the prime wine region of France. What more need be said?

Mme. la baronesse and her large retinue chose the moment of the annual President’s Circle dinner to inaugurate the museum’s new exhibit, “Mouton Rothschild: Paintings for the Labels.” The traveling show, presented under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution and underwritten locally by Wells Fargo Bank, brings to town the original Rothschild wine label designs painted by a host of the 20th Century’s best, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Marc Chagall and Andy Warhol.

The idea of having grand masters design the labels for annual Mouton-Rothschild wines was dreamed up by Baronne Philippe de Rothschild, father of Philippine, in 1924;

then as now, the artists are paid for their work in wine of the same vintage they celebrate. Not a bad bargain, all things considered.

The wines and exhibit proved no more lively an inspiration to frivolity than the baroness, who greeted each guest individually with undisguised Gallic glee and insisted that each enjoy the evening to the fullest--or else. Dressed in rose haute couture ruffles, she declared the gala “extraordinary and exquisite.” She also explained that she received her first inspiration for the exhibit while visiting here, when she discovered that Californians not only were collecting her wines, but the labels that come with them as well. She seemed constantly cheerful, despite the rigors of greeting so many guests, but what less would one expect of a woman who said that her cellars never house less than 400,000 liters of wine?

The party honored the President’s Circle (museum members who contribute a minimum of $1,000 annually), and also marked a changing of the guard in the SDMA board; the previous evening, Gordon Luce passed the president’s staff of office to Joseph Hibben. Luce said, with quite a glowing smile, that the act gave him the summer off--his civic duties will be somewhat lessened until the fall when he assumes the presidency of the board of Scripps Clinic. Hibben merely said that the coming two years will be fraught with interest, as they doubtless will be.

Museum director Steven Brezzo said that when “Paintings for the Labels” became available, he heard opportunity knocking more loudly than is usual.

“I had ulterior motives in bringing this exhibit to San Diego,” he told the audience. “The idea was to enjoy the wines, and of course to enjoy the art. But since they have not yet chosen the artist for the next vintage, I’m going to introduce the baronesse to Ted Geisel.” The logic of all this seemed inescapable to most of the crowd, and, indeed, not long after Brezzo spoke, de Rothschild and Geisel were seen deep in conversation. Noticing this, one observant oenophile-cum-art-lover commented: “It would be interesting to see the Cat in the Hat on a bottle of Mouton-Rothschild.”

Party chairman Alice Cramer worked around the wines to create a classic French menu that started with smoked salmon and asparagus and progressed through rack of lamb, cheese and fruit, and petits pots de creme au chocolat. (Each menu was decorated with a copy of the label that The New Yorker artist Saul Steinberg designed for the 1983 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild. But to keep enterprising guests from affixing those to jugs of ordinary California red, each label was stamped “specimen.” “C’est la vie, “ as the French would say.)

The guest list included Joyce and Gene Klein; Cecil Green; Norma and Ollie James; Elinor Oatman with Legler Benbough; Nancy and Hap Chandler; Anne Evans and her son, Bill; Karen and Don Cohn; Fran and Ken Golden; Barbara and Ed Malone; Richard Cramer; Karon Luce; Ingrid Hibben; Suzanne and Todd Figi; Muriel Gluck; Jane and Frank Rice; Randy Zurbach; Helen and Bennett Wright, and Beverly and Jack Grundhofer.

CORONADO--The Mingei International Museum of World Folk Art suggested that guests at its ninth anniversary celebration, held June 29 in the Grand Ballroom at Hotel del Coronado, get into the spirit of the museum by dressing in “ethnic elegance.”

Let us say that there is a lot of leeway in a suggestion like this, especially when the institution making it has the word “international” in its name. Those who took Mingei up on the offer interpreted the dictum variously with everything from Paris haute couture to Oriental dressing gowns--in situations like this, anything goes.

Celebrated New York saloon singer Bobby Short, the fund-raiser’s star attraction, took the invitation seriously and showed up in his version of ethnic elegance, classic black tie. This has been his nightly uniform since he took up residence in the fashionable Cafe Carlyle in 1968, where members of Cafe Society (whatever remains of it in these decadent days) repair regularly to recharge their batteries on Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin and Duke Ellington.

Short flew across the continent not just to offer up an hour of what New Yorkers can get by strolling over to Madison Avenue at 76th Street but also to do exactly what he said he has wanted to do since he first visited the West Coast in 1943.

“When I first came out to play in Los Angeles, I heard about the Hotel del Coronado,” said Short to the audience. “My dream ever since has been to play here, and as you can see, my dream has come true tonight.”

Since the man was happy, he played happy music, breezing through the easy, lively rhythms of the 1920s and ‘30s, songs that denied the presence of problems in the world, which Short said is precisely what they were written to do. He opened his act with “You’ve Only One Life to Live,” an injunction that none of the 220 guests seemed to find particularly odious, as long as they could spend part of that life listening to Short.

The entertainment capped an evening that started with champagne and with congratulations to museum founder and director Martha Longenecker, whose passion for folk art has resulted in the presentation of more than 30 exhibits since 1978, with four more scheduled in the near future. Shows have ranged from a presentation of the ritual arts of tribal villages in India to a recent exhibit of birth symbols used in women’s art in Eurasia and the Western Pacific.

The gala specifically honored La Jollans Judith and Walter Munk. Walter Munk, a noted educator, served as associate director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCSD from 1959 until 1982. Judith, a sculptor and architectural designer, proposed the idea of locating Mingei in a shopping center (University Towne Center), a radical idea that since has been adopted by young arts institutions elsewhere, Longenecker said.

“The museum became a reality because of Judy’s persistence,” Longenecker said. “She’s the spark who ignited Mingei.”

If the dress was ethnic, so was the menu. Audrey Geisel (who seems to write half the gala menus in town) designed a dinner that began with Italian polenta draped with Gorgonzola cheese, and continued through Swedish cured salmon, Mexican margarita sorbet, lamb and chicken in an Indian curry sauce, and French crepes in Grand Marnier. All this was cleared away before Short’s arrival on stage--the vigorous clanking of knives and forks would have added nothing to his crooning, lullabylike rendition of “Tea for Two.”

The guest list included party chairmen Sugar and Don Birdsall; actress Mercedes McCambridge, dressed in flowing purple and gold like the Assyrians in the poem; gallery owners Jose and Helen Tasende; Ethel and Bert Aginsky; Shirley and David Rubel; Ora DeConcini, mother of Arizona Sen. Dennis DeConcini; Mingei board President Roger Cornell, and JoBobbie MacConnell with Guy Showley.

Others were Betty and Robert Buffum, Katy and Michael Dessent, Helen and Benjamin Dillahunty, and Sue and Art Bell.