Word: cornelias
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This is a glamour girl in the coyote fur coat, an American aristocrat, the goddaughter of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Cornelia Cochrane Churchill Guest, 19, the youngest child of a socially prominent family, grew up on Long Island and in Palm Beach and New York City. She spent 1982 as a debutante, and all year long the New York gossip journalists mentioned her in print, often dusting off a quaint epithet: deb of the year. "I don't get tired of it," she says, having finished her eggs and her Tab and three more cigarettes cadged from...
...because she is the prettiest or cleverest or most accomplished of her debutante crop. She admits that she was deemed ultra-deb partly by default: while her peers went off to college, Cornelia stayed in New York City and spent her time at stylish parties, wearing couture dresses. "Reading books for four years is an excuse not to work," she hazards, "unless you're going to be a plastic surgeon or something." Cornelia earned her high school diploma at home, by mail. "I have an education," she says. "I can add and subtract and read...
...learned enough, anyway, to understand that her debutante splash would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. But these days it is once again fashionable to flaunt the traditional, frivolous perquisites of wealth and class. Fortunately for Cornelia, the Zeitgeist turned conservative just as she came of age. "Debutantes ..." she sighs. "It's a wonderful tradition. I'm glad it's coming back more and more now, not Like in the '60s." Cornelia was born on Thanksgiving Day 1963, six days after President Kennedy was killed. "During the '60s, there were all those revolutions...
...there was a backlash: people would sometimes hiss when she walked into a restaurant. Frazier died last May-after a nervous breakdown, two marriages and a notoriously messy liaison with a titled Italian playboy-still bitter about her overwhelming deb year. "Brenda Frazier was my parents' friend," Cornelia says. "So sad. But I don't want to read about her until I get older...
...also during the 1930s that debutantes began making larky plunges into show business. Between her debut and her marriage in 1947, Cornelia's mother was briefly a Ziegfeld Girl and a Hollywood starlet with a studio contract. In New York City, cafe society was paying to hear debs sing at the Waldorf-Astoria and Plaza hotels, as well as at a West Side nightclub called La Place Pigalle...