Word: debs
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...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 a waiter. "I'm honored. It's fun. It's wonderful. I'm having a wonderful year...
...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...
...year after C.Z. came out, Brenda Frazier became "America's No. 1 Glamour Deb." Her name and photograph were everywhere during 1938, including the cover of LIFE, and 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...
...later, there is a photograph of Cornelia in the Post, with a caption certifying again that she is "deb of the year...
...that night at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, 77 new girls were presented to society at the 47th annual Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball. Reading of them, the deb of the year must have felt an end-of-the-ball shiver. "If the press and everybody stop paying attention to me, I'll roll with the punches," Cornelia says. "If they stop," she adds with a giggle, "I'll just say, 'Well, I'm boring now.' " - By Kurt Andersen