Everyone’s Here, Pass the Oscars

By GUY TREBAY
Published: February 8, 2008
“This is the best place in the house to be,” Angie Harmon said on Wednesday night as she made it through a boldface mob gathered in a tent outside the United Nations, edging her way toward the Champagne bar.

“Then this is the worst place in the house to be!” said Ms. Harmon, who turned on heel and dived back into the celebrity scrum.

The evening’s event, sponsored by Madonna and Gucci, raised $5.5 million for Madonna’s African charity (and, not coincidentally, helped flag the opening on Friday of Gucci’s new store on Fifth Avenue). It also elevated the celebrity quotient of New York Fashion Week by an order of magnitude.

Perhaps because the fate of the Oscars remains in question; perhaps because the Vanity Fair Oscars party has been canceled this year; and perhaps owing to the combined drawing power of the luxury goods label and the Material Girl, the event attracted so many of the people who fuel the tabloids that to wander through the heavily secured tents was like falling down a rabbit hole and into the pages of Star.

Here was Drew Barrymore jammed up against a banquette, wedged between Debra Messing and Vince Vaughn. Here was Rosie O’Donnell squeezing Tom Cruise in a bearhug. Here was Barry Diller talking to anyone who would listen about his new Frank Gehry building. (“It’s pretty. It looks like a lantern lit up at night.”) Here was Ms. Messing flicking on her high-wattage smile whenever she sensed a camera in the vicinity.

Here was Chris Rock liberating Mr. Cruise from Ms. O’Donnell’s death grip in order to pitch not a film script, but real estate. “Eddie Murphy’s house in Beverly Hills is for sale,” Mr. Rock told Mr. Cruise, who was wearing an evening jacket and patent leather shoes, accessorized with a diamond-studded watch and Katie Holmes. “It’s the perfect place for a guy like you,” Mr. Rock said, referring to Mr. Murphy’s 10-bedroom, 19,000-square-foot house in Beverly Park, the gated community for billionaires.

And here was Madonna, being piloted through the crowd by lugs with earpieces and the anatomical proportions of a Humvee. Tiny and fit, and accompanied by her daughter Lourdes, Madonna made stately progress into the large candlelit dining tent to join Salma Hayek and Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony and Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale and Djimon Hounsou and Kimora Lee Simmons and Alex Rodriguez and dozens of other beings from high atop pop culture’s Olympus, people whose names strung together at random read like a kind of found poetry.

There were dusty pink roses on the table and votive candles encased in smoky glass. There was Corton-Charlemagne Burgundy flowing in rivers. There were speeches by Madonna and the economist Jeffrey Sachs about the devastation wrought by AIDS in Malawi and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. And there was a charitable auction during which Christopher Burge, the auctioneer from Christie’s, fielded bids for packages including trips to the Milan fashion shows, a Giants practice or Château Latour in France.

Frantically waving a glow stick and acting on behalf of Mika Noguchi, a Japanese lingerie magnate, the burlesque star Dita Von Teese bid $600,000 for a chance to accompany Madonna on tour. And then, moments later, the singer and producer Timbaland appeared onstage to rouse the crowd with “The Way I Are,” a dance hit whose lyrics (“I ain’t got no money, I ain’t got no car to take you on a date”), as sung to a roomful of people with all the money in the world, seemed very rich indeed.

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