The New Breed of Birthday Celebration? Lavish International Parties

From Town & Country

For Saul Steinberg’s 50th birthday, in 1989, the late financier’s wife threw a party for 250 guests at their Long Island home that included actors posing in tableaux based on Steinberg’s favorite Old Masters paintings, and twins dressed as mermaids frolicking in the pool. When Malcolm Forbes turned 70, also in 1989, the bash he threw in Tangier drew 800 revelers-ferried to Morocco by private jet-including Gianni Agnelli, Barbara Walters, and Elizabeth Taylor, and cost a rumored $2.5 million. And who can forget Stephen Schwarzman’s 60th, which took over the Park Avenue Armory in 2007 and featured Patti LaBelle singing “Happy Birthday” in front of 350 of the billionaire’s closest friends?

Hosting an over-the-top party is an art the one percent has been perfecting since time immemorial. Generally, the most extravagant of these events were reserved for truly meaningful occasions, like milestone birthdays or weddings; Forbes’s bash was dubbed “the party of the century” because there wasn’t one just like it every week.

Recently, however, something seems to have shifted, and once-in-a-lifetime parties have reached a critical mass. Last summer the New York–based event planner Bronson van Wyck hosted 400 friends on the Greek island of Mykonos for what he called a Homeric Ball to celebrate his 44th birthday. Duran Duran and Flo Rida performed. Costumes were required, and guests including Paris Hilton, Carol and Earle Mack, Vanessa Getty, and Emilia and Pepe Fanjul came as gladiators, muses, and Greek gods. Only Schwarzman-who last year had his own destination 70th birthday party in Palm Beach, complete with live camels-went with a modern spin. He dressed as Aristotle Onassis.

“It was instant legend. Truly one of the top 10 nights of my life,” says writer Jill Kargman, a classmate of Van Wyck’s at Yale. “This was the 21st-century version of Truman Capote’s Black & White Ball or the Bal Oriental in Paris, but with a gigantic Trojan Horse.”

Maybe it’s because social media has made exclusive experiences much more visible, but it certainly seems as if the destination birthday has superseded the destination wedding as an important stop on the international society merry-go-round.

“There’s this new trend that any milestone has now moved to a destination,” says one socialite. “In the olden days people got married where the bride was from, or where she spent the summer. Now it has to be in India on top of an elephant. Birthdays are the next exciting way to celebrate in a showoffy way.”

Another regular on the social circuit adds, “Everything has been done in New York City, and we’ve had a bull market for years. Everyone’s done so well that they don’t feel bad about people getting on a plane just to do something different.”

But how much can you really expect your friends to celebrate you?

Event planner David Monn notes that in many cases hosts will pick up the cost of everything but plane tickets to make things easier for guests. “If you’ve got enough money that you think people should travel around the world to celebrate you,” he says, “then you’ve got enough money to appreciate them doing so.”

Still, a destination birthday can be a lot to ask. “I spent a pretty penny this year,” says Kimry Blackwelder, a branding guru who attended birthday parties in Mexico and on the Amalfi Coast, with another to come in Scotland. “But you’re going to all these amazing places with your besties. Who wouldn’t say yes to that?”

You’d be surprised. After all, not everyone is looking to deplete his vacation fund in honor of a pal’s most recent trip around the sun, and even those who are may bristle at the idea of being expected to celebrate nonstop upon arrival. “It costs so much to go to these parties,” one social type says. “I feel as though I’m required to have enough fun to make it worthwhile.”

A prominent designer who has attended birthday blowouts in the past year in Italy, France, and Russia says, “If it’s not a number that ends in zero, it’s kind of ridiculous for people to have these parties. There’s the amount of time you have to take off from work, and the cost of travel. I’m happy to do it, but I can’t keep it up.” One writer who often fraternizes above her station adds, “I don’t even know if I can afford to have friends anymore.”

Of course, that isn’t stopping the hosts and hostesses with something to celebrate. Rena Sindi, who marked her 50th birthday last summer with a multiple-day-and-night affair in St.-­Tropez, feels that destination birthdays are never a bust. “They’re always a success,” she says. “Now that we’re not having weddings so much anymore, it’s an opportunity to get everyone in one place.” And there is some charm in making the event’s setting an actual destination. “If I had done it in London, it would have been a destination for some people. But there wouldn’t be such a sense of community.”

At a traditional birthday party “you don’t see everyone in one night,” Sindi says. A destination party “gives you a chance of doing more than one event and really spending time with your friends.” Even though she has a home in the south of France and knows the lay of the land, Sindi says it took her a year to organize her birthday party. “It gave me time to personalize T-shirts, hats, and fans,” she says. “Those are the little things that make people feel special.”

On the Thursday of the long weekend, some friends of Sindi’s hosted a party on their boat. On Monday, for guests still in the area, other pals turned their villa into a makeshift Club 55 for a luncheon. Meanwhile Sindi planned two big parties for her friends, including Tory Burch and Jamie Tisch: a White Party at La Bouillabaisse on Friday, and on Saturday a Studio 54–meets–La Cage aux Folles main event at the nightclub Stefano Forever. “You can’t ask people to dress in costume more than once-especially for a destination,” Sindi says.

It helps that both Sindi and Van Wyck are widely regarded as being dexterous with an event. Van Wyck’s Homeric Ball, says public relations exec Paul Wilmot, who went with Blaine Trump and the Fanjuls from their yacht, which was parked off Mykonos, “was sort of a busman’s holiday. He knows how to do it, and it ­tickles his fancy. It’s a lot of work. But it was also galvanizing.”

“It was the best party I’ve ever done,” Sindi says of her St.-Tropez birthday festivities. She’d know: She has a new book on entertaining, Be R Guest, based on her blog, coming out this fall. Sindi says she follows a few rules about destination birthdays: Don’t get involved in people’s transportation. “That’s a whole other ballgame,” she says. And leave your guests with one or two days free to relax. Finally, pick a location that isn’t too hard to get to and has access to hairdressers and makeup artists. “I don’t want to go to a remote desert island where I can’t do my hair,” says Sindi, who is attending a 50th birthday party this fall in Turkey.

Van Wyck made Saturday night-the Homeric Ball-the main event, but otherwise he just let his guests know where he planned to be on the other days and evenings, and if they wanted to join, they could. “You can ruin a destination event if you overschedule and overplan people,” he says. “You get sick of that group-and you don’t have to go to Mykonos for that.”

Another perk is giving people an excuse to see a part of the world they might not otherwise visit. “It’s an opportunity to travel,” Van Wyck says. “That’s the luxury. And to do it in an environment where you have access to friends. As a host, you can give your guests the optimized experience.”

That said, “people are really understanding if you can’t go,” says one New Yorker who skipped a few parties this year. “They say, ‘This is what I’m doing. I’d love it if you want to come.’ ” Still, she adds, just watching the revelry on her iPhone made it seem as if she had been there: “I feel like I attended all of them.”

Another frequent guest-who is planning his own 60th, an intimate dinner with friends-points out that, like weddings for groups of friends in their twenties and thirties, big birthday parties tend to cluster during certain stages of life but aren’t around forever.

“The good news is everyone I know will have had their milestone birthdays by the end of next year,” he says, “and then I’ll be sitting home wondering what happened to everyone having fun.”

This story appears in the December 2018/January 2019 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW

('You Might Also Like',)

• 12 Weekend Getaway Spas For Every Type of Occasion

• What Your Favorite Champagne Brand Says About You

• Beauty Gurus Share Their Makeup Secrets for Older Women