In New York: A Deb Sings at Xenon

By KURT ANDERSEN

The winter light is already dim, and in a Manhattan cafe the blond girl is squirming in her seat, dying for a smoke. The cigarette machine is broken. "This is like a joke," she says, annoyed, and leaves her plate of eggs Benedict to bum a Marlboro from one of the other diners. Smoking happily at last, she gives a quick account of herself, sounding bored beyond her years. She dropped out of high school four years ago, at 15, and has no job and no firm idea of what she will do next. She likes to stay up until all hours of the night in this or that nightspot, especially Xenon, a voguish discotheque off Times Square. If she seems jumpy this afternoon, it is because tonight she is going to Xenon not to dance or just mingle but to sing, in front of hundreds of paying customers.

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 a waiter. "I'm honored. It's fun. It's wonderful. I'm having a wonderful year."

Why her? Why now? Not 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."

She is 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 and things, and I guess that now people want to dress up and feel good about themselves. And look good and go out to nice parties and eat good food and have nice things to drink and look pretty and be attractive, instead of having long hair and blue jeans and all that." She is aware of some of the cyclical ironies. "It's funny that all throughout history, every time debutantes have made a comeback, it's been when the country has been in recessions." Guest is thinking, in fact, of the final years of the Depression, when her mother, the former Lucy ("C.Z.") Cochrane, now 62, made her extravagant debut in Boston.

A 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."

It was 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.

Xenon, chic and slightly battered, is Cornelia's latter-day West Side joint. One of her six best friends, Howard Stein, 40, runs the place. The other five best pals: her mother, brother, one of her two agents--Cornelia hopes to model and endorse cosmetics--a movie producer, and Stein's wife, Tawn, 32. This afternoon Stein is explaining how to sing "these soulful songs with percussive interludes." Tonight is to be Cornelia's second public performance as a rock-'n'-roll singer. Last fall she stood up and sang a tune or two at a Xenon party ("People begged me not to go on"), but this will be a full-fledged set, a "Rock-'n'-Roll Christmas Concert." Cornelia even has a crib sheet written out in pencil and propped up near the microphone in case she forgets how to sing her rock rendition of Frosty the Snowman: "Thumpety thump-thump, thum-pety thump-thump, there goes Frosty!"

Onstage with her will be a handsome group of other young Xenon habitues.

Several are foreigners, and Stein, who brought them together, provides some background: Julio Santo Domingo is a Colombian "whose father runs Avianca Airlines," Giora Rachminov is an Israeli "who does diamonds," and Mimmo Ferretti is the son of a Milanese clothing manufacturer. Ferretti is a last-minute replacement for Baron Roger de Cabrol, who is sick. "We wanted to call the band Euro-trash," Stein says, "but, instead, they're called the Greencards." He is grinning: a green card is the Government document issued to resident aliens.

The hullabaloo is more than just fun, by Cornelia's reckoning. "I think it shows such an accomplishment that kids like us can get up and do this," she declares. "Everyone says, 'All they do is party all night.' Well, this will prove we can get up and pull ourselves together and perform and do something that people can be proud of and enjoy."

Watching her final rehearsal is Roberto Riva, Cornelia's boyfriend of a year. Riva, 42, is a dapper real estate speculator whose Italian parents raised him in Peru. I think she is great, fantastic," Riva says, snapping photo after photo of Cornelia in her silver jacket and leather pants. 'Very fantastic. We have a vanguard, you enow?"

The crowd descends in taxis and limousines after 11 p.m., some 1,000 at $12 apiece. They are very young, quite a few under 1 8, but most of the boys are in black tie and the girls are in gowns: the Gold and Silver Ball, an annual gala for the New York prep school set, is just breaking up a few blocks east.

Backstage, Cornelia's principal co-star swings in: Maura Moynihan, 25, a Harvard graduate and only daughter of New York's Democratic Senator.

Maura has pursued a rock-music career with some seriousness, and works full time at Rupert Murdoch's New York Post as a gossip reporter. Both girls are swaddled in red. Out front, Cornelia's mother C.Z. has arrived, dressed in black. C.Z. is a gardening columnist for the Post.

The show begins shortly after midnight and lasts half an hour. Cornelia's syrupy voice might, with training, resemble Teresa Brewer's. The band sounds terrific. That is, the four professional mu sicians (two guitarists, drummer and pianist) Stein hired to play in the shadows downstage sound terrific. Two of Cornelia's friends strum soundless guitars at center stage, faking the struts and grimaces of rock stars. Cornelia seems like a bashful cheerleader, smirky and proud and a little unsure. The last of the eight songs is Satisfaction, which Cornelia's friend Mick Jagger recorded with the Rolling Stones in 1965, when she was an infant. "Wasn't it a great moment?" says Stein of the finale.

Afterward, Maura Moynihan, in her leather miniskirt and cowboy boots, scrambles straightway to the top of an 8-ft.-high pedestal and works off her postperformance nervous energy by go-go dancing. Cornelia, all smiles, steps off the stage to be kissed and congratulated by her mother and brother, by Roberto, by Fashion Photographer Francesco Scavullo, by one of her agents and by half a dozen trim, middle-aged men in business suits who have been buzzing around C.Z.

For the next couple of hours Cornelia sits up high on the back of the banquette that she and her friends always occupy at Xenon, scanning the crowd. She drinks champagne (Moet & Chandon) and flicks Marlboro ashes from her pretty taffeta dress (Fabrice). Some time after 3 a.m., she leaves with Roberto for another discotheque, Studio 54, and stays there until 4.

A day later, there is a photograph of Cornelia in the Post, with a caption certifying again that she is "deb of the year."

But 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 This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.