Celebrated New York playwright Clare Boothe Luce (1903 – 1987) took a break from her weekly column at Vanity Fair to apply her enormous cranium to the subject of the New York social world of the early Thirties:
“The Social Registers, which are the official indices of society in the large cities of the United States somewhat resemble, in character, Le Bottin Mondain, Webster’s Royal Red Book of London, the various Taschenbucher of Europe, with an occasional faint touch of the Almanach de Gotha and Burke’s Peerage”
“The New York Social Register for 1931 contained about thirty-five thousand names, an increase of fifteen thousand over the Social Register of 1914; and the fourteen social registers of the largest American cities contained more than one hundred thousand names – an increase of over fifty thousand names during the same length of time.”
“These figures are particularly remarkable when one considers that the social register of exactly one hundred years ago, Longworth’s New York Directory, boasted exactly eighteen names.”
Elsa Maxwell kept the party going during the Great Depression…
From Amazon: Price of Fame: The Honorable Clare Boothe Luce
