NEW YORK: Part of a Dream

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The Grand Ballroom of Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria was hung with white-dipped smilax, pink lights winking among the leaves, for the 19th annual Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball. On stage, young ladies dressed in white and escorted by formally dressed young men moved rapidly between rows of tall tapers, curtsied, and made their way past a ringside table where sat a handsome woman who was, in a sense, their hostess. Watching the debutantes with intense interest, Jacqueline Cochran, famed flyer and businesswoman, recalled that when she was 18 she had already been working for ten years and was, she guessed, "the sole support of several people." Now, as head of Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetics, Inc., she was the cotillion's sponsor. She had no part in planning the ball, but she had paid about $10,000 to cover its cost. In return, the company received some commercials during the evening, and a credit line in every society-page story the next day. On the whole, she was pleased and had only one real criticism. She thought the debutantes had been rushed through their curtsies too fast: "They ran those girls through just like Ziegfeld Follies girls—with clothes." In a more leisurely era, socially prominent young ladies made their debuts under family auspices. In recent years mass debuts have become the rule, and the modern deb has a commercial sponsor.

(Daddy still pays a good part of the bills, but has no responsibility for the arrangements.) Jackie Cochran's predecessors as angels of the New York Debutante Cotillion, biggest annual presentation of young women in the U.S., include Coty cosmetics, Evyan perfumes, Kayser gloves.

All Grown Up. In the procession that Jackie Cochran watched with such interest, 104 young women* were presented to society. About 2,000 guests bought tickets, netting $75,000 for the New York Infirmary.

The evening began with a serpentine reception line, with stragglers attaching themselves to the end as they arrived.

Some time after 11p.m., at the command of an offstage voice, the receiving line broke up and debutantes arid their escorts retired to an anteroom to prepare for the big moment. The scene was something like the prelude to a mass wedding, with mothers tearfully primping their daughters and fathers making appropriate comments ("My little girl's all grown up"). But after a while the prides of parents left their daughters and drifted up to their boxes, the Meyer Davis orchestra struck up The March of the Toys, and the formal presentation began.

As the orchestra simmered down, the sepulchral voice announced: "Miss Elenita Ziegler!" and a stately young woman entered from stage right, on the arm of a young man. To an applauding ballroom she made a deep curtsy; then her young man led her down four red velvet stairs through the photographers, to a point where the choreographer, Mrs. Beulah Phelps Shonnard ("Now just a housewife, but used to work in a dance studio"), directed her to her seat.

One by one the young ladies made their curtsies—some deep and dramatic, others stiff and jerky, others balky and bored.