Oscar Night: 75 Years of Hollywood Parties

From the first Academy Awards black-tie dinner dance in 1929 to the glittering Vanity Fair gala in 2004, from the 1940s gatherings at the most fashionable nightspots in Los Angeles–Ciro’s, Mocambo, Romanoff’s, Chasen’s–to the star-studded parties thrown by legendary agent Swifty Lazar from the 1960s to the 1990s, here is a photo history of all those events, presented by Graydon Carter and David Friend. More than five hundred archival and personal black-and-white and color photographs–many never seen before–have been collected in Oscar Night . There is an afterword by Dominick Dunne and a look at every detail, from menus to matchbooks to seating charts.

You’ll see intimate and unposed photographs of such classic icons as Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, John Wayne, Gloria Swanson, David O. Selznick, and Alfred Hitchcock, among many others, at the formal dinners of the 1930s through the 1950s. Here also are amazing photographs of another generation of icons at the exclusive Governors Jack Nicholson, John Travolta, and John Belushi, Dennis Hopper with Michelle Phillips, and a very young Ali MacGraw dancing with Robert Evans. And here is a mix of New York and Hollywood at Swifty’s parties, with pictures of Bianca Jagger, Sam Shepard, Michael Caine, David Geffen, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the Ahmet Erteguns. Here, too, is the Hollywood that gathers today at the Vanity Fair Oscar Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger, Oprah Winfrey, Nicole Kidman, Scarlett Johansson, Charlize Theron, Sofia Coppola, Sigourney Weaver, Fran Lebowitz, Sean Combs, and Renée Zellweger.

Irresistibly sumptuous–and juicy– Oscar Night is a book full of elegance and egos, of glamorous pictures that you will want to look at again and again.