As Long as There’s Been an Envelope, Oscar Parties Have Pushed It

The party did not disappoint. Andy Warhol documented the festivities with his 35-millimeter camera. Raquel Welch and Walter Cronkite supped on duck, salmon and pizza. Johnny Carson and Barry Diller, the entertainment mogul who throws his own annual Oscar bash, were there, too.

“To secure an invitation was tougher than getting a ticket to the Academy Awards themselves,” Richard Zanuck, an Oscar-winning producer, told Vanity Fair in 1994. As Mr. Friend said in a recent interview, “It was the beginning of velvet-rope culture.”

But while Mr. Lazar’s Oscar party may have been the flashiest affair, it wasn’t the only exclusive one. Mr. Friend said Mick Jagger attended an Oscar viewing party at Studio 54 in New York in 1978. (Warhol got around: He was there, too.) Elaine’s, the now-defunct Upper East Side hangout favored by Woody Allen and Tom Wolfe, also held parties.

Ms. Janssen told The New York Times Magazine in 2005 that Mr. Lazar wanted to merge his Oscar party with hers, but her husband said no. “Everybody can go out any night and eat dinner anywhere they want,” she recalled him telling her. “But they cannot eat your food.” Bruce Springsteen came for the sweet potatoes, Ms. Janssen told the magazine. Music producer Quincy Jones fancied her black-eyed peas. “Everybody is nutty about my ham because it’s so sweet,” she said.

After Mr. Lazar died in 1993, a number of people stepped in to fill the void with grand-scale parties of their own. Elton John founded an Oscar gala and viewing party earlier that year to raise money for people affected by H.I.V. and AIDS. In 1994, Mr. Carter, who had recently been named editor of Vanity Fair, threw his hat in the ring.

In an excerpt from “Oscar Night” published in Vanity Fair in 2006, Mr. Carter said he had two ground rules for the Vanity Fair party. First, there would be no V.I.P. area. Second, he would greet guests at the door when they arrived. “My feeling was that if the host appeared to be enjoying himself, others would, too,” he wrote. In his early years, he hired a dance band from Havana. Arrivals had to be staggered because so many celebrities showed up.