Nicky Haslam: lord of the dance

Nicky Haslam and Paris Hilton at his party for Janet de Botton at Parkstead House in 2008

10 April 2012

There are certain people who make a party. When they walk into a room, something happens. They give people a fizz. Wallis, the Duchess of Windsor, made a party. Noël Coward could make a party, though he wasn't funny all the time. Unlike Cole Porter, who was more laconic, Coward tried to be funny.

But as the great socialite Lady Diana Cooper said, 'What else can one do but try?' She made a party. Frank Sinatra made a party. Paris Hilton, too. She's marvellous. We were waiting for Paris to arrive at the party I gave last year at Parkstead House in Roehampton, and you could feel a tingle just because she was on her way. Not everyone can spark a party. If you're not going to make a room fizz, why bother coming out? Stay in bed and fizz alone.

You need a few listeners, too - sounding boards. Andy Warhol was like that. He just said 'wow' all the time. The other day someone asked me, 'What would Andy have said about this?' - but he probably wouldn't have said anything at all, just, 'Oh, wow. Wow.'

A talented host inspires their guests, not just on the night but three months before, when the invitations are sent out. They should set the atmosphere tingling. My friend Bunny Roger, couturier and war hero, was a master of the art. 'Miss Norma Desmond. At Home. 2024 Sunset Boulevard,' read one of his invites; guests arrived to see his house transformed into the Sunset Boulevard set, complete with huge silver-framed black and white portraits by Angus McBean of Bunny as Gloria Swanson.

Another of Bunny's invites simply said mysteriously 'The Enchanted Will Meet In Another Part of the Forest' - ballet stars Margot Fonteyn and Frederick Ashton attended, dressed in each other's costumes from Cinderella, he as Cinders, she as the Ugly Sister.

When I left Eton, the debutante system was winding down but I went to a few balls as a 'deb's delight'. One was John Paul Getty's party at Sutton Place, the mansion once home to the Duke of Sutherland. The décor was sumptuous and an enormous marquee provided lavish food and drink, but what most people were fixated on was the fact that Getty was so 'stingy' that he didn't provide cigarettes, and spent much of the evening circling his coinoperated phone box, conspicuous in the hall.

My best friend decided to get his own back by spiriting away one of the table decorations as he left, but unhappily he chose a valuable 17th-century ewer - he had a very discerning eye - and when the fuss about it actually made the newspapers, he sheepishly returned it to Mr Getty, alerting him to the fact he was leaving it in a phone box outside Harvey Nichols.

The early 1950s were thin for parties. Postwar austerity meant people couldn't get the food or the servants. By the late 1950s and 1960s, people thought, 'Right, it's time for a party after all that privation.' In 1965, I went to the last ball in Londonderry House on Park Lane before it was demolished to make way for the Hilton Hotel. It was amazing; the grand staircase lined with footmen, Mick Jagger and Min Hogg [The World of Interiors founding editor] dancing in the ballroom.

The next morning, wrecking balls reduced the house to dust. This lent the night an air of piquancy, of fin de siècle, although that quality is often supplied by retrospect. Take the Duchess of Richmond's famous ball before the Battle of Waterloo. I don't think the soldiers had considered that the next day they would be fighting for their lives. I think they thought it was pure jollification.

Disasters do occur. I was at a party in Gstaad when someone dressed as a lion leaned over a candle to light a cigarette - and his whole costume went up in flames. Not funny at all. When I was living in Lambeth I gave a Guy Fawkes party in the little garden at the back of my house. I'd bought a big wooden crate of fi reworks from Harrods but I hadn't really thought about how I was going to set them off and we were all going 'Ooh!' when a lighted one slipped into the crate. Bunny rushed forward and threw the box over the wall. It all happened so quickly everyone thought it was funny, but the whole lot could have gone up.

Bunny wanted to give a 'Disaster' party, where everything went wrong. I think he was going to wear white satin with an ink stain down it. For his 60th, 70th and 80th birthdays he gave parties themed on precious stones: ruby, sapphire, amethyst. To the last I took a football team of 14 friends dressed in mauve; our football was diamanté. His New Year's Eve parties were an institution, until there was a fetish theme and the News of the World got photographs: the playwright Terry Rattigan in rubber, John Gielgud in high heels!

I was in New York for the 1960s. I gave an enormous party for the Rolling Stones there in 1964. It was for the actress Jane Holzer's birthday, too, and Tom Wolfe described it in that weekend's paper as 'the Party of the Year for the Girl of the Year'.

It was at Jerry Schatzberg's studio and as a nod to our Englishness, everyone was dressed very 'Mod' - I wore a ruffled white shirt and a tiger-skin waistcoat. Halfway through there was a roaring of motorcycles outside and in stormed a gang of Rockers. I'd arranged for leather-clad hulks from the local gay motorcycle gangs to 'crash' the party. Quite a frisson.

As dawn rose, Mick, Jane, Tom and I went for breakfast at the brasserie at the Seagram Building, a scene Tom captured in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. I was there that night Bianca Jagger came into Studio 54 on a horse, and her entrance was rather wonderful, though to be honest I didn't really like Studio 54. It was too dégagé; I like places where you can dance cheek-to-cheek and the ma"tre d' says, 'What would you like, Mr Haslam?'

When Andy Warhol came to London I always gave a party for him. Hosting parties for people is fun - they bring their friends, it mixes people up - and you have an excuse for not inviting everyone: 'Well, you don't know so-and-so.' Much as one wants to, one can't have 900 people every night. When Luise Rainer, the screen goddess and double Oscar winner, turned 98, I invited only men to her dinner party, so she could flirt.

There weren't so many grand balls in Britain in the 1970s. The generations seemed to have divided: the young didn't want to go to organised house parties and to have to behave, they wanted to sit in corners and smoke grass.

The best party I ever went to was the one the Queen gave the night that Prince Charles and Diana were married. It was at Claridge's, where, in a small anteroom, row upon row of heads of state and exiled princes and royals sat mesmerised watching themselves on film - Lady Elizabeth Shakerley, the party planner and Queen's cousin, had managed to edit the film of the wedding in time for a screening.

Everyone was laughing and commenting sotto voce, 'Look what she's wearing.' 'How could she!' Nancy Reagan was sitting there crying because it was all so romantic. After supper, Lester Lanin, the best band leader in America, struck up his orchestra and Prince Andrew gave me his green Lester Lanin party hat. up his orchestra and Prince Andrew gave me his green Lester Lanin party hat. Fancy dress today isn't what it was; you can't commission a couturier to make you an outfit for 45 guineas these days, and people work too long hours to spend much time planning their ensembles-Cecil Beaton used to think of nothing else for months.

The last party he ever went to was at my country house, the Hunting Lodge. The dress code was tenue de chasse; Lady Diana Cooper was the goddess Artemis and I was a maharajah. It was stormy for days before, but the night was clear and wonderful. It's a risk you've just got to take. We set up seats in the woods where people could dally and we had birdsong piped into the forest as birds tend not to oblige at three in the morning.

When Tina Brown became editor of The New Yorker in 1992, she entrusted me with the party that the magazine gave to support the rebuilding of the Royal Court Theatre. I transformed Paddington Public Baths into 'backstage' at the Royal Court. I imported scenery flats, displayed with their canvas backs showing, and rigged props from ropes in the rafters: chairs, birdcages, plaster statues, hip baths, tents, guns, rose bushes...

At a crowded party people look up, not down; it's no good having a spectacular carpet. Tables were ornamented with 'first-night' bouquets in paint pots, lit by beams from Klieg, spot- and floodlights. Though Tina said it would have been cheaper to move the Royal Court to Paddington, that party symbolised the Nineties, the power of new money and celebrity, the mix of old guard and new talent.

If I start working on a party, I can't stop. I get carried away. But let's face it, people give perfectly good parties without one flower, without one ostrich feather. Food at parties should be simple - not all those awful new concoctions and huge half-empty slates going round crashing into people. Trays full of sausages - that's what I like best.

Harsh lighting can be fatal to the ego, and the face. It's fun to provide dim and dusky corners for dalliance. Never be afraid to go to a party where you don't know anyone. Love can still happen to the most hard-bitten. The whole point is to talk to people you don't know. It's boring when little groups of friends stick together; they can do that on any street corner.

One of the most spectacular parties I've been to recently was just the other week, at Richard Caring's house in Hampstead for his son and daughter-in-law. The entire Bolshoi ballet danced Swan Lake and the full Royal Philharmonic Orchestra played rock'n'roll for their wedding party. Unbelievable.

I'm not convinced photos capture parties. I think videos are better because they can zoom in and move about. The writer and director Hannah Rothschild filmed my party at Parkstead House last year - it's in her Storyville documentary Hi Society: The Wonderful World of Nicky Haslam (on BBC Four this month).

It was a party in honour of my friend and client Janet de Botton, and celebrated 25 years of my interior design company, NH Design. The most romantic refusal came from Lady Antonia Fraser, who wrote that she always devoted 16 October to mourning her heroine Marie-Antoinette 'who was murdered on that day, so no dancing'.

Guests had to drive through high-rise estates to get to Parkstead House - people peering off their walkways started cheering and waving. The evening had a Through the Looking-Glass feel, as if the experience wasn't real. I greeted the first 100 arrivals but you can't greet everyone up to 800. No one wants to have a conversation, just say 'Hello, darling' and move on. People who try to engage you in conversation at parties should be shot.

The main thing is simply to invite your friends, and perhaps a few fashionable people of the moment to add spice. Parties aren't meant to sum up anything or represent a cultural moment; quite the reverse. They're about the continuity of friendship. To have the same people at one's parties over the years is wonderful.