At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

A kind of desperate, vulgar edge became attached to almost everything they did. At one New York dinner party, guests found the table heaped with sand and at each place a little gold spade; upon a signal, they were invited to dig in and search for diamonds and other costly glitter buried within. At another party—possibly the most preposterous ever staged—several dozen horses with padded hooves were led into the ballroom of Sherry’s, a vast and esteemed eating establishment, and tethered around the tables so that the guests, dressed as cowboys and cowgirls, could enjoy the novel and sublimely pointless pleasure of dining in a New York ballroom on horseback. Many parties cost tens of thousands of dollars. On March 26, 1883, Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt broke all precedent by throwing a party that cost $250,000, though as the New York Times judiciously conceded, it did mark the end of Lent. Easily dazzled in those days, the Times ran ten thousand words of unrestrained gush reporting every detail of the event.