Short Cuts: Episode I 
Hi, Society!
No one in Houston throws a party like Becca Cason Thrash, the flirty socialite whose dazzling sense of style and irrepressible personality are the talk of the town.
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After graduating from high school, in 1970, she spent two years studying at the Fashion Institute of America, in Atlanta. Then, wanting to experience the cosmopolitan life of Europe, she moved to London, where she dated rock stars and went to fashion shows. In 1973 she came to Houston, where she worked in the Yves Saint Laurent boutique at Sakowitz, went to all the best nightclubs, and lived at the Chateaux Dijon, the hot singles apartment complex (where George W. Bush also lived during his single days). "She was this very stylish young woman with this long hair that she used to flip from side to side," recalls Adriana Longoria, one of Becca's first Houston friends. "She'd sweep dramatically into restaurants; when she walked in she definitely stopped traffic. Everyone would look at her and say, 'Who is that?'"
Becca dated a few of the local trust-fund boys, getting her first taste of Houston society, but in the late seventies she moved to Mexico City to work as the fashion and beauty editor of Mexican Vogue. She envisioned herself becoming the next Diana Vreeland, Vogue's editor during the sixties, who was famous for her wit and her flamboyant affectations. After two years, however, she quit in a huff when her boss told her that she was too demanding. She returned to Houston and started a public relations business, representing trendy restaurants, nightclubs, and retailers that catered to Houston's society crowd. She developed a reputation for staging spectacular parties and fashion shows for her clients. "Even back then, she had these ideas of what would make the perfect party," says Frenchy Falik, a longtime Houston society columnist who was then writing for the now-defunct Houston Post. "Every decoration had to be just right, the candlelight had to be just right, the models had to be dressed a certain way—and if she got there and it wasn't right, woe to the people who screwed up. She had a vision, and whatever it took, she was going to get it!"
"What really made the parties so interesting was that Becca got together all these various elements of Houston life that you had never seen at one party before," says Mickey Rosmarin, a Houston retailer who hired Becca to promote his women's clothing store, Tootsies. "There were people who normally went to country clubs mingling with the young, hip crowd who went to nightclubs and with Saudi Arabians Becca had met who were over here doing oil deals. And she was always inviting all the female fashionistas she could find."
The only party that didn't go off well was a luncheon and fashion show Becca put together for the opening of the Wortham Theater Center in 1987. Walking across the theater's dimly lit stage before the show, she lost her footing and fell seventeen feet into the orchestra pit. "The moment I realized I was falling, I put my feet together and tried to land on the balls of my feet so I wouldn't ruin my new Charles Jourdan alligator pumps," she says. Eighteen bones in her feet were broken, but her shoes were indeed unharmed. The doctors also told her that the tight Jean-Claude Jitrois leather skirt she was wearing had kept her legs from flailing out, thus preventing a serious back injury. The moral of the story, according to Becca? "Being a fashion victim can save your life."
There were some Houston women, especially those from families who thought of themselves as "old money," who found Becca more than a little overbearing, but men were completely fascinated by her freewheeling, gregarious personality. "I remember seeing Becca in Paris for the fashion shows in the mid-eighties," says David Feld, a Dallas-based journalist who has spent 25 years writing lifestyle and society articles for publications like Vogue and the New York Times. "Every time I turned around, she was tooling off on the back of some count's motorcycle for lunch or being picked up at the hotel by someone else in a Ferrari. So many men were sending her flowers that she had to put the bouquets in her bathtub and her bidet. Her room looked like a Mob funeral home."
In the eighties Becca was married for a couple of years to an heir to an Italian fortune who was in Houston overseeing family investments. They divorced because of a lack of common interests—he didn't like going to as many parties as she did, she says—but remain close friends. At one point he told Becca, half joking, that he was going to include Frenchy Falik in the divorce. "He said he wanted to accuse her of alienation of affection because she and I were always on the phone every night talking about what was going on around Houston."
Becca continued working through the mid-nineties. She and her business partner, Holly Moore, were making six-figure salaries staging parties and fundraising events. They became even bigger players in the Houston scene when they started a local society magazine called PaperCity, their idea being that Houston could always use more coverage of social events, especially more pictures of people at parties. Then, on a Sunday night in late 1995, she was walking out of a party just as a man was walking in. "How rude of you to come just as the party is ending," Becca said.
The man was John Thrash, and he was smitten. "I spent the rest of the night talking to her," he says, "and I swear to you I didn't really take the time that night to contemplate how beautiful she was because I was so distracted by all the things coming out of her mouth." He was 41 years old (Becca was then 44), a former emergency-room doctor who had quit practicing medicine to help with his family's energy firm, which had become enormously successful. He had little contact with Houston's society crowd. When he wasn't working, he was supervising the construction of his mansion—a flat-roofed, granite-and-slate showplace with skylights, two-story windows, imposing oak-and-stainless-steel furniture, large marble tables engraved with quotations ("The greatest dreams are realized by those who have the ability to dream greatly"), glass floors that had to be constantly cleaned, and a "pool room" that contained not billiard tables but a 22- by 44-foot indoor swimming pool. "He was building a palace," one of his friends says, "and all he lacked was a queen."
In April 1996, four months after they had met, Becca and John were married. Suddenly, Becca was no longer the hired help; she was the mistress of the mansion. She quit her job, sold her interest in PaperCity, and turned her attention to a new life. She was ready to stop throwing parties for others and start giving parties for herself. She was ready to make her childhood dream come true.
BECCA IS HARDLY THE FIRST flamboyant Houston hostess who was not to the manner born. Longtime residents still swap stories about Joanne King Herring, the former local television personality who looked like Zsa Zsa Gabor. In the sixties— during her first marriage, to Houston millionaire Bob King—she threw a Roman bacchanal party at her home and hired a black Boy Scout troop to dress like little Nubian slaves. During her second marriage, to Robert Herring, the chairman of the board of the Houston Natural Gas Company (which later evolved into Enron), Joanne became more refined, but she still knew how to entertain. For a party honoring a Middle Eastern potentate, she turned her mansion into a sultan's palace. The late seventies saw the rise of Sandy Hovas, a furniture salesman's daughter who was so busty she had been known at Lamar High School as Buckets. She married Baron Enrico di Portanova, a member of Houston's oil-rich Cullen family, transformed herself into the Baroness Alessandra di Portanova, and started throwing parties at their 32-room River Oaks mansion that lasted until sunup. Even the couture-clad Lynn Wyatt recognized the merits of putting on a good Texas show during her heyday. In the late seventies she served chili and fried chicken at a party she threw in Monaco for Princess Grace.
Yet by the early nineties, the older generation of Houston hostesses were either dying or going into semi-retirement, selling their sprawling River Oaks mansions and moving into smaller digs, merely going to parties instead of throwing them. Of course, there were some Houston women who seemed willing to claim the social throne. The beautiful and blond Carolyn Farb was so well known for throwing charity balls that she even wrote a book about her experiences. And there were others who hosted luncheons or elegant dinners and were more than happy to see their name in the society columns, but they didn't have the inclination—or, perhaps, the supportive husband—to orchestrate the kind of over-the-top spectacles that would become part of Houston lore.
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