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.
(Page 3 of 4)
Which left the door wide open for Becca—and she came through it full speed ahead. In 1997, before the house was even finished, she threw a seated dinner to benefit the March of Dimes, and less than a year later she hosted a gala to benefit the Best Buddies Foundation, a national charity run by her new friend Anthony Kennedy Shriver that provides mentoring for the developmentally challenged. Frenchy Falik later wrote that the guest list was "a virtual who's-who-a-thon of society image-makers." Among Becca's celebrity guests was Prince Albert of Monaco (a friend of one of her best friends), who at one point joined a cluster of men gazing up through the second story's glass floor, catching tantalizing glimpses of various female guests. Becca's first outfit of the evening was a beaded pink Badgley Mischka gown that matched the $1.5 million worth of pink pearl-and-diamond jewelry that New York jeweler Harry Winston had loaned her for the evening. Women's Wear Daily ran her picture. Becca was on her way.
Along with numerous dinner parties, she would throw a couple of major galas a year, bringing in such marquee names as Cindy Crawford, Jaclyn Smith, Ali MacGraw, Lois Chiles, and José Eber, the eccentric Los Angeles hairdresser who always wears a cowboy hat. Becca made sure that her parties were filled with guests who were rich, interesting, and good-looking, and she supervised the seating arrangements, never allowing people who were married or dating to sit together. The morning after another Best Buddies benefit, in 1999, some panties were found in one of the bathrooms, setting off rumors around town that have yet to die down.
Some of Becca's parties looked like they cost a small fortune. At one Venetian-themed fete for Houston Grand Opera, she had an authentic gondola shipped from St. Louis, lowered by crane through a skylight, and placed in her swimming pool. At another party for Best Buddies, which she called "Shanghai in the Spring," she transformed her home into what Shelby Hodge described in the Chronicle as "a Far East still life" filled with Asian statuary, golden parasols, and dangling lanterns. But Becca knew how to make money off of her parties. She would charge $700 to $2,500 a ticket and, utilizing her public relations skills, get corporate sponsors to donate everything from the food and the liquor to the valet parking and the airfare for the out-of-town celebrity guests. As a result, she could raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for a charity with just one dinner party. "It's not simply throwing a party that gives me joy," Becca told me, "it's knowing that these parties give back a lot to the community." She maintains an office with a full-time assistant to help with her fundraising events.
Meanwhile, she began making a name for herself on the international scene, jetting off to other people's parties in between her own. At one of the dinners for the Prince of Wales Foundation, she went up to the grande dame American socialite Betsy Bloomingdale, introduced herself, pointed to a diamond ring on Bloomingdale's finger, and said, "My God, that looks like an ashtray on prongs." Then there was the weekend in 1999 when Becca and John were among twenty guests invited by Kip Forbes, a son of the late billionaire Malcolm Forbes, to his fifteenth-century château in Normandy. At the end of a champagne-drenched dinner, the heiress to a huge East Coast fortune asked Becca about Houston's reputation as the home of high-dollar topless dance clubs. Becca was going on about the way the women in these clubs do a "pole dance" when the heir to a huge European fortune asked, "What, my dear, is a pole dance?" Becca climbed into one of the château's ten-foot-tall stone windows and demonstrated how the dancers shimmy while holding onto a pole, and soon she had everyone at the party attempting the pole dance. "There are many women near and dear to my heart," says Forbes, who has spent most of his life in international society's stratosphere, "but Becca does light up a room in a very memorable way. I hope to feast on her company for many years to come."
Not everyone has been so charmed. Backbiting is the favorite sport of the social set, and there are some people in Houston who are more than happy to dish about Becca off-the-record, calling her an arriviste who puts on airs and flaunts her nouveau richness. (Perhaps her critics will talk only off the record because they want to keep being invited to her parties.) They say she's not just a social climber but a veritable social mountaineer. After the W article detailed rather condescendingly the extravagant way Becca had celebrated her fiftieth birthday party (when she was told that she could not book eight tables at Le Grand Véfour, the venerable three-star Paris restaurant, she called some of her French friends and had them book tables separately, infuriating the restaurant's management), several readers fired off irate letters to the magazine. "Becca Cason Thrash is the latest in a long line of high-society caricatures," wrote one woman. Carped another incensed reader, "Becca Thrash sounds like exactly the type of American I do my best to avoid while traveling abroad."
So many letters about Becca were published in W this summer, pro and con, that some people wondered if she had become a regular feature of the letters-to-the-editor page. Did the criticism sting? Becca says she was distraught that people who had not met her would want to judge her. "But, please," she told me, "if I had to tiptoe through life and be cautious, I'd be looking right now for a cyanide capsule. Who wants to live like that?"
And as I was about to find out at her black-tie benefit for the Stages Theatre, when it comes to one's critics, the old adage is still true: Living well is the best revenge.
WEARING MY DECADE-OLD TUXEDO, I drove my rent car, a four-door beige Ford, past the imposing mansions of the city's Memorial neighborhood until I reached the Thrash estate, tucked away at the end of a street called Longwoods. A variety of black Mercedes and Lexus sedans, along with a Bentley, a Jaguar, and other European automobiles I could not identify, were being waved through a stone-and-steel gate by men in official-looking red-trimmed jackets.
"You're here for the Thrash party?" one of the men asked me after I found the right button to lower my driver's-side window.
"Can you believe it?" I said, holding up my invitation. I gunned the engine and headed down a crunchy granite-pebble driveway, wound past an undulating green lawn and a grove of crape myrtle and cedar trees, and came to a stop in front of the most geometrically complicated home I have ever seen. It looked more like a high-tech office building or a cutting-edge art museum than a house. Another man in a red-trimmed jacket whisked my Ford away while even more men in red-trimmed jackets ushered me toward two front doors the size of Mississippi River barges. I gave my name to various people, all of whom said, "Welcome, Mr. Hollandsworth!"
The doors opened, and I took a deep breath. Circulating among the rooms were the kind of handsome, happy-looking people you see in advertisements for fine watches—self-confident men in Armani tuxes and wrinkle-proof women with manes of luminous hair and splendid figures generously enhanced by plastic surgery. To create the right ambience, Becca had installed special lighting to make the walls glow red and hired models to glide around wearing dresses by the designers she was honoring.
Unlike most society parties, which take a couple of hours to warm up, Becca's party was hopping fifteen minutes after it began. The revelers were moving around so quickly, saying hello to one another, that they resembled fresh laundry tumbling in a dryer. The city's great tycoons, their jowls hanging down the sides of their faces like water bags, mingled with the common millionaires. The women hugged and acted thrilled to be together again even though they had probably seen one another only days before at the city's best restaurants.
Then Becca came striding down a hallway toward the foyer, wearing a white Marc Bouwer gown so clingy it made the curves of her body look like a Putt-Putt course. Her hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail and a glass of chilled vodka was in her hand, which she waved around like an orchestra conductor's baton as she greeted her guests. "Sweetie, you're here!" she exclaimed to one woman. "If you hadn't been able to come, I would have slit my wrists with a dull razor blade!" She let out a whoop of laughter. Then, taking a quick sip of vodka, she turned to her right and grabbed the arm of another woman, who was wearing a billowing white silk dress that probably would have paid for my college tuition. "My God, do you look divine or what?" she said.
My Library
