This Man Is Having So Much Fun!

Stocks are down, unemployment is up, and everyone’s feeling lousy. Which is exactly why you need to spend time with Steve Kemble, the most rip-roaring, merry-making, extra-outrageous party planner the state of Texas has ever seen.

by Katy Vine

June 2009

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His ability to diversify as half event planner, half media star proved to be his saving grace last year when the economy began to collapse. He indulged interviewers who wanted him to explain ways to create parties on a budget, though it was clear he lacked enthusiasm for the topic, and he began to notice that many of his high-end clients were toning down their parties, not necessarily for lack of funds but in deference to the current climate. Reassuring me that his events wouldn’t become hay barn hoedowns, he said, “We’ll use the same amount of money, but we’ll have better wine, less flash.” I couldn’t imagine Kemble’s private reaction to being asked to rein things in. It might be like Mariah Carey’s response to a stage manager’s telling her that the audience is sensitive to the upper registers, so would she please not belt out those high notes?

One Thursday morning last December, Kemble pulled up at an Italianate villa on Lakeside Drive that used to belong to Alex Rodriguez. He told me that this was his last big party of the holiday season. It was a private Christmas gathering for 150 guests at the Dallas home of Natalie and Mike McGuire, the daughter and son-in-law of the beer distributor Barry Andrews. In classic Kemble fashion, it would flood the senses with food and decor. But he didn’t stop there.

The house’s exterior decorations were appropriately Christmassy, with an evergreen wreath the size of a Smart car above the front doors, a life-size Santa display next to a fountain, and tall Italian cypress trees brought in specifically for the occasion loaded with tiny white lights. A small man in a baseball cap stood on a ladder in front of the house, Windexing the ten-foot-high glass doors in the entryway.

“Everything looks fabulous!” Kemble squealed as he strode into the two-story foyer.

“I know!” Natalie shouted back from upstairs. She walked down the front staircase to give him a kiss on each cheek. Clearly familiar with Kemble, she did not comment on his full-length black Gucci coat with a fur-lined collar. She was model-pretty, with shiny dark-brown hair and dark-brown eyes, and she talked in a Texas drawl as she took Kemble on a tour of the house, stopping only briefly to show him a decorated four-foot-tall white tree. “I had the florist move this tree centerpiece to the back room so we could have the front room table covered with white hydrangeas,” she said. Kemble nodded, then strolled through the three living rooms on the main floor, craning his neck to admire an antique-looking chandelier that the floral designer had transformed into an explosion of icicles, silver balls, and thin, silver-colored branches.

By 3:45, a full team was working in every room of the house. One man was setting up propane heaters and tables for the caterers. The caterer was constructing a kitchen in the garage. The entertainment vendor was working on the sound. The floral designer had finished arranging more than fifteen vases full of white hydrangeas and was now walking in with four bags of large white candles from Crate & Barrel. Leaf blowers were blasting debris off the grounds, and a man with several trays of white pansies was plugging the flowers into the front garden. “I’m off!” Natalie shouted, running to her hair appointment. The phone was ringing. The doorbell was buzzing. Kemble stood in the center of the chaos for a moment, smiling. He was hopped up on more caffeine than, frankly, I’d like to know, though he seemed as calm as a man getting his feet rubbed.

By seven o’clock, Natalie was dressed in a knee-length Santa-red dress and white fur wrap, and Mike, fit as a marathoner in his perfectly tailored suit, smiled and greeted the guests with a double kiss as they began to arrive. Men looked like Armani models; women walked confidently in their four-and-a-half-inch spiked heels. The guests’ eyes wandered to the second story of the foyer, where snowflakes the size of unicycle wheels were projected onto the walls. Garlands swept the stairway banister. A light, sweet scent of vanilla wafted through the house—and not a hint of garlic from the grilled Brie sandwiches or mini sausage rolls. Three crackling fireplaces on the ground floor gave the rooms an earthy warmth. At the top of the stairs, a group of ten men from the Turtle Creek Chorale were singing Christmas carols. Socialites who knew exactly which end was up surveyed the area like lionesses in the wild, aware of every bird’s motion on every branch around them. There was no trademark look, no one identifiable fingerprint. Still, the women concluded: Steve Kemble must have been near.

“Steve!” Natalie hollered over the chorale’s rendition of “Jingle Bell Rock.” “I want you to meet somebody!” Kemble was unmistakable as he glided through the foyer. No other man at the party was wearing a dark-silver Versace suit with a Nehru collar and a silver Yves Saint Laurent sequined vest. “Everything is so beautiful!” a woman told Natalie. “The snowflakes! The chorale!” As the guest looked around in awe, her coat began to fall off her back. Kemble jumped in to whisk it away.

Many in attendance knew him well. On the way to the coatroom, he was stopped by Kimberly Schlegel Whitman, the Pavestone heiress, who was wearing large diamond earrings and a black dress. “Well, hello!” he said, leaning back dramatically, then kissing her on both cheeks. “I saw your billboard!” Whitman said to him. He shrugged flirtatiously, then responded with a compliment of his own. “I saw your book,” he said, explaining to me that it was a big hardcover about table settings. “It’s fabulous!”

“Steve says everyone is fabulous,” she told me with a wink.

Troy Aikman arrived. Then Daryl Johnston and his wife, Diane. Then Lori Jones, Jerry Jones Jr.’s wife, who told me, “I guess in Los Angeles or New York you can get this type of party. Otherwise, it’s Steve.” In came her brother-in-law, Stephen Jones, and his wife, Karen.

“Where have you been?” Natalie’s mother, Lana, asked Kemble, leaning in for her kisses. Turning to me, she said, “This is awesome. A great event. It’s all about the event.” Lana was a petite woman with dark shoulder-length hair, and she wore a navy-blue dress and spiked heels. “Barry thought about not having a company party this year,” she continued, “but some people only have one party they go to during the season.”

“Steve!” Natalie shouted from a few yards away, and he was off.

Seven-forty: the first sensory-point change, right on schedule. The complete buffet, by George Catering, was brought out, overflowing with Texas blue crab dip, grilled chicken satay with pomegranate sauce, apple-smoked-bacon-stuffed mushrooms, and zucchini muffins with turkey breast and Parmesan mayonnaise. Kemble hustled between the catering kitchen in the garage and the buffet, making sure that the plates stayed full. Then he ran to the foyer to give kisses and take coats and say something witty before hustling back to continue his rounds. One man gawked at the buffet table’s mountain of white hydrangeas and the explosion of winter-wonderland decor and muttered, “Looks like Neiman’s in here.”

Eight-twenty: the second sensory-point change. Kemble gave the chorale a break and turned up the volume on a female vocalist hammering out some jazzy songs on her keyboard, so much so that a group of four women fawning over one another’s long manes had to shout over “Mack the Knife,” “In my next life I want your hair!”

Nine o’clock: the third sensory-point change. Natalie had tried a cocktail on a trip to La Jolla, California, and had asked Kemble to track down the recipe so she could replicate the drink at her party. The result was a custom cocktail called the snow bunny. “The snow bunny is Kahlúa and vanilla ice cream and Grand Marnier, all kinds of stuff like that. It’s like a milk shake,” Kemble told me in the foyer. “Very dangerous.” It did not bode well that a waitress with a tray of drinks got just three feet away from the bar before she was attacked by guests and left holding an empty tray, returning a few minutes later only to be attacked again.

Around 9:40, it was clear that people had downed their share of snow bunnies. The chorale, which had been on break, started another set, while the guests herded into the bar to sample more of the deadly cocktail. Soon afterward, folks became engaged in animated conversation. They didn’t move anymore when people tried to pass. A smorgasbord of cologne and perfume drowned out the scented candles. Natalie’s hairdresser extricated himself from a flock of devotees to say, “Steve Kemble and Natalie McGuire? I wouldn’t miss it. This is by far the best party I’ve been to this season. It just pulls out all the stops.”

Normally a Thursday night affair would end at ten o’clock, but as the night wore on, it became clear that the McGuires would be lucky if everyone left by midnight. Even after the chorale marched down the stairs and out the front door, guests were making themselves comfortable near fireplaces, arranging themselves on couches and sitting on armrests. Kemble hadn’t planned for more sensory changes, and yet some guests were still arriving. The female singer, who had taken only one break, was still plugging away. A woman started dancing next to her. Another woman, in the kitchen, looked at two friends sitting on the countertop and commented on their elaborate shoes. “Those look like a baby grand,” she said, then sighed and gazed longingly into the corner of the room. “Isn’t Daryl Johnston just the cutest thing in the world?”

Around 11:15, Kemble sensed a shift. “Ooo, I see a wave,” he said. “Let me get some coats.” Natalie began hugging her guests, who were now leaving in clusters. As she extracted herself from the final group, a woman approached Kemble for her goodbye. “We’re going to D.C. tomorrow to have dinner with the president,” she said. “When it’s all done, I’ll be like, ‘Where’s the party? Steve!’”

In her voice, I heard a yearning so common among his clients. She did not want to leave and suggested that the caterers remove the centerpiece so that she and Kemble could dance on the table. “Yes!” he said. And he seemed not only sincere but capable of running a few laps around the block afterward. The woman was thrilled. She kissed him on both cheeks. “You know, I tried to point you out to somebody tonight,” she said. “This man asked me, ‘Who’s Steve Kemble?’ I said, ‘He’s the one in the sequin vest,’ and he asks me, ‘What’s sequin?’” They both leaned back and howled.

“Some people just don’t get it,” she said.

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