Oscar® Night : 75 Years of Hollywood Parties

From the first Academy Awards black-tie dinner dance in 1929 to the glitteringVanity Fairgala in 2004, from the 1940s gatherings at the most fashionable nightspots in Los AngelesCiro's, Mocambo, Romanoff's, Chasen'sto the star-studded parties thrown by legendary agent Swifty Lazar from the 1960s to the 1990s, here is a photo history of all those events, presented by Graydon Carter and David Friend. More than five hundred archival and personal black-and-white and color photographsmany never seen beforehave been collected inOscar Night. There is an afterword by Dominick Dunne and a look at every detail, from menus to matchbooks to seating charts. You'll see intimate and unposed photographs of such classic icons as Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, John Wayne, Gloria Swanson, David O. Selznick, and Alfred Hitchcock, among many others, at the formal dinners of the 1930s through the 1950s. Here also are amazing photographs of another generation of icons at the exclusive Governors Balls: Jack Nicholson, John Travolta, and John Belushi, Dennis Hopper with Michelle Phillips, and a very young Ali MacGraw dancing with Robert Evans. And here is a mix of New York and Hollywood at Swifty's parties, with pictures of Bianca Jagger, Sam Shepard, Michael Caine, David Geffen, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the Ahmet Erteguns. Here, too, is the Hollywood that gathers today at the Vanity Fair Oscar party: Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger, Oprah Winfrey, Nicole Kidman, Scarlett Johansson, Charlize Theron, Sofia Coppola, Sigourney Weaver, Fran Lebowitz, Sean Combs, and Renee Zellweger. Irresistibly sumptuousand juicyOscar Nightis a book full of elegance and egos, of glamorous pictures that you will want to look at again and again.

Graydon Carter is the editor of Vanity Fair, author of What We’ve Lost, and producer of the film The Kid Stays in the Picture.

David Friend is editor of creative development at Vanity Fair. Together they edited Vanity Fair’s Hollywood and were executive producers of the documentary 9/11, which won both Emmy and Peabody Awards.