THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 11, 1995 TAG: 9510110081
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY GREG WEATHERFORD, LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: Long : 185 lines
JORDAN SAUNDERS is not pleased at this moment during the final dress rehearsal.
Joshua P. Darden Jr., the chair of the University of Virginia's fund-raising committee and an old friend of Saunders', runs through his impassioned plea for cash from the moneyed donors attending Saturday's gala fund-raiser held on the university's sacred lawn.
At the climax of his speech - just as Darden reads a moving, sentimental letter he wrote about the university - a crowd files from the wings and gathers behind him, preparing to sing the university's ``Good Old Song'' in a rousing finale.
That won't do, says Saunders, the gala's volunteer organizer, to Bob Israel, who's producing the show. ``It's distracting,'' she says. ``Don't you think it's distracting?''
``Today Show'' host Katie Couric, the dinner's mistress of ceremonies, suggests the singers enter at a point earlier during Darden's speech. Saunders thinks Couric's right.
Israel, a veteran of several presidential inaugural balls, isn't so sure. ``I liked it the other way,'' he says, balking politely. ``It works.''
In this hasty, last-minute conference with Israel, Saunders marshals support from Darden, Couric and Saunders' husband, financier Thomas A. Saunders III, a founder of Saunders Karp & Co., a New York-based merchant bank.
Israel backs down. The show goes on the way Saunders wants it.
Saunders had spent the past year working on this Oct. 7 celebration to thank 1,160 of the most generous friends of the University of Virginia. When an ambitious, well-respected state university in Charlottesville faces governmental cuts in financing to higher education, it seems there's only one thing to do: Throw a party.
The idea behind this dinner, of course, is to raise money - $750 million over five years to be exact. U.Va. touts it as the biggest fund-raiser of its kind in history. So it had better be a good party. And that's where the iron-willed Jordan Saunders comes in.
``I will tell you something honestly,'' she says, peering sternly over her green spectacles. ``Hundreds of people have spent 10 months working on this. And the last four months, we've spent 10 or 12 hours a day making sure everything is just perfect. . . . It gave me a lot of sleepless nights.''
Saunders' obsession with accuracy meant months of research to ensure that the party was done the way university founder Thomas Jefferson might have done it, from the menu - grilled and smoked salmon served on a bed of native greens; Guinea fowl stuffed with cornbread and wild mushrooms, accompanied by breast of Muscovy duck with apples; for dessert, miniatures of the university's Rotunda cleverly molded from chocolate and filled with pumpkin mousse - to the native-fruit centerpieces for 130 tables to the color scheme - yellow, white and muted blues - to the keepsake programs - printed in a type face Jefferson would recognize and lovingly wrapped in hand-made Italian paper.
``Everything was driven by Jefferson,'' Saunders says. ``And that's a high standard.''
Thomas Saunders, the chairman of U.Va.'s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration board of trustees, says his wife went the extra mile and more.
``She'd have me down at the printers at 10 o'clock on a Sunday night, proofreading,'' Saunder says. ``She's an absolute perfectionist.''
(What no one mentions - it would be unseemly - is that Mr. and Mrs. Saunders have been generous with more than their time and creative energy: They gave the Darden School $10 million.)
Ernest H. Ern, the university senior vice president who was Jordan Saunders' liaison with the university, gives her glowing praise: ``You just couldn't ask for anything more from a volunteer, from a highly creative individual.''
It's suggested that any program of this magnitude must have presented glitches and creative differences.
``None,'' Ern says. ``None whatsoever.'' And, he adds, each word pregnant with meaning, ``Everything . . . went . . . perfectly.''
All this perfection takes place in an enormous tent on the university's lawn that Saunders' vision has transformed into a glamorous ballroom from another age, with chandeliers and vast swoops of yellow and white fabric draped along the tent's walls and 40-foot canopy.
There are a few touches that would have baffled Jefferson: The slide-and-video show projected onto two 10-by-12-foot screens flanking the stage, for example.
University officials point out that alumni funded the celebration. The school paid to rent the tent. Private contributors picked up the rest of the tab for the (rumored) $1 million weekend, which included seminars and social events and culminated with the grand dinner on the lawn. Already, 60 people or corporations have given the university $1 million apiece - some, far more. In all, donors to date have plunked down more than $350 million.
Raising money is costly. Using a standard rule of thumb for university fund drives, the bill for the U.Va. effort will come to about $75 million over five years. Presumably, Saturday's dinner is just the first of a series of spectacular socials nationwide.
Tonight, it seems worth it. The setting is stunning. ``Part of what they were trying to do,'' says university President John Casteen III, looking smashing and intellectual in black tie, ``was capture the feel of this place when it was new. . . . So I like that.''
``There is something magical,'' Casteen observes, ``about something being held in a tent.''
There's a magic, too - and the source of considerable fretting by Jordan Saunders - about who sits where inside that tent. Tables closest to the stage belong to those who gave the most; the tables farthest away go to those who gave only a couple of thousand or so. It's a subtle but public generosity meter. Katie Couric sits at the front table. So do the Saunderses and Josh Darden and his wife, Betty.
Hampton Roads is well represented. Among the attendees from Norfolk are lawyer Vincent J. Mastracco Jr. and his wife, Suzanne; lawyer Robert G. Hofheimer Jr. and his wife, Joanne; Landmark Communications Inc. president and CEO John O. ``Dubby'' Wynne and his wife, Susan; Eastern Virginia Medical School's head of general surgery, Dr. L.D. Britt; business leader and U.Va. board member Elizabeth Twohy. Among those from Virginia Beach: John D. and Betsy Munford; Hugh L. Patterson; Audrey and Nicholas G. Wilson III; and Mr. and Mrs. W. MacKenzie Jenkins Jr. Also guests were Portsmouth lawyer and U.Va. board member W. Arnold H. Leon and his wife, Telsa.
Before dinner comes the cocktail hour in faculty homes surrounding the lawn, and with it comes the networking and the schmoozing and the watching of people, all glamorous in sequins and off-the-shoulder dresses.
Watching the parade of formal wear make its way from house to house and into the tent is more fun for the uninvited than Oscar night. Watching from the Rotunda steps, Susan Fenstermacher of Richmond and Johnny Ekman of Charlottesville say they came by to check out the glitterati. ``We're the fashion police,'' Fenstermacher says, laughing.
See anybody interesting?
``I saw one of my clients,'' offers Fenstermacher, a travel agent. Ekman teases her: ``And who else?''
``Katie Couric!'' Fenstermacher says, delighted. ``She looked great! Oh, she looks beautiful.''
(The perennially perky Couric, who declined interview requests by saying she's ``really tired,'' gets high marks all around for her professionalism. ``She's great,'' says producer Israel. ``Really nice. Cute.'')
Some students sense an opportunity. Frank Llosa, a fourth-year marketing major who lives in a room on the lawn, taped to his front door an appeal for donations toward his college tuition. ``Tax-deductible,'' the note assures potential donors. ``Why not bypass the hoopla and give directly to the students?''
``That's pretty much a joke,'' Llosa says. Someone apparently took the appeal seriously. ``I got a dollar bill,'' Llosa adds. Two guests, more cryptically, left business cards.
Some students are less impressed. Several say they're worrying more about their studies than about this invasion of the moneyed crowd.
Others say the party's timing is peculiar. The university scheduled the celebration in the middle of midterm season, point out several, and on a ``reading weekend'' during which most students return to their home towns. University officials say that's to keep the celebration from disturbing the students.
But fourth-year psychology major Mary Eno suggests that the timing might have more to do with the worry that students would disturb the celebration.
``The students are really disappointed because they're not taking part,'' Eno says. (President Casteen says he's planning a party for students ``as soon as we find someplace big enough.'')
``If they really didn't want to disturb us, they wouldn't have put the tent up in the middle of the Lawn all last week,'' Eno says. ``They wanted it to be really quiet when the alumni came.''
But in the face of such a magnificent spectacle, such student carping seems, well, uncharitable. It's a party, for heaven's sake! And as the guests mingle in the magical tent - small-talking and greeting one another with air kisses, sipping Mumm Cuvee Napa Blanc de Noirs, munching their Thomas Jefferson-approved food and oohing over the historically correct floral arrangements - the tent is filled with the scent of something more than thousands of yellow roses. It smells like money.
``Probably two people at one of these tables,'' observes producer Bob Israel, could pay for this whole thing.''
And they will, happily. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
KEN BENNETT
Organizer Jordan Saunders checks last-minute details for the gala
Oct. 7.
Photo
KEN BENNETT
U.Va. graduates Katherine Donohoe and George Davies chat during
cocktail hour before the university's fund-raising gala.
by CNB