Music: Society Band

In the yacht and country clubs and the looming shingled mansions by the sea, eastern high society dances the summer nights away to the honey-tongued music of a few favored bands. The men on the bandstands at Newport, Southampton and Bar Harbor are the.same ones who whip out the frothy fox trots at the coming-out balls in the fall, at the canopied weddings in June; two generations of debutantes have been presented, courted and married under the batons of such bandleaders as Meyer Davis and Emil Coleman. Perhaps the busiest of the musical blue bloods is a springy, raw-nerved little man named Lester Lanin, who believes that nothing in life is more important than serving good music to “society.”

Like his rivals in the business, 51-year-old Conductor Lanin has a pool of several hundred musicians. On a busy night he may have as many as 25 Lester Lanin groups blaring his bouncy arrangements from Maine to Maryland. He himself shows up mainly at top-drawer affairs, e.g., last week a Newport dinner dance in honor of Perle Mesta, before that at Southampton’s Tennis Ball and Newport’s Tiffany Ball. There are enough such affairs to keep Lanin on the bandstand most nights of the year.

A Fixture. Grandfather Lanin started the family in the band business 118 years ago in Europe. Lester’s father, also a bandleader, traveled to local weddings and hoedowns around Philadelphia in a creaking wagon, raised a family of nine musicians. Young Lester got an early taste of what society likes to dance to by hanging around the ballroom of Philadelphia’s Bellevue-Stratford Hotel and listening through the doors. By the early ’30s he had heard enough to move to New York and start out on his own. During the war he piped for charity and service balls, became a social fixture on the home front.

In the wealthy strip of Eastern Seaboard where Lanin usually roams, the demand for his services is fiercely competitive. He has solid bookings as far ahead as 1963, verbal engagements up to 1968. The mammas book him for their infant daughters’ debuts in the same way that the papas book their infant sons for Yale; Lanin rechecks each booking a year or two before the scheduled date just in case “they haven’t been clipping their coupons.”

Lanin may charge $90 for a two-man short turn or as much as $15,000 for a nightlong ball with full band. Although he generally stops playing at the contracted hour, well-heeled and well-oiled bloods, their Lester Lanin beanies askew, occasionally dance up to him and slip him $500 or so to keep things jamming till sunrise. Lanin is more flexible about his fees than most society bandleaders. To cultivate a future clientele, he will play for almost nothing for the subdeb crowd or the allowance-ridden young men of Princeton, Harvard and Yale.

The Peabody. “Society people,” says Lanin, “don’t change. They like show tunes.” As a result, he and his competition rarely vary their schmaltzy fare: Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Just One of Those Things, Love for Sale, Sentimental Journey, The Music Goes ‘Round and Around, On the Street Where You Live. The classic society preference is for the “Peabody,” or fast fox trot. Occasionally the social lights will buy a waltz. Dixieland or a samba—but seldom a tango or a rhumba. Although each of the big society bands has a detectable style of its own, they are all distinguished for their slick orchestration, blaring sound and rapid tempos, with scarcely any pause between songs: “The kids like it fast, and the parents would rather see them moving than just swaying in a dark corner.”

Bachelor Lanin, whose informal duties include advising hostesses on decorations and the size of parties, is a strenuous admirer of his clientele, and he wants his bandsmen to feel the same way. A Lanin employee, he says, must be honest, sober and a positive thinker (Gandhi and Norman Vincent Peale are two of Lanin’s idols)—the kind of fellow who can “see a man dancing by with red socks and a tux on and not make a remark about it.” The Eastern Seaboard, Lanin knows, is a faddish place that can cast out its favorites as quickly as it takes them in. He is anxious to keep those dates for 1968.