Little Rock doesn't have a billionaire playboy cum vigilante who by dusk dons cape and cowl and evil-does the evildoers with a technophilic game of catch and desist.
To be clear, we don't have anything like that.
But what we have is a model Wayne Manor for just such an experiment.
If the most exciting place to be this weekend is the Clinton Presidential Center and River Market, where the state's biggest community event -- Riverfest -- is going down, surely the most exclusive place is way to the west, at the French countryside-inspired spread of Warren Buffettian banker George Gleason and his wife, Linda, Chateau Saint-Cloud, where May 16 two powerful philanthropic couples -- Cindy and Chip Murphy and Linda and Rush Harding -- had an exclusive dinner party for about two dozen of their closest friends.
Guests arrived to fluted glasses of rose and valets and violin music. Those on the Murphys' guest list congregated around the koi pond. (These koi, about a dozen, are jurassic in scale, and reportedly Linda has named each one.) Those of the Hardings' met at the chapel on the dusky western slope. The rival gangs met on the terraced back patio for parleys and more liquid cheer poured by white-gloved bartenders, then moved inside the grand-piano-and-chandeliered dining hall. The menu began with a lobster and kiwi with tobacco shallots amuse bouche, a salad, then lamb tenderloin Wellington with macadamia spinach puree; Kobe filet with pomme puree, asparagus, black truffle and a quail egg; and a John Dory (white fish) and lobster with chanterelles, peach and asparagus.
The Gleasons have promised to do more of these to raise money for charity.
The party was the bidding -- literally -- of the Hardings and Murphys during Easter Seals' 2013 Arkansan of the Year gala honoring George Gleason. The dinner party at the Gleasons' west Little Rock estate sparked a bidding war between the Hardings and the Murphys that ended after each agreed to pay $37,500 -- $75,000 total! -- for half the guest list.
Initially it was a party for 20; the Gleasons allowed for more than that.
High Profile on 05/25/2014