On this September evening in 1982, the Glitter Baby looked more beautiful than ever as she gazed at the crowd. A trace of hauteur shone in her not-quite-hazel eyes, and her sculpted chin held an almost arrogant tilt, but inside, Fleur Savagar was terrified. She took a deep, steadying breath and reminded herself that the Glitter Baby had grown up, and she wouldn’t ever let them hurt her again.

She watched the crowd. Diana Vreeland, impeccably dressed in an Yves Saint Laurent evening cape and black silk pants, studied a bronze Benin head, while Mikhail Baryshnikov, all cheeks and dimples, stood at the center of a group of women more interested in Russian charm than African primitives. In one corner a television anchorman and his socialite wife chatted with a fortyish French actress making her first public appearance since a not so hush-hush face-lift, while across from them, the pretty showpiece wife of a notoriously homosexual Broadway producer stood alone in a Mollie Parnis she had foolishly left unbuttoned to the waist.

Fleur’s dress was different from everyone else’s. Her designer had seen to that. You must be elegant, Fleur. Elegance, elegance, elegance in the Era of the Tacky. He’d cut bronze stretch satin on the bias and constructed a cleanly sculpted gown with a high neck and bare arms. At mid-thigh, he’d slashed the skirt in a long diagonal to the opposite ankle, then filled in the space with a waterfall flounce of the thinnest black point d’esprit. He’d teased her about the flounce, saying he’d been forced to design it as camouflage for her size-ten feet.

Heads began to turn, and she saw the exact instant when the crowd’s curiosity changed to recognition. She slowly let out her breath. A hush fell over the gallery. A bearded photographer turned his Hasselblad from the French actress to Fleur and caught the picture that would take up the entire front page of the next morning’s Women’s Wear Daily.

Across the room, Adelaide Abrams, New York’s most widely read gossip columnist, squinted toward the arched doorway.