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(NEW YORK) Love was in the air at Tina Brown's Sutton Place residence Tuesday night, when she and Vanity Fair contributing editor Vicky Ward (who was formerly Brown's executive editor at Talk) co-hosted a party with La Mer celebrating the launch of their friend Susan Nagel's new book, Marie-Thérèse, Child of Terror: The Fate of Marie Antoinette's Daughter.

Kalliope Karella wanted to meet Ghislaine Maxwell's new beau ("tall and tan," she later described); Boykin Curry was congratulated on the birth of new daughter Zinnia; and Alice Ryan glowed at 7½ months pregnant. But it was perhaps Kate Betts who loves Brown best. "I wish I had worked for her," the Time Style & Design editor admitted. "She's my idol. Whatever she edited--The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Talk--I bought and read obsessively. Sometimes I feel like I should be Tina's PR flack!"

Others inclined to mingle included Bronson Van Wyck, Nadine Johnson, Jennifer Creel, Peter Som, Adelina Wong Ettelson, and Amanda Ross. "Is there a bar somewhere?" Jamie Johnson wondered, standing next to a vase of hydrangeas and an open jar of La Mer. 
 
Nagel spent four years getting an intellectual grip on Madame Royale (as her title character was known) while also trying to master a more practical pastime: flying. "It used to be a total phobia," the professor of humanities at Marymount Manhattan College quipped. "Now it's just an uncomfortable state!"  As for relating to her character, she said, "Each woman's struggle is every woman's struggle," before adding, with a laugh, "most of all my friends are blonde and Type A, which goes to show you peroxide doesn't kill brain cells." Nagel's 16-year-old daughter Hadley, who alluded to channeling Versailles in a brocade Cynthia Rowley outfit, piped in, "You also learn to be awake in all time zones."

"I met her when she was exhuming the dauphin to test the DNA," Ward recalled. "I thought it was so cool."

For Brown, hostess duties come naturally, especially when literature is involved. "I'm a history junkie and obsessed with 18th century architecture," she said. As for Madame Royale? "I love secondary characters that people forget about," she offered. "She could've taped about five hours of Oprah and never complained once!"
JIM SHI