Pajama Party, Media Scrum And A Grand Total In Venice

The marathon Sanchez/Bezos ring-exchange celebrations in Venice didn’t precisely follow Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) narrative arc, although the party gauntlet itself did share a number of tropes with Mozart’s and Lorenzo da Ponte’s brilliant 1786 comedy. For one thing, the weekend featured the trials and tribulations of a set of 200-plus figures more than slightly financially and socially elevated in stature from the lowly Figaro as they more or less stumbled (or were shepherded) from luxury abode to rager and back, only to shower, change, eat, shop and then strike out to the boat queue for the next rager. As we can well imagine, not many of the characters present for the Bezos party gauntlet have anything like a “queue” in their lives. Queues part for them. The comedy this past weekend was built around the fact that these Venetian queues didn’t.

So, like Figaro, they had a lot of work set in front of them.

The edgy dress throughout the gauntlet was only amplified by the code for the “final” Arsenale party on Saturday, June 28, as guests began to break out their gear for the—internally announced, but publicly top secret—strikingly retro-themed “pajama party.” Surprising numbers of these highly curated guests managed to adhere to the code. Pictured below, larger-than-life Über-producer Brian Grazer, clearly in touch with his inner apex-predator, in his choice, a leopard, fearlessly boards his launch at the Gritti Palace in his excellently spotted silk sleep-set, bound for the Hef-like bacchanal. The leopard does not change his spots.

Massive kudos to Mr. Grazer for upping the unapologetic male ante. The Gritti’s dock-manager to Grazer’s left, foreground right in the shot, may be suspicious that his sturdy right elbow, offered for support during that parlous little leap from land to sea, is being roundly ignored. But what sort of mimsy leopard would take a dock manager’s elbow? Time for the predator to strike. Nothing like a little entertainment for the paparazzi to keep things rolling out in front of the Gritti. Mr. Grazer brings a bracing dose of team spirit to the Bezos megaparty.

Party after party, all weekend long—and that’s saying something—Italian-American and summer-on-the-Med regular Leo DiCaprio had been oddly ducking and diving each time he exited the Gritti, putting his hands up in front of his face when it was time to board his launch, ruining hundreds of photo editors’ days. In police stakeout parlance, it took two seconds on the first day for the photographers to make his steady girlfriend, Vittoria Ceretti, then, trotting a few yards behind, DiCaprio, so identity-protection could not have been the motive. Why so shy? It wasn’t as if the paparazzi were, in any sort of ancient Native American context, “stealing his soul through his eyes.” DiCaprio’s one of the more regularly photographed men in the United States. It’s part of his job.

Then came the Arsenale pajama party on Saturday. Simultaneously proving that he is a man’s man, and with a wink at the 1960s heyday of the Playboy empire, DiCaprio went straight for the jugular in the Hef-iest of the several Hugh Hefner sets on parade, in Hef’s trademark early-era crimson silk, no less. DiCaprio’s striking LA Dodgers topper, in all black, adds geographical authenticity to the provenance: For all we know, these crimson jammies could have been a set of Hef’s very own, snatched up by an eagle-eyed DiCaprio as they closed the Playboy Mansion West for sale in 2016. It’s the strikingly broad leg of DiCaprio’s capacious bottoms, cut to be comfortable for a super-frictionless exit should duty call, that scream Hef-in-his-1963-heyday. The Gritti Palace associate greeter just to DiCaprio’s left seems pleased with the joke.

Did he duck again? Sadly, yes, but not before the paparazzi caught the full kit, crimson top, crimson bottoms, and the silver neck chain underneath. Shy as DiCaprio seemed to want to remain, Hef would have been very moved by the fashion strut homage. Being a serious Med party veteran of decades standing in Cannes and elsewhere, it can well be that the actor was a bit pained that, as a construct, a pajama party might seem somewhat frivolously out-of-place in Venice? But we can still all hope that, for DiCaprio’s sake, that the kit slayed ‘em at the Arsenale. The dude does run a big-ass studio, after all.

Pictured below, a serene Oprah Winfrey, every inch the film, television, and book mogul in her own right, wins the silk pajama competition on the Gritti dock, as she boards her launch to the Saturday, June 28, Arsenale party.

Easily half the nuptial weekend’s Figaro-esque comedy was brought by the great chase given by the guests and the attendant Sanchez/Bezos party-planning and security apparatus to the coursing hounds of the international press. Although in architecture it was a game of thrust and parry, it was no less hard fought.

Pictured top, a textbook example of the box-and-block tactics that the police on Venice’s new hybrid jet-skis used to corral the photographers aboard their craft outside the sole dock on the private island of San Giorgio Maggiore, site of the Sanchez/Bezos ring ceremony and dinner, on June 27. Jet skis are a splendid invention, for mega-yachtsmen, surfers and surf competitions, and security forces alike. The Venetian police’s hybrids, recently aquired, are by Huracan Marine, designed to run on diesel when the cops need bursts of speed, and on electricity when slow cruising is required.

For Italy and for Venice, the rather large Sanchez/Bezos parade did leave more than a few bonuses for Italy and for Venice in its wake. With pleasantly surprising discretion, in April, as they selected Venice to be their wedding celebration location, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez set a 3-million-euro ($3.5-million) gift in motion to three Venetian charities, while also requesting that their guests eschew personal gifts. Italy’s tourism ministry estimated a 957-million-euro ($1.12 billion) benefit to the overall tourism economy. The lion’s share of that impressive number was calculated to have been in publicity for the country and the city. Like the coverage or not, that, they got in spades.

Over the five intense days of reporting the event, runup to denouement, much of the journalism generated was simply reporting the extraordinary outlay, with a nod to the intensely romantic profile of the city’s fragile archipelago and its lagoon. But as the weekend wore on, by far the largest journalistic focus became the social draw of the bridal couple themselves, as seen in the interestingly eclectic mix of the 200-plus guests. More precisely, the guest list was a delicate trigonometric reflection of the couple’s affections with a very strong quotient of the regard in which the business accomplishments of the groom are held. The social math was layered: Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King could be counted as the bride’s guests, but Winfrey, in particular, is a brilliant content creator and mogul and has every pertinent reason to show up to celebrate the betrothal of the owner of Amazon MGM.

A quorum of guests with similar gravitas — such as Bill Gates, Brian Grazer, or Francois-Henri Pinault — were, in Venice, in the same boat with Winfrey, pun intended. Grazer, along with Endeavor CEO Ari Emmanuel, were the two guests with the most direct interest in the groom’s business portfolio, but they can all be fairly described as senior statesmen in their chosen fields, gentlemen with a lot of other duties and options for the long weekend of June 25-29. But. Business is business, and you never know what sort of opportunities a Jeff Bezos can kick up.

Ergo: Respect for that possibility, in the form of physically showing up to do the three days in the Gritti, waiting for motoscafi cheek-by-jowl with the cartoon-figure Kardashian sisters, or other lightweights of equal or greater ridiculousness, must be shown.

Tom Brady is by no means a senior business statesman yet, but he does sit astride a considerable fortune of some $300 million and, though a young man compared to the others, come hell or high water, he’s aging out of his profession as a player and will be off the field within five years to execute his full pivot into business. His relative youth, at 47, along with his not-so-sudden “single” status, meant that the British tabloids in particular breathlessly tracked his moves.

Brady’s Friday evening joust — an exchange of pleasantries, a dance — on the night of the ring ceremony on San Giorgio Maggiore with the recently-single actress Sydney Sweeney, twenty years his junior, did not go unnoticed by the eagle-eyed London tabloid reporters, nor did Brady’s and Sweeney’s subsequent stroll-about with Orlando Bloom on June 28, before the pajama party. All three of them were booked into the Gritti, so it’s a better than good chance that the rumors of some late-night elbow-bending at the Gritti bar bore a strong resemblance to reality.