The Fifth Estate Birthday Party
Hub page for Mailer's 5 February 1973 fiftieth-birthday party at the Four Seasons, where he announced 'The Fifth Estate'; collects the cluster of contemporaneous press coverage (73.2-73.8, 73.11, 73.18).
On 5 February 1973, his fiftieth birthday, Mailer hosted a party at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York — six hundred guests at $50 a couple, the invitation promising “an announcement of national importance (major).” The announcement was The Fifth Estate, a proposed citizen watchdog organization, a “democratic secret police” to keep tabs on the FBI and the CIA. By most accounts the speech, delivered after much bourbon, misfired; the next day Mailer called a news conference to walk back the “people’s police” framing (73.4). The Watergate break-in that June lent the idea a retrospective prescience (see The Morning After, 73.10, and 73.18).
This page is the hub for the cluster of contemporaneous coverage, recorded as bibliography rows for 1973: Mel Gussow in the New York Times (73.2), Jan Hodenfield in the New York Post (73.3), the Times news-conference report (73.4), Sally Quinn in the Washington Post (73.5), Lucian K. Truscott IV in the Village Voice (73.6), Linda Francke in Newsweek (73.7), Patricia Bosworth in the Saturday Review (73.8), Timothy Ferris in Rolling Stone (73.11), and Frank Crowther‘s later reconsideration in the Village Voice (73.18). A full transcription of the Francke Newsweek account is held, rights pending, at full text.