Bogart-Size Bash Sets Record

Neil Bogart would have been proud of his memorial charity--it threw a party Saturday that did his name justice.

Bogart, the Casablanca Records president who died in 1983, was one of the most flamboyant party givers in show business history.

“Neil loved all parties,” said Paul Schaeffer, president of the Neil Bogart Memorial Fund. “He was 39 when he died. If you and I live to be 80, we would not have lived as much as Neil did.”

In true over-size Bogartian fashion, the fund (with the help of Along Came Mary) took over a 40,000-square-foot hangar at Santa Monica airport, carpeted it, lined the walls with light-filled pepper trees, hung floor-to-ceiling New Orleans cityscape backdrops to go with the evening’s theme and filled the room with the sounds of an all-star band led by George Duke and Quincy Jones.

It was just the kind of scene Bogart would have loved. “He was a larger-than-life character,” said MCA Records chairman Al Teller. “He was one of those guys with the drive, the talent and the over-the-top chutzpah who made the record industry.”

The evening went over the top itself: It raised $1.1 million for cancer, AIDS and leukemia research, making it the most successful event in the fund’s history. Credit for this should go to dinner chair Rikki Rosen, and to the choice of popular Motown Records chairman Clarence Avant as honoree.

Jones called his friend Avant “one of the legendary godfathers of the music business.”

Ed Bradley of “60 Minutes” fame, who has known the Motown chief since 1963, said he never met anyone, “who’s done so much for so many and been so quiet about it.”

And for fight promoter Don King, honoring Avant was, “so spiritually redeeming I had to jump on a plane and come.”

Among the other 900 guests at the dinner were Wesley Snipes, Babyface, Debbie Allen, Marilu Henner, Shari Belafonte, Holly Robinson, Peter Guber, Joyce Bogart Trabulus, Tom Bradley and music industry execs Berry Gordy, Mo Ostin, Danny Goldberg and Jheryl Busby.

Though the dinner went late, it was because the evening had the unrushed good-time feeling of a New Orleans party. “Everything has to be appreciated with joy,” said Jones. “We know cancer. We know what that’s about. But you have to deal with it with joy.”