Just when you thought that saving Africa couldn't get any trendier, Tom Cruise, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vince Vaughn, and every celebrity, demi-celebrity, and celebrity barnacle has joined the cool kids' club. And as they all stream into a black tent at the United Nations headquarters for a $10,000-a-plate gala to benefit Malawi and UNICEF — hosted by Gucci, no less — it's clear that the dark continent has made the transition from cause celeb (A-Rod! Jerry Seinfeld! Drew Barrymore!) to cause capitalist (Vivi Nevo, Barry Diller, François-Henri Pinault). It helps that tonight's hostess, Madonna, has been cracking the whip as aggressively as she did in her dominatrix dress-up days of yore. "I was on the plane going to Africa recently with Bill Clinton," recalls co-chair Arki Busson, the Swiss financier dating Uma Thurman who helped organize the evening. "Madonna called me and was like, 'I need to see you guys as soon as you land.' As soon as you land." Busson laughs and I try to imagine the acute awkwardness of relaying marching orders from her Madgesty to the former leader of the free world.
The mini-machers are here too, from Jared Kushner to Greek shipping heir Stavros Niarchos. The latter has given up professional kite-surfing and semi-professional bed-surfing (he dated a Lohan, a Hilton, and an Olsen) to work for EIM, Busson's $14 billion fund-of-funds. "I didn't go to business school," Niarchos tells me, "so I'm catching up." Soon the crowd filters into dinner and Chris Rock takes the stage to do what comedians do at these things: act appropriately inappropriate. Touting an auction package that includes lunch with Adam Sandler, Rock declares, "If you bid $100,000, you get to fuck Paula Abdul. Only 90 is sex with, uh, Randy Jackson." Blazing performances by Rihanna, Alicia Keys, and Nelly Furtado help erase those unsavory images from our minds, and when Timbaland breaks into "The Way I Are," guests can't help but scan the crowd to see who's jumping up to do the Caucasian boogie (Katie Holmes, Ivanka Trump) and who's gruffly not (Donald Trump).
Of course, the only law at this hour is that of perpetual motion — after all, the people could be prettier somewhere else — so I make my way downtown to the glorified basement rec room Beatrice Inn, where Kate Hudson, Chloë Sevigny, Holly Dunlap, and hotelier Jason Pomeranc are all lounging about. By 4:00 A.M. the dance floor is packed with New York's carpe noctem set, and while I'll discreetly pull a veil over the antics around us — I don't want to be banned from one of the only tolerable nightspots in Manhattan — suffice it to say that after all the do-gooding at the U.N., there's some bad to be had under the Beatrice disco ball. Suddenly Ol' Dirty Bastard's remix of "Fantasy" comes on the stereo and sends the crowd into a mass session of hypnotic head-bobbing, as if we're all communally heeding the chorus: "There's no beginning and there is no end... Feels like I'm dreaming, but I'm not sleeping."
