Literati and glitterati cross-pollinated at a Sag Harbor garden party thrown by Jason Epstein and Judith Miller, and Ivana Lowell (a Guinness heiress and daughter of the late Lady Caroline Blackwood, who was married to painter Lucien Freud, musician Israel Citkowitz, and poet Robert Lowell) to celebrate the publication of The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby’s-Christie’s Auction House Scandal, by Christopher Mason (Putnam, 2004).

Mason’s book eloquently chronicles the price-fixing scandal inside two internationally known auction houses, traveling from galleries to courtrooms, then across the sea to London, Paris, and back. The scandal eventually led to the conviction and one-year prison sentence of billionaire businessman Alfred Taubman, former Sotheby’s chairman and controlling stock-holder. His CEO, Diana “DeDe” Brooks, was sentenced to three years’ probation and placed under house arrest for six months. Christie’s British CEO, Christopher Davidge, was implicated but never prosecuted.

Co-host Judith Miller, an author and Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter on national security and terrorism for The New York Times, now finds herself at the center of her own controversial saga—stemming from recent articles that criticize her journalistic aggressiveness, noncollegial newsroom behavior, and passionate possessiveness of sources, including Ahmad Chalabi, who provided assurances of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq.

Brightening the scenery: Mick Jones, Bianca Jagger, and Sylvia Nasar (author of A Beautiful Mind). There was no lack of conversation among these blooms!