Chicago Tribune - October 18, 2004
Lucinda Hahn, lhahn@tribune.com

"I gave up counting mine," said another guest.

Fifty? asked Toast of the Town.

"More."

Over 75? "Definitely."

Fortunately, Bunky Cushing, a Ralph Lauren sales associate with a social conscience, has stepped into the void, requiring guests at his annual Handbags & Halos lunch to donate a "gently used" bag as the price of admission, along with the $120 ticket. This year, the resulting pile of some 150 unwanted Kate Spades, Pradas and Louis Vuittons tugged at the heartstrings.

"Some of them look like they've been used," said Hinsdale's Hazel Barr.

Happily, they will go to good homes -- and get the love and attention that are every purse's due -- after they are put on sale Oct. 29 at the Brown Elephant shop on Halsted Street. Proceeds of the sale will benefit the Howard Brown Health Center -- whose work on the HIV/AIDS front was the real point of the luncheon, which raised about $25,000 for the center.

After dumping their bags, many women greeted the guest of honor, actress Dina Merrill, who was reminiscing with her old friend Nancy McIlvane. McIlvane's Winnetka home became a kind of suburban Four Seasons Hotel for Merrill and the rest of the cast of Robert Altman's 1978 comedy "A Wedding," when it was being filmed in Lake Forest.

"Carol Burnett would do yoga on the lawn, and the rest of us would sit by the pool," Merrill recalled. "I remember Carol said, 'This is just like summer camp.'"

Merrill, the daughter of cereal heir Marjorie Merriweather Post and financier E.F. Hutton, later spoke to the gathering about growing up in the historic Palm Beach estate Mar-a-Lago, now famously owned by Donald Trump.

"Trump showed me through it one time," she said. "I saw this enormous portrait of him in the paneled library, and I told myself, 'OK, don't say anything.'"

But before that came the big moment: a raffle to win -- what else? -- another purse. Nine stores had donated their most delectable offering, from a pink suede Prada via Neiman Marcus (won by Mamie Walton) to an adorable burgundy "mini-Classic" from Chanel -- admired by a crowd that included Jamee Field, Melissa McNally, Cookie Cohen, Tiffani Kim, Gretchen Jordan and Chaz Ebert.

But it was the Yves St. Laurent, with its antelope horn handle, that had everyone in a near drool. When Cushing pulled Pauline Sheehan's ticket from a glass jar, the applause trickled in ambivalently.

"She hates Yves St. Laurent," one woman sniffed.

True or not, with any luck, Sheehan will give the bag up next year, "gently used."

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