Playhouse 90

To celebrate the first anniversary of his Academy Award-winning megahit, Around the World in 80 Days, Mike Todd decided he would throw “the biggest goddamned birthday party the world has ever seen”. Madison Square Garden would play host—“one of the few places Liz and I have never fought,” Mike quipped—and the Todds would invite 18,000 of their closest friends. Coverage would air live on CBS’s Playhouse 90 on October 17, 1957 in an episode entitled “Around the World in 90 Minutes,” anchored by Walter Cronkite, and the media attention would even upstage Queen Elizabeth II’s state visit to Washington.

The Garden was in her party finery that evening. The London-based set designer Vincent Korda crafted an Oscar from rust chrysanthemums that soared an impressive forty-four feet. The entertainment was to be courtesy of “the clown Emmet Kelly, Scottish Highland Pipers, juggler Deeter Tasso, marching bands, menageries, Texas baton twirlers, Thai dancers, Harlem Elks, Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey (then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) and, atop a woozy and uncertain elephant, actor Sir Cedric Hardwicke”. Arguably the highlight was set to be the moment when Elizabeth would climb a set of stairs to “blow out” the single candle adorning a fourteen foot high cake—baked with two-thousand eggs and covered in 150 pounds of pale blue icing—which she would then proceed to cut.

However, the party quickly descended into chaos. “The whole thing was an unmitigated disaster,” remembered Elizabeth. Prizes were absconded with and some of the waiters sold the free champagne for profit. Although the Todds made their departure early, Elizabeth still had fond memories of the evening. “He made me feel like a queen that night,” she would recall years later. “But he made me feel like a queen every day.”

Mike’s verdict? “It taught me a lesson. I’ll never have a party for 18,000 people. Never more than 17,500 people. 18,000 gets unwieldy”.