Dead Poets Society
Sandy Hill conjures Halloween magic in Santa Ynez.
Photography by Eric Scott SmithOn a soggy, wind-swept October night, by the light of a rising moon, a legendary Los Olivos hostess ushers a ghoulish albeit glam assembly into an old barn, its creaky doors flung wide. Cloaked in shadow, the group gathers around a table laden with burnished silver and smoky goblets, waxen roses and gilded china, taxidermic crows and dripping candelabra. Hanging low from the ceiling glitters a black crystal chandelier. The wind howls. The rain slides sideways. And so it begins. Oak Savanna Vineyard owner Sandy Hill’s enchanting Dinner for Dead Poets commences over eyeball-garnished cocktails. Slips of crumpled paper and dog-eared pages in hand, the honored guests clear their throats.
“I wanna go first, I wanna go first!” cries Ovid, aka Ron Finkelstein, a dashing figure in knee-high sandals and toga, eager to share a few words in dactylic hexameter from his Common Era hit Metamorphoses. As elder statesman, the Roman versifier sets the pace for reading chronologically (that is, first to croak), which puts the hostess of the moment up next. Arrayed in Chinese silks and a chenille pom-pom-trimmed headdress, she channels Li Po, a choice based in part on the eighth-century poet’s musings on enlightenment and in part, she admits, on the bewitching costume options.
By evening’s end, not only has her Li Po delivered a lively version of “Drinking Alone by Moonlight,” but necrotic wags from Oscar Wilde to Hiawatha have toasted one another’s collective legacy over a sublime Pinot Noir and downed a truly spirited repast: mincemeat purses to honor Edward Lear, roasted pork loin stuffed with braised cabbage to salute Lewis Carroll, and blackberry dacquoise—a meringue tribute to Sylvia Plath, laced throughout with the darkest of fruits and oven crisped.
“I’ve always loved Halloween—you get to dress up!” says the raven-haired Hill, with the sort of conspiratorial glee that compels grown-ups to hold forth in frock coats and buckskin bikinis.
Tiny funeral wreaths served as place cards. Menus, the work of New York calligrapher Bernard Maisner (his hand ghosted for Johnny Depp’s in Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow), doubled as festive skull masks. As for the attendees—a bicoastal list long on writers, film producers, and directors—Hill requested only that they dress for dinner as either a dead bard or the subject of one of said dead bard’s poems and arrive ready to recite.
“Of course, everybody wanted to be somebody who dressed cool,” she says, which, in addition to the aforementioned, translated to three poets’ muses, a slew of 19th-century stiffs, and Roman Alonso reading “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
“It was a bit of a challenge,” she notes of the latter. “We didn’t know Roman was Kurt Cobain until he was the only one left.” Somewhat easier calls: Dan Copeland’s sage rendition of Rumi; Brooke Bradbury as the bikini-clad Hiawatha; Cat “Fanny” Doran as Madame Laurent Lecoulteux (“Fanny” to Louis XIV court poet André de Chénier); Hill’s son, Bo Pittman, as a debonair Dickens; Merle Ginsberg in a lace bonnet as Emily Dickinson; Duncan Roy as the barb-witted Wilde; Andrew Bradbury’s sardonic Ambrose Bierce; Amanda Ross as Rilke eye candy Adèle Bloch-Bauer; and Laura Sandler as inspiration for The Master and Margarita by the 20th-century Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov.
As for Hill, she set her sights on Li Po after happening upon a photo of a Chinese opera headdress in a magazine. While the actual touring Jiangsu stage prop ultimately defied procuring, she tracked down a near clone at an Atlanta costume shop, then sought a rhymer to match. “I googled ‘most famous Chinese poet,’” she says. “Li Po comes up and there’s a Wikipedia entry on him, and then I find a collection of his work!”
By evening’s end, necrotic wags from Oscar Wilde to Hiawatha have toasted one another’s collective legacy over a sublime pinot noir and downed a spirited repast.
Google “most famous hostess,” to follow Hill’s lead, and—Lady Astor, Marion Davies, and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild aside—up pops her friend Martha Stewart, though “most intrepid hostess” could be Hill’s for the taking. The former magazine editor, television producer, and mountain climber (all seven summits) now adds author to her repertoire with Fandango (Artisan). “My foodie friends convinced me to do it,” she says of the coffee table book, in which, along with a foreword by Stewart and recipes by Oak Savanna chef de cuisine Stephanie Valentine, Hill shares her singular brand of entertaining. Her guiding principle? To make any occasion “as grand as you would if it were the last thing you would ever do.”
“She’s the queen of entertaining,” says Andrew Bradbury, the poet party’s Bierce. “Martha does it on TV—Sandy does it for real. She has that touch, that eye for every detail.”
The fourth-generation Californian grew up in San Jose, earned a degree in art history at the University of California at Los Angeles, then spent 25 years in New York before returning to her home turf to wed retired commodities trader Tom Dittmer. Seasoned from decades of charity benefits and media events, Hill has since hosted parties at their homes in Manhattan, Miami, Mexico, and the Caribbean, though it’s Oak Savanna (the 25-acre spread has a modernist great house designed by architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen and decorated by Fernando Santangelo) that lends itself to what she does best.
“It’s not about perfect place settings,” she says. “It’s about giving it all you’ve got. When I was a young professional, a lot of my entertaining was for business. Now my husband and I have adult children and, at the ranch, we welcome a steady stream of friends. Because these people are all so dear to us, entertaining has become such a pleasure—these are people I want to knock myself out for!”
In her book, chapters cover such unabashed feats as her Independence Day Blast (a valley-style rodeo and picnic, complete with target-shooting and pig-kissing contests), an Indian Feast to celebrate the Hindu god Ganesh (sari-clad guests dine on lobster tails and tour her vineyard by bejeweled elephant); Harvest (after picking the season’s first ton of Chardonnay grapes, celebrants dive into a bounteous barrel-top spread of charcuterie and cheeses paired with choice selections from Oak Savanna winemaker Andrew Murray); and, for wicked fun with a literary bent, the Gothic Dinner for Dead Poets.
The idea for the worm-food fete first came to Hill two years ago as impromptu fun while on a pheasant hunting holiday in the English countryside. “It didn’t require an elaborate costume,” she says. “It just meant you brought a poem and wore something that gave a nod to your poet—for Edgar Alan Poe, a sinister top hat or something. It was hilarious!” Back home in Los Olivos, a gnarled oak on her property (“To some people it’s just a dead tree; to me, it’s magnificent!”) prompted the poet party redux on a more characteristic scale.
“Sandy has this je ne sais quoi, a willingness to do things out of the ordinary—and it’s heartfelt,” says Cat Doran. “She never met a costume she didn’t like, and nothing seems too crazy to her.” •
Santa Barbara Magazine
By Trish Reynales. All rights reserved.
