No matter how much I spent, the gifts I bought were always wrong ...

(Nancy) and Mrs Oscar de la Renta (Annette), and included TV interviewer Barbara Walters.

At one Manhattan charity dinner with them, I reached for the bread. ‘Barbara,’ Jayne rebuked, ‘bread is not the staff of life.’ They all thought I weighed too much.

Thinness crept up on me. Perhaps it was the mimicking of the Group’s attitude to bread, butter and desserts — items that were the outer circle of hell and never to pass lips — while salads, which I personally hated, were rejoiced over.

Just why I so keenly wanted to be part of this lot is a mystery, although looking at it pragmatically, not. This was my shortcut to becoming ‘known’ to restaurants and photographers, which seemed important at the time.

‘Just bring patio jewellery,’ Texan philanthropist Lynn Wyatt once suggested perfectly seriously when I flailed helplessly about packing for the South of France, where she and her husband had an exquisite villa above Monte Carlo. Patio jewellery, it turned out, meant huge, perfectly spherical and polished turquoise beads alternating with full-cut diamonds.

‘ Pretty, isn’t it?’ said the fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, at a private dinner in the Metropolitan Museum. She extended her wrist delicately, turning it as her head tilted, appraising it. She was referring to her bracelet, which looked about three or four inches wide, of perfectly cut, seemingly flawless diamonds gleaming with furious intensity.

Fine, I know it’s barmy to react to such exchanges, but rise to them I did. If only, instead of endless rows of bottled supplements for strong nails and creams to stop acne, I had something to kill, contain or heal my acquisitiveness, competitiveness and characterlessness.

My own jewellery purchases fell in the $4,500 to $35,000 range, and since I was embarrassed to tell Conrad, I was forever worrying about payment.

Journalists were still being paid well in those times before the internet killed us. With my Times contract, my Maclean’s columns bringing in $2,400 a piece, plus features and columns here and there in American publications, and with no rent, telephone or food bills, I had some money.

I thought the pavé diamond heart earrings I bought for $35,000 were gorgeous and, for the money, they were; the Giovane emerald drops were more so. I tossed my hair back to show them off and longed for the day when I could afford a $75,000 emerald bracelet.

The rot began one day at lunch in London. We were five at Mosimann’s, sitting down for a pleasant interlude.

‘Your earrings,’ said John Gutfreund, known as the ‘King of Wall Street’, ‘did you buy them? They’re the wrong colour.’ His tone of voice left no room for any other interpretation than derisiveness. I squirmed.

‘Probably a lot of oil in them and it hasn’t done much good,’ continued John.

I looked up this business about oil in the encyclopedia when I got home and supposed that, yes, given their price, they must have been heavily treated with oil to give them a better appearance. I won’t wear them any more, I thought.

I didn’t stop to think that getting upset by this was something of a flaw in me slightly deeper than any fissure in my emeralds. I should have laughed, or passed Gutfreund off as an unpleasant idiot, which he clearly was, but it cut.

The fact is I became a caricature of the Group.

Socialising with them meant you got photographed for the New York Times social pages or the glossies rather a lot, and I quite liked that. It came with baggage, though — more concern about my appearance, as if that were possible given my total immersion in myself already.

Meanwhile I gushed and played the social game with enthusiasm, even when my attempts to reciprocate a season of invitations to the opera or a country house by sending extravagant gifts (in my terms) went unremarked or, worse, remarked.

‘I gave the silver bracelets you sent me to my nieces and they loved them,’ said Nancy Kissinger of the two Angela Cummings braided silver cuffs I’d sent her after a Thanksgiving dinner. My fault for asking if she had received them after a month of agonising silence and my fear that someone opened the package and thought they were napkin rings.

Less humiliating was the dead silence I didn’t break: the crocodile wallet I had agonised over at Bergdorf’s for one of the ladies — was it too showy or was it the wrong part of the crocodile? — and the Lana Marks gold lizard evening bags together with the Hermès washbag for someone’s husband.

Both must have been received but never commented upon, even as they profusely thanked one another for a book on planting bulbs.

Every Christmas the gifts would arrive for me. So exquisitely wrapped. You can’t imagine the ribbons and paper and satin and silks that were lavished on a box. While I wrote a note of thanks for Jayne’s knitted sable stole and the box of Manolo Blahnik shoes in absolutely my taste and size (Lily Safra’s gift), I had a feeling I just wasn’t getting it right.

Jayne can help me, I thought. Since she was about 20 years older than the others and an old friend of Conrad’s, I rather looked on her as a sympathetic ally in my new world. The straws a drowning person clutches. Jayne was the Group’s deity, an infallible source of knowledge about high-society life as lived in the thinnest of its ozone layers. She had nothing to lose, I reasoned, and would help a newcomer. After all, in her life before marriage to [oil executive and art collector] Charles B. Wrightsman she was a salesgirl, albeit with a good private school education and at an elegant shop. She must have had to learn the ropes herself.

But I simply could never get Jayne alone for that heart-toheart. It was on par with arranging a private audience with the Pope.

I would arrive at her apartment after we had arranged to have a little lunch or a cup of tea, ‘so just the two of us can have a real chat,’ Jayne would say, and be shown happily into one of her sitting rooms to enjoy a warm greeting from Annette. Or Nancy.

I could hear the telephone conversation: ‘Darling Annette.

Barbara Black is coming over for tea today. I’m at my wits’ end what to talk to her about, you know how she is. Can you come by?’

I must have been an entertaining sight, thrashing about looking for harbour, gussied up with a hook in my mouth.

‘ Nancy asked me to tell you, once again,’ said my staunch husband, ‘that you shouldn’t be so insecure. They really like you.’ Certainly everyone professed love for everyone in the Group. But this was American pro forma social courtesy.

The rudeness was in not professing — at any opportunity, privately or out loud and emotionally, and preferably in a fulsome but joyless toast — love for every damn person with whom you interacted socially.

However, I tied up my shoelaces and invited Jayne and Annette to lunch at my apartment — an agonising prospect for me and obviously too agonising for them. They accepted and then, on the morning of, cancelled. ‘ So sorry, can’t make it.’

Like a series of vivid tableaux vivants, the memory of those women standing in one another’s homes, just out of my reach, remains locked behind my eyes.

And the legs of the women, always thin; they stood like storks in slender black highheeled shoes of classic simplicity. Limousine legs. Though I had spent as much money as many of them on my appearance, their poise could not be bought.

But this constellation, so plotted and chased by me, was well on the way to irrelevance and extinction, without visible achievement. Many of the socialites were second or third wives, and they were childless. The Group would live on for a while, their names purchased, endowed and inscribed in museums, hospitals and opera houses or on the labels of the clothes companies they had built.

But endowments run out, companies are sold. All around the group I knew, celebrity culture was taking over. The sway of the Group was virtually over, although, just like the Romanoffs, they would never realise it until the end.

As for me, the first sign of my own downfall was when I tried to buy two Wolford bodysuits in Bloomingdale’s. The sales lady, who had just complimented me on my Hermès handbag, announced, with a note of slight triumph, I felt, that my Bloomingdale’s card was declined.

I managed to wheedle out the info that my Bloomingdale’s credit limit was now cut to $100 but didn’t twig what was going on — let alone that this was just the start of 12 hellish years to come…

AdApted by Corinna Honan from Friends And enemies: A Memoir by Barbara Amiel, to be published by Constable, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, at £25 on October 13. © 2020 Barbara Amiel. to reserve a copy for £21.25, go to www. mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3308 9193

‘That crocodile wallet . . . was it too showy?’