As usual this Sunday, in her 28th-floor penthouse overlooking Los Angeles, Dani Janssen will throw the city's most glamorous Oscar party that hardly anyone knows about. "Mine is very, very private. No press. No cameras allowed," actor David Janssen's widow said the other day while soaking orchids in her kitchen and preparing dinner for 120 (she insists on cooking almost everything herself). "I have a simple rule: If I don't know them, they aren't invited."
Janssen knows practically everyone. A slim blonde of a certain age, she grew up in Minneapolis, headed west and by age 16 was in the first of four marriages and under contract to Universal. "I was actually discovered in a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard," she told us in her deep sexy voice. "I smoke, of course – and I don't do anything that's politically correct." Among the stars who come out every year for Janssen's Oscar-night bash, which has come to replace the fabled shindig of late superagent Irving "Swifty" Lazar, are her pals "Clint" (Eastwood), "Jack" (Nicholson), "Tom" (Hanks), "Steven" (Spielberg), "Meryl" (Streep), "Bette" (Midler), "Whoopi" (Goldberg) and "Bruce" (Springsteen). Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, is also a regular.
"Bruce's favorite is my sweet potatoes, carmelized and topped with almonds, and Whoopi loves my monkey bread. That's a special pull-apart bread from the South, and my recipe came from a lady who worked for me for 20 years." Janssen said this year's main dish will be baked chicken breast smothered in onion sauce and brown gravy, along with a cranberry-raspberry souffle. Brownies and date bars are for dessert. And because of the expensive cream-colored Edward Fields carpets in her 2,500-square-foot apartment, the only wine Janssen will serve is white.
While the Academy Awards show goes on, the stars will party-hearty – from 5 in the afternoon 'til 5 the following morning. Victorious late-arrivals typically stow their statuettes on Janssen's iron-and-glass dining-room table. And as is traditional, she'll invite guests to fill out ballots with their Oscar guesses and throw $10 into the Oscar kitty. "The kitty is only $500, but for whoever wins, it's terribly exciting," she told us. "These are people who like to win."
