John Paul Rathbone’s fantasy dinner party: Fellini, Katharine Hepburn and a giant conga line

All of my guests are bosom friends, although we have never met, blessed with the gift of joy, although they are dead, and their return to earth on Christmas Eve is my chance to repay them for the years of pleasure they gave me unwittingly.

The setting is my home. I don’t want to dull the sheen of a fantasy, but these long months of pandemic have taught us that we must roll with the times.

It is a crisp and starlit winter night in west London, imbued with that hushed pre-Christmas sense of immanence. The menu is simple and home-cooked: charcuterie, vichyssoise, a roast chicken, green salad with cheese, finished off with chocolate cake and lemon sorbet.

But the fantasy works its greatest marvels elsewhere. My front room, for example, has been transformed into a giant ballroom, because what good dinner doesn’t finish with a dance? In fact, I am marvelling at the expanse of sprung wooden floor when my first guest arrives.

María de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, the Condesa de Merlin, has parked her carriage by the lamppost outside and, followed by the footmen who will also cook and serve tonight, climbed the stairs to my second-floor maisonette in Shepherd’s Bush.

Frederico Fellini never worked with Katharine Hepburn. Perhaps they will hatch a heavenly plan?

With a warm heart and a soprano voice praised by Balzac and Chopin, “La Belle Créole” is Cuba’s Scheherazade. Born to great wealth, she escaped a convent in Havana to brave war-torn Napoleonic Spain and then reinvented herself as one of the great salonnières of Louis-Philippe’s Paris. Her classic memoir Voyage to Havana is a lush evocation of exile and homecoming. It also contributed to the debate on slavery.

The Condesa is my social anchor for the evening. With her finesse, she will ensure the conversation moves smoothly. She also offered to bring wine — champagne, burgundy and aged Cuban rum, all packed in crates with straw. We shall drink like gods tonight.

La Belle Créole will get on famously with Michel de Montaigne, the French Renaissance writer who arrives, wearing a neck ruff, doublet and red cape slung over his shoulder. Montaigne invented the essay and his books, so rich in humanism and good sense, have been my bedside companion for more than 30 years. He lived in a time of plagues, and I cannot think of anyone better to provide perspective on the modern world — Covid, of course, but also its vanity and self-presumption.

“It is not much use to go upon stilts,” as Montaigne once wrote, “for we must still walk with our legs and when seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are still perched on our bums.” It’s a motto I remember whenever interviewing anyone who assumes to walk on stilts or sit on a throne.

Montaigne perches next to us. Champagne is poured. Conversation and laughter soon spread among us. The footmen summon us to dinner.

To my right sits Katharine Hepburn. Dressed in her trademark trousers, which once scandalised Hollywood, she epitomises the best of a certain kind of American Wasp: elegant, witty, brainy and free. “I’ve just done what I damn well wanted to and I’ve made enough money to support myself, and I ain’t afraid of being alone,” she once said. Is it gauche to admit I invited her simply because of a life-long crush?

Next to her is Federico Fellini. Wearing his customary baggy suit, a half-smile on his lips, Fellini, with his sense of absurdity and love of life, is my maestro of Italian cinema — maybe of all cinema. He never worked with Hepburn. Perhaps they will hatch a heavenly plan.

The last guest to arrive is the most explosive: the Ecuadorean Manuela Sáenz. The lover of South American independence hero Simón Bolívar, she was impish and so impulsive that she would blow up statues of their political enemies with rounds of cannon fire. She was also an effective spy against Spain. Bolívar called her the liberator of the Liberator.

Manuela is also known for the withering put-down of Englishness that she sent to her estranged husband, the staid physician James Thorne. If tonight convinces her that monotony is not always “reserved to your nation, in love, for sure, but also in the rest” I will count that as success.

We move through the courses and the wine. Our spirits rise. The band in the ballroom starts playing, led by Cachao López, inventor of the mambo and surely one of the gentlest souls to have graced this earth. Montaigne jumps to his feet, exhorting the rest to follow. “When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep,” he exclaims.

I mambo with Manuela. Federico cha-cha-chas with Katharine. Montaigne executes a courtly danzón with the Condesa. And then we form a giant conga line, led by Fellini as in the closing scene of his masterpiece 8½.

As the sun comes up, I wave the guests goodbye and, as with all the best parties, find that, amid the good times, someone has left their jacket behind. What happiness! It may be Manuela’s. I will arrange for its return on the WhatsApp group we all made before parting.