Her father , Ralph C. Wilson Jr., a millionaire insurance scion who had “a stable in Lexington, Ky., and the Buffalo Bills football team,” seemed happy to toast his daughter in such style. The event reportedly cost $85,000, which would be roughly $675,000 today. (This was just the hometown event; the 18-year-old Ms. Wilson had already been formally presented at the Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball in New York in December 1964.)

It was an era when families of distinction across the country presented their daughters to society, with the intention that suitable men from similar backgrounds would meet their future wives. In Grosse Pointe, it was the “Ford girls,” the great-granddaughters of Henry Ford, who had ramped up the deb-ball arms race. Nat King Cole sang at Charlotte Ford’s storied party in 1959, while Ella Fitzgerald performed at her sister Anne’s soiree in 1961.

Racial dynamics were changing in the 1960s, but often in fits and starts. The Supremes performing at a private club in Grosse Pointe, which still had no black residents, reflected this lurching progress.