THE PRINCE OF WALES and the Duchess of Cornwall will try to charm New York society this week at a lavish cocktail party for 400 of the city’s elite.

Guests include the actor Robert De Niro, Sarah Jessica Parker, the star of the Sex and the City TV series, and her theatre producer husband Matthew Broderick, who played the title role in the 1986 film comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

The gathering, at the recently refurbished Museum of Modern Art (Moma), is seen as crucial to the royal couple’s chances of establishing a positive image in America.

Their week-long trip, which will also take in Washington and California, is Charles and Camilla’s first official tour together.

Before Tuesday’s reception the couple will visit the site of the World Trade Center in New York and dedicate a stone for a memorial garden to British victims of the 9/11 attacks.

Sir David Manning, the British ambassador to America, used a press briefing to dampen photographers’ hopes that the couple would meet showbusiness stars. However, Sir Philip Thomas, the consul general in New York, who is hosting the Moma party, is understood to have invited the British-born actress Kim Cattrall, who played the sexually adventurous Samantha Jones in Sex and the City, Jerry Seinfeld, the television comedian, and Wynton Marsalis, the jazz trumpeter.

Many of the Moma guests are socialites known to Americans as “boldface names” because of the typeface in which their names are printed in New York’s gossip columns. The impressions they take away will influence views of the royal couple for years to come at America’s glitziest dinner parties and social gatherings.

Among the city’s big-hitters least likely to be daunted by royalty is Donald Trump, the brash property billionaire who hosted America’s version of the television show The Apprentice.

Others not known for simpering in any company are Michael Bloomberg, the tycoon and mayor of New York, and Rudolph Giuliani, who was in charge of the city during the September 11 attacks.

Camilla is likely to find her party outfit being inspected by Anna Wintour, the British-born editor of American Vogue, who is known as Nuclear Wintour. Charles’s rather more predictable choice of suit will come under scrutiny from Ralph Lauren, the menswear designer. Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer, the long-standing doyennes of current affairs television, are expected to be on hand and later to share their views of the couple with millions of American viewers.

New York’s social scene is fiercely competitive and observers judged the Moma guest list “cool but safe”. One said: “It’s the traditional A-list — not particularly audacious. This is about wooing New York’s opinion formers. A favourable reception is guaranteed, and being with these people will make Charles and Camilla look good.”

Future donations for Charles’s pet charitable projects could be forthcoming from philanthropists such as Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, of the Estée Lauder company, and Kimberly and Steven Rockefeller, of the oil dynasty.

On Wednesday the couple will have lunch with the Bush family followed by an evening banquet for more than 100 at the White House — inevitably reviving memories of Charles’s visit with Princess Diana in 1985, at which she danced with John Travolta.

Also in Washington, Camilla will make her first public speech since her marriage to Charles at a meeting of experts on osteoporosis, the bone disease from which her mother and grandmother suffered.

Bob Colacello, who has written a 9,000-word profile of Camilla for the glossy society magazine Vanity Fair, said: “Washington is very excited about their visit because there hasn’t been a state dinner at the White House in a very long time.”

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