THE CITY OF CONVERSATION - Lincoln Center Theater Review

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Spring 2014, Issue Number 63 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor

Anthony Giardina's The City of Conversation, set in Washington, D.C., over three decades, is at once an intimate story of a family divided by politics and an insightful and compelling look at the Photograph © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos.

The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc., Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Brooke Garber Neidich and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary

Dorothy Berwin Jessica M. Bibliowicz Allison M. Blinken James-Keith Brown H. Rodgin Cohen Jonathan Z. Cohen Ida Cole Donald G. Drapkin Curtland E. Fields Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Marlene Hess Judith Hiltz Linda LeRoy Janklow, Chairman Emeritus Jane Lisman Katz Betsy Kenny Lack

territory about love and compromise between mothers and sons, siblings, and husbands and wives, it is also very much about political lives: how minds are changed and alliances are formed. We’ve focused this issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review on illustrating the world that the Ferris family and their counterparts in prior generations occupied in our nation’s capital—the Washington insider’s world, where the persuasive power of a dinner-party conversation can influence policy and women played an important role behind the scenes. Today, that role is public, and Giardina’s play guides us through that important change.

This issue presents a lively and unusual blend of voices that provide background on Washington

The City Of Conversation

André Bishop Producing Artistic Director

relationship between the political and the personal. While the play traverses nuanced emotional

society in the second half of the twentieth century. The historian Sally Bedell Smith talks about hostesses in Washington, D.C., how the first families set the tone for socializing in the country’s

Kewsong Lee Memrie M. Lewis Robert E. Linton Ninah Lynne Phyllis Mailman Ellen R. Marram John Morning Elyse Newhouse Robert Pohly Stephanie Shuman Josh Silverman Howard Sloan David F. Solomon Tracey Travis Robert G. Wilmers William D. Zabel

John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, Mrs. Leonard Block, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

Putting the Personal Aside

by Anthony Giardina

capital, and how the role of the hostess has been transformed and diminished in recent years.

4

The attorney James Schroeder, the husband of former congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado, writes about being married to a renowned political figure; Christopher Buckley, satirist and novelist, speaks to our editors about living in Washington and glimpsing the lives of the élite there;

The Doyennes of D.C.: A History of the Hostess with Sally Bedell Smith

the novelist and playwright Jane Stanton Hitchcock describes the job of the hostess, the sparkle

6

and the hustle; and our co-executive editor, John Guare, offers a vignette of a moment from his college years when he espied the then relatively unknown Jackie Kennedy during her first years as a young wife in Georgetown. This issue also features a portfolio of the work of Larry Fink, whose lush

Talk of the Town: An Interview with Christopher Buckley

15

photographs shine a light on two, very different Americas. And, Anthony Giardina reveals how he came to write The City of Conversation and how an author ventures into creating something that is not autobiographical. This play, and by extension this issue, is a fascinating and eye-opening window into the way Washington operates, and how our political life is shaped not just by ideas but

The Drama of the Dinner

by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

18

Larry Fink Portfolio

19

The Denis Thatcher Society

by James Schroeder

21

by conversation. —The Editors

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman The Rosenthal Family Foundation, Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal and Nancy Stephens, Directors, is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

This edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review is also supported by the David C. Horn Foundation.

TO SUBSCRIBE to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org. © 2014 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

Georgetown, 1957

by John Guare

Front and back cover artwork by Omnivore. www.omnivorous.org

23

City of Compromise Washington, D.C., has always been a city of conversation and compromise. Here is a portion of a letter that Abigail Adams wrote in 1792 to her husband, John Adams, the vice-president and, later, the first U.S. president to sleep in the President’s House, in the nation’s newly constructed capital.

If you had known said a person to me the other day; that mr A.s would have remained so long abroad; would you have consented that he should have gone? I recollected myself a moment, and then spoke the real dictates of my Heart. If I had known sir that mr A. could have affected what he has done; I would not only have submitted to the absence I have endured; painfull as it has been; but I would not have opposed it, even tho 3 years more should be added to the Number, which Heaven avert! I feel a pleasure in being able to sacrifice my selfish passions to the general good, and in imitating the example which has taught me to consider myself and family, but as the small dust of the balance when compaired to the great community.

3

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Spring 2014, Issue Number 63 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor

Anthony Giardina's The City of Conversation, set in Washington, D.C., over three decades, is at once an intimate story of a family divided by politics and an insightful and compelling look at the Photograph © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos.

The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc., Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Brooke Garber Neidich and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary

Dorothy Berwin Jessica M. Bibliowicz Allison M. Blinken James-Keith Brown H. Rodgin Cohen Jonathan Z. Cohen Ida Cole Donald G. Drapkin Curtland E. Fields Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Marlene Hess Judith Hiltz Linda LeRoy Janklow, Chairman Emeritus Jane Lisman Katz Betsy Kenny Lack

territory about love and compromise between mothers and sons, siblings, and husbands and wives, it is also very much about political lives: how minds are changed and alliances are formed. We’ve focused this issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review on illustrating the world that the Ferris family and their counterparts in prior generations occupied in our nation’s capital—the Washington insider’s world, where the persuasive power of a dinner-party conversation can influence policy and women played an important role behind the scenes. Today, that role is public, and Giardina’s play guides us through that important change.

This issue presents a lively and unusual blend of voices that provide background on Washington

The City Of Conversation

André Bishop Producing Artistic Director

relationship between the political and the personal. While the play traverses nuanced emotional

society in the second half of the twentieth century. The historian Sally Bedell Smith talks about hostesses in Washington, D.C., how the first families set the tone for socializing in the country’s

Kewsong Lee Memrie M. Lewis Robert E. Linton Ninah Lynne Phyllis Mailman Ellen R. Marram John Morning Elyse Newhouse Robert Pohly Stephanie Shuman Josh Silverman Howard Sloan David F. Solomon Tracey Travis Robert G. Wilmers William D. Zabel

John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, Mrs. Leonard Block, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

Putting the Personal Aside

by Anthony Giardina

capital, and how the role of the hostess has been transformed and diminished in recent years.

4

The attorney James Schroeder, the husband of former congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado, writes about being married to a renowned political figure; Christopher Buckley, satirist and novelist, speaks to our editors about living in Washington and glimpsing the lives of the élite there;

The Doyennes of D.C.: A History of the Hostess with Sally Bedell Smith

the novelist and playwright Jane Stanton Hitchcock describes the job of the hostess, the sparkle

6

and the hustle; and our co-executive editor, John Guare, offers a vignette of a moment from his college years when he espied the then relatively unknown Jackie Kennedy during her first years as a young wife in Georgetown. This issue also features a portfolio of the work of Larry Fink, whose lush

Talk of the Town: An Interview with Christopher Buckley

15

photographs shine a light on two, very different Americas. And, Anthony Giardina reveals how he came to write The City of Conversation and how an author ventures into creating something that is not autobiographical. This play, and by extension this issue, is a fascinating and eye-opening window into the way Washington operates, and how our political life is shaped not just by ideas but

The Drama of the Dinner

by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

18

Larry Fink Portfolio

19

The Denis Thatcher Society

by James Schroeder

21

by conversation. —The Editors

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman The Rosenthal Family Foundation, Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal and Nancy Stephens, Directors, is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

This edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review is also supported by the David C. Horn Foundation.

TO SUBSCRIBE to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org. © 2014 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

Georgetown, 1957

by John Guare

Front and back cover artwork by Omnivore. www.omnivorous.org

23

City of Compromise Washington, D.C., has always been a city of conversation and compromise. Here is a portion of a letter that Abigail Adams wrote in 1792 to her husband, John Adams, the vice-president and, later, the first U.S. president to sleep in the President’s House, in the nation’s newly constructed capital.

If you had known said a person to me the other day; that mr A.s would have remained so long abroad; would you have consented that he should have gone? I recollected myself a moment, and then spoke the real dictates of my Heart. If I had known sir that mr A. could have affected what he has done; I would not only have submitted to the absence I have endured; painfull as it has been; but I would not have opposed it, even tho 3 years more should be added to the Number, which Heaven avert! I feel a pleasure in being able to sacrifice my selfish passions to the general good, and in imitating the example which has taught me to consider myself and family, but as the small dust of the balance when compaired to the great community.

3

Putting the Personal Aside

By An t h on y G iar d in a

 Sometime in 1996 (October, to be precise), I came upon an essay in The New Yorker called “The Ruins of Georgetown.” Sidney Blumenthal was the author; the essay was a kind of eulogy, melancholy and deeply appreciative, for the vanished liberal establishment that had flourished in Georgetown after World War II. Blumenthal resurrected a set of ghosts—the shades of all those dinner-party hostesses who had once been so important, so secretly powerful, in the old, vanished Washington, D.C., of the 1950s and ’60s. Though the essay focused largely on Joseph 4

Alsop and his wife, Susan Mary, it was larger in scope. It touched on a lost world, a lost set of agreements that had seemed to me, as I was growing up, to be the foundation of the political world.

Those agreements had to do with a permanent establishment in Washington—one given to compromise but tilted politically in a certain direction—that had seemed bedrock. Such parties don’t happen anymore (or, if they do, they happen very differently), and the agreements ...well, we all know what’s happened to

Photograph by Maria Miesenberger, Utan titel/Ohne Titel (Triptyk I/Triptych I), from the series Sverige/Schweden, 1998. © Maria Miesenberger 2014. Courtesy Lars Bohman Gallery/Stockholm. www.larsbohmangallery.com.



those. Writers are drawn to lost worlds. Someone should write a play about this, I remember thinking.

I suppose that buried somewhere in that initial thought was the supposition that that someone might be me. But the thought of writing such a play seemed a little far-fetched. I was in my mid-forties then, and had been a produced playwright for twenty years and a published novelist for ten. Though I was no stranger to research, I had, in my playwriting life, followed the familiar male pattern: I had gone from writing about Dad to writing about the problems of middle-aged maleness—all of it intensely personal, one might say even excessively self-involved. But such a journey is the classic American one, after all, the journey from Death of a Salesman to After the Fall. How did the world of Washington hostesses fit into that pattern? It didn’t. As haunted as I had become by the idea, as much as I had begun reading everything on the subject that I could get my hands on, it remained just that: an idea.

But why, if the subject was so important to me, did it have to be a play? The answer, for those who write both novels and plays, is that ideas never arrive formlessly. Novel ideas arrive for me in a smoky form, a bit hazy and uncertain, an image of someone in the world doing something, or perhaps simply waiting. But in the world. Play ideas, on the other hand, always arrive more crisply, as images that have to take place on a stage. If I was haunted by the image of a Washington hostess in decline, it was because I saw her on the stage, saw her moving across it in a beautiful dress, clipping on an earring, eager for the event that was about to happen. She wasn’t a character in a novel; she was a woman on a set, under lights. No less real, for that, but existing within a tighter frame. Still, as clearly as I saw her, I resisted writing her.

It took a conversation with Doug Hughes, who’d been directing my plays (four of them, including The City of Conversation) for more than thirty years, to force her into being. We’d been wrestling together with another play of mine—intensely personal, of course, about the sixties and the politics of the first decade of the twenty-first century, a play that tried to take some sort of measure of the social leap contained by those forty years. In the course of that conversation, Mr. Hughes asked me a question: What would happen if you left the personal aside? What would happen if you gave the self-exploration a rest and wrote a play that explored the same subject—the passage of time in American political life—but asked it not just in the context of what happened to you but in the context of what happened to us?

Eureka, I suppose. Or, at least, permission. Sidney Blumenthal’s ghosts immediately rose from the mists, where they'd been patiently waiting. The lost world of those hostesses and those mythical parties, where warring factions broke bread, and Jack Kennedy showed up late and grabbed Isaiah Berlin and took him into a corner for a little tête-à-tête.

At the time of my important conversation with Doug Hughes, Barack Obama had just been elected president. An epochal moment, to be sure. But it doesn’t take a great deal of self-congratulatory hindsight to say that one knew—one knew, without being able to say precisely how one knew—that the age of the American Agreement, the hearty postprandial handshakes

that led to so much important legislation, was gone, and that it wasn’t coming back. Those of us who were Obama supporters could rejoice while still understanding that an opposing force in American politics had been given a life that wasn’t going to be squelched by anything so ephemeral as an election that had seemed to ratify the reemergence of a left-leaning majority.

One might even say, without, I hope, stretching things too much, that the opposing force had grown, in part, out of those dinner parties—grown, at least, out of a fierce opposition to the assumptions behind those parties. The main assumption, of course, was that the country was meant to be run a certain way, forever. And by a certain set of people: the northeastern élite—what Joseph Alsop himself called “the WASP ascendancy” and Peggy Noonan called “Potomac royalty.” The voices of that opposing force were the voices of those who’d stood by a long time with their noses pressed to the glass of those Georgetown town houses. They’d broken the glass and they’d got in, and what they’d undone forever was the great sixties assumption that there was a permanent Washington, that liberalism would always triumph, that all those unpleasant Republican attempts to undo the great progressive agenda were only brushfires, to be put out as soon as Democrats were in the majority again.

To write a play about such a world—this world, our world— and to leave myself out entirely seems, still, a little strange. Listening to the play, I keep waiting for some young or middle-aged male to enter and deliver a monologue. That’s been, I have to say, with some embarrassment, a not insignificant part of my experience in the theater since André Bishop produced my first play, Living at Home, at Playwrights Horizons, in 1978. No matter what worlds I’ve entered as a playwright—a lower-middle-class Boston household in the sixties, an abortion clinic in the seventies, a too rapidly gentrifying Manhattan in the eighties, a New England college campus in the nineties, the scandal-plagued Catholic Church in the early two thousands—there’s been somebody, in each of these plays, who has carried the torch for my individual struggle.

But the fact of that self-flagellating male character’s having been left out of a play—out of this play—doesn’t, of course, make it any less personal. The “personal” is always going to find its way in. In this case, it’s landed on a woman in a Geoffrey Beene dress, her hair in curlers, her mind intensely focused on dinner plans, because tonight the senator from Kentucky is coming and the great business of the nation is waiting to be accomplished. It’s going to be accomplished over Cognac and cigars, after a very good dinner. She doesn’t know that her world is on its way out, that she’s about to become a figure of the past.

That awareness is all mine.

Anthony Giardina is the author of five novels—most recently, Norumbega Park—and a short-story collection. His plays have been produced at Playwrights Horizons and at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York, and regionally at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., Seattle Repertory Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, and Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. He is a regular visiting professor at the Michener Center for Writers, at the University of Texas at Austin. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

5

Putting the Personal Aside

By An t h on y G iar d in a

 Sometime in 1996 (October, to be precise), I came upon an essay in The New Yorker called “The Ruins of Georgetown.” Sidney Blumenthal was the author; the essay was a kind of eulogy, melancholy and deeply appreciative, for the vanished liberal establishment that had flourished in Georgetown after World War II. Blumenthal resurrected a set of ghosts—the shades of all those dinner-party hostesses who had once been so important, so secretly powerful, in the old, vanished Washington, D.C., of the 1950s and ’60s. Though the essay focused largely on Joseph 4

Alsop and his wife, Susan Mary, it was larger in scope. It touched on a lost world, a lost set of agreements that had seemed to me, as I was growing up, to be the foundation of the political world.

Those agreements had to do with a permanent establishment in Washington—one given to compromise but tilted politically in a certain direction—that had seemed bedrock. Such parties don’t happen anymore (or, if they do, they happen very differently), and the agreements ...well, we all know what’s happened to

Photograph by Maria Miesenberger, Utan titel/Ohne Titel (Triptyk I/Triptych I), from the series Sverige/Schweden, 1998. © Maria Miesenberger 2014. Courtesy Lars Bohman Gallery/Stockholm. www.larsbohmangallery.com.



those. Writers are drawn to lost worlds. Someone should write a play about this, I remember thinking.

I suppose that buried somewhere in that initial thought was the supposition that that someone might be me. But the thought of writing such a play seemed a little far-fetched. I was in my mid-forties then, and had been a produced playwright for twenty years and a published novelist for ten. Though I was no stranger to research, I had, in my playwriting life, followed the familiar male pattern: I had gone from writing about Dad to writing about the problems of middle-aged maleness—all of it intensely personal, one might say even excessively self-involved. But such a journey is the classic American one, after all, the journey from Death of a Salesman to After the Fall. How did the world of Washington hostesses fit into that pattern? It didn’t. As haunted as I had become by the idea, as much as I had begun reading everything on the subject that I could get my hands on, it remained just that: an idea.

But why, if the subject was so important to me, did it have to be a play? The answer, for those who write both novels and plays, is that ideas never arrive formlessly. Novel ideas arrive for me in a smoky form, a bit hazy and uncertain, an image of someone in the world doing something, or perhaps simply waiting. But in the world. Play ideas, on the other hand, always arrive more crisply, as images that have to take place on a stage. If I was haunted by the image of a Washington hostess in decline, it was because I saw her on the stage, saw her moving across it in a beautiful dress, clipping on an earring, eager for the event that was about to happen. She wasn’t a character in a novel; she was a woman on a set, under lights. No less real, for that, but existing within a tighter frame. Still, as clearly as I saw her, I resisted writing her.

It took a conversation with Doug Hughes, who’d been directing my plays (four of them, including The City of Conversation) for more than thirty years, to force her into being. We’d been wrestling together with another play of mine—intensely personal, of course, about the sixties and the politics of the first decade of the twenty-first century, a play that tried to take some sort of measure of the social leap contained by those forty years. In the course of that conversation, Mr. Hughes asked me a question: What would happen if you left the personal aside? What would happen if you gave the self-exploration a rest and wrote a play that explored the same subject—the passage of time in American political life—but asked it not just in the context of what happened to you but in the context of what happened to us?

Eureka, I suppose. Or, at least, permission. Sidney Blumenthal’s ghosts immediately rose from the mists, where they'd been patiently waiting. The lost world of those hostesses and those mythical parties, where warring factions broke bread, and Jack Kennedy showed up late and grabbed Isaiah Berlin and took him into a corner for a little tête-à-tête.

At the time of my important conversation with Doug Hughes, Barack Obama had just been elected president. An epochal moment, to be sure. But it doesn’t take a great deal of self-congratulatory hindsight to say that one knew—one knew, without being able to say precisely how one knew—that the age of the American Agreement, the hearty postprandial handshakes

that led to so much important legislation, was gone, and that it wasn’t coming back. Those of us who were Obama supporters could rejoice while still understanding that an opposing force in American politics had been given a life that wasn’t going to be squelched by anything so ephemeral as an election that had seemed to ratify the reemergence of a left-leaning majority.

One might even say, without, I hope, stretching things too much, that the opposing force had grown, in part, out of those dinner parties—grown, at least, out of a fierce opposition to the assumptions behind those parties. The main assumption, of course, was that the country was meant to be run a certain way, forever. And by a certain set of people: the northeastern élite—what Joseph Alsop himself called “the WASP ascendancy” and Peggy Noonan called “Potomac royalty.” The voices of that opposing force were the voices of those who’d stood by a long time with their noses pressed to the glass of those Georgetown town houses. They’d broken the glass and they’d got in, and what they’d undone forever was the great sixties assumption that there was a permanent Washington, that liberalism would always triumph, that all those unpleasant Republican attempts to undo the great progressive agenda were only brushfires, to be put out as soon as Democrats were in the majority again.

To write a play about such a world—this world, our world— and to leave myself out entirely seems, still, a little strange. Listening to the play, I keep waiting for some young or middle-aged male to enter and deliver a monologue. That’s been, I have to say, with some embarrassment, a not insignificant part of my experience in the theater since André Bishop produced my first play, Living at Home, at Playwrights Horizons, in 1978. No matter what worlds I’ve entered as a playwright—a lower-middle-class Boston household in the sixties, an abortion clinic in the seventies, a too rapidly gentrifying Manhattan in the eighties, a New England college campus in the nineties, the scandal-plagued Catholic Church in the early two thousands—there’s been somebody, in each of these plays, who has carried the torch for my individual struggle.

But the fact of that self-flagellating male character’s having been left out of a play—out of this play—doesn’t, of course, make it any less personal. The “personal” is always going to find its way in. In this case, it’s landed on a woman in a Geoffrey Beene dress, her hair in curlers, her mind intensely focused on dinner plans, because tonight the senator from Kentucky is coming and the great business of the nation is waiting to be accomplished. It’s going to be accomplished over Cognac and cigars, after a very good dinner. She doesn’t know that her world is on its way out, that she’s about to become a figure of the past.

That awareness is all mine.

Anthony Giardina is the author of five novels—most recently, Norumbega Park—and a short-story collection. His plays have been produced at Playwrights Horizons and at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York, and regionally at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., Seattle Repertory Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, and Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. He is a regular visiting professor at the Michener Center for Writers, at the University of Texas at Austin. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

5

 

The Doyennes of D.C.: A History of The Hostess with Sally Bedell Smith  Sally Bedell Smith, biographer and historian, the author of Grace and Power, Reflected Glory, For Love of Politics, and Elizabeth the Queen, spoke with our editors from her home in Washington, D.C. The hostess portrayed in The City of Conversation, I’m sad to say, is not just an endangered species; more than that, she is extinct, a victim of changing society, politics, and mores in the city.

My real knowledge begins with the Kennedys, but I do know something about what preceded that period. The Kennedys came in after a rather fallow time for White House entertaining. The Eisenhowers were older and more traditional in their approach. Perle Mesta, the famous hostess, who declared that she could get people to come to her parties by hanging out a lamb chop, said that the Eisenhowers were quite relaxed in their entertaining, as were the Trumans, who preceded them.

The tone of entertaining in Washington was really set by the White House. The first thing that it is important to understand is that the postwar Georgetown social core really had its origins in the 1930s, when prominent Jewish members of the Roosevelt administration were basically prevented from living in many Washington neighborhoods by restrictive covenants in the deeds on the homes.

Georgetown, which had lots of former servants’ quarters as well as beautiful mansions like Kay Graham’s house, had no limitations, so it became a magnet for liberals. Waves of new Democrats came in, particularly in the Kennedy and Johnson years, and many of them never left, which bound the whole Georgetown social core together with a sort of entitlement and a feeling of ownership. Henry Allen once wrote in the Washington Post that the Democrats, “always act as if they’d been born owning Washington, as if power were something akin to the family silver….When democrats are out, they act like a resentful nobility.”

There was a social stratification in Washington that existed for decades—for centuries, probably. There was that Georgetown social core, which was mostly journalists and people involved in the political world, but there were other self-important groups. There were the Cave Dwellers—they were the blue bloods—who go back four or five generations in places like Kalorama; there was the suburban country-club aristocracy, out in Chevy Chase. There was the important African-American élite going back many generations, who lived predominantly in mansions on the Sixteenth Street corridor. And then, of course, there was the country gentry out in Middleburg.

Some members of these groups became part of the Washington establishment if they had any kind of political or journalistic connections, but for the most part they were out on the periphery.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy’s daughter, who died at ninety-six

and ran a salon for many of those years, said, “Washington is all come and go.” The nature of power in Washington is always shifting, and anyone who has a powerful government post gets automatic admission. In that sense, it’s kind of meritocratic. The tricky part has always been keeping your standing in that élite after losing a high-ranking job, and many people drop from sight or return home, but an awful lot of others get addicted to the power and can’t leave, and the cleverest of them repackage themselves as lobbyists and consultants or journalists. I remember a Senate staffer who told me, "If you stick around this town long enough, you get an aura of respectability."

For a couple of centuries, the traditional role of hostess was really the main route for ambitious women in a city where the power was held by men. So you had Dolley Madison and Peggy Eaton in the nineteenth century, and you had Evalyn Walsh McLean, Perle Mesta, and Gwen Cafritz in the mid-twentieth century. Interestingly, these Washington hostesses had higher prestige than their counterparts in New York or Chicago. Arthur Schlesinger wrote, “The sternest purpose lurks under the highest frivolity.” As every close student of Washington knows, half the essential business of government, at least during Schlesinger’s time, was transacted in the evening. People didn’t hesitate to exchange gossip, but they also talked about issues. Hostesses had a pragmatic purpose: to arrange introductions and to provide places for influential men to share views in a relaxed, neutral, and, by and large, safe setting.

The hostesses were working very much in partnership with their husbands, the men in both parties who had influence and held the political power, and what they did, they did for their husbands. And the hostesses would get, as Ken Galbraith said, “the glow that comes from a sense of being in.” The shorthand for that is Potomac Fever, which people get when they come here and spend a long time.

These hostesses understood that, fundamentally, conversation makes a party. This brings us to the title of the play, which was inspired by the observation Henry James famously made when he first came to Washington, in the early twentieth century, and remarked on “the superior, the quite majestic fact of the City of Conversation pure and simple, and positively of the only specimen, of any such intensity, in the world.”

The Kennedy years were really the high-water mark of the Washington hostess. Betty Burton, a pillar of the city’s social establishment, said that when the Kennedys came in, old-fashioned Washington was kind of put on the side, because the Kennedys brought a whole new crowd to the District. Jackie liked to have pretty women and attractive men at her parties. It’s hard to believe, but that was the

beginning of the Jet Age, so they were bringing in jet-setters in a way that nobody had before. They brought Europeans. Betty said, “Who would have known who Gianni Agnelli was before the Kennedys?”

The other great thing about the Kennedys is that they really loved Washington in a way that no other presidential couple have since. Their friend Bill Walton said that Jack Kennedy had a feeling for Washington that was probably deeper than that of any president since Jefferson. Kennedy and Jackie planned to make the capital a far more beautiful city, and Pat Moynihan helped them. They had a profound impact on the way the city looks today. Kennedy famously described one of the things I love most about Washington: “It is a city of southern efficiency and northern charm.” A wonderful juxtaposition.

Jackie was the ne plus ultra of hostesses. She didn’t come from the outside. She had been a hostess in Georgetown before she came to the White House. She was a blue-blooded international. She was sophisticated. She was an unusual blend. She grew up across the river at Merrywood, in McLean; she finished her college education at George Washington University, but she was also very much of Manhattan, East Hampton, and Paris, where she spent her junior year of college and absorbed French history and culture, which was an essential part of how she reshaped White House life. She had matchless style, and she understood all the rules for how to make an evening really sparkle. Her sister, Lee Radziwill, said to me, “Our background was influential in knowing how things should be done.”

In some ways, Jackie’s approach would not be acceptable today, I’m afraid. Jackie was proudly aristocratic, and she enjoyed, without disguising it in any way, upper-class pursuits, like fox hunting. Above all, she was imaginative. She once said that she never wanted to be a vegetable wife—a sort of humdrum and uninteresting person.

She cultivated a mystique, and was conspicuously conversant with art and literature. She mistrusted the press, although she’d worked for a Washington paper briefly before she married Jack. But, most of all, her imagination carried over into her entertaining. Her aim was to create a lively and informal White House. In one of my favorite quotes from her, she said that she dreamed of being “a sort of overall art director of the twentieth century, watching everything from a chair hanging in space.” Harold Macmillan, who was then the British prime minister, captured the atmosphere of the Kennedy White House when he said, “They certainly have acquired something we have lost—a casual sort of grandeur about their evenings, always at the end of the day’s business, the promise of parties, and pretty women, and music and beautiful clothes, and champagne, and all of that. I must say there’s something very eighteenth century about your new young man, an aristocratic touch.” I almost called my book about them A Casual Grandeur, but then I changed it to Grace and Power, because that better captured Jack and Jackie.

Jackie’s restoration of the White House filled the residence with period antiques, and beautiful art, and sumptuous fabrics from the French interior designer Stéphane Boudin. She created a setting for the most extraordinary entertaining that’s ever—certainly in our lifetime—been in the White House.

Jackie used her power as a hostess, Susan Mary Alsop very astutely told me, “with tact and reticence.” She didn’t mix in politics.

She was a shrewd analyst, and was very helpful to Jack. But the key

thing was that Jackie felt that at small dinner parties—and this gets to the heart of the matter—men could talk to one another. She said the French understood this—that if you put busy men in an attractive atmosphere, in surroundings that are comfortable, where the food is good, they relax, they unwind, and there’s some stimulating conversation, and sometimes quite a lot can happen. Contacts can be made, and that’s part of the art of living in Washington.

Tish Baldridge, who was also a key force as Jackie’s social secretary, said that the Kennedys consciously excluded from White House parties what she called the political paybacks. Mainly, they chose people of accomplishment from across the spectrum of American life, and they really did have a court. Jackie admired Madame de Maintenon and Madame Récamier for their salons. And one of her heroines was Louise de la Vallière, a mistress of Louis XIV. The Kennedys had princes in their circle, they had dukes, they had writers, dancers, actors, journalists, society figures. Harold Macmillan called it the “smart life”(the international socialites and the Hollywood stars) the “highbrow life”(the pundits and the professors), and the “political life.” It was predominantly Democratic, but it was also bipartisan.

John Sherman Cooper and his wife, Lorraine, who were Republicans, were very much fixtures at these gatherings. That flowed from Kennedy himself. David Ormsby-Gore, who was Britain’s ambassador to the United States, said that it was striking how open Kennedy was to contrary opinions, sometimes very unpleasant ones. Jack once said to Ormsby-Gore, “One of the rather sad things about life is you discovered the other side really had a very good case.” And, again, that set a tone. Red Fay, who was a good friend and worked on Kennedy’s election campaigns, was a Republican, and there were, of course, journalists who were very much part of the inner circle, like Ben Bradlee, Charley Bartlett, Joe Alsop, and Phil Graham, the president of the Washington Post. They had blue bloods like Douglas Dillon, also a Republican, who was the secretary of the Treasury. There were Bunny and Paul Mellon, who I always thought were sort of like Edith Wharton’s van der Luydens, who lived in a world of their own; Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., a link to the past; Arthur Schlesinger, who was the court historian; William Walton, who identified with Henry Adams.

Walton called Adams a “stable-companion to statesmen” who lived “on the edge of great events” during Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency.

And then there was the larger-than-life Kennedy family.

Nobody today would ever do the kind of entertaining the Kennedys did in the White House, where Cuba Libres were served in huge tumblers, and the guest lists were made up of people who were chosen not only for their accomplishments but also for their beauty.

The range of the parties and dinners they hosted was astonishing.

They had an unbelievably opulent dinner at Mount Vernon for the president of Pakistan, and the whole purpose was to evoke aristocracy. They routinely went to Georgetown to have dinner at the home of Joe and Susan Mary Alsop. Sometimes the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire were here. Jackie staged Shakespeare at the White House, and Pablo Casals performed. They had a big dinner dance for Gianni and Marella Agnelli, where the twist was introduced at the White House. Lyndon Johnson danced so vigorously that he fell



 

The Doyennes of D.C.: A History of The Hostess with Sally Bedell Smith  Sally Bedell Smith, biographer and historian, the author of Grace and Power, Reflected Glory, For Love of Politics, and Elizabeth the Queen, spoke with our editors from her home in Washington, D.C. The hostess portrayed in The City of Conversation, I’m sad to say, is not just an endangered species; more than that, she is extinct, a victim of changing society, politics, and mores in the city.

My real knowledge begins with the Kennedys, but I do know something about what preceded that period. The Kennedys came in after a rather fallow time for White House entertaining. The Eisenhowers were older and more traditional in their approach. Perle Mesta, the famous hostess, who declared that she could get people to come to her parties by hanging out a lamb chop, said that the Eisenhowers were quite relaxed in their entertaining, as were the Trumans, who preceded them.

The tone of entertaining in Washington was really set by the White House. The first thing that it is important to understand is that the postwar Georgetown social core really had its origins in the 1930s, when prominent Jewish members of the Roosevelt administration were basically prevented from living in many Washington neighborhoods by restrictive covenants in the deeds on the homes.

Georgetown, which had lots of former servants’ quarters as well as beautiful mansions like Kay Graham’s house, had no limitations, so it became a magnet for liberals. Waves of new Democrats came in, particularly in the Kennedy and Johnson years, and many of them never left, which bound the whole Georgetown social core together with a sort of entitlement and a feeling of ownership. Henry Allen once wrote in the Washington Post that the Democrats, “always act as if they’d been born owning Washington, as if power were something akin to the family silver….When democrats are out, they act like a resentful nobility.”

There was a social stratification in Washington that existed for decades—for centuries, probably. There was that Georgetown social core, which was mostly journalists and people involved in the political world, but there were other self-important groups. There were the Cave Dwellers—they were the blue bloods—who go back four or five generations in places like Kalorama; there was the suburban country-club aristocracy, out in Chevy Chase. There was the important African-American élite going back many generations, who lived predominantly in mansions on the Sixteenth Street corridor. And then, of course, there was the country gentry out in Middleburg.

Some members of these groups became part of the Washington establishment if they had any kind of political or journalistic connections, but for the most part they were out on the periphery.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy’s daughter, who died at ninety-six

and ran a salon for many of those years, said, “Washington is all come and go.” The nature of power in Washington is always shifting, and anyone who has a powerful government post gets automatic admission. In that sense, it’s kind of meritocratic. The tricky part has always been keeping your standing in that élite after losing a high-ranking job, and many people drop from sight or return home, but an awful lot of others get addicted to the power and can’t leave, and the cleverest of them repackage themselves as lobbyists and consultants or journalists. I remember a Senate staffer who told me, "If you stick around this town long enough, you get an aura of respectability."

For a couple of centuries, the traditional role of hostess was really the main route for ambitious women in a city where the power was held by men. So you had Dolley Madison and Peggy Eaton in the nineteenth century, and you had Evalyn Walsh McLean, Perle Mesta, and Gwen Cafritz in the mid-twentieth century. Interestingly, these Washington hostesses had higher prestige than their counterparts in New York or Chicago. Arthur Schlesinger wrote, “The sternest purpose lurks under the highest frivolity.” As every close student of Washington knows, half the essential business of government, at least during Schlesinger’s time, was transacted in the evening. People didn’t hesitate to exchange gossip, but they also talked about issues. Hostesses had a pragmatic purpose: to arrange introductions and to provide places for influential men to share views in a relaxed, neutral, and, by and large, safe setting.

The hostesses were working very much in partnership with their husbands, the men in both parties who had influence and held the political power, and what they did, they did for their husbands. And the hostesses would get, as Ken Galbraith said, “the glow that comes from a sense of being in.” The shorthand for that is Potomac Fever, which people get when they come here and spend a long time.

These hostesses understood that, fundamentally, conversation makes a party. This brings us to the title of the play, which was inspired by the observation Henry James famously made when he first came to Washington, in the early twentieth century, and remarked on “the superior, the quite majestic fact of the City of Conversation pure and simple, and positively of the only specimen, of any such intensity, in the world.”

The Kennedy years were really the high-water mark of the Washington hostess. Betty Burton, a pillar of the city’s social establishment, said that when the Kennedys came in, old-fashioned Washington was kind of put on the side, because the Kennedys brought a whole new crowd to the District. Jackie liked to have pretty women and attractive men at her parties. It’s hard to believe, but that was the

beginning of the Jet Age, so they were bringing in jet-setters in a way that nobody had before. They brought Europeans. Betty said, “Who would have known who Gianni Agnelli was before the Kennedys?”

The other great thing about the Kennedys is that they really loved Washington in a way that no other presidential couple have since. Their friend Bill Walton said that Jack Kennedy had a feeling for Washington that was probably deeper than that of any president since Jefferson. Kennedy and Jackie planned to make the capital a far more beautiful city, and Pat Moynihan helped them. They had a profound impact on the way the city looks today. Kennedy famously described one of the things I love most about Washington: “It is a city of southern efficiency and northern charm.” A wonderful juxtaposition.

Jackie was the ne plus ultra of hostesses. She didn’t come from the outside. She had been a hostess in Georgetown before she came to the White House. She was a blue-blooded international. She was sophisticated. She was an unusual blend. She grew up across the river at Merrywood, in McLean; she finished her college education at George Washington University, but she was also very much of Manhattan, East Hampton, and Paris, where she spent her junior year of college and absorbed French history and culture, which was an essential part of how she reshaped White House life. She had matchless style, and she understood all the rules for how to make an evening really sparkle. Her sister, Lee Radziwill, said to me, “Our background was influential in knowing how things should be done.”

In some ways, Jackie’s approach would not be acceptable today, I’m afraid. Jackie was proudly aristocratic, and she enjoyed, without disguising it in any way, upper-class pursuits, like fox hunting. Above all, she was imaginative. She once said that she never wanted to be a vegetable wife—a sort of humdrum and uninteresting person.

She cultivated a mystique, and was conspicuously conversant with art and literature. She mistrusted the press, although she’d worked for a Washington paper briefly before she married Jack. But, most of all, her imagination carried over into her entertaining. Her aim was to create a lively and informal White House. In one of my favorite quotes from her, she said that she dreamed of being “a sort of overall art director of the twentieth century, watching everything from a chair hanging in space.” Harold Macmillan, who was then the British prime minister, captured the atmosphere of the Kennedy White House when he said, “They certainly have acquired something we have lost—a casual sort of grandeur about their evenings, always at the end of the day’s business, the promise of parties, and pretty women, and music and beautiful clothes, and champagne, and all of that. I must say there’s something very eighteenth century about your new young man, an aristocratic touch.” I almost called my book about them A Casual Grandeur, but then I changed it to Grace and Power, because that better captured Jack and Jackie.

Jackie’s restoration of the White House filled the residence with period antiques, and beautiful art, and sumptuous fabrics from the French interior designer Stéphane Boudin. She created a setting for the most extraordinary entertaining that’s ever—certainly in our lifetime—been in the White House.

Jackie used her power as a hostess, Susan Mary Alsop very astutely told me, “with tact and reticence.” She didn’t mix in politics.

She was a shrewd analyst, and was very helpful to Jack. But the key

thing was that Jackie felt that at small dinner parties—and this gets to the heart of the matter—men could talk to one another. She said the French understood this—that if you put busy men in an attractive atmosphere, in surroundings that are comfortable, where the food is good, they relax, they unwind, and there’s some stimulating conversation, and sometimes quite a lot can happen. Contacts can be made, and that’s part of the art of living in Washington.

Tish Baldridge, who was also a key force as Jackie’s social secretary, said that the Kennedys consciously excluded from White House parties what she called the political paybacks. Mainly, they chose people of accomplishment from across the spectrum of American life, and they really did have a court. Jackie admired Madame de Maintenon and Madame Récamier for their salons. And one of her heroines was Louise de la Vallière, a mistress of Louis XIV. The Kennedys had princes in their circle, they had dukes, they had writers, dancers, actors, journalists, society figures. Harold Macmillan called it the “smart life”(the international socialites and the Hollywood stars) the “highbrow life”(the pundits and the professors), and the “political life.” It was predominantly Democratic, but it was also bipartisan.

John Sherman Cooper and his wife, Lorraine, who were Republicans, were very much fixtures at these gatherings. That flowed from Kennedy himself. David Ormsby-Gore, who was Britain’s ambassador to the United States, said that it was striking how open Kennedy was to contrary opinions, sometimes very unpleasant ones. Jack once said to Ormsby-Gore, “One of the rather sad things about life is you discovered the other side really had a very good case.” And, again, that set a tone. Red Fay, who was a good friend and worked on Kennedy’s election campaigns, was a Republican, and there were, of course, journalists who were very much part of the inner circle, like Ben Bradlee, Charley Bartlett, Joe Alsop, and Phil Graham, the president of the Washington Post. They had blue bloods like Douglas Dillon, also a Republican, who was the secretary of the Treasury. There were Bunny and Paul Mellon, who I always thought were sort of like Edith Wharton’s van der Luydens, who lived in a world of their own; Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., a link to the past; Arthur Schlesinger, who was the court historian; William Walton, who identified with Henry Adams.

Walton called Adams a “stable-companion to statesmen” who lived “on the edge of great events” during Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency.

And then there was the larger-than-life Kennedy family.

Nobody today would ever do the kind of entertaining the Kennedys did in the White House, where Cuba Libres were served in huge tumblers, and the guest lists were made up of people who were chosen not only for their accomplishments but also for their beauty.

The range of the parties and dinners they hosted was astonishing.

They had an unbelievably opulent dinner at Mount Vernon for the president of Pakistan, and the whole purpose was to evoke aristocracy. They routinely went to Georgetown to have dinner at the home of Joe and Susan Mary Alsop. Sometimes the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire were here. Jackie staged Shakespeare at the White House, and Pablo Casals performed. They had a big dinner dance for Gianni and Marella Agnelli, where the twist was introduced at the White House. Lyndon Johnson danced so vigorously that he fell



 the arrival of Pamela Hayward in August of 1971. Averell Harriman, her lover from World War II, was seventy-nine years old; she’d been recently widowed, following Leland Hayward’s death. She was fifty-one, and arranged to come to a dinner party at Kay Graham’s because she knew that Averell, who was also recently widowed, would be there. She cast her spell again, and within eight weeks they were married. His wife, Marie, had been a very successful political hostess

 If you put busy men in an attractive atmosphere, in surroundings that are comfortable, where the food is good, they relax, they unwind, and there’s some stimulating conversation, and sometimes quite a lot can happen. Contacts can be made, and it’s part of the art of living in Washington.  of a different sort, but Pam and Averell were married at the end of September, only six months after Leland died. Averell introduced Pamela at a huge party—five hundred people came to his house in Georgetown to meet her. David and Evangeline Bruce had a party for her. She cut a very wide swath. She was viewed with a jaundiced eye by the established hostesses, like Luvie Pearson, the widow of Drew Pearson, but she brought a different sort of glamour to Washington. She was English, the daughter of Lord Digby. She was the former daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill. She’d led the life of a courtesan in Paris, with Gianni Agnelli, and Élie de Rothschild, and Ali Khan, and Stavros Niarchos. She had a very exclusive club of lovers. So in 1971 Pamela arrived in Georgetown, where the élite was still mostly Democratic, and was still dominated by Achesons and Kennedys, Grahams, Alsops, and Harrimans.

Pamela’s evolution as a hostess is quite fascinating. She first sort of molded herself to Averell’s interests and became a very traditional hostess, but she did it in her own particular way. She would have lunches and dinners in the British tradition. I remember talking to Tom Brokaw, who was new to Washington in the early seventies, and was struck, when he was invited to Pamela’s house for dinner, by how perfectly she’d balanced the dinner table. She had Joe Biden, who was then a bright young politician; she had Gaylord Nelson, who was sort of an old pol; she had Clayton Fritchey, a prominent journalist, and his wife, Polly; and she had Clark Clifford, a Washington powerbroker. After dinner, the men went into the study for cigars and talk, and the women went upstairs. She was a natural, because she’d always loved power and politics. She understood that politics was power, and she cultivated politicians. Then Watergate rocked the capital.

The Fords came in; it was an easygoing presidency. It was an

Painting by Julia Jacquette, My Houses (Dining Room with Horse Painting), 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

on Helen Chavchavadze, who was one of Jack’s secret lovers. The next day, Mac Bundy was severely hung over in the West Wing, and Ken Galbraith watched him try three times to find a document to give him; he was completely befuddled. Imagine Jackie and her sister, Lee, teaching Averell Harriman and Robert McNamara to do the twist! The Kennedys had a famous dinner for the forty-nine Nobel Prize winners, which they called the Brains Dinner. The guest list was unbelievably impressive—the Trillings, Mary Hemingway, George Marshall’s widow, William Styron, Robert Frost—and, afterward, a dozen guests gathered upstairs to drink and talk while Jack smoked a Cuban cigar. When they all crowded into the elevator after midnight, Bobby Kennedy said, “Hold on, Mr. Frost!” A dinner for André Malraux had another illustrious guest list that featured Tennessee Williams, Saul Bellow, Elia Kazan, and Archibald MacLeish, and it just goes on and on. This level of entertaining at the White House really set the tone for Washington entertaining overall.

Jackie decided that you could have better conversation if you had eight or ten people sitting at a round table, so she came up with the idea of putting plywood tops on her tables to make them large enough, with tablecloths that dropped to the floor. This form of entertaining was copied all over Washington.

There were great hostesses in Washington during the Kennedy years. Oatsie Charles would have costume parties. Once, she wore a black fur hat and a black-and-white bodysuit to symbolize immigration. Clearly, there was a dark side, too. Mistresses were included in a lot of these parties. Jackie was aware of these women, but she turned a blind eye. I remember that Schlesinger very delicately described her and Jack's relationship as one of reciprocal forbearance.

Then there was the assassination. It was a massive shock to the country and to the city. Joe Alsop wrote that Washington was “littered with male widows.” These were all the people who had been around Jack and who had revered him, and they were for a period of time quite lost. There was a moment right before the funeral when Mary McGrory gave a dinner for a group of friends, and she said to Pat Moynihan, “You know, we’ll never laugh again.” Moynihan replied, “We will, but we’ll never be young again.”

The glamour diminished considerably. There was still conversation. People like Perle Mesta were still giving parties and being entertained by the Johnsons. The style of entertaining in the White House changed, though—a lot of barbecue was served. Perle said the Johnsons brought a Texas atmosphere to the White House, which was very noisy. And the hostesses continued. Then, in 1968, the Johnson era ended, and Nixon was elected and, again, Perle Mesta, who was right in the thick of things for so many years, said that the Nixons were quieter. But then again, she added, “there’s never been anybody as noisy as the Texans.”

Nixon was more of an outsider than any of his predecessors, even though he’d lived in Washington since 1946. He’d been a fixture there when he was elected to Congress and the Senate, but still considered himself an outsider, and was viewed as one. He was introverted; he was awkward. He’d go to Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s for dinner, but he wasn’t a social animal.

One of the most interesting phenomena of the Nixon era was

accidental presidency. It was short. He was very well known in Washington, because he’d been in Congress for many years and he’d been vice-president. In a sense, the social scene got a little livelier after Nixon, not least because there was such relief at the end of the Nixon drama and his resignation. Kay Graham, with the triumph of her reporters and editors after Watergate, emerged as Washington’s most powerful woman. Being chairman of the Washington Post gave her equal billing with men, even as she was the most prestigious hostess. But Pamela was very much on the move, and she said to Lucy Moorhead, who was the wife of a congressman, “I wish the phrase ‘dinner party’ had not been invented. Dinner is about something serious. You get substance from a dinner, you learn something.

A party is a celebration. Averell and I far more often have dinners because a dinner has a purpose.” This was the moment when the notion of having fun at a dinner party began to diminish.

The Carter years were a low point socially. The Carter White House really de-emphasized entertaining; he didn’t even serve drinks

in the White House, which is not conducive to having a great time.

This was also when Pamela started ratcheting up her fund-raising capability with her talents as a hostess. She and Averell were late on the Carter bandwagon, but they tried to ingratiate themselves with the new president. On the eve of the election they gave a buffet dinner for sixty Carter supporters, and on inauguration night they hosted an even bigger party, which they sprinkled with a little Hollywood gold dust—Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty.

Then, in the Reagan years, the tone shifted again. Reagan is a fascinating case, because, unlike Kennedy, he was a true outsider: he was from the West Coast. But he and Nancy were charming; they knew how to effectively work the Washington social scene, and Reagan made an effort to socialize across the aisle. He famously had a very congenial relationship with Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House, and Nancy quite cleverly befriended Robert Strauss, one of the biggest Democratic powerbrokers.



 the arrival of Pamela Hayward in August of 1971. Averell Harriman, her lover from World War II, was seventy-nine years old; she’d been recently widowed, following Leland Hayward’s death. She was fifty-one, and arranged to come to a dinner party at Kay Graham’s because she knew that Averell, who was also recently widowed, would be there. She cast her spell again, and within eight weeks they were married. His wife, Marie, had been a very successful political hostess

 If you put busy men in an attractive atmosphere, in surroundings that are comfortable, where the food is good, they relax, they unwind, and there’s some stimulating conversation, and sometimes quite a lot can happen. Contacts can be made, and it’s part of the art of living in Washington.  of a different sort, but Pam and Averell were married at the end of September, only six months after Leland died. Averell introduced Pamela at a huge party—five hundred people came to his house in Georgetown to meet her. David and Evangeline Bruce had a party for her. She cut a very wide swath. She was viewed with a jaundiced eye by the established hostesses, like Luvie Pearson, the widow of Drew Pearson, but she brought a different sort of glamour to Washington. She was English, the daughter of Lord Digby. She was the former daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill. She’d led the life of a courtesan in Paris, with Gianni Agnelli, and Élie de Rothschild, and Ali Khan, and Stavros Niarchos. She had a very exclusive club of lovers. So in 1971 Pamela arrived in Georgetown, where the élite was still mostly Democratic, and was still dominated by Achesons and Kennedys, Grahams, Alsops, and Harrimans.

Pamela’s evolution as a hostess is quite fascinating. She first sort of molded herself to Averell’s interests and became a very traditional hostess, but she did it in her own particular way. She would have lunches and dinners in the British tradition. I remember talking to Tom Brokaw, who was new to Washington in the early seventies, and was struck, when he was invited to Pamela’s house for dinner, by how perfectly she’d balanced the dinner table. She had Joe Biden, who was then a bright young politician; she had Gaylord Nelson, who was sort of an old pol; she had Clayton Fritchey, a prominent journalist, and his wife, Polly; and she had Clark Clifford, a Washington powerbroker. After dinner, the men went into the study for cigars and talk, and the women went upstairs. She was a natural, because she’d always loved power and politics. She understood that politics was power, and she cultivated politicians. Then Watergate rocked the capital.

The Fords came in; it was an easygoing presidency. It was an

Painting by Julia Jacquette, My Houses (Dining Room with Horse Painting), 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

on Helen Chavchavadze, who was one of Jack’s secret lovers. The next day, Mac Bundy was severely hung over in the West Wing, and Ken Galbraith watched him try three times to find a document to give him; he was completely befuddled. Imagine Jackie and her sister, Lee, teaching Averell Harriman and Robert McNamara to do the twist! The Kennedys had a famous dinner for the forty-nine Nobel Prize winners, which they called the Brains Dinner. The guest list was unbelievably impressive—the Trillings, Mary Hemingway, George Marshall’s widow, William Styron, Robert Frost—and, afterward, a dozen guests gathered upstairs to drink and talk while Jack smoked a Cuban cigar. When they all crowded into the elevator after midnight, Bobby Kennedy said, “Hold on, Mr. Frost!” A dinner for André Malraux had another illustrious guest list that featured Tennessee Williams, Saul Bellow, Elia Kazan, and Archibald MacLeish, and it just goes on and on. This level of entertaining at the White House really set the tone for Washington entertaining overall.

Jackie decided that you could have better conversation if you had eight or ten people sitting at a round table, so she came up with the idea of putting plywood tops on her tables to make them large enough, with tablecloths that dropped to the floor. This form of entertaining was copied all over Washington.

There were great hostesses in Washington during the Kennedy years. Oatsie Charles would have costume parties. Once, she wore a black fur hat and a black-and-white bodysuit to symbolize immigration. Clearly, there was a dark side, too. Mistresses were included in a lot of these parties. Jackie was aware of these women, but she turned a blind eye. I remember that Schlesinger very delicately described her and Jack's relationship as one of reciprocal forbearance.

Then there was the assassination. It was a massive shock to the country and to the city. Joe Alsop wrote that Washington was “littered with male widows.” These were all the people who had been around Jack and who had revered him, and they were for a period of time quite lost. There was a moment right before the funeral when Mary McGrory gave a dinner for a group of friends, and she said to Pat Moynihan, “You know, we’ll never laugh again.” Moynihan replied, “We will, but we’ll never be young again.”

The glamour diminished considerably. There was still conversation. People like Perle Mesta were still giving parties and being entertained by the Johnsons. The style of entertaining in the White House changed, though—a lot of barbecue was served. Perle said the Johnsons brought a Texas atmosphere to the White House, which was very noisy. And the hostesses continued. Then, in 1968, the Johnson era ended, and Nixon was elected and, again, Perle Mesta, who was right in the thick of things for so many years, said that the Nixons were quieter. But then again, she added, “there’s never been anybody as noisy as the Texans.”

Nixon was more of an outsider than any of his predecessors, even though he’d lived in Washington since 1946. He’d been a fixture there when he was elected to Congress and the Senate, but still considered himself an outsider, and was viewed as one. He was introverted; he was awkward. He’d go to Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s for dinner, but he wasn’t a social animal.

One of the most interesting phenomena of the Nixon era was

accidental presidency. It was short. He was very well known in Washington, because he’d been in Congress for many years and he’d been vice-president. In a sense, the social scene got a little livelier after Nixon, not least because there was such relief at the end of the Nixon drama and his resignation. Kay Graham, with the triumph of her reporters and editors after Watergate, emerged as Washington’s most powerful woman. Being chairman of the Washington Post gave her equal billing with men, even as she was the most prestigious hostess. But Pamela was very much on the move, and she said to Lucy Moorhead, who was the wife of a congressman, “I wish the phrase ‘dinner party’ had not been invented. Dinner is about something serious. You get substance from a dinner, you learn something.

A party is a celebration. Averell and I far more often have dinners because a dinner has a purpose.” This was the moment when the notion of having fun at a dinner party began to diminish.

The Carter years were a low point socially. The Carter White House really de-emphasized entertaining; he didn’t even serve drinks

in the White House, which is not conducive to having a great time.

This was also when Pamela started ratcheting up her fund-raising capability with her talents as a hostess. She and Averell were late on the Carter bandwagon, but they tried to ingratiate themselves with the new president. On the eve of the election they gave a buffet dinner for sixty Carter supporters, and on inauguration night they hosted an even bigger party, which they sprinkled with a little Hollywood gold dust—Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty.

Then, in the Reagan years, the tone shifted again. Reagan is a fascinating case, because, unlike Kennedy, he was a true outsider: he was from the West Coast. But he and Nancy were charming; they knew how to effectively work the Washington social scene, and Reagan made an effort to socialize across the aisle. He famously had a very congenial relationship with Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House, and Nancy quite cleverly befriended Robert Strauss, one of the biggest Democratic powerbrokers.



 Pam set up a political-action committee called Democrats for the Eighties, which became known as PamPAC. This was a really different form of entertaining. Her evenings became much more partisan; they became issues evenings, during which prominent Democrats were introduced to up-and-coming Democrats who were going to be the future stars in the Democratic Party—most prominently, Bill Clinton and Al Gore. These evenings had real cachet, because the Harrimans’ home was beautiful. Averell had paintings

 The art of conversation is becoming attenuated. It’s being overwhelmed by the fragmentary nature of Twitter and by the cacophony of TV and radio. The political discourse here has very sadly become a kind of echo chamber. Increasingly, people in Washington want to hear only affirmations of what they believe.  political orientation. I was there at her seventieth-birthday party in 1987, which was a huge bash at the Mellon Auditorium. I was dancing with somebody, and Kay and Ronald Reagan came swooping by me, dancing together. It was just a great scene.

Kay would have big dinners for fifty or sixty people, and it was invariably a bipartisan room, everybody sitting at round tables. There were probably more Democrats in the room than there were Republicans, but the point was that people were able to have sensible, reasoned conversations in safe places where they wouldn’t be overheard or reported on.

It was in those years, after the Democrats had gotten walloped in the presidential election and had lost the Senate, that Averell and

Watercolor by Julia Jacquette, My Houses (Chintz Couches and Coffee Table with Roses), 2006. Courtesy of the artist.

Like the Kennedys, the Reagans created a new form of glamour in Washington and made it appealing, with Hollywood types and New Yorkers, people like Oscar de la Renta. They had a state dinner every month. They dressed in white tie.

There were a lot of lively embassy parties in those years. Georgetown was still the center of gravity, and there were still terrific hostesses who knew how to have gatherings in the old style, like Susan Mary Alsop (Joe had died), Oatsie Charles, and Vangie Bruce.

In the eighties, Kay Graham was the top ticket in Washington.

She very conspicuously reached out to Ronald and Nancy Reagan and became genuinely friendly with them, despite her Democratic

by van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, and Renoir, and Pam’s beautiful antiques. It was a kind of government-in-waiting on N Street in Georgetown.

That was a real turning point—Pamela gave hostessing a specific partisan gloss. She was building her power base, and a new power base for the Democratic Party. You can’t underestimate the role she played in networking. From the time she was a young woman in England, even before she turned twenty, she was perfecting the art of networking.

I remember talking to Liz Rohatyn once, and she said, “Well, she’s doing for the Democratic Party what she always did for her men.” When Pamela first met Gianni Agnelli, he was a very provincial character from Turin, and she set about introducing him to all the most influential men she could find, including Winston Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook. She got him a franchise in North America.

She was a master at networking and connecting people to the people they needed to know.

So she was operating in her own sphere; the Reagans enlivened Washington society as a whole; and then Bush 41 came, and he was much more in the spirit of Eastern establishment entertaining. He was familiar with Washington; he’d lived here. His attitude was quite open, and he, too, was smart enough to socialize with the opposition. He once told his social secretary that he really did believe that if two world leaders could have lunch or dinner and have an informal conversation they could more easily negotiate tricky issues in their business meetings. He frequently entertained opposition Democrats.

Then, in 1992–93, the Clintons and the Gores came in. They were two very attractive young couples who summoned up a sort of

Kennedy-style vigor. Even before the inauguration, they were prominently guests of honor at dinner parties hosted by Pamela, Vernon Jordan, one of the great powerbrokers in Washington, and Kay Graham. This was all designed to introduce Bill and Hillary to the movers and shakers.

But the Clintons’ style grated against the Washington grain.

Their inaugural committee described its four-day celebration as a cross between a state dinner and a Crittenden County coon supper.

It had a folksiness to it: Kenny G played the saxophone, and Bill’s brother, Roger, sang at the MTV inaugural ball; Virginia Kelley, Bill’s mother, with her three-foot-high hairdo, couldn’t believe that hard liquor was banned at the Arkansas ball, so she sent a man to a package store for a bottle of Chivas Regal; and Hillary’s brothers were kind of like the Festrunk Brothers on Saturday Night Live—they were just nothing but trouble. You couldn’t make them up. There were a lot of Washington establishment people rolling their eyes.

The Clintons were wary of Washington, and there were those in their circle who were quite openly antagonistic—certainly to the Washington media. Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, a TV writer and Arkansas friend, said that Hillary considered Washington to be treacherous. So the Clintons were not an easy fit. They waited almost a year and a half before hosting their first state dinner; the Kennedys had a half-dozen state dinners during that same period.

Getting back to the notion that the White House sets the tone for the hostesses in Washington, Hillary was the first first lady to have an office in the West Wing, and she really wasn’t interested in the way the White House social activity had been conducted. She and Bill said they wanted to get away, in their official entertaining, from what they called “the Republican way.” Hillary also had an East Wing office, but everything had a political tilt. She told Ann Stock, her first social secretary, that she considered the role of social secretary to be one of the most political jobs, sort of like running a small ad agency and taking the day’s message and translating it into events for the president and the first lady. At the beginning, the Clintons would venture out to the homes of friends in Georgetown and to local restaurants, but, as they became more engulfed by scandal, that became increasingly rare. The private gatherings they tended to like most in the White House were their movie nights, and there they did bring in the Hollywood contingent. Steven Spielberg came, and Tom Hanks and Barbra Streisand. But their tight circle was from Arkansas, and so, with the exception of a few friends like George and Liz Stevens, whose house they would go to, they didn’t mingle with the Georgetown set very much at all. The Clintons were hit by scandals from the beginning: questions about Whitewater that trailed them to the White House like tin cans on their ankles; the death of Vincent Foster. So they adopted a bunker mentality quite early, and they compounded the problem by selling nights in the Lincoln Bedroom to political contributors. White House entertaining became, for the first time, really politicized. The Democratic National Committee actually controlled the guest lists. This was in sharp contrast to the Kennedys, who, if they were given political contributors to be invited to White House parties, would just throw those lists out. The Clintons built an enormous tent behind the White House



 Pam set up a political-action committee called Democrats for the Eighties, which became known as PamPAC. This was a really different form of entertaining. Her evenings became much more partisan; they became issues evenings, during which prominent Democrats were introduced to up-and-coming Democrats who were going to be the future stars in the Democratic Party—most prominently, Bill Clinton and Al Gore. These evenings had real cachet, because the Harrimans’ home was beautiful. Averell had paintings

 The art of conversation is becoming attenuated. It’s being overwhelmed by the fragmentary nature of Twitter and by the cacophony of TV and radio. The political discourse here has very sadly become a kind of echo chamber. Increasingly, people in Washington want to hear only affirmations of what they believe.  political orientation. I was there at her seventieth-birthday party in 1987, which was a huge bash at the Mellon Auditorium. I was dancing with somebody, and Kay and Ronald Reagan came swooping by me, dancing together. It was just a great scene.

Kay would have big dinners for fifty or sixty people, and it was invariably a bipartisan room, everybody sitting at round tables. There were probably more Democrats in the room than there were Republicans, but the point was that people were able to have sensible, reasoned conversations in safe places where they wouldn’t be overheard or reported on.

It was in those years, after the Democrats had gotten walloped in the presidential election and had lost the Senate, that Averell and

Watercolor by Julia Jacquette, My Houses (Chintz Couches and Coffee Table with Roses), 2006. Courtesy of the artist.

Like the Kennedys, the Reagans created a new form of glamour in Washington and made it appealing, with Hollywood types and New Yorkers, people like Oscar de la Renta. They had a state dinner every month. They dressed in white tie.

There were a lot of lively embassy parties in those years. Georgetown was still the center of gravity, and there were still terrific hostesses who knew how to have gatherings in the old style, like Susan Mary Alsop (Joe had died), Oatsie Charles, and Vangie Bruce.

In the eighties, Kay Graham was the top ticket in Washington.

She very conspicuously reached out to Ronald and Nancy Reagan and became genuinely friendly with them, despite her Democratic

by van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, and Renoir, and Pam’s beautiful antiques. It was a kind of government-in-waiting on N Street in Georgetown.

That was a real turning point—Pamela gave hostessing a specific partisan gloss. She was building her power base, and a new power base for the Democratic Party. You can’t underestimate the role she played in networking. From the time she was a young woman in England, even before she turned twenty, she was perfecting the art of networking.

I remember talking to Liz Rohatyn once, and she said, “Well, she’s doing for the Democratic Party what she always did for her men.” When Pamela first met Gianni Agnelli, he was a very provincial character from Turin, and she set about introducing him to all the most influential men she could find, including Winston Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook. She got him a franchise in North America.

She was a master at networking and connecting people to the people they needed to know.

So she was operating in her own sphere; the Reagans enlivened Washington society as a whole; and then Bush 41 came, and he was much more in the spirit of Eastern establishment entertaining. He was familiar with Washington; he’d lived here. His attitude was quite open, and he, too, was smart enough to socialize with the opposition. He once told his social secretary that he really did believe that if two world leaders could have lunch or dinner and have an informal conversation they could more easily negotiate tricky issues in their business meetings. He frequently entertained opposition Democrats.

Then, in 1992–93, the Clintons and the Gores came in. They were two very attractive young couples who summoned up a sort of

Kennedy-style vigor. Even before the inauguration, they were prominently guests of honor at dinner parties hosted by Pamela, Vernon Jordan, one of the great powerbrokers in Washington, and Kay Graham. This was all designed to introduce Bill and Hillary to the movers and shakers.

But the Clintons’ style grated against the Washington grain.

Their inaugural committee described its four-day celebration as a cross between a state dinner and a Crittenden County coon supper.

It had a folksiness to it: Kenny G played the saxophone, and Bill’s brother, Roger, sang at the MTV inaugural ball; Virginia Kelley, Bill’s mother, with her three-foot-high hairdo, couldn’t believe that hard liquor was banned at the Arkansas ball, so she sent a man to a package store for a bottle of Chivas Regal; and Hillary’s brothers were kind of like the Festrunk Brothers on Saturday Night Live—they were just nothing but trouble. You couldn’t make them up. There were a lot of Washington establishment people rolling their eyes.

The Clintons were wary of Washington, and there were those in their circle who were quite openly antagonistic—certainly to the Washington media. Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, a TV writer and Arkansas friend, said that Hillary considered Washington to be treacherous. So the Clintons were not an easy fit. They waited almost a year and a half before hosting their first state dinner; the Kennedys had a half-dozen state dinners during that same period.

Getting back to the notion that the White House sets the tone for the hostesses in Washington, Hillary was the first first lady to have an office in the West Wing, and she really wasn’t interested in the way the White House social activity had been conducted. She and Bill said they wanted to get away, in their official entertaining, from what they called “the Republican way.” Hillary also had an East Wing office, but everything had a political tilt. She told Ann Stock, her first social secretary, that she considered the role of social secretary to be one of the most political jobs, sort of like running a small ad agency and taking the day’s message and translating it into events for the president and the first lady. At the beginning, the Clintons would venture out to the homes of friends in Georgetown and to local restaurants, but, as they became more engulfed by scandal, that became increasingly rare. The private gatherings they tended to like most in the White House were their movie nights, and there they did bring in the Hollywood contingent. Steven Spielberg came, and Tom Hanks and Barbra Streisand. But their tight circle was from Arkansas, and so, with the exception of a few friends like George and Liz Stevens, whose house they would go to, they didn’t mingle with the Georgetown set very much at all. The Clintons were hit by scandals from the beginning: questions about Whitewater that trailed them to the White House like tin cans on their ankles; the death of Vincent Foster. So they adopted a bunker mentality quite early, and they compounded the problem by selling nights in the Lincoln Bedroom to political contributors. White House entertaining became, for the first time, really politicized. The Democratic National Committee actually controlled the guest lists. This was in sharp contrast to the Kennedys, who, if they were given political contributors to be invited to White House parties, would just throw those lists out. The Clintons built an enormous tent behind the White House



  social arbiter over the years, wrote a piece, back in the late eighties, called “The Party’s Over.” In the eighties, we saw far fewer senators and congressmen moving to Washington with their families, which means that, when they’re in the city, they’re working all the time; they vote at night, and they’re here for three days, then they leave for their home states or their districts to raise money and deal with issues back there, so there’s virtually no time for informal, offthe-record conversations between people of different political persuasions, where agreements could be struck after hours. Senators and congressmen don’t really see Washington as their home but, rather, as a temporary place to alight. It was Newt Gingrich who promoted the idea that senators and congressmen should leave their families at home (he obviously had other ideas), and that to socialize in Washington was somehow toxic. As a result of that shift, our elected representatives have lost connection with other key people in Washington, and this has led to a hardening of their political positions.

Another important factor is the fact that women now actively pursue careers. Unless they have the resources of somebody like Kay Graham, who had a big house and a large staff to organize the entertainment, working women have had neither the time nor the money to become major hostesses. There really are no more grande dames. Luvie Pearson died in the early nineties, Lorraine Cooper died in the mid-eighties, Vangie Bruce died in the mid-nineties, Susan Mary Alsop died about ten years ago, Oatsie Charles, who was one of the liveliest, funniest hostesses in Washington, packed up and moved to Newport when the Clintons arrived, and she said, “As far as I’m concerned, the Washington I knew is over.” And then Kay died in the summer of 2001. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that that really marked the end of bipartisan entertaining on a grand scale. There has not been anybody since Kay who really has done that. Deeda Blair, who was probably Washington’s most glamorous figure—someone called her a peacock among the wrens—another holdover from the Kennedy years, left for New York in 2005. Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, who were really very much in the Kay Graham mold, brought a lot of people together in the nineties with their annual New Year’s Eve parties—mostly Democrats, but also a good number from the other side of the aisle. I remember once watching Colin Powell dancing cheek to cheek with Lauren Bacall, and James Carville and Ed Rollins nearly coming to blows over something. There were sometimes pointed conversations, but people of differing ideas

From left, oil on wood by Julia Jacquette, Pearl Necklace, 2010 and Bourbon, Straight, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

that held three times as many people for state dinners, and they filled the guest lists with contributors.

The power of money began to infiltrate Washington in a new way. During the Clinton years, the new hostesses who emerged were wealthy fund-raisers like Beth Dozoretz. Then Bush 43 came in. Kay Graham reached out to the president and the first lady, and entertained them at a dinner only a couple of months after he took office, at a moment when feelings were running very high against both of them as a result of the Supreme Court’s having decided the election. Kay, to her credit, was trying to keep up the bipartisan spirit. She also invited some of the new powerbrokers, like Steve Case, who started AOL. Then the events of 9/11 put a damper on what had, with Kay’s party, begun to thaw relations between the Bushes and the Washington establishment. Unlike Bush 41, George W. Bush wasn’t interested in reaching out to Washington society, particularly the Georgetown set, who were mostly Democrats who resented his victory and looked down on him. He didn’t much like socializing. He liked to go to bed at nine o’clock at night. When it came time to entertain foreign leaders, he preferred to do it at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

And, much like the Clintons, the Bush 43 crowd was a very small circle, and they continued the tradition of inviting lots of donors to state dinners, like the one for Queen Elizabeth in May of 2007. So the pattern of attaching specific political agendas to entertaining, which started with Pamela, picked up steam with the Clintons, and was solidified with the Bushes, and it continues today.

The Obamas came in—young, attractive, the first African-American president and first lady—and everybody was hoping for a bipartisan effort that would bring people together. I remember that on the night of Obama’s election there was a huge spontaneous celebration outside the White House; people danced and cheered.

The Obamas have connected with the city in interesting ways— reaching out to underserved areas, having an organic garden at the White House and promoting healthy eating, and inviting jazz musicians and other entertainers who, previously, might not have been included. But the partisan mood intensified, and both sides are at fault. The Obama White House, sadly, refused to meet, much less socialize with, its Republican counterparts. It set a very unfortunate tone for socializing in general, and increased the polarizing that had already begun.

It’s striking that no prominent hostesses have emerged during the Obama administration. For a brief moment, George Stephanopoulos and his wife, Ali Wentworth, were doing some interesting entertaining, but they moved to New York pretty early in Obama’s first term.

I think the changes really began in the seventies and eighties, and there have been so many factors at work. The Harrimans, to some extent, started the trend by linking elegant entertainment to fund-raising; the relentless demands of campaign financing have accelerated the trend; and, as part of that, lobbyists have become so much more prominent, not only in the corridors of power but in orchestrating social life. Sally Quinn, who has been a prominent

 Like the Kennedys, the Reagans created a new form of glamour in Washington and made it appealing, with Hollywood types and New Yorkers, people like Oscar de la Renta.

They had a state dinner every month.

They dressed in white tie.

could converse in the same room. Actually, the following year James Carville and Ed Rollins made up. But, you know, Sally always understood that the secret to creating a balance at a party was having people from the current administration, like the secretary of state, but also having people who were out of power. Nobody has really picked up the mantle.

There are plenty of wealthy women, but their parties always have an agenda. There’s a younger woman, Juleanna Glover, who gives a lot of parties, but she’s a lobbyist, and they’re really all about business: promoting somebody new, or some corporate client. There are still a lot of book parties in Washington, which are parties with a purpose, but also about having fun; and some of the embassies still entertain very well.

The polarization that’s taken place in the past fifteen years means it’s really rare to see Republican and Democratic lawmakers at the same party. And the arrival of big money—starting in the eighties, high-tech millionaires began to make appearances at parties—puts the emphasis on fund-raising, and in an odd way Washington has become more like New York, where people tend to be measured more by the size of their financial contributions than by their achievements. With the traditional Washington hostesses, the emphasis was on achievement rather than money.

Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn had a big party at the end of 2012; it was billed as “The Last Party.” Sally said that it was prompted by the Mayan prophecies for the end of the world. Present was the usual crowd of journalists, who were local figures, but it lacked the fizz of the New Year’s Eve bashes, which attracted people from New York and L.A. There were also a lot of ghosts in that room—people who’d either died or moved out, like Al and Tipper.

The White House, although it’s great to get an invitation there, is no longer the social epicenter of Washington. Presidents simply

have less contact with social Washington; they’re operating in a completely different sphere. The city has also changed. There are many more twenty- and thirty-somethings. As a result of gentrification, the city is shifting from being a predominantly black city to becoming predominantly white. There are new kinds of enterprises everywhere. There’s tech, social-media companies, finance giants.

Areas of the city, like the U Street Corridor and Fourteenth Street, which fifteen years ago were run-down, are now centers of activity.

There are a lot of parallel worlds, which operate much the way New York does.

Power has just become more diffuse. The traditional journalists, who were hugely powerful for so many years, are now rivaled by all the bloggers, and the social structure is much more difficult to define. The sad thing is that specific communities tend to spend more time with their own, and they don’t much care whether they’re accepted by other social groups. There’s also no longer any assurance that an evening will be kept out of the media; the whole concept of the safe house, where people could speak openly and know that their words would not end up someplace, is gone. Now Mike Allen, of Politico, can be seen tweeting in the middle of parties.

My worry—and it goes beyond what’s happening in Washington—is that the art of conversation is becoming attenuated. It’s being overwhelmed by the fragmentary nature of Twitter and by the cacophony of TV and radio. The political discourse here has very sadly become a kind of echo chamber. Increasingly, people in Washington want to hear only affirmations of what they believe. I can’t help thinking back to Jack Kennedy, and the notion that he was open to opposing arguments. Even unpleasant ones. And that one of the rather sad things about life is you discover that the other side really has a very good case.



  social arbiter over the years, wrote a piece, back in the late eighties, called “The Party’s Over.” In the eighties, we saw far fewer senators and congressmen moving to Washington with their families, which means that, when they’re in the city, they’re working all the time; they vote at night, and they’re here for three days, then they leave for their home states or their districts to raise money and deal with issues back there, so there’s virtually no time for informal, offthe-record conversations between people of different political persuasions, where agreements could be struck after hours. Senators and congressmen don’t really see Washington as their home but, rather, as a temporary place to alight. It was Newt Gingrich who promoted the idea that senators and congressmen should leave their families at home (he obviously had other ideas), and that to socialize in Washington was somehow toxic. As a result of that shift, our elected representatives have lost connection with other key people in Washington, and this has led to a hardening of their political positions.

Another important factor is the fact that women now actively pursue careers. Unless they have the resources of somebody like Kay Graham, who had a big house and a large staff to organize the entertainment, working women have had neither the time nor the money to become major hostesses. There really are no more grande dames. Luvie Pearson died in the early nineties, Lorraine Cooper died in the mid-eighties, Vangie Bruce died in the mid-nineties, Susan Mary Alsop died about ten years ago, Oatsie Charles, who was one of the liveliest, funniest hostesses in Washington, packed up and moved to Newport when the Clintons arrived, and she said, “As far as I’m concerned, the Washington I knew is over.” And then Kay died in the summer of 2001. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that that really marked the end of bipartisan entertaining on a grand scale. There has not been anybody since Kay who really has done that. Deeda Blair, who was probably Washington’s most glamorous figure—someone called her a peacock among the wrens—another holdover from the Kennedy years, left for New York in 2005. Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, who were really very much in the Kay Graham mold, brought a lot of people together in the nineties with their annual New Year’s Eve parties—mostly Democrats, but also a good number from the other side of the aisle. I remember once watching Colin Powell dancing cheek to cheek with Lauren Bacall, and James Carville and Ed Rollins nearly coming to blows over something. There were sometimes pointed conversations, but people of differing ideas

From left, oil on wood by Julia Jacquette, Pearl Necklace, 2010 and Bourbon, Straight, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

that held three times as many people for state dinners, and they filled the guest lists with contributors.

The power of money began to infiltrate Washington in a new way. During the Clinton years, the new hostesses who emerged were wealthy fund-raisers like Beth Dozoretz. Then Bush 43 came in. Kay Graham reached out to the president and the first lady, and entertained them at a dinner only a couple of months after he took office, at a moment when feelings were running very high against both of them as a result of the Supreme Court’s having decided the election. Kay, to her credit, was trying to keep up the bipartisan spirit. She also invited some of the new powerbrokers, like Steve Case, who started AOL. Then the events of 9/11 put a damper on what had, with Kay’s party, begun to thaw relations between the Bushes and the Washington establishment. Unlike Bush 41, George W. Bush wasn’t interested in reaching out to Washington society, particularly the Georgetown set, who were mostly Democrats who resented his victory and looked down on him. He didn’t much like socializing. He liked to go to bed at nine o’clock at night. When it came time to entertain foreign leaders, he preferred to do it at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

And, much like the Clintons, the Bush 43 crowd was a very small circle, and they continued the tradition of inviting lots of donors to state dinners, like the one for Queen Elizabeth in May of 2007. So the pattern of attaching specific political agendas to entertaining, which started with Pamela, picked up steam with the Clintons, and was solidified with the Bushes, and it continues today.

The Obamas came in—young, attractive, the first African-American president and first lady—and everybody was hoping for a bipartisan effort that would bring people together. I remember that on the night of Obama’s election there was a huge spontaneous celebration outside the White House; people danced and cheered.

The Obamas have connected with the city in interesting ways— reaching out to underserved areas, having an organic garden at the White House and promoting healthy eating, and inviting jazz musicians and other entertainers who, previously, might not have been included. But the partisan mood intensified, and both sides are at fault. The Obama White House, sadly, refused to meet, much less socialize with, its Republican counterparts. It set a very unfortunate tone for socializing in general, and increased the polarizing that had already begun.

It’s striking that no prominent hostesses have emerged during the Obama administration. For a brief moment, George Stephanopoulos and his wife, Ali Wentworth, were doing some interesting entertaining, but they moved to New York pretty early in Obama’s first term.

I think the changes really began in the seventies and eighties, and there have been so many factors at work. The Harrimans, to some extent, started the trend by linking elegant entertainment to fund-raising; the relentless demands of campaign financing have accelerated the trend; and, as part of that, lobbyists have become so much more prominent, not only in the corridors of power but in orchestrating social life. Sally Quinn, who has been a prominent

 Like the Kennedys, the Reagans created a new form of glamour in Washington and made it appealing, with Hollywood types and New Yorkers, people like Oscar de la Renta.

They had a state dinner every month.

They dressed in white tie.

could converse in the same room. Actually, the following year James Carville and Ed Rollins made up. But, you know, Sally always understood that the secret to creating a balance at a party was having people from the current administration, like the secretary of state, but also having people who were out of power. Nobody has really picked up the mantle.

There are plenty of wealthy women, but their parties always have an agenda. There’s a younger woman, Juleanna Glover, who gives a lot of parties, but she’s a lobbyist, and they’re really all about business: promoting somebody new, or some corporate client. There are still a lot of book parties in Washington, which are parties with a purpose, but also about having fun; and some of the embassies still entertain very well.

The polarization that’s taken place in the past fifteen years means it’s really rare to see Republican and Democratic lawmakers at the same party. And the arrival of big money—starting in the eighties, high-tech millionaires began to make appearances at parties—puts the emphasis on fund-raising, and in an odd way Washington has become more like New York, where people tend to be measured more by the size of their financial contributions than by their achievements. With the traditional Washington hostesses, the emphasis was on achievement rather than money.

Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn had a big party at the end of 2012; it was billed as “The Last Party.” Sally said that it was prompted by the Mayan prophecies for the end of the world. Present was the usual crowd of journalists, who were local figures, but it lacked the fizz of the New Year’s Eve bashes, which attracted people from New York and L.A. There were also a lot of ghosts in that room—people who’d either died or moved out, like Al and Tipper.

The White House, although it’s great to get an invitation there, is no longer the social epicenter of Washington. Presidents simply

have less contact with social Washington; they’re operating in a completely different sphere. The city has also changed. There are many more twenty- and thirty-somethings. As a result of gentrification, the city is shifting from being a predominantly black city to becoming predominantly white. There are new kinds of enterprises everywhere. There’s tech, social-media companies, finance giants.

Areas of the city, like the U Street Corridor and Fourteenth Street, which fifteen years ago were run-down, are now centers of activity.

There are a lot of parallel worlds, which operate much the way New York does.

Power has just become more diffuse. The traditional journalists, who were hugely powerful for so many years, are now rivaled by all the bloggers, and the social structure is much more difficult to define. The sad thing is that specific communities tend to spend more time with their own, and they don’t much care whether they’re accepted by other social groups. There’s also no longer any assurance that an evening will be kept out of the media; the whole concept of the safe house, where people could speak openly and know that their words would not end up someplace, is gone. Now Mike Allen, of Politico, can be seen tweeting in the middle of parties.

My worry—and it goes beyond what’s happening in Washington—is that the art of conversation is becoming attenuated. It’s being overwhelmed by the fragmentary nature of Twitter and by the cacophony of TV and radio. The political discourse here has very sadly become a kind of echo chamber. Increasingly, people in Washington want to hear only affirmations of what they believe. I can’t help thinking back to Jack Kennedy, and the notion that he was open to opposing arguments. Even unpleasant ones. And that one of the rather sad things about life is you discover that the other side really has a very good case.





Talk of the Town: An Interview with Christopher Buckley 

The playwright John Guare, our co-executive editor, sat down with the writer, satirist and one-time speechwriter Christopher Buckley at the Yale Club.

Photograph © Tamar Cohen.

John Guare: I read the bio at the end of your review, in the New York Times Book Review, of This Town, by Mark Leibovich, and it said that you had lived in Washington for twenty-nine years, and I thought, That’s a man that we want to talk to.

Christopher Buckley: Usually one uses an author ID under a review for the purpose of self-promotion, and I may have mentioned that I had a book coming out, but since one of Mark’s themes was that no one ever leaves Washington, I couldn’t resist saying, “Christopher Buckley lived in Washington for twenty-nine years, but then left.” (Laughter) Joe Alsop—who was a character with a capital "C," you know— originally came from Connecticut, then went to Harvard, then to Washington. He was related to Eleanor Roosevelt, so he had great cachet and entrée. How’s that? Two French words in one sentence. (Laughter) Alsop said that, no matter how long one lives in Washington, it somehow always feels temporary. (Laughter) Meanwhile, he himself remained one of the great institutions. He had enormous status as a—what’s the masculine for salonista? Salonnière?

JG: Salonnière. Another French word, yes.

CB: I’m going to keep track of the number of French expressions I drop.

JG: Because Kennedy came to his house at dawn on the night of his inauguration, after the last ball ended.

CB: Famously. Joe was a great hawk on Vietnam. And that a bit undid him. Vietnam ended up being a very bad bet, and he had put all his chips on that table. But he endured.

But a more classic case of—I think you could call it hubris: Clark Clifford, who was a pillar of the Washington community. He had been a young aide to Truman. When Churchill traveled by train to Fulton, Missouri, to deliver the famous Iron Curtain speech, Clifford had been detailed to go along with

him and to lose at poker. (Laughter) He was on every board; he sat at the right hand of Katharine Graham’s dinner parties; and when Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980 Clifford famously dismissed him as an “amiable dunce.” And then along came the B.C.C.I. scandal, which was a very dirty business. Don’t ask me to recapitulate all the details, but it was a bank in the Middle East that was up to no good, and Clark Clifford was on the board. So that turned on him and he suddenly found that some of his assets were frozen. I remember Caspar Weinberger, who served in many capacities, notably as Reagan’s secretary of Defense, shaking his head and telling me that poor Clark wasn’t even able to pay his gardener.

JG: How did these things affect Alsop and Clifford socially? Were they suddenly struck from the scene?

CB: No, not at all. Joe Alsop remained a staple. He lost a certain luster, but he stayed in there, by dint of his personality, which combined the orchid and the cactus. He was an interesting guy. He was an homme sérieux. That’s my fourth French expression.

And he was damned good company and had a well-stocked mind.

JG: Do you have any examples of familial rifts that resulted from political differences?

CB: Well, I was walking along Sixth Avenue yesterday, and right by Eighth Street they sell old magazines, and there was a whole line of Playboys, and there was Patti Davis saluting her father by appearing in Playboy.

In 1986 my first novel was coming out.

It was a parody of the White House memoir.

It was the called The White House Mess. Simultaneously, Patti Davis published a novel, a roman à clef.

JG: Five!

CB: But the clef was enormous. This was so clearly her relationship with her mother. So on my first book tour, in every greenroom I was in, there was Patti Davis. Of course, she would go on first. I was sort of the sloppy seconds on the Larry King show or whatever.

Yes, Patti had her issues, as we say.

JG: And young Ron was a staple on MSNBC. CB: Well, he had entered Yale and remained for about a semester. Then he quit to pursue ballet, which, apparently, was his dream.

I’m going to tell you this story, which I’ve never told before. Well, President Reagan was crushed that his son was leaving university and leaving a, you know, not a bad one. I know, we’re having this conversation in the Yale Club. (Laughter) My father and Reagan were close, and my dad had always acted as a kind of godfather to the Reagan children, so Reagan called up my dad and expressed to him his worry that this meant that his son played for the other team. My dad ventured the opinion that all people in the arts might not be gay, but there wasn’t much he could really say about this, and, of course, we now know Ron’s not gay.

JG: Which years did you live in Washington?

CB: I arrived in 1981.

JG: For what purpose?

CB: I went down to be a speechwriter for Vice-President George Bush.

JG: What was that like?

CB: Oh, that was great. That was one of the great adventures of my life. When I took the job, Mr. Bush and I were about to shake hands and his press secretary, Pete Teeley, who would be my boss—a great character— said, “Uh, Mr. Vice-President, wasn’t there something you were going to mention to Chris?” And Mr. Bush went, “Oh, oh, yeah.”

Then, in his lovely, sweet, reticent WASP way, he said, “Well, uh, it might be better if you, uh, do you think you could see your way to, like, maybe not write about this?”

And I was amused, because, I thought, everyone writes White House memoirs, but who the hell cares about the memoirs of a vice-presidential speechwriter? On the food chain, you know, that’s down on the Precambrian level.

Well, I worked for him for two years, and my reading hobby became White House memoirs, which can be absolutely delicious.

I mean, they’re a wonderful subgenre of Washington literature, and the bitchier, really, the better.

15



Talk of the Town: An Interview with Christopher Buckley 

The playwright John Guare, our co-executive editor, sat down with the writer, satirist and one-time speechwriter Christopher Buckley at the Yale Club.

Photograph © Tamar Cohen.

John Guare: I read the bio at the end of your review, in the New York Times Book Review, of This Town, by Mark Leibovich, and it said that you had lived in Washington for twenty-nine years, and I thought, That’s a man that we want to talk to.

Christopher Buckley: Usually one uses an author ID under a review for the purpose of self-promotion, and I may have mentioned that I had a book coming out, but since one of Mark’s themes was that no one ever leaves Washington, I couldn’t resist saying, “Christopher Buckley lived in Washington for twenty-nine years, but then left.” (Laughter) Joe Alsop—who was a character with a capital "C," you know— originally came from Connecticut, then went to Harvard, then to Washington. He was related to Eleanor Roosevelt, so he had great cachet and entrée. How’s that? Two French words in one sentence. (Laughter) Alsop said that, no matter how long one lives in Washington, it somehow always feels temporary. (Laughter) Meanwhile, he himself remained one of the great institutions. He had enormous status as a—what’s the masculine for salonista? Salonnière?

JG: Salonnière. Another French word, yes.

CB: I’m going to keep track of the number of French expressions I drop.

JG: Because Kennedy came to his house at dawn on the night of his inauguration, after the last ball ended.

CB: Famously. Joe was a great hawk on Vietnam. And that a bit undid him. Vietnam ended up being a very bad bet, and he had put all his chips on that table. But he endured.

But a more classic case of—I think you could call it hubris: Clark Clifford, who was a pillar of the Washington community. He had been a young aide to Truman. When Churchill traveled by train to Fulton, Missouri, to deliver the famous Iron Curtain speech, Clifford had been detailed to go along with

him and to lose at poker. (Laughter) He was on every board; he sat at the right hand of Katharine Graham’s dinner parties; and when Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980 Clifford famously dismissed him as an “amiable dunce.” And then along came the B.C.C.I. scandal, which was a very dirty business. Don’t ask me to recapitulate all the details, but it was a bank in the Middle East that was up to no good, and Clark Clifford was on the board. So that turned on him and he suddenly found that some of his assets were frozen. I remember Caspar Weinberger, who served in many capacities, notably as Reagan’s secretary of Defense, shaking his head and telling me that poor Clark wasn’t even able to pay his gardener.

JG: How did these things affect Alsop and Clifford socially? Were they suddenly struck from the scene?

CB: No, not at all. Joe Alsop remained a staple. He lost a certain luster, but he stayed in there, by dint of his personality, which combined the orchid and the cactus. He was an interesting guy. He was an homme sérieux. That’s my fourth French expression.

And he was damned good company and had a well-stocked mind.

JG: Do you have any examples of familial rifts that resulted from political differences?

CB: Well, I was walking along Sixth Avenue yesterday, and right by Eighth Street they sell old magazines, and there was a whole line of Playboys, and there was Patti Davis saluting her father by appearing in Playboy.

In 1986 my first novel was coming out.

It was a parody of the White House memoir.

It was the called The White House Mess. Simultaneously, Patti Davis published a novel, a roman à clef.

JG: Five!

CB: But the clef was enormous. This was so clearly her relationship with her mother. So on my first book tour, in every greenroom I was in, there was Patti Davis. Of course, she would go on first. I was sort of the sloppy seconds on the Larry King show or whatever.

Yes, Patti had her issues, as we say.

JG: And young Ron was a staple on MSNBC. CB: Well, he had entered Yale and remained for about a semester. Then he quit to pursue ballet, which, apparently, was his dream.

I’m going to tell you this story, which I’ve never told before. Well, President Reagan was crushed that his son was leaving university and leaving a, you know, not a bad one. I know, we’re having this conversation in the Yale Club. (Laughter) My father and Reagan were close, and my dad had always acted as a kind of godfather to the Reagan children, so Reagan called up my dad and expressed to him his worry that this meant that his son played for the other team. My dad ventured the opinion that all people in the arts might not be gay, but there wasn’t much he could really say about this, and, of course, we now know Ron’s not gay.

JG: Which years did you live in Washington?

CB: I arrived in 1981.

JG: For what purpose?

CB: I went down to be a speechwriter for Vice-President George Bush.

JG: What was that like?

CB: Oh, that was great. That was one of the great adventures of my life. When I took the job, Mr. Bush and I were about to shake hands and his press secretary, Pete Teeley, who would be my boss—a great character— said, “Uh, Mr. Vice-President, wasn’t there something you were going to mention to Chris?” And Mr. Bush went, “Oh, oh, yeah.”

Then, in his lovely, sweet, reticent WASP way, he said, “Well, uh, it might be better if you, uh, do you think you could see your way to, like, maybe not write about this?”

And I was amused, because, I thought, everyone writes White House memoirs, but who the hell cares about the memoirs of a vice-presidential speechwriter? On the food chain, you know, that’s down on the Precambrian level.

Well, I worked for him for two years, and my reading hobby became White House memoirs, which can be absolutely delicious.

I mean, they’re a wonderful subgenre of Washington literature, and the bitchier, really, the better.

15

16

the tradition of the great salon hostesses of France?

CB: I think so. In fact, it’s interesting you bring that up, France being a subtheme of our conversation. Evangeline Bruce—who was a real grande dame, and she looked like a grande dame; she looked as though she’d been painted by Gainsborough—had been the wife of the U.S. ambassador to Paris.

Susan Mary Alsop had also lived in Paris.

There was sort of a French subcurrent. And sometimes at these dinners Susan, Mary, and Evangeline would start palavering en français.

JG: Do you think that those dinners had any effect on politics?

CB: I don’t think there was a one-to-one impact. But I recall a dinner at Meg Greenfield’s—it was Meg, Joe Alsop, maybe Edmund and Sylvia Morris might have been there, and Jim Baker, who was then chief of staff at the White House. Now, Jim Baker was the only Republican at that table. I was there, but I didn’t count. And the talk was of the upcoming reelection campaign, and Joe was picking Jim’s brain as to what the strategy was going to be. Baker was a very smart guy, and you could see his mind working out how much he was going to give away and whether what he would give away might be useful.

JG: Because these dinners were not off the record?

CB: I think it was entendu. No, I never once, in all those dinners, ever heard anyone say, “Now, this is off the record.” That would have been considered gauche. Ten. I'll stop there.

JG: I’ve always wondered about those dinners. Were there ever arguments about, say, “You quoted me directly. You got me in trouble for what I said at dinner last night”?

CB: I don’t remember ever hearing that, exactly, but there would be scolding. There would be: “I don’t think that column really accurately represented the situation in Sudan.” I remember one indelible moment.

George Will gave a dinner party. George was very social. And I was sitting next to him and Jack Kemp, who was the architect of Reagan’s economic program—you know, trickle down, the supply side. And we were all talking about Milton Friedman. (Laughter)

JG: Only in Washington.

CB: Only in Washington is Milton Friedman a Playboy pinup. But George thought very highly of Milton Friedman—and, for whatever it’s worth, I certainly did, too— but Jack was having none of it. He said to George, “What are you talking about? He single-handedly destroyed the economy of Chad!” (Laughter) I think it’s the only time I ever heard George laugh. (Laughter) JG: What is the life of people when they’re out of power?

CB: Well, we now have the fabled revolving door. Which is brilliantly addressed in Mark Leibovich’s book. No one leaves. You go into lobbying.

JG: But do you go into a shadow salon, the shadow dinner party?

CB: Shadow salon is an interesting concept.

I can’t recall having experienced one, but you should write a play about that. But, yes, there would be little pockets of recess.

JG: Are there still salons now?

CB: Well, no. I mean, dinner parties go on.

On the other hand, they go on less, because women now work. Do you know Joan Bingham?

JG: Oh, sure, she’s my publisher.

CB: Yes. Well, Joan was my girlfriend when I moved to Washington.

JG: No. CB: Yes. So, really, I was very, very fortunate. I was very fortunate to have Joan as a girlfriend, but I was doubly fortunate, because she, too, was a hostess. And how dear Joan hated to be called a hostess. She would go, “Ugh!” But she was, and she was a formidable one. She set a very good table.

It was there that I got to know a guy who became very important to me, Christopher Hitchens. Christopher, in his really brilliant memoir, Hitch 22, talks about how he was invited by all the great hostesses in Washington. He said, “As Frank Harris said, ‘I was invited to all the great houses of England— once.’” (Laughter) JG: Why did you leave Washington?

CB: It was time. A change of life. My first marriage was ending, and I had a sense it was time. I really don’t mean to sound blasé, but after a while, a certain ennui sets in.

Oh, my God. Maybe we should just do the whole thing in French. (Laughter) It was time. It was just time.

JG: I get the impression that, nowadays, people just spend time with people who agree with them, that there is no discussion.

CB: I think you would find dinner parties going on in Washington that aren’t just tea parties—as in capital "T", capital "P", parties—but what you don’t have are these salons, and I think Washington is the poorer for that. But what are you going to do, set back the clock? I’m talking the ancien régime.

JG: Fourteen, fifteen.

CB: And here comes another. I think Voltaire said that no one who had lived before the revolution truly knew what douceur de vivre was.

JG: Well, talking about douceur de vivre, that aura still clings to the Kennedy years, but also to the Reagan years, no?

CB: When I look back on it, the Reagans were my Kennedys. I was a happy collateral beneficiary of my parents’ friendship with the Reagans. You know, not many vice-presidential speechwriters got invited to state dinners or to intimate dinners. There was one that almost resulted in disaster. I was asked to an intimate soirée at the White House, a dinner for, maybe, twenty people.

Mr. Bush was giving a big speech the next day, and I had to work on it. I tried to get out of the dinner, but Muffie Brandon, who was Mrs. Reagan’s social secretary, said, “Oh, oh, no you don’t.” I said, “But I’ve got a speech to write.” She said, “You have to come.” And I know, I know vice-presidential speeches are unimportant and no one cares about them, but I was the speechwriter and I did care. Anyway, so the custom was after dinner there would be a movie in the movie theater. On this night it was Isaac Stern in China. It was a documentary. So after dinner I went to Muffie and I said, “I’m leaving.” And she said, “No, you can’t. They’ve got you seated next to them in the front row.” The theater would accommodate maybe thirty people, but in the front row were four heavy armchairs. They almost looked like the armchairs that Soviet leaders sat in. (Laughter) You know, those overstuffed things. And there was Mrs. Reagan and Clare Boothe Luce—she was a grande dame. By this point in the evening, I’m getting panicky about the speech. The president wasn’t seated yet. The movie hadn’t started. I saw

my chance, so I got up. I said, “I’ll be right back. I have to go to the men’s room.” So I went out, and as I rounded the corner I ran smack into Tim McCarthy—the Secret Service agent who shielded Reagan in the Hinckley shooting—and the president. And I said, “Oh, Mr. President.” He said, “Where

 I remember Evangeline Bruce talking about the whole concept of the salon. She was ruing that it didn’t really exist anymore because what a salon was about was everyone got the references; you didn’t have to provide the footnotes. 

JG: Who was the bitchiest?

CB: The one that I clasped to my bosom was John Ehrlichman’s Witness to Power. All the White House memoirs have titles with the word “power” in them. (Laughter) You know, it’s “power,” “principle,” and “parking spaces.” And they all have two themes.

The first is “It wasn’t my fault” and the second is “It would have been much worse if I hadn’t been there.” (Laughter) So, after three or four years, I had read a bunch of these and I was looking around for something to write, and I thought, Wouldn’t it be fun to send up this form? So I wrote a parody of a White House memoir that had nothing to do with Mr. Bush’s White House, and I told no stories out of school, but it became a New York Times best seller, and even Jon Yardley, the literary critic for the Washington Post, who is a very tough grader, was enthusiastic about it. So I found myself being invited into the fabulous Georgetown circles. And the first time I met Joe Alsop himself I was terrified, because he was this crusty, scary figure. But he said, “You gave me a great deal of pleasure!” I still cherish that moment.

JG: Being invited to these dinners and salons—that’s so Washington. Has the scene changed or diminished?

CB: I was very lucky. I got there just in time for the Götterdämmerung—five French, one German—of the great hostesses. I got to know—and I don’t claim great intimacy here, but I got to know Evangeline Bruce, Susan Mary Alsop, a little bit Mrs. Graham, whom we still refer to as “Mrs. Graham,” and some other very interesting ones.

My favorite was Meg Greenfield, who was the Washington Post’s editorial-page editor. Even though she was a petite grande dame—six—she was a power base, and she had a very original mind and a very méchant sense of humor—seven—and she had wonderful dinners. Everyone came to them.

I must tell you this: Meg’s passion at a certain point in the 1980s was a television show called Dynasty. And Slim Keith, who was a friend of Meg’s, would come down from New York every so often to watch Dynasty with her. (Laughter) And Joe Alsop would come. They had a fun side. They did not take themselves very seriously.

JG: Were these great hostesses operating in

are you going?” I said, “I’m just going to the men’s room.” He said, “Oh, okay, okay.”

So this is in the basement of the White House, and there’s this very long corridor.

So I headed off down this corridor and I’d just gotten to the end of it, and I hear this “Psst.” And I turn around and it’s Muffie Brandon. She waves me over, and I said, “What?” She said, “Where are you going?”

I said, “I have to write a speech.” She said, “He just stood up and made an announcement that we were going to wait for you to start the movie.” (Laughter) JG: You mentioned Clare Boothe Luce.

CB: Clare was a huge part of my time in Washington. She had decided, rather shrewdly, to take up residence in Washington at the beginning of the Reagan administration. The excuse for it being she was on the board of the marvelously acronymed P.F.I.A.B., the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which was nicknamed Team B. (Laughter) This was a panel of elders—sometimes they were former heads of the C.I.A., but they were wise men and wise women whose job was to second-guess Team A, which was the C.I.A.. You know, we now have sixteen intelligence agencies. In those days, we had

the C.I.A. Clare’s job was to advise on that.

Anyway, evenings with Clare were never dull. She converted to Catholicism at one point, and she famously had an audience with the pope, Pius the Twelfth, and, apparently, at one point he said, “Mrs. Luce, Mrs. Luce, you must understand, I, too, am a Catholic.” (Laughter) And when she was asked who she wanted to hear her first confession on the eve of her acceptance into the Church, she famously replied, “Bring me someone who has seen the rise and fall of empires.” (Laughter) Now, that’s a dame.

You would go to Clare’s apartment and there would often be the papal nuncio, who was rather a cool cat. His name was Pio Laghi, and he was from Ravenna, I recall, because he would tell me about Ravenna pottery. I thought, I don’t think I’m in Kansas anymore, Toto. But everyone, everyone, came to Clare’s.

JG: Republicans and Democrats?

CB: Oh, yes, sure. She had in her bedroom— she was a scamp, because she promised to leave it to me and she never did—a pencil drawing of PT-109, and it was signed to her

by President Kennedy. Let’s put it this way: Clare knew everyone. You’d walk into her apartment, there was a portrait of her by Magritte from her days as a U.S. ambassador to Italy.

JG: It’s funny how many of these you remember. That’s what’s going to be interesting for the audiences of The City of Conversation—to go back into this world that really has vanished.

CB: I remember Evangeline Bruce talking about the whole concept of the salon. She was ruing that it didn’t really exist anymore, because what a salon was about was everyone got the references; you didn’t have to provide the footnotes.

JG: Do you miss Washington?

CB: I do. I miss smart people.

17

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the tradition of the great salon hostesses of France?

CB: I think so. In fact, it’s interesting you bring that up, France being a subtheme of our conversation. Evangeline Bruce—who was a real grande dame, and she looked like a grande dame; she looked as though she’d been painted by Gainsborough—had been the wife of the U.S. ambassador to Paris.

Susan Mary Alsop had also lived in Paris.

There was sort of a French subcurrent. And sometimes at these dinners Susan, Mary, and Evangeline would start palavering en français.

JG: Do you think that those dinners had any effect on politics?

CB: I don’t think there was a one-to-one impact. But I recall a dinner at Meg Greenfield’s—it was Meg, Joe Alsop, maybe Edmund and Sylvia Morris might have been there, and Jim Baker, who was then chief of staff at the White House. Now, Jim Baker was the only Republican at that table. I was there, but I didn’t count. And the talk was of the upcoming reelection campaign, and Joe was picking Jim’s brain as to what the strategy was going to be. Baker was a very smart guy, and you could see his mind working out how much he was going to give away and whether what he would give away might be useful.

JG: Because these dinners were not off the record?

CB: I think it was entendu. No, I never once, in all those dinners, ever heard anyone say, “Now, this is off the record.” That would have been considered gauche. Ten. I'll stop there.

JG: I’ve always wondered about those dinners. Were there ever arguments about, say, “You quoted me directly. You got me in trouble for what I said at dinner last night”?

CB: I don’t remember ever hearing that, exactly, but there would be scolding. There would be: “I don’t think that column really accurately represented the situation in Sudan.” I remember one indelible moment.

George Will gave a dinner party. George was very social. And I was sitting next to him and Jack Kemp, who was the architect of Reagan’s economic program—you know, trickle down, the supply side. And we were all talking about Milton Friedman. (Laughter)

JG: Only in Washington.

CB: Only in Washington is Milton Friedman a Playboy pinup. But George thought very highly of Milton Friedman—and, for whatever it’s worth, I certainly did, too— but Jack was having none of it. He said to George, “What are you talking about? He single-handedly destroyed the economy of Chad!” (Laughter) I think it’s the only time I ever heard George laugh. (Laughter) JG: What is the life of people when they’re out of power?

CB: Well, we now have the fabled revolving door. Which is brilliantly addressed in Mark Leibovich’s book. No one leaves. You go into lobbying.

JG: But do you go into a shadow salon, the shadow dinner party?

CB: Shadow salon is an interesting concept.

I can’t recall having experienced one, but you should write a play about that. But, yes, there would be little pockets of recess.

JG: Are there still salons now?

CB: Well, no. I mean, dinner parties go on.

On the other hand, they go on less, because women now work. Do you know Joan Bingham?

JG: Oh, sure, she’s my publisher.

CB: Yes. Well, Joan was my girlfriend when I moved to Washington.

JG: No. CB: Yes. So, really, I was very, very fortunate. I was very fortunate to have Joan as a girlfriend, but I was doubly fortunate, because she, too, was a hostess. And how dear Joan hated to be called a hostess. She would go, “Ugh!” But she was, and she was a formidable one. She set a very good table.

It was there that I got to know a guy who became very important to me, Christopher Hitchens. Christopher, in his really brilliant memoir, Hitch 22, talks about how he was invited by all the great hostesses in Washington. He said, “As Frank Harris said, ‘I was invited to all the great houses of England— once.’” (Laughter) JG: Why did you leave Washington?

CB: It was time. A change of life. My first marriage was ending, and I had a sense it was time. I really don’t mean to sound blasé, but after a while, a certain ennui sets in.

Oh, my God. Maybe we should just do the whole thing in French. (Laughter) It was time. It was just time.

JG: I get the impression that, nowadays, people just spend time with people who agree with them, that there is no discussion.

CB: I think you would find dinner parties going on in Washington that aren’t just tea parties—as in capital "T", capital "P", parties—but what you don’t have are these salons, and I think Washington is the poorer for that. But what are you going to do, set back the clock? I’m talking the ancien régime.

JG: Fourteen, fifteen.

CB: And here comes another. I think Voltaire said that no one who had lived before the revolution truly knew what douceur de vivre was.

JG: Well, talking about douceur de vivre, that aura still clings to the Kennedy years, but also to the Reagan years, no?

CB: When I look back on it, the Reagans were my Kennedys. I was a happy collateral beneficiary of my parents’ friendship with the Reagans. You know, not many vice-presidential speechwriters got invited to state dinners or to intimate dinners. There was one that almost resulted in disaster. I was asked to an intimate soirée at the White House, a dinner for, maybe, twenty people.

Mr. Bush was giving a big speech the next day, and I had to work on it. I tried to get out of the dinner, but Muffie Brandon, who was Mrs. Reagan’s social secretary, said, “Oh, oh, no you don’t.” I said, “But I’ve got a speech to write.” She said, “You have to come.” And I know, I know vice-presidential speeches are unimportant and no one cares about them, but I was the speechwriter and I did care. Anyway, so the custom was after dinner there would be a movie in the movie theater. On this night it was Isaac Stern in China. It was a documentary. So after dinner I went to Muffie and I said, “I’m leaving.” And she said, “No, you can’t. They’ve got you seated next to them in the front row.” The theater would accommodate maybe thirty people, but in the front row were four heavy armchairs. They almost looked like the armchairs that Soviet leaders sat in. (Laughter) You know, those overstuffed things. And there was Mrs. Reagan and Clare Boothe Luce—she was a grande dame. By this point in the evening, I’m getting panicky about the speech. The president wasn’t seated yet. The movie hadn’t started. I saw

my chance, so I got up. I said, “I’ll be right back. I have to go to the men’s room.” So I went out, and as I rounded the corner I ran smack into Tim McCarthy—the Secret Service agent who shielded Reagan in the Hinckley shooting—and the president. And I said, “Oh, Mr. President.” He said, “Where

 I remember Evangeline Bruce talking about the whole concept of the salon. She was ruing that it didn’t really exist anymore because what a salon was about was everyone got the references; you didn’t have to provide the footnotes. 

JG: Who was the bitchiest?

CB: The one that I clasped to my bosom was John Ehrlichman’s Witness to Power. All the White House memoirs have titles with the word “power” in them. (Laughter) You know, it’s “power,” “principle,” and “parking spaces.” And they all have two themes.

The first is “It wasn’t my fault” and the second is “It would have been much worse if I hadn’t been there.” (Laughter) So, after three or four years, I had read a bunch of these and I was looking around for something to write, and I thought, Wouldn’t it be fun to send up this form? So I wrote a parody of a White House memoir that had nothing to do with Mr. Bush’s White House, and I told no stories out of school, but it became a New York Times best seller, and even Jon Yardley, the literary critic for the Washington Post, who is a very tough grader, was enthusiastic about it. So I found myself being invited into the fabulous Georgetown circles. And the first time I met Joe Alsop himself I was terrified, because he was this crusty, scary figure. But he said, “You gave me a great deal of pleasure!” I still cherish that moment.

JG: Being invited to these dinners and salons—that’s so Washington. Has the scene changed or diminished?

CB: I was very lucky. I got there just in time for the Götterdämmerung—five French, one German—of the great hostesses. I got to know—and I don’t claim great intimacy here, but I got to know Evangeline Bruce, Susan Mary Alsop, a little bit Mrs. Graham, whom we still refer to as “Mrs. Graham,” and some other very interesting ones.

My favorite was Meg Greenfield, who was the Washington Post’s editorial-page editor. Even though she was a petite grande dame—six—she was a power base, and she had a very original mind and a very méchant sense of humor—seven—and she had wonderful dinners. Everyone came to them.

I must tell you this: Meg’s passion at a certain point in the 1980s was a television show called Dynasty. And Slim Keith, who was a friend of Meg’s, would come down from New York every so often to watch Dynasty with her. (Laughter) And Joe Alsop would come. They had a fun side. They did not take themselves very seriously.

JG: Were these great hostesses operating in

are you going?” I said, “I’m just going to the men’s room.” He said, “Oh, okay, okay.”

So this is in the basement of the White House, and there’s this very long corridor.

So I headed off down this corridor and I’d just gotten to the end of it, and I hear this “Psst.” And I turn around and it’s Muffie Brandon. She waves me over, and I said, “What?” She said, “Where are you going?”

I said, “I have to write a speech.” She said, “He just stood up and made an announcement that we were going to wait for you to start the movie.” (Laughter) JG: You mentioned Clare Boothe Luce.

CB: Clare was a huge part of my time in Washington. She had decided, rather shrewdly, to take up residence in Washington at the beginning of the Reagan administration. The excuse for it being she was on the board of the marvelously acronymed P.F.I.A.B., the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which was nicknamed Team B. (Laughter) This was a panel of elders—sometimes they were former heads of the C.I.A., but they were wise men and wise women whose job was to second-guess Team A, which was the C.I.A.. You know, we now have sixteen intelligence agencies. In those days, we had

the C.I.A. Clare’s job was to advise on that.

Anyway, evenings with Clare were never dull. She converted to Catholicism at one point, and she famously had an audience with the pope, Pius the Twelfth, and, apparently, at one point he said, “Mrs. Luce, Mrs. Luce, you must understand, I, too, am a Catholic.” (Laughter) And when she was asked who she wanted to hear her first confession on the eve of her acceptance into the Church, she famously replied, “Bring me someone who has seen the rise and fall of empires.” (Laughter) Now, that’s a dame.

You would go to Clare’s apartment and there would often be the papal nuncio, who was rather a cool cat. His name was Pio Laghi, and he was from Ravenna, I recall, because he would tell me about Ravenna pottery. I thought, I don’t think I’m in Kansas anymore, Toto. But everyone, everyone, came to Clare’s.

JG: Republicans and Democrats?

CB: Oh, yes, sure. She had in her bedroom— she was a scamp, because she promised to leave it to me and she never did—a pencil drawing of PT-109, and it was signed to her

by President Kennedy. Let’s put it this way: Clare knew everyone. You’d walk into her apartment, there was a portrait of her by Magritte from her days as a U.S. ambassador to Italy.

JG: It’s funny how many of these you remember. That’s what’s going to be interesting for the audiences of The City of Conversation—to go back into this world that really has vanished.

CB: I remember Evangeline Bruce talking about the whole concept of the salon. She was ruing that it didn’t really exist anymore, because what a salon was about was everyone got the references; you didn’t have to provide the footnotes.

JG: Do you miss Washington?

CB: I do. I miss smart people.

17





By Jane Stanton Hitchcock

Larry Fink

The Drama of the Dinner  Jane Stanton Hitchcock is a writer. Her plays include an adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel The Custom of the Country, and Vanilla.

Her novels include Trick of the Eye, Social Crimes, and Mortal Friends, which is about murder and social life in Washington, D.C., where she lives with her husband, Jim Hoagland, and their dog, Chloe.



18

guests were the people shaping the topic at that very moment—the movers and shakers of Washington and beyond. Hearing the chairman of the Federal Reserve expound on the state of the economy, or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs talk about new dangers facing the world was a show in itself—a moment to dine out on for days to come. She gave all her guests a chance to shine. And those who were too intimidated to speak up got front-row seats to a fine production and learned a lot.

But then there was the time Princess Diana came for dinner. Punditry went on the back burner and gawkitry took the lead. There was no “gen con” that night—just “gen buzz” about the radiant girl who had plunged a dagger into the British monarchy and stolen hearts around the world while she was at it. Whether you loved, hated, admired, scorned, or were totally indifferent to her, Princess Diana was given America’s approval in being honored by the Queen of Washington.

No hostess today has that kind of drawing power. These gals have to sing for their supper guests. If a hostess can make friends with somebody before he or she becomes a Somebody, so much the better. Then an invitation doesn’t seem so calculating; it has the appearance of genuine friendship. But things rarely work that way. A hostess has to work hard courting those already in power. She must be clever at making important people feel even more important, so they will come to her house. She also has to assure them that they will be in equally important company over dinner. To do that, she may have to resort to some theatrical trickery, like, perhaps, implying to Important Person A that she’s giving a little dinner for Important Person B, and vice versa. When either A or B accepts, bingo! Another good way to land a star is to give a splashy party at a glamorous institution, like the National Gallery or the Kennedy Center. What politician would refuse to break bread with the all-star cast of a hit play?

A persistent hostess who lands a major political star is now in for a long party run. Field of Hostess Dreams: “If you bill it, they will come.”

But what happens when the wheel turns and the star she has courted so ruthlessly is no longer in power, thus no longer important in Washington? What’s a girl to do? Unless she has a house the size of FedExField, she’s going to have to cut them. Not right away, of course.

Just until the person who’s expected to fill that post gets confirmed and she can start all over again.

Note to star: Break bread while your sun shines, because when your eclipse comes you’ll be dropped faster than your name was when you were in power.

Note to hostess: God forbid the fallen star should return to power and have a long memory.

The hostess who is the wife of an ambassador has an excuse for the craven pursuit of power: it’s her job. But the ordinary hostess must have a touch of Eve Harrington in her personality in order to recast her former “good friends” for the sake of the production.

All in all, hostessing in the nation’s capital is a treacherous affair.

The old saying goes, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”

If you want a lot of friends, get the president to come for dinner. Or act as if you can get him.

That’s what a powerful hostess will do: act.

All photographs © Larry Fink.

A great hostess is a theatrical production unto herself. She produces, designs, directs, and acts in her own party productions. But she must excel as a casting director. To do that, she must snare a star.

In Washington, guest stars are ranked according to political influence, which makes the president and the vice-president the biggest “gets,” followed by cabinet members, senators, Supreme Court justices, top military brass, media personalities, high-profile ambassadors (important countries, pretty embassies), journalists, billionaires (yes, money is a political position), worker bees (i.e., government and nongovernment people in fairly high positions with whom less important guests can feel well seated), people you owe (other hostesses), and so on down the line, until you hit actual friends. True friendship, like health care, is much desired and hard to achieve in a company town where the company changes every four years.

Hostessing used to be a lot easier. In the last century, congresspeople stuck around on weekends because it wasn’t so easy or so necessary to get back home. Those were the days of the great political salons, run by such legends as Evangeline Bruce, Susan Mary Alsop, Polly Fritchey, and the greatest of them all, Katharine “Kay” Graham. These elegant women provided “safe” dinners, where politicians could get together over drinks rather than issues. Is it a coincidence that there is far more contentiousness in Congress now that convivial bipartisan social life has declined? Or is there something to be said for the superficial in this world of increased gravitas?

Now, with wider air travel, constituents clamoring for personal attention, and the egregious need for constant fund-raising, senators and congresspeople are obliged to go back and forth to their home states on a regular basis. That leaves the stars precious few nights for socializing, and the modern hostess precious few stars to choose from.

And here’s another problem: even if you get a senator or a cabinet member to accept a dinner, there’s a fair chance that he or she will show up late, if at all. These people work hard at not getting anything done. If they’re sitting in Congress or the Oval Office, they’re not sitting with you. But when they do show up it’s a coup. There’s no greater thrill for an ambitious hostess than the sight of a few black vans holding security or Secret Service agents parked outside her house.

Getting people in power to come to your house now requires networking on a cosmic scale. Mrs. Graham didn’t have that problem. If hostessing is theater, her parties were Broadway. Everyone wanted to go, to see and be seen. She didn’t have to send out “save the date” invitations months in advance, as many hostesses now do.

A proper white invitation card arrived two weeks before a party. Acceptance was pretty much a given unless you were out of the country or out of your mind. The “theater” was her cozy grand house on a corner of R Street in Georgetown. First, you had drinks in the library, where you scoped out your fellow guests, who were always interesting and, more often than not, included top politicians and newsmakers of the moment. Her large dining room accommodated forty people in a pinch. The round tables seating ten were Old World proper, set with fresh flowers, candles, and heirloom silver, crystal, and china. The lighting was soft. The food was good, not great. No one cared. You weren’t there for the décor or the culinary delights.

You were there for good company and good conversation.

Mrs. Graham was a great proponent of “gen con,” short for general conversation. She would toss out a subject and go around the table asking guests to do a little soliloquy on the topic. Very often, her

The award-winning photographer Larry Fink was born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island by a radical mother whose belief in social balance was ingrained in him from an early age. In his landmark first monograph, Social Graces, first published in 1984, he captured the voluptuous black-tie life of New York's élite (some of these photos are shown here) and the everyday gatherings of people in working-class Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, where Fink moved, making his home on an abandoned farm.

Fink says his work is political, but notes that his photographs are taken in the spirit of empathy. His irrepressible humanism is evident in each shot—a look between two lovers, the gesture of a child, the placement of a hand, the pull of a dress, or a fold of skin. The people he photographs are alive with desire, boredom, joy, and pride whether they’re at a kitchen table in Pennsylvania or a banquet hall in New York. The juxtaposition of these worlds offers a startling and iconic look at class, at the gulf between rich and poor, but also at the universality of the human experience.





By Jane Stanton Hitchcock

Larry Fink

The Drama of the Dinner  Jane Stanton Hitchcock is a writer. Her plays include an adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel The Custom of the Country, and Vanilla.

Her novels include Trick of the Eye, Social Crimes, and Mortal Friends, which is about murder and social life in Washington, D.C., where she lives with her husband, Jim Hoagland, and their dog, Chloe.



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guests were the people shaping the topic at that very moment—the movers and shakers of Washington and beyond. Hearing the chairman of the Federal Reserve expound on the state of the economy, or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs talk about new dangers facing the world was a show in itself—a moment to dine out on for days to come. She gave all her guests a chance to shine. And those who were too intimidated to speak up got front-row seats to a fine production and learned a lot.

But then there was the time Princess Diana came for dinner. Punditry went on the back burner and gawkitry took the lead. There was no “gen con” that night—just “gen buzz” about the radiant girl who had plunged a dagger into the British monarchy and stolen hearts around the world while she was at it. Whether you loved, hated, admired, scorned, or were totally indifferent to her, Princess Diana was given America’s approval in being honored by the Queen of Washington.

No hostess today has that kind of drawing power. These gals have to sing for their supper guests. If a hostess can make friends with somebody before he or she becomes a Somebody, so much the better. Then an invitation doesn’t seem so calculating; it has the appearance of genuine friendship. But things rarely work that way. A hostess has to work hard courting those already in power. She must be clever at making important people feel even more important, so they will come to her house. She also has to assure them that they will be in equally important company over dinner. To do that, she may have to resort to some theatrical trickery, like, perhaps, implying to Important Person A that she’s giving a little dinner for Important Person B, and vice versa. When either A or B accepts, bingo! Another good way to land a star is to give a splashy party at a glamorous institution, like the National Gallery or the Kennedy Center. What politician would refuse to break bread with the all-star cast of a hit play?

A persistent hostess who lands a major political star is now in for a long party run. Field of Hostess Dreams: “If you bill it, they will come.”

But what happens when the wheel turns and the star she has courted so ruthlessly is no longer in power, thus no longer important in Washington? What’s a girl to do? Unless she has a house the size of FedExField, she’s going to have to cut them. Not right away, of course.

Just until the person who’s expected to fill that post gets confirmed and she can start all over again.

Note to star: Break bread while your sun shines, because when your eclipse comes you’ll be dropped faster than your name was when you were in power.

Note to hostess: God forbid the fallen star should return to power and have a long memory.

The hostess who is the wife of an ambassador has an excuse for the craven pursuit of power: it’s her job. But the ordinary hostess must have a touch of Eve Harrington in her personality in order to recast her former “good friends” for the sake of the production.

All in all, hostessing in the nation’s capital is a treacherous affair.

The old saying goes, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”

If you want a lot of friends, get the president to come for dinner. Or act as if you can get him.

That’s what a powerful hostess will do: act.

All photographs © Larry Fink.

A great hostess is a theatrical production unto herself. She produces, designs, directs, and acts in her own party productions. But she must excel as a casting director. To do that, she must snare a star.

In Washington, guest stars are ranked according to political influence, which makes the president and the vice-president the biggest “gets,” followed by cabinet members, senators, Supreme Court justices, top military brass, media personalities, high-profile ambassadors (important countries, pretty embassies), journalists, billionaires (yes, money is a political position), worker bees (i.e., government and nongovernment people in fairly high positions with whom less important guests can feel well seated), people you owe (other hostesses), and so on down the line, until you hit actual friends. True friendship, like health care, is much desired and hard to achieve in a company town where the company changes every four years.

Hostessing used to be a lot easier. In the last century, congresspeople stuck around on weekends because it wasn’t so easy or so necessary to get back home. Those were the days of the great political salons, run by such legends as Evangeline Bruce, Susan Mary Alsop, Polly Fritchey, and the greatest of them all, Katharine “Kay” Graham. These elegant women provided “safe” dinners, where politicians could get together over drinks rather than issues. Is it a coincidence that there is far more contentiousness in Congress now that convivial bipartisan social life has declined? Or is there something to be said for the superficial in this world of increased gravitas?

Now, with wider air travel, constituents clamoring for personal attention, and the egregious need for constant fund-raising, senators and congresspeople are obliged to go back and forth to their home states on a regular basis. That leaves the stars precious few nights for socializing, and the modern hostess precious few stars to choose from.

And here’s another problem: even if you get a senator or a cabinet member to accept a dinner, there’s a fair chance that he or she will show up late, if at all. These people work hard at not getting anything done. If they’re sitting in Congress or the Oval Office, they’re not sitting with you. But when they do show up it’s a coup. There’s no greater thrill for an ambitious hostess than the sight of a few black vans holding security or Secret Service agents parked outside her house.

Getting people in power to come to your house now requires networking on a cosmic scale. Mrs. Graham didn’t have that problem. If hostessing is theater, her parties were Broadway. Everyone wanted to go, to see and be seen. She didn’t have to send out “save the date” invitations months in advance, as many hostesses now do.

A proper white invitation card arrived two weeks before a party. Acceptance was pretty much a given unless you were out of the country or out of your mind. The “theater” was her cozy grand house on a corner of R Street in Georgetown. First, you had drinks in the library, where you scoped out your fellow guests, who were always interesting and, more often than not, included top politicians and newsmakers of the moment. Her large dining room accommodated forty people in a pinch. The round tables seating ten were Old World proper, set with fresh flowers, candles, and heirloom silver, crystal, and china. The lighting was soft. The food was good, not great. No one cared. You weren’t there for the décor or the culinary delights.

You were there for good company and good conversation.

Mrs. Graham was a great proponent of “gen con,” short for general conversation. She would toss out a subject and go around the table asking guests to do a little soliloquy on the topic. Very often, her

The award-winning photographer Larry Fink was born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island by a radical mother whose belief in social balance was ingrained in him from an early age. In his landmark first monograph, Social Graces, first published in 1984, he captured the voluptuous black-tie life of New York's élite (some of these photos are shown here) and the everyday gatherings of people in working-class Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, where Fink moved, making his home on an abandoned farm.

Fink says his work is political, but notes that his photographs are taken in the spirit of empathy. His irrepressible humanism is evident in each shot—a look between two lovers, the gesture of a child, the placement of a hand, the pull of a dress, or a fold of skin. The people he photographs are alive with desire, boredom, joy, and pride whether they’re at a kitchen table in Pennsylvania or a banquet hall in New York. The juxtaposition of these worlds offers a startling and iconic look at class, at the gulf between rich and poor, but also at the universality of the human experience.



The Denis Thatcher Society B y Ja m es S ch r o eder

 "People like to have their pictures taken. Some will endure the pain of flash-blindness because recorded experience is somehow more important to them than actual experience. It is a profound aspect of our culture, this compulsion for proof." —Larry Fink

All photographs © Larry Fink.

When one sees a play such as The City of Conversation, or reads an article or a book about a political family, one cannot help but wonder: What is it like to be part of a political family? What is it like to be the spouse of a politician?

For more than fifty years now, I have been married—happily—to the former congresswoman Pat Schroeder (D-Colorado). Pat was first elected to Congress in November, 1972, and reelected eleven times; she retired in 1996, after twelve successful terms. She was the first woman elected to the Congress from Colorado, and the second-youngest woman elected to Congress. The first woman to serve on the House Armed Services Committee, she was also the primary mover behind the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 and the 1985 Military Family Act. She explored running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1987, and was selected in the Gallup Poll of 1988 as one of the ten most respected women in America. The Denver Post named Pat one of the ten most memorable Coloradans of the twentieth century.

When opportunity knocks on the door of a married couple, both may open it, but only one may be able to walk through that door and down a new path—hopefully, with the encouragement and support of the other. For years people asked me why I didn’t run for Congress in 1972. The short and best answer is that I, and others, decided that we needed a stronger candidate. We were able to convince Pat that she should run.

Pat and I are both lawyers. I think there are two major realities that every dual-career couple must face. At any particular time, or perhaps all the time, one career may be the dominant or leading one. The partner with the secondary, or less prominent, career will probably be the one faced with making more compromises or accommodations. Historically, it was the man’s career that was the principal one, but that is not necessarily so today, and was not in our case, at least after Pat was elected to Congress.

Second, if and when children enter the picture, it is inevitable—and, I think, necessary—that the wife will assume greater responsibility and require more time and effort with the children and on the home front than the husband. The responsibilities and the joys of parenthood can and should be shared, but I’m sure Pat would agree that the burdens are not equal. The ladies can’t and should not have to do it all. But they will do more.

Their career paths will therefore be subject to different pressures and choices.

At some point in our lives, we are all faced with the question of whether or not to compromise. We all negotiate our way through life. We may stand on principle and refuse to budge.

But, more often than not, the reasonable course of action is to compromise, to give up something in order to achieve something else—or, for that matter, in order to achieve anything at all. I agree with President Obama that compromise is not an eroding of principle for the sake of getting something done but a principle in itself—the certainty of uncertainty, a basic part of union.

For a political spouse, compromises are particularly essential. Trade these long, profitable hours at the law firm for more time with the kids while Pat is on the Hill? Yes. Take on these

high-paying lobbying jobs? No. When Pat considered running for president in 1987, the Legal Times took an extensive look at my career and my practice, and at our family finances. The article observed that “James Schroeder will not cause his wife any political embarrassment,” and that “he appears to have scrupulously avoided any appearances of impropriety.”

Some would argue that in the political world the “ideal” spouse may well be one who does not have a separate career, or, perhaps, has given up his or her career in order to support the political spouse full-time. I knew several congressmen and senators whose wives devoted their free time and efforts exclusively to fulfilling the role, duties, and responsibilities—at least as they saw them—of “the wife of the Honorable…”

But I believe it is not only possible but also probably a good thing for each person to continue to pursue a separate and independent career. While one career, at any given time, may have to be secondary, it still provides a sense of personal satisfaction and accomplishment that cannot be gained simply by osmosis from the other partner’s job. Two careers may also be advisable for economic reasons. In the event of death or divorce—or retirement or defeat at the polls—the surviving spouse may have no choice: a job will be a necessity.

As for competition between partners or spouses, I submit that it doesn’t work: in a successful and happy relationship, a man and a woman cannot be competitors. One need only look to Hollywood and the failure of one marriage after another. You simply cannot be consumed by your own career and success— and concerned primarily with your star burning brighter than your spouse’s—and maintain a stable and rewarding partnership. As the actress Amy Adams observed of her six-year relationship with her actor boyfriend and fiancé, Darren Le Gallo, “He’s not competitive with me; he does not think that my success is his failure.”

In a successful two-career marriage—and, I suppose, in the case of a one-career family as well—it is preferable, if not essential, that the spouse understand, appreciate, and even enjoy the other partner’s job or profession: the pressures, the demands on time, the constraints, the detriments as well as the benefits. In the political arena, the most supportive spouse is probably one who enjoys politics and has good political sensibilities.

Let me give you several examples, fellow husbands of congresswomen who enjoyed supporting their successful political wives. There were very few of us around in the early 1970s, and these were some of the best.

In 1974, I joined Pat and several other congresswomen on a congressional trip to China. The group included Bella Abzug (D-New York), Yvonne Brathwaite Burke (D-California), Gladys Noon Spellman (D-Maryland), and Helen Stevenson Meyner (D-New Jersey). I traveled with these four congressional spouses: Martin Abzug, a warmhearted, successful Jewish stockbroker from New York; Bill Burke, a talented African-American businessman from Los Angeles; Reuben Spellman, a professional engineer from Maryland; and Bob Meyner, the patrician ex-governor of New Jersey.

21



The Denis Thatcher Society B y Ja m es S ch r o eder

 "People like to have their pictures taken. Some will endure the pain of flash-blindness because recorded experience is somehow more important to them than actual experience. It is a profound aspect of our culture, this compulsion for proof." —Larry Fink

All photographs © Larry Fink.

When one sees a play such as The City of Conversation, or reads an article or a book about a political family, one cannot help but wonder: What is it like to be part of a political family? What is it like to be the spouse of a politician?

For more than fifty years now, I have been married—happily—to the former congresswoman Pat Schroeder (D-Colorado). Pat was first elected to Congress in November, 1972, and reelected eleven times; she retired in 1996, after twelve successful terms. She was the first woman elected to the Congress from Colorado, and the second-youngest woman elected to Congress. The first woman to serve on the House Armed Services Committee, she was also the primary mover behind the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 and the 1985 Military Family Act. She explored running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1987, and was selected in the Gallup Poll of 1988 as one of the ten most respected women in America. The Denver Post named Pat one of the ten most memorable Coloradans of the twentieth century.

When opportunity knocks on the door of a married couple, both may open it, but only one may be able to walk through that door and down a new path—hopefully, with the encouragement and support of the other. For years people asked me why I didn’t run for Congress in 1972. The short and best answer is that I, and others, decided that we needed a stronger candidate. We were able to convince Pat that she should run.

Pat and I are both lawyers. I think there are two major realities that every dual-career couple must face. At any particular time, or perhaps all the time, one career may be the dominant or leading one. The partner with the secondary, or less prominent, career will probably be the one faced with making more compromises or accommodations. Historically, it was the man’s career that was the principal one, but that is not necessarily so today, and was not in our case, at least after Pat was elected to Congress.

Second, if and when children enter the picture, it is inevitable—and, I think, necessary—that the wife will assume greater responsibility and require more time and effort with the children and on the home front than the husband. The responsibilities and the joys of parenthood can and should be shared, but I’m sure Pat would agree that the burdens are not equal. The ladies can’t and should not have to do it all. But they will do more.

Their career paths will therefore be subject to different pressures and choices.

At some point in our lives, we are all faced with the question of whether or not to compromise. We all negotiate our way through life. We may stand on principle and refuse to budge.

But, more often than not, the reasonable course of action is to compromise, to give up something in order to achieve something else—or, for that matter, in order to achieve anything at all. I agree with President Obama that compromise is not an eroding of principle for the sake of getting something done but a principle in itself—the certainty of uncertainty, a basic part of union.

For a political spouse, compromises are particularly essential. Trade these long, profitable hours at the law firm for more time with the kids while Pat is on the Hill? Yes. Take on these

high-paying lobbying jobs? No. When Pat considered running for president in 1987, the Legal Times took an extensive look at my career and my practice, and at our family finances. The article observed that “James Schroeder will not cause his wife any political embarrassment,” and that “he appears to have scrupulously avoided any appearances of impropriety.”

Some would argue that in the political world the “ideal” spouse may well be one who does not have a separate career, or, perhaps, has given up his or her career in order to support the political spouse full-time. I knew several congressmen and senators whose wives devoted their free time and efforts exclusively to fulfilling the role, duties, and responsibilities—at least as they saw them—of “the wife of the Honorable…”

But I believe it is not only possible but also probably a good thing for each person to continue to pursue a separate and independent career. While one career, at any given time, may have to be secondary, it still provides a sense of personal satisfaction and accomplishment that cannot be gained simply by osmosis from the other partner’s job. Two careers may also be advisable for economic reasons. In the event of death or divorce—or retirement or defeat at the polls—the surviving spouse may have no choice: a job will be a necessity.

As for competition between partners or spouses, I submit that it doesn’t work: in a successful and happy relationship, a man and a woman cannot be competitors. One need only look to Hollywood and the failure of one marriage after another. You simply cannot be consumed by your own career and success— and concerned primarily with your star burning brighter than your spouse’s—and maintain a stable and rewarding partnership. As the actress Amy Adams observed of her six-year relationship with her actor boyfriend and fiancé, Darren Le Gallo, “He’s not competitive with me; he does not think that my success is his failure.”

In a successful two-career marriage—and, I suppose, in the case of a one-career family as well—it is preferable, if not essential, that the spouse understand, appreciate, and even enjoy the other partner’s job or profession: the pressures, the demands on time, the constraints, the detriments as well as the benefits. In the political arena, the most supportive spouse is probably one who enjoys politics and has good political sensibilities.

Let me give you several examples, fellow husbands of congresswomen who enjoyed supporting their successful political wives. There were very few of us around in the early 1970s, and these were some of the best.

In 1974, I joined Pat and several other congresswomen on a congressional trip to China. The group included Bella Abzug (D-New York), Yvonne Brathwaite Burke (D-California), Gladys Noon Spellman (D-Maryland), and Helen Stevenson Meyner (D-New Jersey). I traveled with these four congressional spouses: Martin Abzug, a warmhearted, successful Jewish stockbroker from New York; Bill Burke, a talented African-American businessman from Los Angeles; Reuben Spellman, a professional engineer from Maryland; and Bob Meyner, the patrician ex-governor of New Jersey.

21

       Georgetown,   1957  B y Jo h n G ua r e                                                

 For years people asked me why I didn’t run for Congress in 1972.

The short and best answer is that I, and others, decided that we needed a stronger candidate. We were able to convince Pat that she should run.  sell newspapers and place their byline on the front pages. As the saying goes, if something wasn’t in the press or on TV, it didn’t happen. On the other hand, sometimes an incident or event is reported that didn’t happen—or, at least, didn’t happen in the way it was publicized.

For a congressional spouse, the press is a reality, a presence always to be reckoned with. Sort of like my daughter’s pet cat, Mao: fed regularly and petted often, she was a pleasant addition to the family, but if ignored or mistreated she could create havoc.

Jane Sanders is the wife of Bernie Sanders, a former congressman and the current senator from Vermont. Reflecting the feelings of many congressional spouses, she once observed that the hardest part of being in politics or of being married to a politician is waking up with a knot in your stomach as you wonder what is on the front page of the newspapers. You know that it may not bear any resemblance to the truth, she said, but you still have to deal with it.

Every political spouse probably developed his or her own rules for dealing with the press. Denis Thatcher, the husband of Margaret Thatcher, the late and former British prime minister, had this advice: “Ignore the press, and simply do not respond to their questions or request for interviews.”

I elected to follow a different path. I had always been an avid newspaper reader and a devoted follower of the TV news and talk shows. Many reporters and columnists were friends, or, at least, good acquaintances. I admired their craft and respected their professional responsibilities. If they wanted to talk to me, I would be happy to talk to them. There remained one overriding concern: not to embarrass my politician wife or become a problem or a separate source of controversy.

22

In life in general, and in politics in particular, it is good to have a sense of the ridiculous and to keep a sense of humor.

Back in the early 1980s, I was browsing through the Washingtonian one evening when an article regarding the formation of a new, somewhat mysterious organization caught my eye: the Denis Thatcher Society. The columnist observed that in a city traditionally dominated by powerful men, there was no refuge for the husbands of powerful women.

The godfather of this society was Charles Horner, then a mid-level bureaucrat with the United States Information Agency but, more importantly, the husband of Constance Horner, then the head of the United States Office of Personnel Management (and later the deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services). Horner explained that he felt that it was time to have a club for the husbands of women who were both powerful and the subject of media attention while the husbands themselves remained obscure. Moreover, Horner observed, he was continually intrigued by the many comments and questions he received from friends regarding his own status: What was it like to be eclipsed by your wife? Are you not threatened by your wife’s success? You must be jealous. How do you control your anger? How, in a word, do you survive?

Reflecting on his status and on such questions, Horner noted that his situation in life was not entirely dissimilar to that of the husband of Margaret Thatcher. Hence the name of the organization: the Denis Thatcher Society.

But why Denis Thatcher? There were, after all, other husbands of prominent women who might be a suitable namesake.

Horner explained that Denis Thatcher was indeed the perfect role model for his new society: a man who clearly was not threatened by his more powerful and prominent wife, a woman whom he loved and supported. With a good sense of humor (and a glass of Scotch), Denis Thatcher was content to remain out of the limelight as much as possible.

The Denis Thatcher Society had no officers or membership roles, no bylaws or records. We did agree to meet only where we could sign the name of someone’s wife for the check, and we adopted a slogan: “Yes, dear.” Our “membership” included Martin Ginsburg and John O’Connor (the husbands, respectively, of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor); Steve Lowey (the husband of Nita Lowey, D–New York); and Tom Harvey (the husband of Cathleen Black, the publisher of USA Today).

In 1997, I received a call from an editor at Esquire. He asked about the society, and we had a lengthy chat. It was clear that I was a subject of interest to him because of my marriage to a prominent businesswoman. He was curious to know how dual-career marriages survived, especially when the woman becomes the more successful and prominent of the two partners.

I decided that the best advice I could give was to quote Denis: “The job is easy. It is love and loyalty, as simple as that, plus a bit of common sense.”

James Schroeder is the husband of the former congresswoman Pat Schroeder (D-Colorado, 1972–1996), whom he met at Harvard Law School. He practiced law for many years in Colorado and Washington, D.C., before serving in the Clinton administration as the deputy undersecretary for the U.S.D.A.’s Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services from 1993 to 2001. The Schroeders now reside in Celebration, Florida.



They all had some important things in common. They loved their wives and supported their wives’ political careers with sensitivity and enthusiasm, even if from a secondary or subordinate position, and they loved their own lives, which included independent careers and the opportunity to stay involved in politics and public policy, which they tried to do with good judgment and a sense of humor.

Why not let women walk alongside men, or even lead?

These men, I think, would say that it makes for a sometimes challenging but always interesting and rewarding life.

No article on politicians would be complete without a few comments about the media. Politicians and the media coexist in a hazardous world. Politicians seek, and often crave, publicity.

Reporters are constantly in search of news: stories that will

In 1957, I was a freshman at Georgetown University and had never been happier in my life. Georgetown was considered a party school, and was it ever. The ratio of girls to boys in Washington, D.C., was four to one. Every school in the area had mixers every weekend. Georgetown’s were called rat races. You dreamed of meeting a G-girl, as women who worked in the government were called.

G-girls were easy to nail and hot to trot. But, for now, we’d settle for girls from Trinity or Marymount or Visitation Convent. Back then, lush pickings meant endless bouts of Lindy dancing (Tab Hunter’s “Young Love”), a lot of gin and tonics and beer, and desperate attempts to maybe neck with one of the rugs, as girls were known.

(Pat Boone sang “Don’t Forbid Me.”) But all the lust was virginal; everything was a sin except drinking, and we did a lot of that.

Alarms woke us up early every morning for compulsory daily Mass at Dahlgren Chapel. The priest would pace up and down. No Communion? Why? Confession is right here. Why put your soul at risk? (I remember agonizingly confessing that I had touched a girl. The priest intoned through the grating, “You must never see this tool of Satan again.”—“But I’m taking her to the Fall Festival.”

—“What’s more important? The Fall Festival or your immortal soul?

Three Hail Marys. Take Communion.”) Receiving a copy of Playboy in the mail was grounds for immediate dismissal.

A priest went through my room, as they did, and found that I had come to the nation’s oldest Catholic college—founded in 1789— with copies of Madame Bovary and Ulysses. Mr. Ambrogi S.J., our freshman prefect, summoned me to his office: Didn’t I realize these books were on the index of forbidden books? Merely possessing them put my soul at risk. I bought it all.

Georgetown, in addition to making me and my soul feel very safe, was easy, more like high school than what I thought college would be, and that was okay by me. Ike was president. Wasn’t Georgetown itself, our section of Washington, also the home of the people who actually ran the world? The boundaries of my world were defined and safe and comforting. I never laughed so hard in my life.

And then one day in the spring of 1957, on my way to class in Copley Hall, I saw a woman striding with distracted authority out of a wooded area that was a shortcut to Reservoir Road, the site of Georgetown Hospital.

It was unhinging to come upon someone so shockingly beautiful, but not movie-star beautiful. This woman—because she was a Woman, with a capital “W,” an adult, as opposed to every other female in D.C., who was a rug—possessed a ferocity. Her head was much larger than her slender body, her slender legs. Her dark hair, slightly short and curled in a current fashion, had been slicked back in a way that emphasized her features, giving her eyes, her nose, her mouth the force of a primitive sculpture. But there was nothing primitive about her elegance. Today you’d recognize the clothes she wore, the casual retro fashion that Ralph Lauren would popularize decades later, but, back then, that look was new. Her clothes had the quality of a disguise, though. Had she come from another continent—a more passionate continent?

Her smile was not directed at the world, like the social smile of everybody else in D.C., but sprang from some secret interior place.

What was she thinking? She was happy, but in a way that I had never seen. She seemed impossibly complete.

I started to follow her, but couldn’t. I told myself that I mustn’t be late for class. She was terrifying.

The next day, at approximately the same time, I waited at the stone stairs leading from Reservoir Road. Nothing. The next. The next. She appeared again on the path, which was thick with winter trees just starting to show green. She walked with the same confident gait that said, “I belong in the world in a way that you don’t.”

Could I speak to her? Would she answer? Did she even speak English? What would I say? I followed her to a red brick house on N Street. She entered and shut the door.

I told my roommate, Bill. The next day, he joined me at the stone stairs. She appeared. We followed her back to 3307 N Street. She went in. Bill had an idea. We went around to Thirty-third Street, to a driveway behind the houses, where cars could be parked, deliveries made. We checked garages. Bill said, “Here.” We stood in the darkness of the garage, looking through a window that opened onto the garden.

She came out of the house wearing a two-piece bathing suit.

She stretched out on a lounge chair and rubbed lotion on her body.

She leaned back to receive the first warm rays of 1957. I tell you, the effect was electrifying. What do you do with these feelings that had everything to do with, and nothing to do with, this woman?

We asked around about her. Oh, yes. Isn’t she something? She’s the wife of the junior senator from Massachusetts. She’s Catholic.

Life took over. I didn’t see her again. Life went back to being safe, or so I thought. In May, at the year’s big dance called the Spring Festival, the Dean of Men, a stern Jesuit named Father Rock, was caught in a situation with the young president of the student body in a room at the hotel where the dance was held. No one was told specifically what had happened. We didn’t have words for that. But something unspeakable had happened. Word got out that the priest would be leaving the campus the next day. We woke up in the early morning to watch as he was driven off in disgrace. The president of the student body was put on leave. No one spoke of it. How could we? No one’s vocabulary contained the words for the meaning of what had happened. But it had to do with sex. The campus atmosphere was charged with an unspoken incomprehensibility. Whatever they were, were they another side of the feelings engendered by that Woman of indescribable power? Who could talk about it?

Rules changed. We gentlemen of Georgetown no longer had to endure compulsory daily Mass. Had we been bought off? Was this the bargain for our never mentioning this episode again? Everything loosened. At parties, on jukeboxes, Elvis Presley replaced Pat Boone.

The next time I saw the woman was in the fall of 1957. I, now a sophomore, saw her at the theater. She was very pregnant, and that November she gave birth to a daughter. I counted back and realized that when I first saw her she must have been coming from Georgetown Hospital in the early days of her pregnancy.

I was happy when, a few years later, she became the most famous woman in the world. But I never again saw that stunning ferocity that changed my world.

       Georgetown,   1957  B y Jo h n G ua r e                                                

 For years people asked me why I didn’t run for Congress in 1972.

The short and best answer is that I, and others, decided that we needed a stronger candidate. We were able to convince Pat that she should run.  sell newspapers and place their byline on the front pages. As the saying goes, if something wasn’t in the press or on TV, it didn’t happen. On the other hand, sometimes an incident or event is reported that didn’t happen—or, at least, didn’t happen in the way it was publicized.

For a congressional spouse, the press is a reality, a presence always to be reckoned with. Sort of like my daughter’s pet cat, Mao: fed regularly and petted often, she was a pleasant addition to the family, but if ignored or mistreated she could create havoc.

Jane Sanders is the wife of Bernie Sanders, a former congressman and the current senator from Vermont. Reflecting the feelings of many congressional spouses, she once observed that the hardest part of being in politics or of being married to a politician is waking up with a knot in your stomach as you wonder what is on the front page of the newspapers. You know that it may not bear any resemblance to the truth, she said, but you still have to deal with it.

Every political spouse probably developed his or her own rules for dealing with the press. Denis Thatcher, the husband of Margaret Thatcher, the late and former British prime minister, had this advice: “Ignore the press, and simply do not respond to their questions or request for interviews.”

I elected to follow a different path. I had always been an avid newspaper reader and a devoted follower of the TV news and talk shows. Many reporters and columnists were friends, or, at least, good acquaintances. I admired their craft and respected their professional responsibilities. If they wanted to talk to me, I would be happy to talk to them. There remained one overriding concern: not to embarrass my politician wife or become a problem or a separate source of controversy.

22

In life in general, and in politics in particular, it is good to have a sense of the ridiculous and to keep a sense of humor.

Back in the early 1980s, I was browsing through the Washingtonian one evening when an article regarding the formation of a new, somewhat mysterious organization caught my eye: the Denis Thatcher Society. The columnist observed that in a city traditionally dominated by powerful men, there was no refuge for the husbands of powerful women.

The godfather of this society was Charles Horner, then a mid-level bureaucrat with the United States Information Agency but, more importantly, the husband of Constance Horner, then the head of the United States Office of Personnel Management (and later the deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services). Horner explained that he felt that it was time to have a club for the husbands of women who were both powerful and the subject of media attention while the husbands themselves remained obscure. Moreover, Horner observed, he was continually intrigued by the many comments and questions he received from friends regarding his own status: What was it like to be eclipsed by your wife? Are you not threatened by your wife’s success? You must be jealous. How do you control your anger? How, in a word, do you survive?

Reflecting on his status and on such questions, Horner noted that his situation in life was not entirely dissimilar to that of the husband of Margaret Thatcher. Hence the name of the organization: the Denis Thatcher Society.

But why Denis Thatcher? There were, after all, other husbands of prominent women who might be a suitable namesake.

Horner explained that Denis Thatcher was indeed the perfect role model for his new society: a man who clearly was not threatened by his more powerful and prominent wife, a woman whom he loved and supported. With a good sense of humor (and a glass of Scotch), Denis Thatcher was content to remain out of the limelight as much as possible.

The Denis Thatcher Society had no officers or membership roles, no bylaws or records. We did agree to meet only where we could sign the name of someone’s wife for the check, and we adopted a slogan: “Yes, dear.” Our “membership” included Martin Ginsburg and John O’Connor (the husbands, respectively, of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor); Steve Lowey (the husband of Nita Lowey, D–New York); and Tom Harvey (the husband of Cathleen Black, the publisher of USA Today).

In 1997, I received a call from an editor at Esquire. He asked about the society, and we had a lengthy chat. It was clear that I was a subject of interest to him because of my marriage to a prominent businesswoman. He was curious to know how dual-career marriages survived, especially when the woman becomes the more successful and prominent of the two partners.

I decided that the best advice I could give was to quote Denis: “The job is easy. It is love and loyalty, as simple as that, plus a bit of common sense.”

James Schroeder is the husband of the former congresswoman Pat Schroeder (D-Colorado, 1972–1996), whom he met at Harvard Law School. He practiced law for many years in Colorado and Washington, D.C., before serving in the Clinton administration as the deputy undersecretary for the U.S.D.A.’s Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services from 1993 to 2001. The Schroeders now reside in Celebration, Florida.



They all had some important things in common. They loved their wives and supported their wives’ political careers with sensitivity and enthusiasm, even if from a secondary or subordinate position, and they loved their own lives, which included independent careers and the opportunity to stay involved in politics and public policy, which they tried to do with good judgment and a sense of humor.

Why not let women walk alongside men, or even lead?

These men, I think, would say that it makes for a sometimes challenging but always interesting and rewarding life.

No article on politicians would be complete without a few comments about the media. Politicians and the media coexist in a hazardous world. Politicians seek, and often crave, publicity.

Reporters are constantly in search of news: stories that will

In 1957, I was a freshman at Georgetown University and had never been happier in my life. Georgetown was considered a party school, and was it ever. The ratio of girls to boys in Washington, D.C., was four to one. Every school in the area had mixers every weekend. Georgetown’s were called rat races. You dreamed of meeting a G-girl, as women who worked in the government were called.

G-girls were easy to nail and hot to trot. But, for now, we’d settle for girls from Trinity or Marymount or Visitation Convent. Back then, lush pickings meant endless bouts of Lindy dancing (Tab Hunter’s “Young Love”), a lot of gin and tonics and beer, and desperate attempts to maybe neck with one of the rugs, as girls were known.

(Pat Boone sang “Don’t Forbid Me.”) But all the lust was virginal; everything was a sin except drinking, and we did a lot of that.

Alarms woke us up early every morning for compulsory daily Mass at Dahlgren Chapel. The priest would pace up and down. No Communion? Why? Confession is right here. Why put your soul at risk? (I remember agonizingly confessing that I had touched a girl. The priest intoned through the grating, “You must never see this tool of Satan again.”—“But I’m taking her to the Fall Festival.”

—“What’s more important? The Fall Festival or your immortal soul?

Three Hail Marys. Take Communion.”) Receiving a copy of Playboy in the mail was grounds for immediate dismissal.

A priest went through my room, as they did, and found that I had come to the nation’s oldest Catholic college—founded in 1789— with copies of Madame Bovary and Ulysses. Mr. Ambrogi S.J., our freshman prefect, summoned me to his office: Didn’t I realize these books were on the index of forbidden books? Merely possessing them put my soul at risk. I bought it all.

Georgetown, in addition to making me and my soul feel very safe, was easy, more like high school than what I thought college would be, and that was okay by me. Ike was president. Wasn’t Georgetown itself, our section of Washington, also the home of the people who actually ran the world? The boundaries of my world were defined and safe and comforting. I never laughed so hard in my life.

And then one day in the spring of 1957, on my way to class in Copley Hall, I saw a woman striding with distracted authority out of a wooded area that was a shortcut to Reservoir Road, the site of Georgetown Hospital.

It was unhinging to come upon someone so shockingly beautiful, but not movie-star beautiful. This woman—because she was a Woman, with a capital “W,” an adult, as opposed to every other female in D.C., who was a rug—possessed a ferocity. Her head was much larger than her slender body, her slender legs. Her dark hair, slightly short and curled in a current fashion, had been slicked back in a way that emphasized her features, giving her eyes, her nose, her mouth the force of a primitive sculpture. But there was nothing primitive about her elegance. Today you’d recognize the clothes she wore, the casual retro fashion that Ralph Lauren would popularize decades later, but, back then, that look was new. Her clothes had the quality of a disguise, though. Had she come from another continent—a more passionate continent?

Her smile was not directed at the world, like the social smile of everybody else in D.C., but sprang from some secret interior place.

What was she thinking? She was happy, but in a way that I had never seen. She seemed impossibly complete.

I started to follow her, but couldn’t. I told myself that I mustn’t be late for class. She was terrifying.

The next day, at approximately the same time, I waited at the stone stairs leading from Reservoir Road. Nothing. The next. The next. She appeared again on the path, which was thick with winter trees just starting to show green. She walked with the same confident gait that said, “I belong in the world in a way that you don’t.”

Could I speak to her? Would she answer? Did she even speak English? What would I say? I followed her to a red brick house on N Street. She entered and shut the door.

I told my roommate, Bill. The next day, he joined me at the stone stairs. She appeared. We followed her back to 3307 N Street. She went in. Bill had an idea. We went around to Thirty-third Street, to a driveway behind the houses, where cars could be parked, deliveries made. We checked garages. Bill said, “Here.” We stood in the darkness of the garage, looking through a window that opened onto the garden.

She came out of the house wearing a two-piece bathing suit.

She stretched out on a lounge chair and rubbed lotion on her body.

She leaned back to receive the first warm rays of 1957. I tell you, the effect was electrifying. What do you do with these feelings that had everything to do with, and nothing to do with, this woman?

We asked around about her. Oh, yes. Isn’t she something? She’s the wife of the junior senator from Massachusetts. She’s Catholic.

Life took over. I didn’t see her again. Life went back to being safe, or so I thought. In May, at the year’s big dance called the Spring Festival, the Dean of Men, a stern Jesuit named Father Rock, was caught in a situation with the young president of the student body in a room at the hotel where the dance was held. No one was told specifically what had happened. We didn’t have words for that. But something unspeakable had happened. Word got out that the priest would be leaving the campus the next day. We woke up in the early morning to watch as he was driven off in disgrace. The president of the student body was put on leave. No one spoke of it. How could we? No one’s vocabulary contained the words for the meaning of what had happened. But it had to do with sex. The campus atmosphere was charged with an unspoken incomprehensibility. Whatever they were, were they another side of the feelings engendered by that Woman of indescribable power? Who could talk about it?

Rules changed. We gentlemen of Georgetown no longer had to endure compulsory daily Mass. Had we been bought off? Was this the bargain for our never mentioning this episode again? Everything loosened. At parties, on jukeboxes, Elvis Presley replaced Pat Boone.

The next time I saw the woman was in the fall of 1957. I, now a sophomore, saw her at the theater. She was very pregnant, and that November she gave birth to a daughter. I counted back and realized that when I first saw her she must have been coming from Georgetown Hospital in the early days of her pregnancy.

I was happy when, a few years later, she became the most famous woman in the world. But I never again saw that stunning ferocity that changed my world.