Washington still cherishes a belief that it was long a place of bipartisan comity, of after-hours socializing during which fences were leapt and mended and the gears of the republic were lubricated with alcohol and bonhomie. There is an element of truth to the legend. Until the late nineteen-fifties, all U.S. senators occupied a single Senate Office Building, affectionately called the S.O.B. They saw a lot of one another. But, as they and their ever-growing staffs spread out over Capitol Hill (they’re now in three different buildings), senators became less likely to R.S.V.P. in the affirmative to any Washington social invitation. As Neil MacNeil and Richard A. Baker point out in their 2013 history of the Senate, “Since the 1960s, with the greater availability of high-speed jet aircraft, senators have found it convenient—or politically necessary—to return home at least weekly,” not only to raise money but also to see their families, whom they often no longer bring to live in the capital.
Allen Drury’s “Advise and Consent,” still the most famous of Washington novels, was published in 1959, on the cusp of the changes MacNeil and Baker describe. The book features a hostess named Dolly Harrison, her first name probably an homage to both Dolley Madison and Dolly Gann, a Washington hostess of the twenties and thirties. But some of Drury’s Dolly is a toned-down Perle Mesta, the capital’s most famous mid-twentieth-century party-giver. Readers are told that in Dolly’s “great white house amid the dark green trees”—an image that resembles Mesta’s mansion—“more than one crisis has been solved.” In her 1960 autobiography, “Perle: My Story,” Mesta tells a tale that fits in with the productive fraternizing Drury portrays:
It’s a nice story, likely one with more charm than fact. David Brinkley, in “Washington Goes to War” (1988), provides a more fully believable description of Mesta’s chief party-giving predecessor, Evalyn Walsh McLean, who owned the Hope Diamond and, at the beginning of the nineteen-forties, hosted dinners in a big house called Friendship:
Reality aside, it is Perle Mesta, not Evalyn McLean, whose name is still remembered, albeit a bit dimly, fifty years after her death. With political loyalties that oscillated between Republicans and Democrats, Mesta was not especially interested in amassing Washington’s usual currency, power. It was notice that she wanted, and she achieved an everlasting degree of it as “the hostess with the mostes’, ” Ethel Merman’s character in Irving Berlin’s Broadway musical “Call Me Madam” (1950). Mesta didn’t run a salon; she threw soirées. As Meryl Gordon explains in her new biography, “The Woman Who Knew Everyone” (Grand Central), “Perle wanted her guests to unwind and enjoy themselves, to look forward to seeing new entertainers and surprise performers.” Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House, called her Perly-Whirly. She sent her guest lists to the society pages of the city’s newspapers, and then invited the reporters themselves.
Born in 1882, Pearl Skirvin—she later Frenchified her first name to Perle—grew up in Texas and Oklahoma, where her father, whom she revered, made fortunes in land speculation, oil, and construction. The Skirvin hotel still stands in Oklahoma City, and it was there, Perle said, that she got her “first interest in politics from eavesdropping on the lobby conversations.” She adopted, at least initially, her father’s Republican politics, and, more lastingly, the Christian Science beliefs of her younger sister, Marguerite, who had a successful career in silent films. Perle served as Marguerite’s chaperon for a number of years before marrying George Mesta, a rich industrialist, in 1917. The couple settled down outside Pittsburgh, in a plutocratic version of living above the store. “Her husband owned a ten-thousand-square-foot 1880s mansion on the bank of the Monongahela River. But the view from the picture windows was hardly scenic,” Gordon writes. “The Mesta Machine Company, with manufacturing buildings on twenty acres, spewed smoke and grit into the sky.”
The First World War prompted a life-changing move to Washington, when Woodrow Wilson’s Administration required consultations with George about steel production. The Mestas rented a suite at the Willard Hotel, and Perle became friends with another guest, Thomas Marshall, the Vice-President remembered for saying that what the country really needed was a good five-cent cigar. She was soon going to dinners, including some of Evalyn McLean’s, and then giving parties, small ones, of her own. Gordon explains, “She wasn’t trying to press a political agenda. But she liked being adjacent to power and useful to George by socializing with politicians.” Her husband “liked to show off his wealth,” and he gave a hundred thousand dollars to the 1924 campaign of Calvin Coolidge. Though she was less conservative than George—she frequently stuck up for his workers back in Pittsburgh—Perle wouldn’t back a Democratic ticket for another twenty years.
George died a month after Coolidge’s Inauguration, at the age of sixty-three. His widow, only forty-two, soon enough sold the Pittsburgh mansion and moved into Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. She also bounced around to the races in Saratoga Springs and the opera in New York, and shared one of Newport’s baronial “cottages” with her sister. But Perle was always drawn back to Washington and to any opportunity for getting her name in the papers. An unpleasant one arose in the late thirties, when she, her siblings, and stockholders in her father’s main company waged legal war against the patriarch over questionable “financial maneuvers.” Judge Alfred P. Murrah (for whom the federal building bombed by Timothy McVeigh would be named) scolded the whole Skirvin family from the bench: “You should be ashamed of yourselves.” They more or less patched things up.
Into the Second World War and beyond, Mesta kept at her self-promoting hospitality. “God, she was such an obvious social climber,” the ninety-nine-year-old journalist Marie Ridder recalls to Gordon. “But she was not an unkind human being. She just used her entrée and her money to do what she wanted to do. She did some very worthwhile things along the way.” Mesta was a tenacious feminist and a longtime advocate of the still unpassed Equal Rights Amendment. During the New Deal, the measure was pressed by the suffragette Alice Paul but opposed by both Eleanor Roosevelt and F.D.R.’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, because it would require the repeal of certain special protections for women that were already in place. Mesta had occasional lobbying successes, such as firming up the support of a back-bench Missouri senator, Harry Truman, for the E.R.A., after which the two became friends. She also made some progress off the Hill. The acidic Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s eldest child, found her quite resistible at first, but over time warmed up a little. Mesta’s chief rival, for decades, was the far more beautiful and soignée Gwen Cafritz, a Hungarian immigrant married to a wealthy and charitable real-estate baron. Cafritz’s denunciations of her foe included a remark that Mesta had arrived in D.C. by “flying out of the outhouse.” Press-wise, though, their long feud did both of them more good than harm.
Mesta’s friendship with Truman, his wife, Bess, and their daughter, Margaret, was the real making of her. She supported him as the replacement for Henry Wallace on the 1944 Democratic ticket with Roosevelt, and threw a big party for him at the Sulgrave Club during his very brief Vice-Presidency. She even tried to advance Margaret’s shaky career as a singer. Gordon asserts that Truman made Mesta more or less “an extended member of the family”—a claim that seems plausible given the profusion of favors she performed. Mesta hopped aboard the President’s whistle-stop train during his come-from-behind campaign in 1948, and she raised the money to keep it on the rails through Election Day. She was soon co-chairing Truman’s inaugural ball, which she entered on the President’s arm.
A “tangible reward,” Gordon writes, was expected, and it came, in the form of a nine-hundred-and-ninety-eight-square-mile bauble known as the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. However improbable, her nomination to be the U.S. representative there was never in any real danger—neither from one senator’s complaint about her lack of qualifications nor from the fact that Mesta knocked nine years off her age in the confirmation papers she had to submit. She took along her Packard automobile and a vast amount of Coca-Cola when, in August, 1949, she sailed for Europe on the S.S. America.
Luxembourg is so small that Mesta was sent there as an envoy, not an actual ambassador. Her sustained efforts to obtain the higher title never bore fruit, but that made little difference to a public entertained by her European adventure. Mesta worked hard at the job, giving parties for war orphans and observing Luxembourg’s steel production, her old life with George allowing her to demonstrate some expertise. Eleanor Roosevelt, who had viewed Mesta’s appointment with disfavor, dropped into the duchy and changed her mind after seeing her in action.
By the standards of the day, Mesta was a racial progressive; she had helped integrate Truman’s inaugural ball, and in Luxembourg she made a point of informing the press that she danced with Black G.I.s at the parties she regularly gave for U.S. soldiers stationed with NATO. However well she meant, though, she could never keep her foot far from her mouth. When, in 1965, the Black attorney and activist Patricia Roberts Harris was appointed to her old post, Mesta remarked, “I am sure people will like her. When I went to Luxembourg I took my butler and maid, who are colored, and people adored it.”
Mesta’s daily life at the duchy’s U.S. legation was, in fact, bruising. Adopting the parlance of the time, Gordon speaks of an “enemy within”—not Communist subversives but the State Department’s ordinary male career personnel who had no respect for Mesta and endlessly undermined her. (Back in Washington, the Under-Secretary of State, David Bruce, described her as “an ignoramus and a pretentious bore.”) She came to despise her successive deputies, Paul West and Anthony Swezey, and attempted to take early advantage of the “Lavender Scare,” the State Department’s nineteen-fifties purge of gay employees, by spreading word to officials back in the U.S. that Swezey was homosexual. She failed to destroy his career.
Seeking leverage, Mesta persistently, but to little avail, mentioned her closeness to Truman. Only toward the end of her tenure did she openly let the career men have it—first in a lengthy, in-person complaint to a visiting State Department inspector, and then in a ten-page memo to the President himself. She had genuine grievances, but her tactics were crude and curiously naïve for someone who had been in the thick of politics for so long. As the Republicans returned to power in 1953, she actually thought that Eisenhower, whom she’d entertained at her Luxembourg residence when he was NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, might keep her on.
When “Call Me Madam” opened in New York, on October 12, 1950, the State Department’s professionals were determined to spoil any show-biz pleasure for their nominal boss. The character based on her, Sally Adams, might be called “the priestess with the leastes’ protocol,” but the real Mesta was instructed not to see the show. In what sounds like a negotiated settlement, she stayed away on opening night but attended a matinée two weeks later, accompanied, at the President’s suggestion, by Bess and Margaret Truman. Some of the jokes in the show made Mesta uneasy, but she was delighted by the “imperious Foreign Service officer” with whom Sally is made to cross swords. “I thought the State Department man was just perfect,” she told the press. Mesta and the show’s star, Ethel Merman, two loud peas in the same pushy pod, became and remained fast friends.
On plenty of other social occasions, Mesta had male escorts, but she was content without a man constantly by her side. Gordon describes one “serious romance” during the early years of her widowhood—with Carl Magee, the inventor of the parking meter—but Mesta mostly lived a life without romantic tumult. Before she went off to Luxembourg, there were rumors of something afoot between her and Truman’s merry widower of a Vice-President, Alben Barkley, who had been born in a Kentucky log cabin and was seventy-one when he became the “Veep,” a coinage of his grandson’s. The press had cooked up the story chiefly for its own purposes, but it nicely synchronized with Mesta’s own continuing chase of publicity.
Mesta had no enthusiasm for the next Democratic Presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, and there was talk, her politics being as fungible as they were, that she might return to the Republican fold. But the Eisenhowers, once in the White House, displayed a certain wariness toward her, over some less-than-supportive remarks she was believed to have made. Cordial relations were restored, but a lunch with Mamie and a couple of White House invitations—one to a party with the Queen Mother—did not give Mesta the kind of steady centrality she craved. She kept herself in the news by touring Russia (the State Department refused her a diplomatic passport), and then by writing articles and giving lectures.
In the late fifties, she seemed to find a new Truman in Lyndon B. Johnson, ardently promoting his Presidential candidacy with a view toward restoring her own status. When she published her memoir, in the spring of 1960, she hawked both products: “Every place I was supposed to talk about my book, I plugged LBJ.” The effort proved disastrous. Once friendly with the young congressman John F. Kennedy (she tried to fix him up with Margaret Truman), Mesta had become a back number to his family even before she threw in her lot with L.B.J. and alienated them for good. So disappointed was she by Johnson’s loss of the 1960 Democratic nomination that she began to criticize both Kennedy’s inexperience and Jackie’s occasional failure to wear stockings in public. She went so far as to endorse Nixon, partly because he had come out in favor of the E.R.A., but also because of the age-old desire to befriend the enemy of one’s enemy. Gordon seems understandably perplexed by what she calls the hostess’s “social suicide” at the dawn of Camelot. The star power from which Mesta estranged herself is of such posthumous endurance that the cover of “The Woman Who Knew Everyone” features a photograph of Mesta with Jackie Kennedy before things went wrong.
After becoming the Vice-President, Johnson, mindful of Mesta’s previous support, forgave her fling with Nixon, who was in some ways also the enemy of his enemy. He bought her mansion, Les Ormes, and populistically de-Frenchified it into the Elms. Mesta rented a grand apartment for herself on Watson Place, where she began throwing parties subsidized by the women’s magazine McCall’s, for which she was now writing a column. Gwen Cafritz even came to the first of them. The two women, with the sixties starting to swing, decided to bury the cocktail toothpick at last.
Mesta was in San Juan the day Kennedy was assassinated, and, on hearing the news, she characteristically let slip the words “I always knew it. I always said Johnson would be President some day.” She supported the new President on civil rights, organizing and financing a huge outdoor concert with an interracial cast of musical performers in the wake of Washington’s 1968 riots, and she supported him on Vietnam, declaring, “There is nothing dove about me.” Indeed, Mesta stood by him even as things capsized to the point that she had to cancel the party she had planned to give in Chicago during the Democratic Convention later that year.
After Nixon was elected, he and Pat did extend some White House invitations to Mesta, but more often they kept a certain distance, and she had to content herself with company lower down on the Presidential pyramid. She became friendly with Judy Agnew, the wife of the Vice-President, and saw a good deal of Nixon’s personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, with whom she shared Robert Gray, a Washington public-relations man, as a walker. She eventually found a raucous kindred spirit in Martha Mitchell—whose husband, Attorney General John N. Mitchell, was involved in the Watergate scandal—and the duo made a number of trips to New York together. (One wonders if Merman ever joined them.)
Generally sympathetic to Mesta, Gordon does tag her not only with an “insatiable need for publicity” but also with a “deep fear of becoming irrelevant.” A decade after Mesta criticized Jackie Kennedy’s bare legs, a reporter she invited to tea noted that the hostess, now in her late eighties, was dressed “in a blue mini-dress with white calf-length boots.” Those who liked her must have cringed at the way she became a lurid Washington relic, the hostess equivalent of the toupeed senator who just can’t let go. But by early 1974 Mesta was at last out of gas. She returned to Oklahoma City and died there the following year, at the age of ninety-two.
Gordon, whose previous biographical subjects include Brooke Astor and Rachel (Bunny) Mellon, does Mesta justice and a little more, sometimes allowing a researcher’s enthusiasm to overestimate others’ interest in the ghost she’s pursuing. Mesta did make the cover of Time in 1949, but to say that “during the first six months of 1956 more than two thousand stories about Perle appeared in U.S. newspapers” is to say more about a vanished world of syndication than about one woman’s celebrity. There’s a certain chumminess, occasionally charming but often not, to Gordon’s narrative: readers get told to “imagine” a scene when the documentation is too scant for a full reconstruction. When the first-person voice appears, more than two hundred and fifty pages into the volume, it feels as if the author has somehow crashed her own party, and like most hosts and guests she sometimes runs out of interesting things to say: “Things happen. If only we could roll back the clock and change the outcome. Therein lies the heartache: we can’t.”
Hostessing has never fully disappeared as a Washington occupation. After Perle Mesta’s heyday, Evangeline Bruce, the wife of the career diplomat who pronounced Mesta an “ignoramus,” gave parties in Georgetown that were more elegant and rarefied affairs than Mesta’s. But the center of social gravity eventually shifted from Bruce’s drawing room to the nearby one commanded by Pamela Harriman, whose invitations, beginning in the nineteen-seventies, were all business and entirely partisan. Her efforts on behalf of Democratic candidates helped flip the Senate away from the Republicans in 1986, and seven years later she could take some of the credit for installing Bill Clinton in the White House. The substance of her contribution can be measured by her ambassadorial reward: not Luxembourg but France.
Bipartisan socializing did not fade away altogether, even in the contentious years of the Iraq War, when the best invitation in town was probably the one to Christopher Hitchens’s annual after-party on the night of the White House Correspondents’ dinner. From my diary for April 21, 2007: “Scalia was there, having a high old time, and so was [Paul] Wolfowitz, unaccompanied by the woman who’s about to cost him his job at the World Bank.” But Jerry Brown was also present that night, and appeared intrigued by someone’s cross-party suggestion that, if he made another run for governor of California, he could “contrive a way to get Nancy Reagan to endorse him.”
During her days in Washington, Mrs. Reagan, however much a newcomer, greatly respected the capital’s establishment, bringing her husband to social affairs and cultivating friendships with Katharine Graham and Buffy Cafritz, a hostess and philanthropist who had married the nephew of Mesta’s old rival. Even Presidents and First Ladies who never seemed to care much for socializing with the capital’s permanent residents—the Carters generally stayed home; George W. Bush went to bed early; the Obamas had their friends come to them—dutifully went to annual entertainments like the Correspondents’ dinner and the Kennedy Center Honors. During the first Trump Administration, when even the White House Christmas trees seemed to run with blood, the President never showed up at either of those moderately unifying events.
Early on in Trump I, the largest social divide ran between implacable Never Trumpers and other Republicans who fell in line with craven speed as soon as Trump won. As time went on, the city’s atmosphere became so innovatively awful that some people had trouble dining out with their own families and political brethren: doxing and flash mobs briefly made inroads into the world of nontransferrable invitations and valet parking. With the arrival of Trump II, thoughts have been turning back to the city’s last complete social collapse, in 1861. At the beginning of that year, Mrs. Jefferson Davis, whose husband was preparing to resign from the Senate, went by herself to say goodbye to President James Buchanan, Senator Davis’s fellow-Democrat, and described Washington as a “great mausoleum” glumly devoid of social engagements. These days in the still quiet capital, there is a feeling, spoken of by many and disputed by some, that the “disrupters” coming to town—not just rioters this time but nominees—are intent on ripping up documents far more important than whatever’s left of the book of etiquette. ♦
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