The Power Elite: Society in the Capital
When Mrs. George F. Baker gave her celebrated (locally, at least) dinner party for Senator Barry Goldwater at “Viking’s Cove,” her Oyster Bay estate, she was regarded very definitely as a pioneer. Great excitement preceded the event, and no one was at all sure what might happen. A number of “unusual” people had been invited. There were one or two journalists (to one of whom Mrs. Baker confided that her favorite author is Albert Payson Terhune, writer of dog stories). Mr. Roy M. Cohn, a New York lawyer and former member of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “team,” was also there. Political figures included Senator John Tower of Texas. The late Styles Bridges, Senator from New Hampshire, had wired his regrets. Louise Gore, active in conservative politics in Maryland and, at that point, heavily involved in Senator Goldwater’s campaign, had flown up from Washington with the Senator—or “Barry,” as everyone was cheerfully calling him. In other words, a certain section of Society had decided to assert itself politically. “It’s high time,” Mrs. Baker announced, “that some of us who are in a position to do something did something—to get the kind of government we want.”
Society’s idea, it often seems, of a perfect political leader would be someone along the lines of Bing Crosby—affable, affluent, Republican, and fun. There are, in fact, a number of people around the country who feel that Crosby would make a better President than any we have had in recent years, and a similar small but ardent number favored the late Walt Disney. (Society often thinks of itself as in a kind of show business, and so its affinity for right-thinking actors—George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Shirley Temple—is not surprising.) When North Shore Society turned out to meet Senator Goldwater, it discovered that he was a kind of super-Bing Crosby. Like Bing, Barry was a golfer. Like Bing, Barry had a Western breeziness and charm and, as the evening progressed, it turned out that Barry Goldwater could also sing. “He’s the most attractive man I’ve met in ages!” one woman cooed.
There were a number of uncommon aspects to Mrs. Baker’s party. For one thing, it was a party for a serious cause—to Save the Country. Society is accustomed to helping stamp out diseases by giving balls, but the matter at stake at “Viking’s Cove” was of far greater moment. For another thing, this was a party in a private house where there would be speeches. Society people are notoriously poor public speakers, and the possibility that a number of Old New York names might be called upon to say a few words about Goldwater was the cause of considerable jittery apprehension. At the same time, Mrs. Baker’s party illustrated—as well as anything—Society’s own quaint approach to national politics and political issues.
Mr. Edmund C. Lynch, a New York broker (of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith), introduced Senator Goldwater as “a man with ideas we should all listen to,” and everyone agreed that “Eddie did a wonderful job” with his speech. The Senator, however, was surprisingly glib and perfunctory, and his speech was over so quickly that no one was sure what he had said. He turned the podium over to Senator Tower, who proved to be quite a bit more articulate. In sonorous tones, he reminded the assembled members of Society who they were and what they represented—“the leaders of the great city of New York”—and he assured his audience that their traditional and happy “way of life” was seriously threatened. “I look at you beautiful women,” the Senator said, “in your beautiful dresses and your beautiful jewels. Unless Barry Goldwater is elected President, all that will go—down the drain.” The women of the group cast nervous looks at one another, and fingered the diamonds at their throats.
Senator Tower knew, it seemed, that the best way to arouse Society from its traditional political lethargy was to suggest that it faced a change in the status quo. He offered Barry Goldwater as the status quo’s savior and preserver. Similarly persuasive as a North Shore politician is Steven B. Derounian, Congressman from the Second District of New York (which includes the North Shore). Though considerably less socially polished than either Senators Goldwater or Tower, Representative Derounian—an immigrant from Bulgaria, a graduate of N.Y.U. and Fordham Law—is, nonetheless, much in demand as a guest at the best Long Island parties in the largest estates. “He helps us get our long driveways plowed in winter,” one man says, but there is more to Derounian’s appeal than that. Also a conservative Republican, Derounian likes to hint that if conservative Republicans are not at the helm in Washington, the very fabric of Society is about to be torn apart. “Do you know what will happen if this man Kennedy gets into the White House?” he once predicted. “Clubs like your wonderful Piping Rock will be forced to take in at least fifty per cent Jews.” Everyone shudders at thoughts like these.
After the political speeches, Mrs. Baker’s black-tied and begowned guests turned to dancing and otherwise enjoying themselves, and an atmosphere of wealthy reassurance began to return. The country was surely soon going to be in good hands. At about eleven o’clock, Goldwater and his party were preparing to leave for the airport, and Mrs. Baker’s guests gathered under the vast portico of her house to bid him good-bye. Waving and blowing kisses, the Senator stepped into his limousine, and the great car started down the drive. Suddenly the wheels spat to a stop in the gravel, and the Senator emerged from the car, ran back to the trunk, opened it, and withdrew a bottle of whiskey. He waved it cheerfully in the air, ran back to the car, climbed inside, and was off. Everyone cheered.
“Isn’t he wonderful?” one woman said. “And what he says makes so much sense. I just know he’s going to win.”
“I just wish,” said a friend, “that they’d passed the hat after the speeches. With all the money that’s represented in this house tonight, he could have raised millions for his campaign.”
“Oh, but you couldn’t have people writing checks with all these servants running around,” the first woman said. “I’m always afraid my servants will find out how much money I have. If they ever did, and there ever was a Communist take-over, I know they’d murder me in my bed.”
“Still, I know he could have collected an awful lot of money.”
“He should try calling some of the men here in their offices tomorrow,” the first woman said.
“Oh, but he won’t be able to get a tenth as much out of them tomorrow—when they’ve all sobered up—as he would have if he’d tried tonight,” said her friend.
Meanwhile, in Washington, both Society and politics are somewhat differently regarded. “Oh, baloney! There isn’t any real Society here! ‘Society’ is just a word made up by a lot of boobs on newspapers for a lot of other boobs to read about!” said Alice Roosevelt Longworth not long ago as she sipped tea in her wisteria-shaded Massachusetts Avenue house. “More tea?” she offered her guest. “Or would you like a snort of something serious?” “Mrs. L.,” as she is affectionately called in Washington—“Auntie Sis” to members of the family—is still, at over eighty, slender, fair, and elegantly beautiful as when she was known as “Princess Alice,” and when the color “Alice blue” was named after her. Her wit is quick and caustic. Even if she were not the daughter of one United States President (furry mementoes of her father’s big-game hunts hang upon her walls), and the cousin of another, she would still be considered a member of the American aristocracy. At Truman Capote’s celebrated bal masque in 1966, when women who considered themselves “of Society” spent hundreds of dollars on elaborate masks, Mrs. L. showed up in a thirty-nine-cent mask from Woolworth’s and was the grandest woman there. And yet she insists that her own life has not been typical of what she calls “real” Society. “My life has been all publicity-publicity-publicity,” she says. She feels, instead, that her life typifies Washington Society, which is a somewhat special thing. “I came out in the White House, for instance,” Mrs. Longworth says with a little shrug of her shoulders. As is the case with many people who are in Society in the capital, Washington is only an adopted home for her. “Washington Society,” she says, “is all come-and-go.” It is all newcomers.
This is why, to Real Society, Washington Society seems incomprehensible—a contradiction in terms. It can’t be real. It actually welcomes newcomers. Newcomers seem to be Washington Society’s lifeblood and, even more baffling, most of the newcomers are politicians.
Real Society has never favored politics as a career. By its very nature, politics involves a stepping-out from the enclosure of family and wealth, and an attempt to make all sorts of friends. When its members have occasionally gone into politics, Real Society families have always elaborately forgiven them, while treating the occasional political-minded Rockefeller, Roosevelt, or Lindsay as strays. “Heavens,” says a Philadelphia lady, “I’d always be polite to a politician. They are our public servants.” She would be equally polite, she implies, to any servant. After Senator Goldwater’s rather decisive defeat at the polls, Mrs. Baker and her Long Island friends decided that they, too, had been unwisely dabbling in affairs best left to menials. That they themselves had been politically naïve was never considered, much less mentioned. “It was the machine,” said one woman vaguely, “that brought Barry down.” “Of course I’m not sorry I’m a Republican,” said another. “This sort of thing merely proves that we should support the Republican party more and more. But as for the politicians—they’re best left for other politicians to handle.” The odd distinction that Society in America so often makes between voting, which is regarded as a sort of moral stance, and politics, which is simple skulduggery, was never more apparent. “It was one thing for Edith Baker to vote for Barry,” says a friend, “but quite another to give a political dinner party for him. After all, the way to get a man elected is with money.”
To Real Society, Washington Society seems all wrong. Real Society has always been based on a wish to maintain the standards and the balance of things. In its battle against change, Society must be admired for its spunk and pitied for its defeat. It has tried, again and again, to establish something that could be called a system, and it has seen, again and again, its systems collapse. So it is particularly painful to look at Washington where, regardless of who is in or out of Society, Society continues to function, and with a certain order and predictability. It has done so, furthermore, for more than a hundred and fifty years. People come and go in a steady stream, but the architecture of Washington Society stays. Socially, it is the most fluid and yet the most stable of American cities.
The concerns of other cities simply do not occur in Washington. The most successful social voice in town may belong to Polly Guggenheim Logan’s bird, which says “Hellew!” in a powdered accent to visitors as they enter. (“It talks that way,” its owner explains, “because it was trained by Mr. Guggenheim’s valet.”) Where one went to school, or where one’s daughter came out, matters little. Nor does it matter much where one is from because nearly everyone is from somewhere else, and this is often a town no one has heard of.
“I feel sorry for people who come here from Oshkosh, get a taste of our Society, and then have to go back,” is an observation frequently heard in Washington. In Washington, “Oshkosh” is shorthand for elsewhere; venture twenty-five miles from the Capitol steps in any direction and you enter, socially, Oshkosh. Because Washington Society is easier to get into than Oshkosh Society, and because the returnee to Oshkosh may find himself just as much out of Society as before he went away, he may elect to stay on in Washington long after his political job has ended.
Washington is populated with ex-Senators, ex-Representatives, ex-Cabinet members, and ex-diplomats who are now practicing in downtown Washington law offices. “Making the job tougher for those of us who were born here,” says one local lawyer. Similarly, widows of Senators, Representatives, Cabinet members, and diplomats have shown a preference for staying on. But to a majority of those in politics and government, the escape from Oshkosh is only temporary, and for those who go home, Society in the capital remains a dressy memory and a scrapbook-ful of old invitations and yellowing newspaper clippings.
The way the transient quality of its people lends permanence to Washington Society’s design is visible everywhere—most strikingly, perhaps, in people’s houses. Political fortunes change, administrations arrive and depart, but the silken background against which Society moves remains as immutable as the Pyramids, or New York’s Plaza Hotel. After attending a handful of Washington parties, you begin to get the sense, as you enter each new house, of having been there before. Decorative details repeat themselves. The furniture is in the stiff and gilded style of Louis XIV and XV, but—different from real Society furniture—it is usually not véritable French. Reproductions, Washington finds, are better at withstanding the traffic of the comers and goers. The curved love seat is everywhere.
Washingtonians decorate their houses in pale, beige-y shades and, of course, there is good reason for this. Neutral colors, no more personal than those in an average hotel suite, are more likely to satisfy a succession of different owners. When a new Senator buys a house in Washington, he must consider the possibility that he will not need it six years later. So he is cautious about making extensive structural changes. Personalizing a house too much can lessen its resale value. He is usually willing to buy, along with the house, the former owner’s beige carpets, off-white draperies, and love seats—while the sellers of Washington houses usually have their own furniture waiting for them back in Oshkosh.
The monogrammed matchbook, considered middle class elsewhere, serves a triple function in Washington, which is why no house is without an abundant supply. A Washington woman may not be able to repaint her drawing room, but she can sprinkle every tabletop with her initials. Mrs. Lyndon Johnson who, as the Vice-President’s wife, moved into Mrs. Perle Mesta’s old house, accepted some of Mrs. Mesta’s furniture, but lighted her cigarettes with “LBJ” matches. Now, of course, she is in somebody else’s old house. Matchbooks are also a quicker means of identification than calling cards; a glance in the Steuben ashtray will remind you instantly where you are, and this is considered helpful to a politician in a busy season where he may drop in on as many as ten functions an evening. Also, matchbooks tell others where you have been; they are status conveying, nonverbal name-droppers. A gentleman lighting a lady’s cigarette with White House matches will not fail to produce a flutter of respect. No one leaves an important Washington party these days without artfully pocketing a handful of matchbooks.
Washington has been called a “company town,” the main industry being politics, but this is a quite superficial appraisal of the Washington situation. Washington is a city—one of a very few cities—where Society wields true power. It is the taste of power, more than the taste of wealth, that is addictive in Washington and that keeps the ex-Senators, the ex-diplomats, the ex-Cabinet members and their widows staying on in the city, the scene of their greatest triumphs. And Government power—which is merely the magnetic core of the power that is achievable in Washington—is not the only power of importance here. Around the government have gathered satellite powers, and the men who represent these satellites—the lobbyists, the representatives of industry, of agriculture, of trade unions, of banks and legal firms—are as important to politicians in the balance of power as politicians are to them. Socially, these too must be reckoned with. Then, among the most powerful of all, are the journalists, the representatives of the newspapers, magazines, and broadcast media. A Senator may wait for months for a personal chat with the President of the United States, but a journalist can set it up for tomorrow morning. Everyone is aware of the power of these men and women and, socially, they have probably the easiest time of it. They are on everyone’s invitation list for they can make or destroy careers. Everyone, too, is concerned with “handling” the press, for politicians have learned how the press can handle them, how a reporter—by artfully disguising himself as “a spokesman close to the White House,” or “a close observer of the Washington scene”—can slant a story any way he wishes. “Socially, the press corps here is more powerful than the diplomatic corps,” one wife says. “At every party I give, I make damn sure that the press people are having a good time.”
There is also the possibility of getting into Washington Society by making politics a hobby. The young Washington housewife, if she is willing to devote a few hours a week to the furtherance of the career of a favorite Senator, perhaps helping him organize a campaign or speaking tour, helping him solicit funds, will find herself—like her Scarsdale sister who spends an afternoon a week hemming sheets for the hospital—swept into the Washington social whirl. In fact, because of the nature of American government and politics, Washington is a town where everyone is given a fighting chance; in Washington, everyone is essentially nice to everyone else—even to total strangers who wander in. Those strangers could, if nothing else, be voters.
Unlike the visitor to New York, Philadelphia, or Boston, the visitor to Washington—who would like to go to Society parties—can simply telephone his Senator or Congressman. Immediately, a little snowfall of invitations will descend upon his mailbox. Or he can just crash. The noted hostess Mrs. Gwen Cafritz admits that all her parties contain crashers. If they behave themselves, they are allowed to stay. They may even be invited back. But it would be a mistake to think of Washington’s determined hospitableness as true “friendliness.” “Remember,” warns the capital’s leading social arbitress, Carolyn Hagner Shaw, “that personal friendships do not count in official Washington.” They never have counted. Washington friendships are business friendships, instantly breakable, just as they were when Dolly Madison was giving the parties.
Perhaps it is because the pattern of Washington Society never really changes that everyone looks for change wherever possible. With each new administration, a new and vigorous search for change begins. Possible signs of it become the major topic of conversation. The New Frontier, under President Kennedy, was said to have “changed everything.” But Scottie Lanahan, the blond daughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald who has lived in Washington during several administrations and was considered a full-fledged member of the “New Frontier Set,” says, “The only change I remember is that when the Peter Lawfords came to town, the Sargent Shrivers had a party and had Lester Lanin’s orchestra flown in from New York.”
One reason why Washington Society changes little is that its tenets were established—albeit accidentally—by the United States Constitution. Another reason is Oshkosh. To the Oshkosh politician and his wife, Washington is the end of the rainbow. Arriving in Washington at last, they want exactly the kind of social life they have read about, with its cocktails, Gulf shrimp, black-tie dinners with five courses and three wines, and with—more than anything else—its traditional gaiety. “Boy, if the folks back home could see me now!” said the wife of a recently arrived young Senator as she turned, in her sequinned ball gown, admiring her image in a pier glass before leaving for a ball.
Washington has had somber periods, but they haven’t lasted long. Gaiety comes bouncing back, and even national disasters can do little to dampen it. Betty Beale, a chatty columnist for the Washington Star, stated the situation accurately not long ago in a whole column devoted to gaiety. She observed that Washington was so gay one might think the town was caught up in “the excitement of a war.” For anyone who is active in political life, or who “takes the town seriously” and enjoys feeling that he is close to the pulse of things, there is enough required gaiety to keep an engagement calendar solidly booked. An up-and-coming State Department man, for instance, who feels he ought to attend foreign embassy parties, finds that there are over a hundred foreign embassies in Washington, most of which have one important function a year—on their national days—if not two. This is already quite a lot of gaiety. Then there are the parties within his own department, the parties of other departments and agencies, the military parties, the press parties—and many more.
Also, as a matter of form, each newcomer is given a party. “It sometimes seems to me as though we could keep busy going to nothing but Welcome-to-Washington parties, and farewell parties,” sighs Mrs. Archibald Roosevelt. Prominent out-of-towners also add to the load of essential entertaining. “They come, they expect a party, and of course they want to meet a lot of big shots,” says Mrs. Longworth. “So people here throw something together for them—a few dining-out Senators, a Cabinet member, a couple of ambassadors—it’s like putting together a salad.”
Not every newcomer to Washington finds the gaiety buoying. Mrs. McGeorge Bundy, for example, a member of an old Boston family, found the change from quiet New England to busy Washington initially “a little frightening.” She says, “All those parties—I wasn’t used to it, you know. It took a lot out of me.” “I’m afraid we shortened his poor life at least ten years,” says another woman sadly, referring to a diplomat who, after an unusually heavy dose of farewell parties, collapsed on the gangplank of the ship that was to take him to his new post. “It’s not easy,” a Washington man confessed, “to be perpetually charming.” And those who cannot be, or who simply do not wish to be, have often had to resort to desperate solutions. One of the more ingenious of these is offered by a Washington woman, the mother of nine, who says wryly, “Washington Society is to blame for all my children. I decided the only way I could avoid them was to be perpetually pregnant. Still, when I offer that as an excuse, people say to me, ‘But that doesn’t stop Ethel Kennedy.’”
Another visitor, a Philadelphian, finds Washington’s gaiety “all rather mechanical and cold-blooded.” He had been invited to a party at the Francis Biddies’—“charming people, but I hardly had a chance to say hello to them”—and found himself cornered by a young man “who proceeded immediately to explain that he had seven parties to go to between six and eight that evening, and he had them all ranked. The Biddies’ was going to get nineteen minutes of his time. The next people would get only eleven minutes—and so on, down to the last two parties which he would only pop in on.”
One unfortunate aspect of Washington parties is that they tend, like Washington social schedules, to become quite crowded. Often there seem not only to be too many people but too many important people, so that the effect of seeing so many dignitaries packed together is dizzying rather than impressive. Only in Washington can one become numbed by the sight of famous faces, weary of shaking famous hands. “At the Stewart Alsops’ one night,” a guest recalls, “I got caught in a jam between Hubert Humphrey, Walter Lippmann, and what’s-his-name, the French ambassador. The Secretary of the Treasury was behind me, trying to push through, and in front of me were three people named Roosevelt. The only thing I could think of was how to get out.” Later, this same man says, “A girl lost an earring, and when I stooped to look for it I saw that the Alsops’ rug was covered with stamped out cigarette butts.”
The best-known way of getting into Washington Society, if one is not elected or appointed to it, is to party-throw one’s way in. The late Evalyn Walsh McLean did so. Peggy Eaton, the wife of Andrew Jackson’s Secretary of War did so. So did Kate Chase, the daughter of Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, and dozens of others. The only necessary ingredients for success are determination, energy, and a great deal of money. To these might be added a few secondary requirements such as a thick skin, a shrewd eye for the value of publicity, and a sympathetic—or preferably absent—spouse. Washington has long been a city where wealthy widows and divorcees and other maritally displaced persons, who have been left out of things in other cities, can come into their own. It has also been ideal for the woman (the game of “Washington hostess” has only rarely been played by a man) whose money, for one reason or another, would not buy her a place in Society elsewhere.
A smallish but very rich widow from Oklahoma named Perle Skirvin Mesta tried the party-tossing road to High Society first in Oklahoma, then in Pittsburgh and Newport, with minimal results. She then came to Washington, and the rest is musical comedy history. Washington provided a similar field day for a little girl from Budapest named Gwendolyn Detre de Surany Cafritz. To others who envied her success, she once warned, “It is not enough to be Hungarian. One must also have talent.” Yet also successful were Mrs. Marjorie Merriweather Post Close Hutton Davies May, from Chicago, and Mrs. Patricia Firestone Chatham, from Akron, and they were not even Hungarian.
The pattern is simple: a big new house on Foxhall Road, a refurbished Georgetown mansion, or “a vast apartment in Foggy Bottom; a stack of engraved invitations, a copy of the Washington “Social List,” the name of a caterer; and the hostess is ready to begin. It is not necessary, as in New York, that she first establish herself as a worker for worthy causes; politics is Washington’s favorite charity. It is not even necessary, as it certainly is everywhere else, that she personally know any important people. When her late husband, a real estate man, started on his way toward considerable riches, Gwen Cafritz set her sights, and she set them high. “I started out having little attachés,” she says. She then went on to bigger attachés. Then, “I worked my way up to the Supreme Court.” The late Morris Cafritz, an unassuming little man, was content to stand on the sidelines of his wife’s social career. At her parties, he often made himself helpful by holding open doors as the great and famous passed through, and one guest, thinking he had tipped a footman, realized he had pressed a five-dollar bill into the hand of Morris Cafritz. Typically, Mr. Cafritz did not remonstrate with the man, but merely smiled and thanked him.
There are a few tricks that Washington hostesses have learned over the years. “There’s a way they have of inviting you,” Scottie Lanahan says. “It’s hard to put into words, but it’s a tone of voice they use over the phone. They ask you to a party in such a way that you’re terribly flattered. They make you think that you must have done something pretty important recently, or you wouldn’t even be considered.” A hoarier technique is that of giving a party “in honor of” someone. A call to the wife of the Attorney General, asking her to a party honoring the British ambassador, is almost certain to get an acceptance. Political necessity demands that such an invitation be accepted. Then, quickly, another call to the British ambassador’s wife, inviting her to a party for the Attorney General, will complete the ruse. Similarly, other important guests can be played off against each other.
But guile is not really required of the Washington hostess because Washington uniquely needs its Mmes. Cafritz, Mesta, May, Howar, and all their spiritual sisters present and future. Washington has always looked for ways to make the running of the United States government more efficient but, as government agencies have multiplied, the job has become increasingly complicated. An official’s day is bound up in regulations, protocol, red tape, clogged telephone wires. But protocol and tape and switchboard delays blur and dissolve at parties. Parties become a tool for doing business and, therefore, an implement of government—for which, miraculously, the taxpayer does not pay. Gwen Cafritz was amused not long ago to read in her newspaper that a certain Supreme Court decision would be reached on “October 8.” This was a Sunday, when the Court would not be in session and, of course, the Court traditionally decides on Mondays. But the eighth was the date of Mrs. Cafritz’s annual Supreme Court party, the event Mrs. Cafritz likes to call “the real beginning” of the city’s social season. Though the date was a typographical error, Mrs. Cafritz felt that it unknowingly stated the truth. “That decision will be made right here in my drawing room!” she announced. Here one can sense again the feeling of power that Washington Society enjoys—the thrill of knowing that events are taking place at one’s dinner table that may, by morning, command the attention of the entire world, and that one may even have had a hand in helping to shape them.
It is possible that, in a social situation, an embattled Defense Department man can buttonhole a stubborn Congressman and perhaps, before the evening is over, the two may come to an agreement on an appropriation that it would otherwise have taken months to reach. Also, it is important for men in divergent branches of government simply to meet one another. Parties provide the meeting places. The belief that they are helping the ponderous wheels of national government move an inch or two forward adds to the Washington hostesses’ sense of high calling.
Politics may be in the back of everyone’s mind at a Washington party, but the political differences are almost never discussed, and, if they are discussed, they are almost never argued about. On the rare occasion that an argument does start, it is kept determinedly friendly—thanks to the hostesses. “No one ever fights at my parties!” Gwen Cafritz says grimly, and the others are with her to a girl. Political rivalries, they feel, should be subordinated to the greater cause of let’s-all-pull-together-for-the-good-of-the-country. Trying to tame warring factions after five o’clock may not produce any permanent results, but the hostesses feel that compromise is the best way to end a stalemate, that negotiation is a path to peace, and that dinner music can soothe the savage breast when Dove sits next to Hawk. Like jungle missionaries, they feel that their first task is to get the headhunters into Mother Hubbards.
Parties are also an important news medium. A new crisis in the Middle East reaches the ears of Washington partygoers a full two hours before it reaches a network television screen, and twelve hours before it reaches the morning readers of the New York Times. Washington parties exist, among other things, for gossip and gossip in Washington is highly respected. Indeed, it has almost reached the level of an art form. Information, news, hard fact, rumor, hints, interpretations, analyses, innuendoes, and guesses pass from guest to guest with astonishing speed and with an even more astonishing degree of accuracy.
“Secretary Rusk said to me just now …” a Washington hostess begins, and all ears turn toward her. She then pauses, framing her quotation carefully so as to relay an exact transcription of the Secretary’s words and tone and implication. Then, for minutes afterwards, the Secretary’s meaning will be dissected; possibilities will be weighed, examined, reassembled with laboratory care. Often, of course, the Secretary’s words may amount to a general observation of no importance or news value. But there is always the possibility that they will amount to something large and startling. A woman who is poor at passing along gossip properly will never become an important Washington hostess.
There is always, too, the more titillating possibility that someone, somewhere along the line, may be made indiscreet by Martinis and reveal a full-scale secret. But the unwritten rules of Washington Society carry a built-in protective clause: the worst social gaffe that can be committed in the capital is to have too much to drink at a party.
The power that Washington hostesses share with the officials of government is not always looked on kindly by the male population in the city. As they slump over their brandy and cigars in the library after dinner, Washington men often ask themselves: what is the psychology behind the “hostess drive”? Is it compensation for an ego bruised in childhood? Is it a sex substitute? Do these women really want to usurp the power of Washington men? The speculations bubble down to the general conclusion that, for a city in which social position is supposed to be determined by a man’s position in government, Washington women have gone too far.
Women’s admission to the sacred second floor of the Metropolitan Club was bad enough. So were Congress-woman Clare Boothe Luce’s efforts to use the men’s gymnasium in the House of Representatives. “But I’m sure you’d think I looked so pretty in my little bloomers!” she was quoted as having said at the time. “I sometimes wish the girls would stick just to parties,” one man says sadly. But, on the whole, most Washington men are resigned to what Washington women do, and try to make the best of it.
Like other cities, Washington has loved to think of itself as being divided into sets but, always, the lines separating most of them are tenuous and indistinct. It is hard to tell, for instance, where the “Georgetown Set” leaves off and the “Foggy Bottom Set” begins. But there are a few sets which really are sets, and which have managed through the years to retain an identity of their own, largely by removing themselves from the mainstream of Washington’s government Society.
To be a member of the “Cave Dweller Set,” one must theoretically belong to a second- or third-generation Washington family. The cave dwellers, needless to say, choose to think of themselves as “the real backbone” of Washington Society, distinctly above the city’s political and diplomatic comings and goings. Because of this attitude, the cave dwellers have been ignored by the Society of politicians and diplomats. As the latter’s ranks have grown in size and importance and influence, it often appears that the cave dwellers have merely been passed by—and today have no real importance, social, cultural, or otherwise, at all.
Out in Virginia, in towns like McLean and Middleburg, there is a definite “Fox-Hunting Set,” and several branches of a family named Lee who also hover on the fringes of Washington Society. And in suburban Maryland there are well-to-do Washingtonians who live apart from the gaiety of politics. Indeed, members of the “Chevy Chase Set” seem unaware that any sort of life goes on in the capital area other than their own. “There are girls I’ve grown up with in Washington,” says Louise Gore, daughter of a family long prominent in politics, “I’ve gone to school and college with them, but when they marry and move to Chevy Chase, something happens to them. They gradually withdraw from things here, and then completely disappear.” Another woman says, “I think those Chevy Chase people are afraid to enter the real social life of Washington. They’re afraid that they don’t have enough to offer, and that if they mixed with the rest of us they’d be boring.” It is certainly true that when, on a rare occasion, a Chevy Chaser finds himself at a non-Chevy Chase party, curious things happen. Friends still tell the story of a young Chevy Chase matron who found herself at a party honoring Madame Hervé Alphand: she seemed unaware of who Madame Alphand was and, in fact, addressed her repeatedly as “Madame Elephant.”
Getting into the Chevy Chase set is not at all as easy as getting into official Washington Society. The social center of the set is the exclusive Chevy Chase Club, considered “much more exclusive” than the Metropolitan Club—but not so exclusive as the 1925 F Street Club, which is called “the most exclusive club in the world,” and “so exclusive that no member knows who the other members are.” Members of the Metropolitan are a little bitter about the Chevy Chase because it was the Metropolitan that got the unfortunate publicity when a group of members, led by Senator Robert F. Kennedy, resigned in protest over the exclusion of diplomatic emissaries from new African nations. The Chevy Chase Club, Metropolitan men point out, is even more exclusive—and many of the men who resigned from the Metropolitan continued, quietly, to be members of the Chevy Chase.
If Washington’s feeling about Negroes is not surprising, considering the city’s geographic location, its anti-Semitic streak is more mysterious. The Washington Junior League, for instance, has a firm policy against Jewish members. During the Kennedy administration, the League was confronted with a ticklish problem. To its annual bazaar, it customarily invites all cabinet officers and their wives—but what was it to do in the cases of Secretaries Goldberg and Ribicoff? The ladies solved the dilemma ingeniously—by not issuing invitations to Secretaries Goldberg, Ribicoff, and Stewart Udall, a Mormon.
“Washington is just a country town,” says Carolyn Shaw who compiles the Washington “social list.” And Mrs. David Bruce, wife of the former American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s says, “Why, Washington is like—like Cranford, New Jersey! Morgan’s Drug Store, right here in Georgetown, is the clearinghouse for news about practically everybody.” Mrs. Wilfried Platzer, wife of the Austrian ambassador, says, “Every year or so they say, ‘Look how Washington has changed!’ But I don’t think new people coming in ever change Washington. To me, it seems the other way around. Washington is such a vivid, live place that it simply makes the new people conform to it.”
All these observations come close to describing Washington. Washington has a bit of everything—Southern hospitality, Western openness, New England Puritanism (particularly in matters of dress), New York sophistication, Cranford gossipiness, French cooking—all mixed together in a special concoction that is particularly American, and which Washington serves with a special gusto. Perhaps the rarest thing about Washington Society is that it approaches everything it does with joy. Unlike her social sister in New York, arranging yet another charity ball, the Washington hostess planning a party is not looking for an escape from boredom. She is looking forward with a kind of breathless excitement to the possibilities the evening may hold. “Of course I don’t have any figures to prove it,” one woman says, “but I’m sure there’s a lower percentage of people going to psychiatrists here than in New York or Los Angeles.”
Washington Society is based on love and duty. It loves the world’s Oshkoshes, and wants their love in return. It is snobbish, but snobbish in recognizing achievement and hard work. Its particular sense of power lends it a sense of purpose, too. And through the whole fiber of Society runs an old-fashioned sort of Fourth of July patriotism, binding everyone together with red-white-and-blue bunting.
Those outside official Washington Society will always complain that it is “all come and go,” and insist that it is the cave-dweller group of families that supply Washington with both standards and continuity. But, says one cave-dweller, “It does sometimes seem as though the rest of them are having more fun than we are.”