Word: goings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...stooped old lady, who in her daytime tweeds and cotton stockings looks like a tired, worn housewife, Mrs. Truxtun Beale entertains with rigid selectivity at Decatur House, the only house in Washington still lighted by gas and candlelight. Said a society writer: "If you go to Beale's you're made. She has no ax to grind, nothing to sell. She's just so secure...
Visiting diplomats find Washington society more hectic, more alcoholic, and less chic than that of European capitals. They go to parties because they have to: drawing rooms are their workrooms. But they miss the sure social structure of London, the intellectual tone of Paris, the darkened grace of Rome's great palazzi. They deplore the fact that official Washington society is made up of small-town politicians, uninteresting businessmen, journalists, and wives who wear the same dress three or four times. Embassies used to be consecrated ground for uninhibited splendor-but no longer. Now host and guest alike feel...
...need worry at a Mesta party if he cannot quote Oscar Wilde, if he thinks Picasso is a ham & eggs painter, or is unable to pronounce the name of French Premier Queuille. In the new, hearty Mesta milieu, the lorgnette has abdicated to the guitar. Said a friend: "You go to a great many beautiful formal houses here where people barely speak above a whisper. You go to Perle's, and you know it's going...
...elephant." Another summed up: "She's amiable, of course, but she's commonplace, that's the word-so full of deportment." Adds Virginia-born Lady Astor, a past mistress of the catty crack: "She gives enormous parties that nobody who's anybody really ought to go...
...Perle is go-getting and able in her own way. She is a money-raiser extraordinary. At Harry Truman's request, she hustled her checkbook out to Kansas City in 1946, saved the day for his campaign to purge his home-town Congressman, Roger Slaughter. As co-chairman of last year's Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners, she raised $250,000, kept at it doughtily during the campaign. Declared Louis Johnson, chairman of the Democratic Finance Committee: "When our crowd got discouraged, Perle Mesta would raise hell. She called us men of little faith. She was a tonic...