Word: hostess
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Oklahoma widow, whose wealth came from a marriage of Oklahoma oil and Pittsburgh machine tools. Not even her warmest admirers, who liked her liveliness, would credit her with overwhelming charm or notable wit. But ambassadors, Senators and Cabinet officers come at her beck. In a city where a hostess' success can be scored like points in a cribbage game by counting up the rank of her guests, Perle Mesta outscores them all. Unlike her predecessors, Perle Mesta won her position not by prestige and not alone by wealth. She won by 303 electoral votes -those that elected Harry Truman...
Professional society is based on entertaining people who are not necessarily your friends. Washington visitors are astonished at the ferocity with which it is practiced in the capital. Years of rigorous competition have produced a prototype of the hardy, or winter-blooming Washington hostess. She is a widow, past 60, of ample means and ample bosom. She must have enough forwardness to fight for her prey, enough toughness to withstand the fangs of her rivals...
...Robert Low Bacon is the leading Republican hostess, a tall, tweedy woman with an air of conscious aristocracy who, in the nervous summer of 1948, was heiress presumptive to Mrs. Mesta's crown. At her small, select salon in the John Marshall house there is no foolishness about fun or songs. Each table is assigned a topic of conversation and their hostess sees that her guests stick...
Center Ring. The main ring in Washington's three-ring circus is the official circle. Here are the big governmental names which the successful hostess, of whatever circle, must catch. Most of them are ready to be caught: they hold offices of high prestige and medium salaries, which limit their own powers of entertaining. In, this ring, Perle Mesta is supreme...
...Party. Perle does not like to be considered just a hostess nowadays. She insists she is a kind of "across-the-table political worker." Says she solemnly: "The entertaining I do is my way of serving the President and the party." But Perle has made the Democratic Party her party only since 1942, when she walked out on the Republicans because of their treatment of Willkie ("They rushed me in to see Dewey, but they couldn't budge...