Word: hostessing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Harlot's Guest. The hostess is an ex-prostitute named Mrs. Goodman. Among her guests: a kindly, timid intellectual, Max Ford; Max's brother Tom, physician and egocentric man of action; Father Morton, doddering, syphilitic priest; Daisy Tillet, "girl of the golden legs," to whom both brothers are attracted; Miss Black, who switched from an unfaithful Italian lover to religion...
...Sweden, the middies had shaken hands with spry old King Gustaf. They watched goggle-eyed on the beaches as buxom Swedish lasses publicly doffed their clothes to slip into scanty bathing suits in full public view. Later, a Swedish hostess was dumfounded when the adaptable middies, invited to take a dip in her private pool, promptly stripped to the buff and dove in. When she complained to a senior officer, he told her that the boys thought they were following the local custom. In Edinburgh, like their elder brothers in wartime, they had been greeted by street urchins calling...
...with Annie, Tanis & Loelia. In London, hostess-of-the-week was Anne (Annie) Geraldine Mary O'Neill, Viscountess Rothermere, energetic wife of the second Viscount (Daily Mail) Rothermere, who organized a "treasure hunt." This was a farewell gesture for some visiting friends-Howard and Tanis Dietz (she is the former Tanis Guinness, of the stout Guinnesses; he is MGM's publicity potentate who originated Leo the Lion). When Anne's Mayfairest guests rolled up (sixish) at the Rothermeres' Warwick House behind St. James's Palace, they found that no ordinary treasure hunt awaited them...
According to the rules laid down by their hostess, the gentlemen would have to bid in cold cash (which would go to a charity) for the ladies they wished to escort during the impending quest. Some of the ladies objected; after a democratic vote, the majority went along with the auction plan. So Master-of-Ceremonies Baron Stanley of Alderley (he's terribly good at this sort of thing) mounted a chair in the sitting room. Cried he: "Now, who wants Loelia?" (the recently divorced Duchess of Westminster). Bidding was sluggish, and the ex-Duchess finally went for seven...
Evalyn Walsh McLean, Washington's late, free-handed hostess, turned out to have been a rather cautious grandmother. Her will distributed her estate (including the Hope Diamond) equally among her seven grandchildren-but it left plenty of time for everybody to thresh everything out (including the distribution of the 44¼-carat diamond). The divvy was not to be made until...