Word: hostessing
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When Widower Charles Curtis was elected Vice President of the United States in 1928, he assumed that his half-sister, Mrs. Dolly Gann, would rank as his official hostess. Dolly had been with Curtis in Washington ever since he came out of Kansas to enter the House of Representatives in 1893, and had acted as his secretary for 20 years. Even her marriage to Patent Lawyer Edward Everett Gann, a Kentucky Democrat, did not separate Dolly from brother Charles. She continued to play an active part in his campaigns and, after the death of his wife in 1924, she became...
...eminence, however, Dolly's social status became a hot issue. Her opponents argued that, in the absence of President Hoover's wife, top rank at the dinner table belonged to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, wife of Speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth and daughter of Teddy Roosevelt. Official hostess or not, they declared, Dolly was only the Vice President's sister, and should sit below the wives of foreign ambassadors. The leaders of this school of thought were the Longworths...
This did not sit well with Dolly and brother Charles. As the Vice President's hostess, they insisted, Dolly was entitled to the same social precedence as a Vice President's wife. To settle the point, brother Charles asked for a decision from Secretary of State Henry Stimson. (Stimson's predecessor, Frank Kellogg, had irritated Curtis by ruling against Dolly.) After a chat with President Hoover, canny Henry Stimson ruled that the matter would have to be decided by the diplomatic corps. In a plenary session at the British Embassy, the harried diplomats gave...
...Quixote who trod on Quirino's toes by pushing his investigations of municipal graft embarrassingly close to the presidential palace, Lacson likes to boast that he "calls a spade a spade, and if necessary, a dirty, stinking, lousy shovel." Not surprisingly, it was his tongue (which a Manila hostess once suggested he should send to the laundry) that got him into trouble. Lacson was sued for libel-and gladly suspended by President Quirino-after he publicly denounced his deputy chief of police as "ignorant, an ignoramus and incompetent...
Grace Vanderbilt's most potent social weapon was the cultivation of European royalty, a technique which earned her the nickname "Kingfisher." Her first great coup occurred in 1902, when by request of Kaiser Wilhelm II she was hostess to Prince Henry of Prussia at the only private social function he attended in the U.S. In the years that followed, she entertained the King and Queen of the Belgians, the Crown Prince of Sweden, the Crown Prince of Norway, and every British ruler from Edward VII to George VI. By 1915 she had completely routed erratic, sharp-tongued Mrs. Stuyvesant...