Word: mesta
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Hostess Perle Mesta smiled and smiled. Big names are not exactly a novelty at Washington cocktail parties, but this was something else again. There, large as life among the warm martinis and cold canapes, were not only Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, but Abe and Mary Lincoln-not to mention Captain John Smith and Pocahontas. F.D.R. waved his cigarette holder, Churchill chomped his cigar, and some 1,200 assorted Washingtonians stared at them and chattered at each other to raise money for the American Newspaper Women's Club and to celebrate the opening of the capital...
...like so many hearthsides on a winter's day. There was a good deal of social handicapping about which ones were the really chic occasions (among the leaders: a joint reception given by Philanthropist Mary Lasker and Washington Lawyer Abe Fortas, parties thrown by Gwen Cafritz and Perle Mesta...
Avedon is possessed of a lens that is a subtler, cruder instrument of distortion than any caricaturist's pencil. Washington Hostess Perle Mesta appears whiskered and wattle-throated; Dwight Eisenhower looks like his own corpse simple people getting married at City Hall look bloated, ugly, foolish; Adlai Stevenson looks tired, disillusioned, a little sly; Playwright Arthur Miller looks scrufty, torn by anxiety...
...hostess with the mostest in Atlantic City was none other than Perle Mesta, 73, back in style after a Kennedy Administration cold shoulder. Aside from a dinner dance for a scant 700 of "my most intimate friends" at the Claridge Hotel, Perle held nightly buffets in her rented twelve-room villa in nearby Ventnor...
Perle's guests got printed maps of the fastest routes to the villa. To get the folks back home, Perle provided a siren escorted shuttle service of minibuses, each marked PERLE'S PARTY LINE. The Mesta affairs were Atlantic City's top gate-crashing attractions-despite the fact that Perle herself was everlastingly vigilant, standing at the door with pencil and guest list in hand...