rarely hits the gossip columns. Even Evie Robert and her mother, Mrs.
Helen Walker, have been dormant for years. Evie, the wife of “Chip”
Robert, a brilliant political wire-puller, does not and never did
give parties for social advantage. They were to advance the political
prospects of her husband.
Today’s Washington Society has no class levels. All you need is dough
and the urge and the energy to spend it on freeloaders. If you can snag
more important political people to your parties in any one calendar
season, from October to May, than your neighbor, you are Number 1
social leader, regardless of whether you wore shoes before you were
twenty.
Perle Mesta, a determined hostess who was lucky enough to have been
gracious to Harry Truman when he was a secondary Senator from Missouri,
is living proof of the potency of the Washington cocktail party. Her
reward was the appointment as Minister to Luxembourg.
But Mrs. Mesta is by no means the only social climber in Washington,
though she is and was the most publicized.
We would like to tell you about Mrs. Gussie (Gushie) Goodwin, formerly
a Chicagoan. She is the wife of Federal Judge Clarence Norton Goodwin,
who sentenced Harry Bridges in the Communist leader’s first round
before the courts. They were friends of the Woodrow Wilsons, which gave
them some kind of claim to social standing. Meanwhile, Judge Goodwin
started to go deaf, which handicapped him as a social figure. Gussie’s
star was setting.
Then came a turn to her fortunes. She met a charming Latin gentleman,
Ramon Ramos, at a cocktail melee. He was a professor of Spanish. Gussie
got an inspiration. She was going to cement Latin-American relations
and her own social relations. She started a private class. Her little
study group met once a week at her home. During the first year, there
were eight women in it, each of whom chipped in a buck towards the
professor’s fee.
Gussie began calling the wives of the more important officials and
Senators, and invited them to join her group. She was very careful to
see that it was equally divided between Republicans and Democrats.
One of the ladies who gladly became a member was the wife of Senator
Harry Truman. After the Trumans succeeded to the White House, the
Secret Service wouldn’t allow Mrs. Truman to go to the lessons at
Gussie’s house, so all the meetings were moved to the White House,
though Gussie continued to be its leading spirit. Mrs. Goodwin was very
offish. When Dean Acheson resigned as Undersecretary of State, his wife
was not asked back.
Meanwhile, Professor Ramos showed he had hidden talents. His hobby
is cooking. The ladies were charmed. So an extra feature was added.
Each week the program was expanded to include a luncheon, held at a
different woman’s house. The Professor masterminded the menu, while the
ladies did the cooking and waited on the others. Mrs. Truman came to
these parties and pitched in with the work. The luncheons were run on a
Dutch treat basis, and each woman continued to pay her dollar fee per
lesson.
By this time there were sixty or seventy ladies in the group, including
good Queen Bess. Some took private Spanish lessons on the side. Mrs.
Truman was one of the few who was really serious and wanted to learn
the language. Most of the others apparently came to the meetings
because the Professor had the personality to hold “menopause Minnies.”
Among the students were a few who thought they should come along for
the ride without paying for lessons or the luncheon, because of their
social position. One was Mrs. Robert Patterson, wife of the then
Secretary of War. Mrs. Truman always paid.
When the Professor began to get too much publicity, Gussie busted it
up. After all, the whole purpose was to make Gussie a figure, not the
Professor. Gussie even went so far as to ask newspaper society writers
to use her name instead of his, saying Mrs. Truman had complained about
the Professor’s publicity, which was not accurate.
Anyway, no one learned much, but that wasn’t the Prof’s fault.
In the absence of Madame Mesta, Gwendolyn Cafritz is ballyhooed as
Washington’s leading hostess. She is a social climber who invites only
those in office or who she thinks are due to be in. She sadly misjudged
the 1948 elections. She excommunicated the Democrats. So she had a
hell of a time recouping her position. She still has her eye on the
Republicans in 1952.
Compared to Madame Mesta, Mrs. Cafritz is a good-looking woman, in
early middle age. She may have been a raving beauty when she was a
slim, black-haired girl.
Her husband, Morris Cafritz, is a millionaire Washington real estate
owner. His office, in the Ambassador Hotel, which he owns, is next
door to the hotel’s High Hat cocktail lounge, which is favored by the
pick-up gals as a hunting preserve. Gwen drives her husband slightly
nuts with her parties. He would prefer to play poker, at which he is
adept. A lot of hogwash has been written about the Cafritzes since they
zoomed into political and social prominence. Gwen was born in central
Europe and may or may not have been the daughter of a college professor
or a nobleman, as the stories go.
Cafritz’s father ran a grocery store in Washington. The son’s early
days were spent in a bowling alley which he owned and operated. Then he
turned to real estate in boomtime and found the Midas touch.
Gwen’s enemies spread catty stories about her. One says she was a
Broadway chorus-girl before she met her husband. If she was, she
must’ve been a beaut. The other is that she was employed in Cafritz’s
bowling alley. The researcher finds it difficult to separate the truth
from the chaff. There are no clippings about her early days in the
Washington newspaper morgues. Cissie Patterson was her close friend. It
is reported she destroyed the clippings in her own library and asked
the publishers of Washington’s other papers to do likewise.
Meanwhile, Mmes. Mesta and Cafritz had better look to their laurels,
because a new assault is being made on Washington’s social citadel,
this time by a bullet-proof princess--Tawhida Halim, a cousin of King
Farouk of Egypt, and immensely rich. She and Frank Rediker, a denizen
of Gotham’s cafe society set, were recently wed, repeat engagements for
both.
The princess then acquired a mansion at 2339 Massachusetts Avenue, in
which she and her bridegroom began to give lavish parties, designed to
outdo any of the Cafritz woman’s, with the elan that goes only to those
born to the purple.
(_INSIDE STUFF_: The Redikers’ social campaign is being managed by
Leonard McBain, elegant publicist and society arbiter of New York’s
plush El Morocco, where the snootiest people on earth gather. Leonard
has steered royalty before. He could do marvels for Tawhida.)
Since the old aristocrats died or went into hiding, it is easier to get
into Washington’s society columns, if you care to horn in with inferior
white trash.
Almost anyone, including justices of the United States Supreme Court,
will go to any party to which they are invited. Many who aren’t invited
will also show up. The trick nowadays is to entertain lavishly and
often, and sooner or later the papers will have to write about you,
because there is nothing else to write about.
Ambitious hostesses buy the “Social List of Washington, D.C.,” and
invite names from it at random. The odds are 90 percent will show up,
but the odds are as high that 95 percent of the 90 per cent aren’t
social. This list competes with the standard “Social Register.” It
contains most of the names in the latter, plus an amplification
consisting of prominent politicians and diplomats. It is published by
Carolyn Hagner Shaw. Mrs. Shaw told us a “board” selects the candidates
for entry in the book. The board, however, is highly secret. One
Washington newspaper insists it is as mythical as the balanced budget.
Mrs. Shaw claims no one ever tells her why a name is added or dropped.
If you thought Maj. Gen. Harry Vaughan was part of the _crème de la
crème_ of the Washington social whirl, you’d better change your mind.
He isn’t any more. Not if you take the word of Mrs. Shaw. She omits the
military aide to the President from her fancy green directory of the
socially prominent. Mrs. Shaw doesn’t know why General Vaughan isn’t
socially correct any more. She blamed it on the anonymous board.
About 200 who sought to make the list were turned down. Again no
reasons given. Many bought copies at 12 bucks, hoping to see their
names in. They didn’t.
However, Guy George Gabrielson and William Marshall Boyle, respective
chairmen of the Republican and Democratic National Committees, were
among the new names added this year. The book also has the _dernier
cri_ on what to do about cards. They should not be left at Blair House,
but given to the guard at the northwest gate of the White House.
“A courtesy call should be made on the President and his family once a
year. This is a mark of respect that should not be neglected.” (This
was before two Puerto Rican enthusiasts tried it.)
Mrs. Shaw reminds her readers “During World War II, formal observance
of the conventional days set aside for leaving cards on various
officials was canceled. A return to formal recognition of these
traditional days has yet to take place, and it is doubtful that it will
ever again become obligatory to leave cards on certain days.”
As to protocol, it notes: “It is well to remember personal friendships
do not count. The rank of one’s guest must be the deciding factor.”
If you are not sure of the comparative ranking of any guest, it is
better not to invite him. Many of the biggest social wars were caused
by such things. Still remembered is the feud between Alice Roosevelt
Longworth, then wife of the Speaker of the House, and Dolly Gann,
sister and hostess of Vice-President Curtis, over their respective
precedence.
Officials and embassies receive advice on protocol matter from the
State Department, but non-official hostesses are on their own. Mrs.
Shaw supplies a service which gives assistance in seating.
An important fixture in Washington is the debutante party. These
have almost disappeared in New York, where each year’s crop of young
hopefuls is introduced in a mass get-together. In Washington, the
girl who doesn’t get a dinner-dance on her own is a social slob.
Washington’s Elsa Maxwell for these parties is Mrs. Curt Hetzel, who
succeeded Mrs. Merriam. Mr. Hetzel is a pianist in a restaurant--Ted
Lewis’. Mary Stuart Price, a young woman, handles some debby parties as
a sideline.
Club life is another sacred institution. Many important political
decisions are reached at such places as the Burning Tree Club, the
Chevy Chase Club, and the Sulgrave, famous for the McCarthy-Pearson
battle of the century--more maybe than in the Senate and the House
cloakrooms. The 1925 F Street Club, where ranking members of the
Senate give parties, was once the exclusive home of Mrs. Laura Curtis
Gross, who lent her house for parties. It is now a sanctuary for the
whipped-cream of Washington society. Its dining-room seats about 60 and
the club’s membership is strictly limited.
Washington’s newest aristocracy is evidenced by stone piles. The wife
of the man who can build the biggest and plushiest office building is
the reigning social leader.
Those currently with the highest batting average are Morris Cafritz, of
course, Gus Ring, Garfield Cass and Preston Wire, all with gleaming new
structures named after themselves. Much of the money of the real estate
_nouveau riche_ came from wise investments in Black Belt housing, or
from refugee sources.
Until very recent years the august justices of the United States
Supreme Court remained aloof from social functions, but during the
days of the New Deal and Fair Deal, when the court was packed with
soft-shirted politicians, the custom changed. Judges like Douglas are
avid party-goers. The late Frank Murphy was a mixer with true CIO
deportment, a hoofer and Saturday night sport. The result is that the
opening of the fall season is now coincident with the convening of
the Supreme Court. Then the jurists can meet the typists and clink
cocktails with mobsters’ mouthpieces.
The easiest way to get into what is called “society” is to be elected
or appointed into it. Every ex-cow-puncher, dirt-farmer, smalltown
lawyer and big-city ward-heeler who now has an “Honorable” in front of
his name is as social as those who were born into it, bought their way
in, or got in through a diplomatic passport.
All 96 Senators and 435 Representatives, nine cabinet officers,
countless under-secretaries, assistant secretaries, judges, department
heads and military brass are social, with a listing in the directory,
though some never wore ties or socks until they got to Washington.
These ex-officio lions became the life of the party in 1933.
Washington once thrived on dirt in high places. Grover Cleveland’s
bastard child didn’t interfere with his electoral or social standing.
Nor was Woodrow Wilson ruined when a certain lady was booted out of
Washington by the Secret Service. President Harding’s house on K Street
is still remembered. There’s nothing like it now. And his village
sweetie and her baby have vanished. President Truman’s poker games are
penny-ante, not the lusty ones of yore.
The late Roosevelt administration is credited with more snappy spice
than any other in history. Out-of-school tales were told about most of
his children. The President and his wife were not spared by gossipers.
But President Truman’s personal life is treated as dull and austere.
His advisers are farmers or aging professors. They were pirates in the
first Roosevelt decade. The sports, drinkers and rounders who held high
cabinet and military rank then are either gone or too old. Now most
official vice is grubby stuff, with call-girls supplied by a protected
vice-ring, about which nothing is ever heard, and which no Congressman
or Senator will admit he knows.
President Truman’s pal, General Harry Vaughan, is comparatively quiet
now, held to mama’s apron-strings. There’s gambling for him and the
President in the White House. There’s no liquor shortage, either. The
President likes his bourbon. He never smokes. He will not countenance
whoring in his official family, though he doesn’t put detectives on
official tails.
Probably the only real sport in town is Senator Warren Magnuson.
The others save their skylarking for New York. When they do it in
Washington, they are as frightened as schoolboys at it, and often as
unimaginative.
What a change from the Roosevelt days, when sex was the prerogative
of all government officials, and usually paid for by the grateful
tax-payers! Uncle Sam even had to help Harry Hopkins do it. A
monkey-gland doctor grafted sex virility on Hopkins and two other
aging administration stalwarts, one of whom recently resigned from a
little-cabinet post.
The doctor billed the wealthiest of the three $3,000 for each
treatment. He charged the other two $1,000. Hopkins had already stiffed
the medico for three operations when he asked for the fourth, in view
of his pending marriage to a young woman. The doctor’s verdict was no
money, no honeymoon. But Hopkins had a way out. He suggested the doctor
needed a vacation anyway, so he offered to get him an appointment to
make an inspection trip to army medical bases in the West Indies,
with all expenses paid for self and wife, plus $35 a day fee until
the $3,000 was paid. The doctor took the trip and Hopkins took the
honeymoon.
High military brass is quiet today compared to the lusty generals and
admirals of the ’20s and ’30s. Washington is still talking about how
General Pershing, then chief of staff, ordered young General Douglas
MacArthur to the Philippines after MacArthur married Mrs. Louise
Cromwell Brooks, of the Philadelphia Stotesbury clan. Mrs. Brooks,
after her divorce from her first husband, met “Black Jack” Pershing
abroad. When she returned to America, she became his official hostess
in Washington. She was 25 to his 60. Two months after their wedding,
in 1922, the MacArthurs were shipped to the Philippines. Washington
cats said Pershing sent his successful young rival into exile to get
even. He had also exiled the captain of the Army polo team, who was
attentive to the rich, beautiful Louise. She is now Mrs. Alf Heiberg,
the proud owner of Washington’s only private atom-bomb shelter, which
she constructed under her Georgetown Mansion.
The late General of the Armies, a widower, was quite a man with the
women. He kept a Roumanian babe and her mother at the Shoreham Hotel
for 20 years.
“Thirty” was written to Washington Society when a local paper fired its
social editor because she refused to print the names of Negro hostesses!
22. STRIPED PANTS
Elsewhere, men who wear them bury the dead; here, most of those who
wear them are dead but not buried.
The decadence of the diplomats ran parallel with the fadeout of
society, though not for the same causes. Continental and cosmopolitan
life on Embassy Row was a war casualty.
The democratization and bolshevization of Europe turned their
extra-territorial domains here into tawdry outhouses reflecting
monarchies and empires riddled into busted republics and dictatorships,
either scrabbling for the necessities of life or committed to the
political policy of shabby proletarianism.
The kings are no longer king. The courts of Vienna, Berlin, Moscow,
Madrid, Rome, and of the giddy little Balkan states are now the
headquarters of Labor Parties and worse. The crowned heads of England,
The Netherlands and the Scandinavian kingdoms are kept figureheads.
Diplomatic display is a sin against poverty and the world rash for
unilateral social and economic status.
There is not an embassy in Washington which does not cost far more than
it did 20 years ago. That is because they have become workhouses where
the press of international business is sordid and tremendous. Gone are
the Thursday and Friday open-house hospitalities and grand balls in
Technicolor, animated by gowns and costumes and uniforms of galaxies of
all nations.
“These are difficult and different days,” the deans of diplomacy sigh.
The old spirit has vanished not only from the governments, but from
their representatives, who are living close to the vest, hoarding
precious American dollars against revolution or overturn by popular
vote of their countries. Ambassadors and Ministers are salting away
what they can skim off in Black Belt real estate, farms and U. S.
securities. Some go much further. They are actual dealers in American
goods which they can procure and can send home free of import duty to
their countries. At the same time they blackmarket merchandise here,
where they can buy liquor, cigarettes, cosmetics and other excised
products free of internal revenue tax. For the best whiskey and
champagne they pay $13 a case.
During Prohibition, a small Central American legation was actively in
the rum-running business, importing huge quantities under diplomatic
immunity, then reselling to Jack Cunningham, a local bootlegger. One
day rival gangsters caught up with Cunningham in an alley in I Street,
and there he was knocked off. The killing was hushed up. It would have
involved too many untouchables.
These business opportunities and the degree of austerity which is still
light as compared with most of the globe--all of it except Canada and
South America--have made Washington the choice diplomatic plum, in
place of London and its Court of St. James’.
The diplomats here are timid, precise and industrious. They are fearful
of a false step which might mean recall, for here they are saving
against eventual retirement. But their caution cannot withstand their
greed and some smuggle dope in via their sealed and search-proof
official pouches. They have discovered the glories of the American
installment plan and buy not only land and houses, but cars and
mechanical gadgets unobtainable at home. If they are transferred they
rent out their properties here, which, in the only currency still
reasonably dependable, makes them rich wherever they go, even into
exile.
Another factor which helps reduce the gaiety and glamor of Washington
diplomatic life is the competing diplomatic corps accredited to the
United Nations, in New York. It is gradually getting the ace publicity
breaks.
The question of sex looms big on the agenda of every ambassador. He
prefers all his aides married, with wives in residence, so they will
create no scandal. Many of the younger members of the various staffs,
with modest jobs and salaries, are bachelors. These men are usually
forbidden, under pain of being sent home, to fool around with women in
Washington. Their chiefs, from time to time, order them to go to New
York “to have a party.”
If the press of business is too great to allow for long weekends, when
the ambassador notes that the young men on his staff are getting hot
britches he sends them to Baltimore, where they are unknown and nothing
is barred.
Ambassadors, themselves, and senior diplomats with roving eyes, are
taken care of by the Protocol Division of the State Department, which
also handles the sex problems of visiting foreign brass. That’s a
job for specialists. There are so few girls in Washington glamorous
enough to satisfy VIPs. Sometimes it is not politic to have them
associate with local talent anyway, because of its tieups. So the State
Department has compiled a list of amiable New York models, willing to
come to Washington to spend a night with a foreign dignitary. They
get $200 a night and expenses, from “contingent funds” coming out
of the pockets of the American tax-payers. They are provided on an
ancient reciprocity custom, in exchange for girls supplied to American
junketeers who flit abroad.
This privilege is avidly utilized by American Senators, Congressmen and
other officials, and is one reason why so many find it necessary so
often to fly to Europe, Asia and South America at government expense.
One prominent Republican solon, who never cheats in Washington, was
shown such a good time by a French babe supplied by the Quai d’Orsay,
he ended up in a Paris hospital for five days and has been a sick man
ever since.
When the State Department procures women for foreign dignitaries,
they are given security and VD tests. It is easy to see how delicate
diplomatic relations might be ruptured by a microcosmic thunderclap.
Many embassies have their own “company- and party-girl” lists. They
do not always want the State Department to know what they are doing.
There’s a girl named Mary Karrica, 1471 M Street, NW, who furnishes
them to the diplomatic corps.
One of the major problems of such dialectics for the State Department’s
bright boys arises when a visiting notable plans to tour the country
and doesn’t plan to sleep alone. Protocol then makes contacts through
local police departments, which are expected to know the best
call-house madames in their own towns.
When the young Shah of Persia visited America a couple of years ago,
the State Department had no trouble furnishing desirable girls for him
in Hollywood and Chicago; but in New York, where he wanted a blonde
that night, they had to get him a Powers model. Apparently his majesty
liked it, because the next day he gave her an emerald worth $20,000.
The guy from the State Department who told us about this sighed, “But
the bitch still took our $200!”
Years ago, when Italo Balbo made his triumphal tour of the country, he
turned his nose up at showgals and screen stars. The Italian air ace
insisted on one from the Social Register. The Navy was in charge of
entertaining him. Some of its younger attachés dug up a semi-society
babe from Chicago, who was willing to take a fling with the Italian
aviator. The Navy had no dough for the purpose, so the young officers
chipped in $300 to buy her a watch, and told her it was from Balbo. Now
a graying middle-aged woman, she still prizes the watch “given to her
by the dashing Italian.”