Washington’s Hostess with the Mostes’
Washington still cherishes a belief that it was long a place of bipartisan comity, of after-hours socializing during which fences were leapt and mended and the gears of the republic were lubricated with alcohol and bonhomie. There is an element of truth to the legend. Until the late nineteen-fifties, all U.S. senators occupied a single Senate Office Building, affectionately called the S.O.B. They saw a lot of one another. But, as they and their ever-growing staffs spread out over Capitol Hill (they’re now in three different buildings), senators became less likely to R.S.V.P. in the affirmative to any Washington social invitation. As Neil MacNeil and Richard A. Baker point out in their 2013 history of the Senate, “Since the 1960s, with the greater availability of high-speed jet aircraft, senators have found it convenient—or politically necessary—to return home at least weekly,” not only to raise money but also to see their families, whom they often no longer bring to live in the capital.
Allen Drury’s “Advise and Consent,” still the most famous of Washington novels, was published in 1959, on the cusp of the changes MacNeil and Baker describe. The book features a hostess named Dolly Harrison, her first name probably an homage to both Dolley Madison and Dolly Gann, a Washington hostess of the twenties and thirties. But some of Drury’s Dolly is a toned-down Perle Mesta, the capital’s most famous mid-twentieth-century party-giver. Readers are told that in Dolly’s “great white house amid the dark green trees”—an image that resembles Mesta’s mansion—“more than one crisis has been solved.” In her 1960 autobiography, “Perle: My Story,” Mesta tells a tale that fits in with the productive fraternizing Drury portrays:
It’s a nice story, likely one with more charm than fact. David Brinkley, in “Washington Goes to War” (1988), provides a more fully believable description of Mesta’s chief party-giving predecessor, Evalyn Walsh McLean, who owned the Hope Diamond and, at the beginning of the nineteen-forties, hosted dinners in a big house called Friendship:
Reality aside, it is Perle Mesta, not Evalyn McLean, whose name is still remembered, albeit a bit dimly, fifty years after her death. With political loyalties that oscillated between Republicans and Democrats, Mesta was not especially interested in amassing Washington’s usual currency, power. It was notice that she wanted, and she achieved an everlasting degree of it as “the hostess with the mostes’, ” Ethel Merman’s character in Irving Berlin’s Broadway musical “Call Me Madam” (1950). Mesta didn’t run a salon; she threw soirées. As Meryl Gordon explains in her new biography, “The Woman Who Knew Everyone” (Grand Central), “Perle wanted her guests to unwind and enjoy themselves, to look forward to seeing new entertainers and surprise performers.” Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House, called her Perly-Whirly. She sent her guest lists to the society pages of the city’s newspapers, and then invited the reporters themselves.
Born in 1882, Pearl Skirvin—she later Frenchified her first name to Perle—grew up in Texas and Oklahoma, where her father, whom she revered, made fortunes in land speculation, oil, and construction. The Skirvin hotel still stands in Oklahoma City, and it was there, Perle said, that she got her “first interest in politics from eavesdropping on the lobby conversations.” She adopted, at least initially, her father’s Republican politics, and, more lastingly, the Christian Science beliefs of her younger sister, Marguerite, who had a successful career in silent films. Perle served as Marguerite’s chaperon for a number of years before marrying George Mesta, a rich industrialist, in 1917. The couple settled down outside Pittsburgh, in a plutocratic version of living above the store. “Her husband owned a ten-thousand-square-foot 1880s mansion on the bank of the Monongahela River. But the view from the picture windows was hardly scenic,” Gordon writes. “The Mesta Machine Company, with manufacturing buildings on twenty acres, spewed smoke and grit into the sky.”
The First World War prompted a life-changing move to Washington, when Woodrow Wilson’s Administration required consultations with George about steel production. The Mestas rented a suite at the Willard Hotel, and Perle became friends with another guest, Thomas Marshall, the Vice-President remembered for saying that what the country really needed was a good five-cent cigar. She was soon going to dinners, including some of Evalyn McLean’s, and then giving parties, small ones, of her own. Gordon explains, “She wasn’t trying to press a political agenda. But she liked being adjacent to power and useful to George by socializing with politicians.” Her husband “liked to show off his wealth,” and he gave a hundred thousand dollars to the 1924 campaign of Calvin Coolidge. Though she was less conservative than George—she frequently stuck up for his workers back in Pittsburgh—Perle wouldn’t back a Democratic ticket for another twenty years.
George died a month after Coolidge’s Inauguration, at the age of sixty-three. His widow, only forty-two, soon enough sold the Pittsburgh mansion and moved into Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. She also bounced around to the races in Saratoga Springs and the opera in New York, and shared one of Newport’s baronial “cottages” with her sister. But Perle was always drawn back to Washington and to any opportunity for getting her name in the papers. An unpleasant one arose in the late thirties, when she, her siblings, and stockholders in her father’s main company waged legal war against the patriarch over questionable “financial maneuvers.” Judge Alfred P. Murrah (for whom the federal building bombed by Timothy McVeigh would be named) scolded the whole Skirvin family from the bench: “You should be ashamed of yourselves.” They more or less patched things up.
Into the Second World War and beyond, Mesta kept at her self-promoting hospitality. “God, she was such an obvious social climber,” the ninety-nine-year-old journalist Marie Ridder recalls to Gordon. “But she was not an unkind human being. She just used her entrée and her money to do what she wanted to do. She did some very worthwhile things along the way.” Mesta was a tenacious feminist and a longtime advocate of the still unpassed Equal Rights Amendment. During the New Deal, the measure was pressed by the suffragette Alice Paul but opposed by both Eleanor Roosevelt and F.D.R.’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, because it would require the repeal of certain special protections for women that were already in place. Mesta had occasional lobbying successes, such as firming up the support of a back-bench Missouri senator, Harry Truman, for the E.R.A., after which the two became friends. She also made some progress off the Hill. The acidic Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s eldest child, found her quite resistible at first, but over time warmed up a little. Mesta’s chief rival, for decades, was the far more beautiful and soignée Gwen Cafritz, a Hungarian immigrant married to a wealthy and charitable real-estate baron. Cafritz’s denunciations of her foe included a remark that Mesta had arrived in D.C. by “flying out of the outhouse.” Press-wise, though, their long feud did both of them more good than harm.
Mesta’s friendship with Truman, his wife, Bess, and their daughter, Margaret, was the real making of her. She supported him as the replacement for Henry Wallace on the 1944 Democratic ticket with Roosevelt, and threw a big party for him at the Sulgrave Club during his very brief Vice-Presidency. She even tried to advance Margaret’s shaky career as a singer. Gordon asserts that Truman made Mesta more or less “an extended member of the family”—a claim that seems plausible given the profusion of favors she performed. Mesta hopped aboard the President’s whistle-stop train during his come-from-behind campaign in 1948, and she raised the money to keep it on the rails through Election Day. She was soon co-chairing Truman’s inaugural ball, which she entered on the President’s arm.
A “tangible reward,” Gordon writes, was expected, and it came, in the form of a nine-hundred-and-ninety-eight-square-mile bauble known as the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. However improbable, her nomination to be the U.S. representative there was never in any real danger—neither from one senator’s complaint about her lack of qualifications nor from the fact that Mesta knocked nine years off her age in the confirmation papers she had to submit. She took along her Packard automobile and a vast amount of Coca-Cola when, in August, 1949, she sailed for Europe on the S.S. America.
Luxembourg is so small that Mesta was sent there as an envoy, not an actual ambassador. Her sustained efforts to obtain the higher title never bore fruit, but that made little difference to a public entertained by her European adventure. Mesta worked hard at the job, giving parties for war orphans and observing Luxembourg’s steel production, her old life with George allowing her to demonstrate some expertise. Eleanor Roosevelt, who had viewed Mesta’s appointment with disfavor, dropped into the duchy and changed her mind after seeing her in action.
By the standards of the day, Mesta was a racial progressive; she had helped integrate Truman’s inaugural ball, and in Luxembourg she made a point of informing the press that she danced with Black G.I.s at the parties she regularly gave for U.S. soldiers stationed with NATO. However well she meant, though, she could never keep her foot far from her mouth. When, in 1965, the Black attorney and activist Patricia Roberts Harris was appointed to her old post, Mesta remarked, “I am sure people will like her. When I went to Luxembourg I took my butler and maid, who are colored, and people adored it.”
Mesta’s daily life at the duchy’s U.S. legation was, in fact, bruising. Adopting the parlance of the time, Gordon speaks of an “enemy within”—not Communist subversives but the State Department’s ordinary male career personnel who had no respect for Mesta and endlessly undermined her. (Back in Washington, the Under-Secretary of State, David Bruce, described her as “an ignoramus and a pretentious bore.”) She came to despise her successive deputies, Paul West and Anthony Swezey, and attempted to take early advantage of the “Lavender Scare,” the State Department’s nineteen-fifties purge of gay employees, by spreading word to officials back in the U.S. that Swezey was homosexual. She failed to destroy his career.
Seeking leverage, Mesta persistently, but to little avail, mentioned her closeness to Truman. Only toward the end of her tenure did she openly let the career men have it—first in a lengthy, in-person complaint to a visiting State Department inspector, and then in a ten-page memo to the President himself. She had genuine grievances, but her tactics were crude and curiously naïve for someone who had been in the thick of politics for so long. As the Republicans returned to power in 1953, she actually thought that Eisenhower, whom she’d entertained at her Luxembourg residence when he was NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, might keep her on.
