And, surely, Bess Truman was not sent from above for the Restoration.
From the founding of the city until the recent demise of Evelyn Walsh McLean, who owned the Hope Diamond, Washington was celebrated for its intrigue, romance and scandal in high Society.
Eleanor “Cissie” Patterson and Mrs. McLean were the last of the city’s great hostesses. Mrs. Patterson retired from the tea-table wars when she became active in newspaper work. With her death, and that of Mrs. McLean, the Washington Society pages were taken over by the climbers.
One needs no long memory to remember when social leaders from everywhere converged on this city. Dupont Circle was Fifth Avenue refined and rarefied, the cream of established snobbery, wealth, officialdom and diplomacy.
Ambitious minglers from the Middle West, such as the Pullmans, the Leiters and others, bypassed New York’s fatuous 400 and came directly to Washington.
Social history there begins with beauteous Elizabeth Patterson, of Baltimore, who wed Napoleon’s younger brother. Its first tasty scandal was whispered in Jefferson’s time, about the French Ambassador who was reputed to have married his jailer’s daughter, who had saved him from the guillotine.
Early Washington Society was titillated by duels among high personages. The duel on the Hudson shore in which Alexander Hamilton was killed by Aaron Burr, in 1804, was talked about for years, until 1820, when a new gory sensation arose to take its place: the mortal wounding of Commodore Stephen Decatur in an arranged meeting of gentlemen across the District line in Maryland.
After a hundred years, Washington still talks about Peggy Eaton and President Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet. But, today’s mundane morsels will make no interesting reading, leave no spice for the raconteur.
Society is on the wane everywhere. Taxes, Communist and New Deal propaganda, the high cost of living, make it virtually impossible to keep up huge menages. Now only rich labor leaders, black marketeers, gangsters and grafters can afford the expense.
There are a handful of rich dowagers like Mrs. Jay Borden Harriman and Mrs. Gifford Pinchot, but they are out of the running.
Cornelia Pinchot only entertains the “intellectuals,” and they are legion in Washington. Where you find an intellectual in the District you will probably find a Red. Mrs. Pinchot does not know it, but the Commies have taken the elderly hostess over and are making hay with her name.
She lives in a Gay Nineties mansion on Scott Circle, where she often throws parties for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, attended by white and colored college professors, pansies and political economists. Mrs. Pinchot looks her age, though her hair is dyed the most amazing shade of carrot-red.
Mrs. Robert Low Bacon, the hostess of the Republican intellectuals, 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.