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.”
Most foreigners are discreet. Little rough stuff seeps out of the embassies. The Washington newspapers cover Embassy Row--there are two--16th Street and Massachusetts Avenue--but usually give their readers stories about cocktail parties, dances and weddings, instead of snappy copy.
Being confidential reporters we did not go through the front doors. What we know is mostly backstairs buzz, out of the kitchens and garages of the following embassies:
ARGENTINA--The Embassy, at 1815 Q Street, provided Washington with one of its liveliest tidbits. The real lowdown has not been divulged before. We got this out of confidential Congressional files, where the information was testified to under oath.