Washington still cherishes the belief that it has long been a place of bipartisan comity, of after-hours sociability during which fences were jumped and mended and the gears of the republic greased with alcohol and conviviality. There is an element of truth in the legend. Until the late 1950s, all U.S. Senators occupied a single office building in the Senate, called the SOB. They saw a lot of each other. But, with their ever-expanding presence and staff on Capitol Hill (they are now in three different buildings), senators have become less inclined to respond positively to any social invitation in Washington. As Neil MacNeil and Richard A. point out, Baker in their 2013 history of the Senate, “Since the 1960s, as high-speed jet aircraft have become more available, senators have found it expedient — or politically necessary — to return home at least weekly. “, not only to raise money but also to see their families, who often no longer bring them to live in the capital.
“Allen Drury”Providing advice and consent“, the most famous of Washington’s novels, was published in 1959, on the cusp of the changes described by MacNeil and Baker. The book features a hostess named Dolly Harrison, whose first name is perhaps a tribute to both Dolly Madison and Dolly Gunn, the Washington hostess of the 1920s and 1930s. But some of Dolly Drury She is Pearly Mista, D.C.’s most famous party planner in the mid-20th century, readers are told, in “Dolly’s big white house among the dark green trees” — an image reminiscent of Mista’s mansion “More than one crisis solved,” she wrote in her 1960 autobiography.Pearl: My story“, Mista tells a story that fits the fruitful fraternization that Drury depicts:
It’s a beautiful story, and probably more magic than truth. David Brinkley, in “Washington goes to war(1988), offers a more entirely believable account of Mista’s major party-throwing predecessor, Evalyn Walsh McLean, who owned the Hope Diamond and, in the early 1940s, hosted dinners at a large house called Friendship:
Whatever the reality, it is Pearl Mesta, not Evalyn MacLean, whose name is still mentioned, if somewhat dimly, fifty years after her death. With political loyalties oscillating between Republicans and Democrats, Mista was not particularly interested in amassing the usual currency in Washington: power. This was what she wanted, and she achieved an eternal degree of it as “the hostess with the mustaches,” the character of Ethel Merman in the Irving Berlin Broadway musical “Call Me Madam” (1950). Mista wasn’t running a salon; She held evening parties. As Meryl Gordon explains in her new autobiography:The woman who knew everyone(Grand Central), “Pearl wanted her guests to relax and enjoy themselves, and to look forward to seeing new artists and surprise performers.” Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House, called her Pearly-Whirly. She sent her guest lists to the social pages of the city’s newspapers, then She invited the reporters themselves.
Born Pearl Skirvin in 1882 – she later changed her first name to Pearle in French – she grew up in Texas and Oklahoma, where her father, whom she respected, made fortunes in land speculation, oil and construction. The Skirvin Hotel still stands in Oklahoma City, and Pearl said her “first interest in politics came from eavesdropping on lobby conversations.” She adopted, at least initially, the Republican politics of her father and, more permanently, the Christian Science beliefs of her younger sister, Margaret, who had a successful career in silent films. Pearl worked as Margaret’s companion for a number of years before she married George Mesta, a wealthy industrialist, in 1917. The couple settled outside Pittsburgh, in a plutocratic version of living above the store. Her husband owned a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion dating back to the 1880s on the bank of the Monongahela River. “But the view from the picture windows was not great,” Gordon writes. “The Mesta Machine Company, with its twenty-acre industrial buildings, spewed smoke and gravel into the sky.”
World War I prompted a move to Washington, when the Woodrow Wilson administration requested consultations with George about steel production. The Maestas rented a suite at the Willard Hotel, and Pearl became friends with another guest, Thomas Marshall, the vice president who remembers him saying that what the country really needed was a good five-cent cigar. Soon she was going out to dinner, including some from Evalyn McLean, and then having small parties of her own. “She wasn’t trying to push a political agenda,” Gordon explains. But she liked to be close to power and helpful to George by socializing with politicians. Her husband “liked to flaunt his wealth,” and he gave one hundred thousand dollars to Calvin Coolidge’s campaign in 1924. Although she was less conservative than George—often defending his workers in Pittsburgh—Pearl did not support the Democratic ticket for twenty years Other.
George died a month after Coolidge’s inauguration at the age of sixty-three. His widow, only 42 years old, soon sold her Pittsburgh mansion and moved to Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. She also went to races in Saratoga Springs and the opera in New York, and shared one of the baronial “cottages” in Newport with her sister. But Pearl was always drawn to Washington and any opportunity to get her name in the newspapers. An unpleasant situation arose in the late 1930s, when she, her siblings, and shareholders in her father’s main company launched a legal war against the patriarch over questionable “financial maneuvers.” Judge Alfred P. Murrah (after whom the federal building bombed by Timothy McVeigh would be named) scolded the entire Skirvin family from the bench: “You should be ashamed of yourselves.” They more or less got things right.
In World War II and beyond, Mista maintained its self-promoted hospitality. “Oh my God, she was such an obvious social climber,” ninety-nine-year-old journalist Mary Reader recalled to Gordon. “But she wasn’t a cruel person. She used her appetizers and her money to do what she wanted to do. She did some worthwhile things along the way.” Mista was a tenacious feminist and a longtime advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment that had not yet been passed. During new deal, The measure was lobbied by suffragette Alice Paul but opposed by both Eleanor Roosevelt and Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, because that would require eliminating some of the special protections for women that already existed. Mista had occasional lobbying successes, such as bolstering Missouri Senator Harry Truman’s support for the ERA, after which the two became friends. I’ve also made some progress off the hill. The acidic Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s eldest daughter, found it quite resistant at first, but over time she improved a little. Mista’s main rival, for decades, has been the prettier and more beautiful Gwen Cafritz, a Hungarian immigrant married to a wealthy and philanthropic real estate baron. Cafritz’s denunciations of her opponent included the remark that Mista had arrived in the capital by “flying out of the outhouse.” In journalistic terms, though, their long feud did them more good than harm.
It was Mista’s friendship with Truman, his wife Bess, and their daughter Margaret that made her real. She supported him as a replacement for Henry Wallace on the 1944 Democratic ticket with Roosevelt, and threw him a large party at the Sulgrave Club during his very short term as Vice President. She even tried to boost Margaret’s shaky career as a singer. Gordon asserts that Truman made Mista more or less an “extended member of the family”—a claim that seems plausible given the abundance of services she provided. Mista jumped aboard the president’s train during his campaign in 1948, raising money to keep him on the tracks through Election Day. She soon co-chaired Truman’s inauguration, which she entered on the president’s arm.
Gordon writes that “the tangible reward was expected, and it came in the form of a nine-hundred-ninety-eight-square-mile trinket known as the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.” Although she was unlikely to be nominated to be the US representative there, there was never any real danger – neither from a senator’s complaint about her lack of qualifications nor from the fact that Mista had lowered her age by nine years in the confirmation papers she had to submit. She took her Packard and a large quantity of Coca-Cola with her when she sailed in August 1949 for Europe on the SS America.
Luxembourg is so small that Mesta was sent there as an envoy, rather than an actual ambassador. Her persistent efforts to capture the top title came to nothing, but that didn’t make much difference to the fans who enjoyed her European adventure. Mista worked hard at the job, throwing parties for war orphans and monitoring steel production in Luxembourg, and her old life with George allowed her to show some experience. Eleanor Roosevelt, who viewed Mista’s appointment with disfavor, descended on the Duchy and changed her mind after seeing her in action.
By today’s standards, Mista was a racial progressive. She helped integrate Truman’s inaugural ball, and in Luxembourg she made sure to inform the press that she had danced with black soldiers at parties she regularly gave for American soldiers stationed with her. NATO. No matter how good his intentions were, she could never keep her foot away from her mouth. When black lawyer and activist Patricia Roberts Harris was appointed to her old position in 1965, Mista said: “I’m sure people will love her. When I went to Luxembourg, I took my servant and maid, the colored ones, and the people liked it.”
Mista’s daily life at the American Duchy’s legation was indeed painful. Using the language of the time, Gordon speaks of the “enemy within” – not Communist saboteurs but rank-and-file male employees of the State Department who had no respect for Mista and undermined her endlessly. (Back in Washington, Under Secretary of State David Bruce described her as “ignorant and pretentious.”) She came to despise her two successive deputies, Paul West and Anthony Swayze, and tried to capitalize early on the “Lavender Scare,” the State Department purge of the 1950s. Against gay employees, by spreading news among officials in the United States that Swayze was homosexual. You failed to ruin his career.
Seeking influence, Mista constantly mentioned, but to no avail, her closeness to Truman. Only at the end of her term did she publicly let career men have it—first in a lengthy personal complaint to a visiting State Department inspector, then in a ten-page memo to the president himself. She had real grievances, but her tactics were strangely crude and naive for someone who had been in the thick of politics for so long. When the Republicans returned to power in 1953, she actually believed that Eisenhower, whom she had received at her residence in Luxembourg when he was NATOThe Supreme Allied Commander may keep it.
