Widow from Oklahoma

Last week, in a richly furnished room overlooking the lights of Washington, the Vice President of the United States danced a little solo to the strains of an accordion and a guitar. Secretary of the Treasury John Snyder and Postmaster General Jesse Donaldson beat time, grinning appreciatively. With the Italian ambassador and the others, Senator Tom Connally and Colonel Louis Johnson, the new Defense Secretary-to-be, caroled My Old Kentucky Home and The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You. Mrs. Perle Mesta, all gotten up in a brown net Dior dress, was entertaining at "Uplands."

Perle Mesta is the capital's No. 1 hostess, a position she had inherited, almost by default, from a long line of free-spending, haughty, and sometimes charming dowagers. Hostess Mesta had discovered a useful and economical secret: her kind of guests like to entertain each other. At Perle Mesta's parties, Harry Truman has played the piano, General Ike Eisenhower has sung Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes (in a shaky baritone), Pat Hurley, without too much encouragement, has given his Comanche war whoop, and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt has whistled in a duet.

On such jolly occasions, the food is always bountiful, the liquor excellent and plentiful. A teetotaler herself, Mrs. Mesta sips Coca-Cola and warily watches the spirits rise around her. She likes everybody to be gay, but not to get out of hand. It is a kind of entertaining peculiarly suited to the plain Government of plain Harry S. Truman. So is Hostess Perle Skirvin Mesta.

The Cribbage Board. A hearty, goodfellow type of woman, Perle Mesta is an Oklahoma widow, whose wealth came from a marriage of Oklahoma oil and Pittsburgh machine tools. Not even her warmest admirers, who liked her liveliness, would credit her with overwhelming charm or notable wit. But ambassadors, Senators and Cabinet officers come at her beck. In a city where a hostess' success can be scored like points in a cribbage game by counting up the rank of her guests, Perle Mesta outscores them all. Unlike her predecessors, Perle Mesta won her position not by prestige and not alone by wealth. She won by 303 electoral votes --those that elected Harry Truman.

Professional society is based on entertaining people who are not necessarily your friends. Washington visitors are astonished at the ferocity with which it is practiced in the capital. Years of rigorous competition have produced a prototype of the hardy, or winter-blooming Washington hostess. She is a widow, past 60, of ample means and ample bosom. She must have enough forwardness to fight for her prey, enough toughness to withstand the fangs of her rivals.

Crossroads. She needs to know nothing about high policy, but she must know a lot about politicians. She is a master of the cross-phone invitation (tell the Chief Justice the Secretary is coming, tell the Secretary the Chief Justice is coming, get both).* She is a kind of social crossroads; her guests come not so much to see her as to see each other. Her satisfaction comes from hobnobbing conspicuously with the great and near-great.

Washington society persists chiefly because the capital is one of the world's most boring cities. It is a city of history, monuments and no industry. Its big men are strangers to it and to one another. Its natives live in it like caretakers in a museum, scornful of the gawking tourists, keeping aloof from the public gaze, resentful of being crowded, vaguely proud of the privilege of darting through the doors marked "private." It has no theater, little music, no night life of note, no distinguished restaurants. Washington society is an exhaustive effort of Washingtonians to have fun.

Big Business. Next to Government, society is Washington's biggest business. Its annual expenditure runs to tens of millions of dollars. It absorbs the energies of 40 or 50 top-flight hostesses, debutantes, party consultants, 25 society columnists and writers, and assorted sycophants and camp followers.

Hubert's and Avignone Freres, Washington's biggest caterers, each handle up to 700 parties during the season, as many as 14 a day during the December peak. Ridgewell's can supply 200 silver table settings instanter. Hubert's even has Washington's drinking habits well measured--three cases of champagne for every 100 guests. Total costs for a little buffet reception of 1,000 people, including service, flowers, awnings and orchestra, run not less than $15 a head.

No Strangers. Once, when Washington itself was only a malarial outpost on the banks of the Potomac, Virginia society considered the Government its own social corral. The entire U.S. Government consisted of less than 50 officials, and few were strangers to Virginia's hostesses. The ladies called familiarly at the White House, and Dolly Madison, with bird-of-paradise feathers nodding from her famed turbans, drove through the muddy streets to return the calls.

Most First Ladies, thrust into power by their husbands' skill in electioneering, were either unfitted, disinclined or too poor for the expensive game. Young, dark-eyed Mrs. Grover Cleveland was the last White House mistress to exert social dominance (she frowned on the bustle and the bustle disappeared). The White House experienced a brief, last burst of gaiety when "Princess Alice" Roosevelt (now the widow of Speaker Nicholas Longworth) made her debut there and was serenaded wherever she went with Alice Blue Gown.

In Washington's gilded, gaslight age, the cave dwellers (native Washington society) took over. The last of their queens were wealthy Mrs. John R. McLean, a Virginia lady of formidable presence, and her convivial, raucous daughter-in-law, Evalyn Walsh McLean, who died in 1947. Evalyn wore a diamond (the Hope) as big as a tiger's eye, and called men impartially "darlin' boy." At her crowded parties (at the old and new "Friendship"), men had to bring their brains with them; Evalyn delighted in pairing mortal enemies at dinner. Said an old friend, admiringly: "Evalyn had spite."

By the time Mrs. McLean rose to her zenith, the cave dwellers had retreated one by one to the hills, to ride to hounds over the Virginia and Maryland countryside, to gather at the Warrenton Hunt in their pink coats, or to sulk in their silken tents.

"So Secure." Today the remaining citadels of resident society are held by such doughty widows as Mrs. J. Borden ("Daisy") Harriman, and three other garrison leaders known as "the three Bees." They are a pretty subdued lot.

Mrs. Robert Low Bacon is the leading Republican hostess, a tall, tweedy woman with an air of conscious aristocracy who, in the nervous summer of 1948, was heiress presumptive to Mrs. Mesta's crown. At her small, select salon in the John Marshall house there is no foolishness about fun or songs. Each table is assigned a topic of conversation and their hostess sees that her guests stick to it.

Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss is heiress of the Castoria millions ("Children Cry For It"), and of an unassailably long Washington ancestry. She and her ex-diplomat husband quietly entertain a small, gilt-edged group of diplomats, officials and cave dwellers in their Georgetown home.

A stooped old lady, who in her daytime tweeds and cotton stockings looks like a tired, worn housewife, Mrs. Truxtun Beale entertains with rigid selectivity at Decatur House, the only house in Washington still lighted by gas and candlelight. Said a society writer: "If you go to Beale's you're made. She has no ax to grind, nothing to sell. She's just so secure."

Visiting diplomats find Washington society more hectic, more alcoholic, and less chic than that of European capitals. They go to parties because they have to: drawing rooms are their workrooms. But they miss the sure social structure of London, the intellectual tone of Paris, the darkened grace of Rome's great palazzi. They deplore the fact that official Washington society is made up of small-town politicians, uninteresting businessmen, journalists, and wives who wear the same dress three or four times. Embassies used to be consecrated ground for uninhibited splendor--but no longer. Now host and guest alike feel a little self-conscious about lavish suppers when the U.S. is doling out aid to the ambassador's hungry nation.

Center Ring. The main ring in Washington's three-ring circus is the official circle. Here are the big governmental names which the successful hostess, of whatever circle, must catch. Most of them are ready to be caught: they hold offices of high prestige and medium salaries, which limit their own powers of entertaining. In, this ring, Perle Mesta is supreme.

Perle Mesta's parties are neither so fancy nor so noisy as Mrs. Evalyn McLean's, so exclusive as Mrs. Truxtun Beale's, so smart as Mme. Bonnet's at the French embassy. Her menus are adequate but not sumptuous. At the Alben Barkley dinner last week, the 24 guests had turtle soup, filet of beef, peas, browned potatoes, aspic salad, and a rum-and-ice-cream dessert.

No Senator need worry at a Mesta party if he cannot quote Oscar Wilde, if he thinks Picasso is a ham & eggs painter, or is unable to pronounce the name of French Premier Queuille. In the new, hearty Mesta milieu, the lorgnette has abdicated to the guitar. Said a friend: "You go to a great many beautiful formal houses here where people barely speak above a whisper. You go to Perle's, and you know it's going to be fun."

"Mrs. Thing." Perle relishes her position to the full. She has learned not to call society editors to read them her guest list (the girls are glad to call her), but she is not above inquiring coyly after a dinner: "How many ambassadors did I have last night? Six or eight? I never can remember." She often summons her guests from afar, likes to remark casually: "So-and-so is flying in from San Francisco for my dinner tomorrow."

This sort of thing does not sit well with Washington's envious cave dwellers. One refers to her as "Mrs. Thing," claims she has "a hide like an elephant." Another summed up: "She's amiable, of course, but she's commonplace, that's the word--so full of deportment." Adds Virginia-born Lady Astor, a past mistress of the catty crack: "She gives enormous parties that nobody who's anybody really ought to go to."

Perle Mesta is shaped to the mold of a Rubens model who has reached the age of a Helen Hokinson character. Her figure requires stern corseting; she carries a diet book in her purse, consults it before ordering. Except for her parties, she hates to spend money. Once she walked two blocks to Democratic headquarters because her hotel charged 12-c- for a phone call. People are always trying to wheedle money out of her; she does her own ordering for big affairs, and drives a good housewifely bargain. Says Perle, thrusting out her chin: "I'm stingy. That's why I've got my money today."

Her friends, who range from Joe Martin, the Robert Tafts, and the Fred Vinsons to Omar Bradley and Louis Bromfield, find her a likable, kindly woman. Bromfield pronounces her "one of the gayest people I know--she could give you a good time if she had only a five-cent beer." They suspect that she is lonely. With the bounty of a childless woman, she lavishes affection on her blonde niece Betty Tyson, whose Newport coming-out party in 1945 was the gaudiest shindig since before the war. Her restlessness has found outlets in her parties and such causes as the women's equal-rights amendment, for which she has lobbied tirelessly for years. With unconscious wistfulness, she explains: "Only the busy person is happy."

Little Girl. When she is asked about her past, Perle conjures up a picture of an Oklahoma childhood liberally sprinkled with scenes of little Perle in colored hair ribbons matching the sash around her waist. The little girl lived in a big, red brick mansion with stables out back, where each child had its own Shetland pony. Perle likes to say that she organized her first party on her twelfth birthday.

This isn't quite the way some of her Oklahoma City friends recall it. Pearl, as they unfeelingly refer to her, did not come to Oklahoma until 1906, they say, when she was a full-blown, dark-haired woman of 25. Her father, William B. Skirvin, was a farm-implement salesman, a brash, stubby little cockerel of a man, who left Sturgis, Mich, and headed for the thriving Southwest. Like many another boomer, he set up in real estate in Galveston, Tex., then made a killing around Alta Loma, 18 miles north. Oldtimers are still bitter about that. Wrote one:

Away back when Alta Loma was first born

Nothing was here but the Santa Fe track;

A company was formed, which we all know,

Without any scruples and without any dough;

They platted a town with the object in "view,

To rob the poor suckers as they came passing through.

With his profits, Billy Skirvin bought an acre in the new Spindletop field near Beaumont, and hit oil. The Skirvins struck it rich. In 1906 Billy moved his family to Oklahoma City, set up the American Oil & Refining Co. and sold shares in its holdings. With the money, he built the 14-story Skirvin Hotel, still one of Oklahoma City's best.

No Shoes. Billy Skirvin did not go in for society stuff. He loved to sit in the lobby of his hotel in his stocking feet, talking. In later years, he drank, and about 9 o'clock every evening, a thin, wiry little woman would come down to the lobby, pick up his shoes and lead him off upstairs. She was Mabel Luty, and she was his confidential secretary for 31 years.

But Billy did his best to make Pearl (he never could remember to spell it Perle) happy. He put $36,000 into sending her East, gave her a fancy car, and kept her there in good husband-catching style. In 1916, Perle met George Mesta. A year later she married him. George Mesta was 54, a tall, blond man of Italian descent who was president of the Mesta Tool Co. in Pittsburgh, and a World War I $1-a-year man in Washington. For Perle, he was the first big step. After the war, he took her abroad 22 times, started building her a $600,000 limestone house in Pittsburgh where she could entertain. He contributed $100,000 to Coolidge's campaign, and Perle was rewarded with three overnight visits to the White House. Then in 1925, Mesta, to whom his wife referred affectionately as "the wop," died. Perle got $845,000.

Getting Ahead. Perle never lived in the $600,000 house, which was finished just before Mesta's death. She found Pittsburgh society "too stuffy." She bought a place in Boston, and sold it after two weeks, bought a cattle ranch in Arizona, and resold it because it was "too lonely out there." She also took a place in Newport, began entertaining cautiously and discreetly, got inside the door at aloof Bailey's Beach, eventually established herself firmly among the matriarchs of Millionaire's Row. She struck up a friendship with Hoover's courtly Vice President Charles Curtis, who spent a week at her Newport mansion. He got her presented at the Court of St. James's in 1931.

Once Perle Mesta had to drop her social campaigning and hurry back to Oklahoma City. There brother O. W. Skirvin was keeping an eye on old father Billy. He peeked into his father's safe, found the old man had made out stock transfers of his American Oil shares to his three children.

Billy learned of his son's doings, in a fury tore up the certificates.

Perle sued her father for misappropriation of the hotel's and oil company's assets. Some suspected that Perle was afraid faithful Secretary Mabel Luty would get her inheritance. Receivers were appointed and the case was bitterly argued for six years. In court, old Billy wept. The judge bellowed at them: "You Skirvins ought to be ashamed of yourselves."

On appeal, the court turned the properties back to Billy. That same day, he was injured in an automobile accident, died two weeks later. Perle got about $400,000.

New Drive. Perle Mesta began her final assault on Washington in 1941. She moved into the exclusive Sulgrave Club, got some professional advice on press relations, and started giving parties. She shrewdly gave a yearly alcoholic "tea" for the women's press corps. Either with rare good luck or uncanny generalship, she ingratiated herself early with Harry Truman. She feted him as a Senator, gave the first party in his honor--a $5,000 blowout--when he became Vice President. She gave a huge "coming-out" party for Margaret Truman in 1946. When Margaret sang in Oklahoma City, Perle brought Bess Truman's bridge club all the way down from Independence to hear her, threw a big party at the Skirvin Hotel afterward.

Perle is reaping her reward. She is one of the few people who call Mrs. Truman "Bess," often drops in for lunch at Blair House. At the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, she sat at the President's right hand with her famed diamond clips aglitter, next day proudly stood beside him in a receiving line for deserving Democrats. ("Did you notice us winking at each other? That's because several people called me Mrs. Truman.") She even made her first political speech, and the President told her it was wonderful.

For the Party. Perle does not like to be considered just a hostess nowadays. She insists she is a kind of "across-the-table political worker." Says she solemnly: "The entertaining I do is my way of serving the President and the party." But Perle has made the Democratic Party her party only since 1942, when she walked out on the Republicans because of their treatment of Willkie ("They rushed me in to see Dewey, but they couldn't budge me").

Perle is go-getting and able in her own way. She is a money-raiser extraordinary. At Harry Truman's request, she hustled her checkbook out to Kansas City in 1946, saved the day for his campaign to purge his home-town Congressman, Roger Slaughter. As co-chairman of last year's Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners, she raised $250,000, kept at it doughtily during the campaign. Declared Louis Johnson, chairman of the Democratic Finance Committee: "When our crowd got discouraged, Perle Mesta would raise hell. She called us men of little faith. She was a tonic for us --our little pepper-upper."

"I Just Act Dumb." Perle admits that the duties of "unofficial hostess" to the President are heavy. "I have to know exactly what's on his mind and what he thinks of people all the time," she explains. "I know, too. I don't have to call him and ask." Then, too, people pester her. "They all know I can get to the White House any time I need to. Lots of them try to pump me to find out who's going to be fired and who's going to get hired." She winked. "I just act dumb." At a fashion show last week, she blurted to reporters: "Did you hear the news--that stinker Forrestal's out? My man Johnson is in."

Perle's conception of herself as a combination Machiavelli and Madame de Stael makes White House aides smile quietly. Actually, she plays a more becoming role in the Administration: she entertains Harry Truman and his friends, gives pleasure in doing so, and gets pleasure from it. Said one aide flatly: "She has no more influence, policywise, than that post."

Rich, gusty, vigorous Perle Mesta obviously served Harry Truman well as Washington's No. i hostess, and Truman was obviously grateful. It seemed a very satisfactory arrangement for both.

*The official order of precedence in seating: President, Vice President, Chief Justice, ambassadors, Speaker of the House, Secretary of State, U.S. Representative to U.N., ministers, Associate Justices of the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, governors, Senators, Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief, former Vice Presidents, Congressmen . . .

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