D.C. Diarist

In Washington, Society Columnist Evelyn Peyton Gordon of the Daily News is read by almost everyone from ambassador to upstairs maid. They all count on Evie for the latest tidbits about the most-dropped names in town. Last week Evie let her readers in on something that had happened to Evie herself. She was about to go down the reception line at a White House party when she remembered an unpleasant rumor that had gone the rounds. Was it true, she asked Mamie Eisenhower's Secretary Mary Jane McCaffree, that there was a new ban against working reporters' going through the receiving line? Quite so, answered Mary Jane, and, in fact, they were never supposed to.

Fumed Evie in her column: "I've been covering White House receptions since the days of Calvin Coolidge, and it's the first time I ever heard of invited guests being told they could not follow the route to the presidential handshake . . . despite their correct evening attire, their long white gloves." Added Columnist Gordon later: "We might as well go in galoshes and tweed hats." The Battles of Protocol. A late-in-life blonde with the temper of a redhead, Columnist Gordon has fought many a skirmish before on the field of protocol.

When the Windsors were married, she wrote a long series of columns on the event, got herself temporarily banned from the British embassy. When Queen Elizabeth came to the U.S., Evie carped at her for not letting "anybody know which of her evening gowns she'll don." Once Evie and her husband, who runs a family investment company, went to a Saudi Arabian party "just boiling to get a drink," and found that, in accordance with Moslem law. no liquor was being served. Next day. she wrote an indignant "when in Rome" column, and her relations with Saudi Arabia have been strained ever since.

Actually, Evelyn Peyton Gordon can go through most Washington receiving lines on the basis of background alone. A fifth-generation Washingtonian, chic, fiftyish Evie attended schools all over the world, graduated from Manhattanville College, made her debut in Washington 28 years ago and has been a staunch cave dweller ever since. Starting as a society reporter for the Washington Post in 1927, she later moved to the tabloid News, where she decided to stay because "it was a small paper; they didn't have nine managing editors and all that nonsense." Because she is so popular, News editors do not tamper with her sometimes confusing finishing-school prose, and the copy desk likes to have its fun with the headlines for Evie's columns: DOES ELIZABETH STILL

LOVE BLUEBERRIES AXD FRIED CHICKEN? A NOTEWORTHY CHAP IS CUBA'S SENOR JOE BARON.

Not one to be cowed by people in high places, Evie is outspoken on her column's cast of characters (the British: "They bore me:" the Italians: "Dull"). She does not pretend to cover Washington society completely, since "I really haven't got time for Congress." Good Business. Evie Gordon makes the rounds of up to two dozen cocktail parties and receptions a week, seldom takes notes but remembers what she sees or hears--and prints it on the theory that liveliness is more important than documented facts. "Rumors persist, though it seems improbable." she wrote recently, "that George Jessel will be the next envoy to Israel." On occasion, the rumors backfire. Once she made the mistake of crossing pens with Rival Columnist Austine ("Bootsie") Hearst of the Times-Herald, erroneously reported that Austine, six months after the birth of one child, was expecting another. Austine retaliated with her own equally erroneous item: childless Evie Gordon was "at long last . . . expecting" (TIME. Jan. 2, 1950).

Columnist Gordon longs for the old days when embassy staffs were small and Washington's select social group stood out like the monument. Says she: "It really isn't society anymore." Nevertheless. Evie has adjusted herself to the new social bureaucracy, nowadays frequently prints items about such relative newcomers as Hostesses Perle Mesta and Gwen Cafritz. While Evie Gordon travels among the elite, the bulk of her public--and some of her best sources--are such people as doormen and automobile callers at Washington receptions. One denizen of the social world once said to her: "Oh Evie, somebody told me you had a piece about me today. We don't take the News, but my servants do. Would you send the column to me?" Evie takes such jibes in stride. Says she: "My readers are janitors and cab drivers and ambassadors and Cabinet members' wives. What the hell, if I have a back-door public I don't care. As long as people like my own cook read me, I guess I don't have to worry. It's a good business."

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