Social Snooping

When black-tie guests at Bobby Kennedy's Hickory Hill estate found themselves bobbing, fully clad in the moonlit swimming pool fortnight ago, no one worried about the dozen reporters who were present. Each was a trusted insider who could be counted on to remain discreetly silent. But four days later news of the soggy soiree was in print across the nation. As might have been expected, the byline belonged to Betty Beale, 50, society columnist for the Washington Star.

The scoop was typical of a style official Washington has ruefully come to know. Betty Beale is nosy, pushy and blunt. She snoops. She pries. Society is scared stiff to be noticed in her column, because mention once too often brings prompt exclusion from the nation's most elegant salons--the White House especially. She behaves like a police reporter, thinks like an editorial writer, and, as a perfectly natural result, she is easily the best society reporter in town--and in the country.

What They Say. Betty is now so far out in official Washington that she is almost back in again: tipsters favor her with items they know would be wasted on other, more timid columnists. But once Betty is on to a story, she pursues it with ruthless zeal, never blanching at button holing Washington's most imposing figures to check it out, rarely pausing to consider its consequences.

To fill her thrice-weekly columns for the Star (plus her once-a-week national column, now in 75 papers), Betty goes to 500 parties a year, avoids so much as a sip of wine for fear it will lull her into missing a story. Most of her parties are loaded with diplomats, and she prepares for them by studying the news carefully; she is always alert for the informed conversation that will give her a hard news story. "Getting anything out of the people who are the news of the day is the most important thing," she says. "I try for the hard news. To me, what people wear is not important. Nor is what they eat. What makes good reading is what they say." In pursuit of what people say, Betty cheerfully butts into conversations, shamelessly descends on eminences emerging from a tete-`a-tete, and inquires what was said. She later jots her gleanings down in a small notebook, using a rapid shorthand she learned in a secretarial course.

When hard news comes her way, she escapes the limbo of the women's page and appears in company with the capital pundits--out on Page One. During the Eisenhower Administration, she scooped the entire capital press corps by first reporting the retirement of Army Secretary Robert Stevens, and in the days before the Kennedy Cabinet was chosen, she astonished her colleagues by predicting who would get top Department of Defense jobs; she was uncomfortably accurate.

Search for Power. Betty caught on as Washington's diarist in 1945. She rode to, the crest of capital society in the wake of Good Friend Perle Mesta. In the process, she built a strong reputation as a reporter.

Since Perle's day, Betty has kept her reputation and her status too. A tall, slim blonde and a lifelong spinster, she devotes full time to her work, rarely ending her day before the small hours. Having now weathered two Administrations, Betty prefers the livelier social climate brought by the Kennedys, even if it does exclude her. From her visionary chair on the outside, she appraises that climate with precise intelligence. "Washington society," she says, "is dominated by the search for power and the desire to bask in its glow." Even her friends agree that in the vanguard of the search party is Betty herself.

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