The Party Line
(See Cover)
Above the clink of crystal goblets and the beat of a twist tune wafted shreds and snippets of conversation. "Looks like Pierre made a party on the way." "No, darling, these models don't have a thing on underneath. They don't have anything to hide." "Look at Ethel go! Where does she get the energy?" "Look, McCone is actually smiling!" "I would love to see Allen Dulles twist." Floating among the crowd of 300 smartly-dressed people was the hostess, a tawny blonde, her hair bouffant, her gown a new Cardin, her perfume by Dior. At 1:30 a.m. her husband, Herve Alphand, 56, the French Ambassador to the U.S., disappeared into an elevator on his way to bed. By 3:30 a.m. the last guests had departed, and Nicole Alphand, surveying all the bereft buffet trays and empty champagne bottles, smiled. It had been a good party.
The Merry-Go-Round. Giving good, and sometimes superb, parties is the most important thing in Nicole Alphand's life. It sounds like a frivolous occupation, but her husband often gets more done in ten minutes of quiet conversation at one of Nicole's dinners than in a day of shuffling papers. For in Washington the dinner table is merely an after-hours extension of the office desk, and at 5 p.m., when the lights wink off in thousands of offices all over town, the working day is only half over. Then the Senators and socialites, the diplomats and department heads begin to flow in a river of limousines toward the mansions on Foxhall Road, the shuttered houses of Georgetown and the row of embassies along Massachusetts Avenue.
From September to May, there are roughly 200 official parties a month in Washington, perhaps 20 times as many private ones. "During this season," says one diplomat, "there is hardly time between gulps of champagne and mouthfuls of canapes to think of anything but your feet, your stomach and your head" --and all three ache.
Keeping the merry-go-round whirling are the city's hostesses. There are dozens of them, ranging from the First Lady down to the newest Texas millionairess, who figures all she needs to succeed is a wad of money and a big house, just like Dolly Harrison in Advise and Consent. But on the New Frontier, where talent and power are the most negotiable currency, the moneyed matrons are out and the "official" hostesses--the wives of ambassadors and Administration officials--are in. Short of a summons to dinner at the White House, few invitations are treasured as highly as those to 2221 Kalorama Road, N.W., site of the grey stone, Tudor-style French embassy and home of Nicole Alphand.
The Power Play. She is, says one New Frontiersman, "a truly amazing woman, one of the rare hostesses who know how to combine fun with the power play." At 46, her skin has been lightly bronzed by the sun of Bar Harbor summers and Palm Beach winters. She is 5 ft. 8 in., scarcely an inch shorter than her husband. Her hair, rinsed a soft honey blonde, frames an angular face with high cheekbones. Long, curling lashes fringe blue eyes with just a touch of green in them. Her mouth is wide--too wide--but when she smiles or contorts it in the often losing battle with an English phrase, it is her most arresting feature.
Nicole, in a way, is a cliche: she is precisely what everyone except a Frenchman imagines the mature, sophisticated Frenchwoman to be. American women ask me if I brush my teeth with white wine and eat only the frog and the snail," she complains. "I say, 'Does your husband wear his cowboy hat at home with him, does he chew his gum and shoot, how you say, cows?' "
Three times in the last four years she has been named one of the worlds ten best-dressed women, a standing she protects with three trips a year to Paris to refurbish her collection of 60-odd Diors Chanels, Cardins, Jacques Heims and St Laurents. She has a full-length mink coat, and when Herve gave her another for her birthday last month, she converted it into a button-in lining tor six coats--including a raincoat. "It is not chic to display all of what you have," she purrs. "Besides, mink is warmer inside than out."
The Back Room. Paris-born, she has the Parisienne's knack of flirting without quite inspiring wives to reach for steak knives. "Men can't help but look kind of gaga when they are around her, muses ex-Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis Strauss. At a recent dinner she turned her charm on an extremely high-ranking Administration offical seated next to her, so entranced him that, in the words of another guest, he almost fell into her soup."
In a city where VIPs sift through a dozen invitations a day and are confirmed members of the better-offers club Nicole receives few regrets. Her husband has an $80,000-a-year entertainment and housekeeping allowance from the French government, and she uses it wisely. She has the best French chef in Washington, Maurice Bell, who has spent two-thirds of his 40 years collecting and perfecting a drawerfu of menus. One of them is inscribed simply, "Danke--Adenauer."
When the Mona Lisa came to Washington last January, Nicole had 90 people over for drinks and dinner. Everybody was there," recalls Nicole, and she is one of the few people who can say everybody with confidence. Almost the whole Kennedy clan was there--Jack and Jackie, Bobby and Ethel Sarge and Eunice, Steve and Jean, Pat and Mother Rose. Only Peter and Senator Teddy could not make it.
"This is my job," says Nicole, "I work hard at it." She thrives on large groups. "Nothing is worse than not having enough people," she says. But, like most of the best hostesses in Washington she finds smaller dinner parties--known in the trade as "working sesions"--most valuable. "Nicole never loses sight of the purpose of each function," says one of her guests. When it is business, she is all business. The conversation is light and gay, but if you talk too much, that delectable lobster is simply whisked away. The aim of the affair is to get the men into the back room. And she does. You have fun while you're getting there, but she definitely gets you there on time.
Oiling the Hinges. Ever since the first cave man sealed a tribal alliance over a haunch of charred flesh and a gourdful of fermented juice, such working sessions have been as much a part of diplomacy as the formal conference. Thanks largely to his wit and disarming manner at parties, Benjamin Franklin coaxed 55 million livres out of a nearly bankrupt French government during American Revolution. Bound for the Congress of Vienna, Talleyrand told King Louis XVIII, "Sire, I have more need of casseroles than of written instructions," and his success in softening the terms imposed on his defeated nation in 1815 was due in no small part to the superb table laid by his chef Careme
"Entertaining," says one diplomat, "oils the hinges of a man's office door It is true that the whole party round can be a wearing process, and many a diplomat, trapped in a wall-to-wall crush, has recalled wistfully how Andrew Jackson climbed out of a White House window during his own Inaugural reception in 1829 and hot footed it across the Potomac to Gadsby's Tavern "But sometimes," says U.S. Ambassador to Poland John Moors Cabot, "there is a direct payoff, with an immediate discussion behind the potted palms." Some recent payoffs along Washington's champagne circuit:
>At a reception earlier this year, Mexican Ambassador Antonio Carrillo Flores got Vice President Lyndon Johnson and U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Thomas Mann into a drawing room tor a two-hour talk, emerged with the promise of a settlement of Mexico's 52-year claim to the 630-acre Chamizal strip on the Texas border (TIME, July 26).
> During last year's Red Chinese border attacks, Indian Ambassador Braj Kumar Nehru entertained high State and Defense officials, ironed out at private parties many of the details involved in the offer of U.S. military aid.
>When the State Department was threatening to cut its foreign aid allotment to Spain, Madrid's Ambassador Antonio Garrigues appealed to Catholic Congressmen he had cultivated at luncheons and dinners, persuaded them to help block the cut.
Befuddled Nikita. In eclipse nowadays are the ladies who held social sway during the Truman and Eisenhower years. "I started out having little attaches," Gwendolyn Detre de Sunny Cafritz, Hungarian-born wife of a wealthy Washington builder, once said, "and I worked my way up to the Supreme Court." But while Gwen could once corral several Supreme Court justices for her annual October cocktail party lately she has been getting none. Her chief rival, Perle Mesta, used to make up guest lists "like Noah, who invited something of everything into his ark " But Perle has sold her ark, a mansion called Les Ormes, to the Lyndon Johnsons, now lives in an apartment less suited to serving regiments.
In Washington the First Lady can always be first on the social scene if she wants to. Not every Presidents wife has wanted to. Eleanor Roosevelt, for one was more interested in social workers than social life. Bess Truman set a good table, but threw humdrum affairs. Mamie Eisenhower tried, but lacked the flair. At a 1959 state dinner for Premier Khrushchev, she had Fred Waring in to entertain. While Waring's Pennsylvanians belted out Dry Bones, a translator mumbled "de words of de Lawd into the ear of a befuddled Nikita: Anklebone connected to de shinbone, shinbone connected to de kneebone . . .
Jackie Kennedy does want to be first, has worked hard to stay there. Both she and Jack have a rare zest for parties, and she has an even rarer knack for making them click. She is a perfectionist who frets over floral settings and menus for even the smallest dinners, but the big ones bring out the best in her. Her extravaganzas are the talk of the Western world--a sunset cruise down the Potomac for 138, a floodlit lawn party at Mount Vernon, a roomtul of Nobel laureates waltzing over the parquet White House floors to the tem po of the Air Force's Strolling Strings.
Since she lost her baby last August, Jackie has done no large-scale entertaining, instead has given small dinners a few times a week. Besides, with an election year coming up, there is a sneaking suspicion in Washington that too much partying might leave some voters with a political hangover.
Other hostesses who cut a broad swath on the New Frontier:
sbMRS ROBERT F. KENNEDY. Bobby and Ethel used to keep a barking sea lion in their pool, but after the beast chased Ethel into a parked car, it was sent ott to a zoo. Now the Attorney General and his wife go in for more formal entertaining. Ethel has refurbished Hickory Hill, seats her guests on period chairs, provides candlelight. Ethel tends to greet her guests with an over-the-shoulder "Hi ya kid," but there have been no dunkings lately, and her parties, attended by diplomats, Cabinet members, and Bobby's Justice Department boys, are fun.
sbMRS DOUGLAS DILLON. Aside from her husband's investment banking fortune, Phyllis Dillon boasts several advantages. She had a four-year taste of official entertaining when Douglas was Ambassador to France. Since her husband is a registered Republican as well as Treasury Secretary for a Democratic President, her range of guests is often broader than is the case with more partisan hostesses. And Dillon, who owns a fine French vineyard, has a wine cellar that ranks with Herve Alphand's.
sbLADY ORMSBY GORE. Invitations bearing the lion-and-unicorn crest have long been coveted in official Washington, and Sylvia ("Cissie") Ormsby Gore can have anybody she wants to dinner. In tact, she could probably have everybody, for the massive British embassy is among the world's largest and gets one ot the fattest entertainment-and-housekeeping allowances anywhere ($94,680). Sir David knows the President from the days when Joseph Kennedy was Ambassador to London, sails with him on the Honey Fitz and is friendly with most of the Administration's other key people. Cissie prefers having twelve for dinner "conversationally a good number," but fed 600 at a ball last spring. She is not the field general that Nicole Alphanc is during a party, and a friend says that "she never seems to be quite sure the wine will appear." But her unaffected ways are part of her charm.
sbSRA FERNANDO BERCKEMEYER. American-born Claribel Berckemeyer, the stately, attractive wife of Peru's ambassador, offers French cuisine, fine wines and lively parties at a palatial embassy set on 25 wooded acres in Chevy Chase. She and Fernando, a wealthy aristocrat who went to Notre Dame but speaks with a British accent, often entertain younger members of the New Frontier--the Bobby Kennedys, the Paul Fays--and the guests sometimes form conga lines or twist.
sbSRA. ANTONIO CARRILLO FLORES. When Diego Rivera painted the beautiful wile of Mexico's ambassador, he left her feet bare to emphasize her ' peasant origins." Her parties, attended by the Lyndon Johnsons, Cabinet-level officials and State Department specialists, display a kind of native vitality--featuring mariachi musicians from Mexico City, a table laid with tortillas, black beans and tangy beef, evenings of guitar playing. Carrillo Flores, a full-blooded Tarascan Indian whose father was the 19th child of illiterate parents, made $100,000 a year as a lawyer-and economist, took something like a $75,000 cut to come to Washington.
sbSRA. SERGIO GUTIERREZ-OLIVOS The wife of Chile's newly arrived ambassador scored well with a novel form of entertainment. She and her husband, a former law school dean, worked up a month-long "Image of Chile" program, lured more than 300 diplomats and officials, including the Bobby Kennedys, the Johnsons, the Arthur Schlesingers Jr., to hear performers like Pianist Claudio Arrau and Felicia Montealegre, Leonard Bernstein's actress wife, who recited Chilean poetry.
sbMME BRAJ KUMAR NEHRU. Hunganan-born Shobha Nehru met her husband, a cousin of Jawaharlal's, when they were students in London, and married him in 1935 over the protests of his Brahman family. She has "Indianized" the embassy, throws parties with a strictly Indian flavor. The food, says one guest, "is sometimes unrecognizable but always delicious."
Spooky Atmosphere. Not all of Washington's best hostesses are the wives of ambassadors or Administration officials. At a wood frame house on Woodley Road and a summer cottage in Maine, Mrs. Walter Lippmann, wife of the pundit, graciously entertains a stream of foreign policy experts--Llewellyn Thompson, Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson and McGeorge Bundy. Another columnist's wife, Mrs. Joseph Alsop, gives small dinners that satisfy even Joe's epicurean palate, has had most top Administration officials (including the President) as guests. Susan Mary Alsop does not talk much at the table, but neither does anyone else once Joe gets going. And while most Congressmen go to far more parties than they give, Mrs. John Sherman Cooper, wife of Kentucky's senior Republican Senator, is known for small, elegant dinners that are perfect down to the demitasse.
"Practicing diplomats," wrote Sir William Hayter, onetime British Ambassador to Moscow and now warden of Oxford's New College, "despise the social arts at their peril." Even so, Washington has its share of those who do little entertaining, or who do it poorly.
Though West German Ambassador Heinrich Knappstein gets $78,500 a year to run his embassy and buy drinks, he is stiff and uneasy at parties, and his wife manages to give the impression that they are an unwelcome interruption in her domestic routine. "They are so nervous, so afraid someone will drop a spoon and upset Herr Foreign Minister that everybody gets nervous," says one official.
With Russia's Anatoly Dobrynin, there are gigantic caviar and cocktail blasts, private dinners for two, and almost nothing in between. "The atmosphere is rather spooky," said a recent lunch guest. "You walk in expecting to see other people, and bang!--you are placed over a bowl of borsch at a table for two in a big room."
Some embassies use the "shotgun technique," mixing up such disparate types as Southern Senators and Justice Department officials. Others save all year for enormous "national day" parties, where nobody can move, much less carry on a worthwhile conversation, and everybody goes away growling. Many of the newer African embassies hold jampacked pours every month or so to repay their social obligations in one easy session.
Colossal Ego. Nicole Alphand would no more play hostess at such a gauche function than brush her teeth with white wine. The second of three children of a middle-class French industrialist, she was raised in Paris, spent two years at an English girls' school, and a year in the conventlike atmosphere of the College d'Hulst in Paris. At 17, she met Man-about-Paris Etienne Bunau-Varilla, son of the French engineer-adventurer who in 1903 signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty that led to the building of the Panama Canal. Three years later, she married him.
Bunau-Varilla, who died two years ago, was 28 years older than Nicole, and a Protestant into the bargain. "All of us thought him too old for her," says her brother Marc Marenda, 49, a Paris advertising man. With a fortune based on the right-wing Paris daily Le Matin, which spouted the Vichy and Nazi lines during World War II, Etienne never worked, instead haunted ski resorts and the Grand Prix auto-racing circuit while Nicole tended the children--Philippe, now 23 and serving in the French air force, and Prisca, 20, who is married to the son of a French wine merchant. They spent the war years in a Normandy chateau, and afterward Etienne resumed his night life with gusto. "I think Nicole realized what a colossal ego he was," says Marc. They were divorced in 1957, the same year that Herve Alphand shed his first wife.
Cackle, Cackle. A onetime boy wonder, Alphand, at 22, became an in-specteur des finances, the youngest in French history. When the Turkish government asked France to send someone to help untangle its finances, Alphand, then only 27, was chosen. Kemal Ataturk was expecting Alphand's father, who had served as French Ambassador to Moscow and Bern. After a few days, he nervously asked Herve, "But where is your father?" So helpful did Herve prove as an adviser that Ataturk soon stopped asking.
In 1930 Herve married Claude Raynaud, a delicate-featured blonde whom he had met when she was singing in amateur Paris musicals. He was interested in the theater then and still excels as a mimic; at parties his imitations range from Khrushchev to a cackling hen. When war came, Herve went to the U.S. as an economic expert for Vichy, but he quit in less than a year to join De Gaulle's Free French in London. Claude stayed behind, supporting herself by singing at such Manhattan boites as the Blue Angel and the Maisonette for as much as $750 a week.
After the war, Herve became a top French troubleshooter at major international conferences. He was named Ambassador to the United Nations in 1955, Ambassador to Washington the following year. In 1957 he and Claude were divorced. "I cannot stand official life," she explained. "I loved Washington, but not the life of an ambassador."
As Nicole recalls it, she had known Herve for a number of years before their respective divorces. "But it was not until we sat vis-`a-vis one night at a narrow dinner table that we really met one another," she says. "It was, how does one say, the moment." They were married a year after the divorces, and Paris tongues wagged furiously.
The Swivel Game. Just one day after their Paris wedding in 1958, dissident French generals seized power in Algeria, precipitating the crisis that led to De Gaulle's return to power. A week later, the Alphands boarded a plane for the U.S. Says she: "I had never flown before; I had never been in the United States before; and I had never been in diplomatic life before. If there had not been someone behind me going up the steps, I would have turned around. I was frightened."
But her husband had been behind her, and she swiftly swallowed her fears. On her third day in Washington, she entertained the John Foster Dul-leses at a sitdown dinner for 20. Within weeks her parties became the most talked about in Washington. She held a Hula-Hoop contest, sponsored a showing of 120 Dior designs. Once she invited 15 ladies over for a "pique nique au boudoir" and had Alexandre of Paris in to do their hair.
Nicole, like Jackie Kennedy, has tried wherever possible to relax the ponderous rules and practices that still turn many official parties into stupefying bores. One such practice is known as the "swivel game": the person on the left is spoken to during soup, the person on the right during fish, and so on clear through dessert.
Perhaps taking a cue from Thomas Jefferson, who put everyone at circular tables, Nicole equipped the embassy's magnificent forest-green dining room with round tables that can seat anywhere from four to 15 guests, thus creating an intimate atmosphere even with 60 people. "Ambiance" she says, "that is the important thing.* The house has to be cozy and look nice with flowers. We put on a little music, low and soft. And we have candlelight. That makes everyone look better--even the men."
Made for Sniffing. Ambiance is what the embassy has, but Nicole spent some anguished hours achieving it. She had just about finished remodeling when, in 1961, a short circuit in an elevator shaft started a three-alarm blaze that sent flames licking 30 ft. above the dormered roof. The Alphands rushed home from a dinner at the Peruvian embassy, dashed inside to save what they could. When Nicole reached up for a valuable Bonnard painting, "I felt my dress slipping away." Having entered the building in a strapless, floor-length evening gown, she emerged 15 minutes later in a trim, grey daytime number. One newspaper headlined its story: MADAME ALPHAND CHANGES ATTIRE FOR THE FIRE.
Nicole finally finished remodeling last June. The building, purchased from Mining Engineer John Hays Hammond in 1936 for $450,000, once was like a dark, heavy-timbered English manor house inside. Now everything has a light, airy look. Flowers are everywhere. In the entrance hall hangs a huge Gobelin tapestry. A Matisse still life in brilliant blue-greens and yellows dominates the Empire Room. There are Porthault linens, Baccarat crystal, Lapar silver, blue and gold Sevres china, phalanxes of bisque Sevres nymphs and cherubs. The crowning touch: six 18th century panels from Le Petit Trianon at Versailles, around which Nicole built the dining room.
The remodeled embassy is Nicole's creation--but the wine cellar is strictly Herve's. In a 20-by-12-ft. bin whose temperature is always kept at 60DEG F., he has a collection of 1,500 bottles. He is strong on reds--Chateau Lafite-Rothschild '54, a rare Chambertin '47, Gorton Clos du Roi '57--but a trifle weak on the whites, though even in that category he boasts an Alsatian Riesling Gran Cru '59. And then there is an Alfred Norton '14 cognac that sends Chef Bell into ecstasies. "It is a sin to drink it," says he. "It is made for sniffing."
"Very Dull." Once, says Nicole, "I could not bear to leave Paris. But now I am never homesick. We go three times a year to France, but sometimes I say to my husband after a month, 'Let us go home now,' and he says, 'Washington, you mean?'--and I do."
At home she rises at 8:30, breakfasts in bed (orange juice, dry toast, tea), glances at the front pages and gives the society columns a more thorough reading. By 9 she is on the intra-embassy phone. "Dinner for 36 on Wednesday," she tells the chef. "Veal would be nice. We are dancing, so it should not be too heavy. Banana souffle? Merveilleux!" She exercises for 25 minutes. "I do the sit-up and the push-up and the deep bend. I do also the deep breathing and try to stand on my head." She neither drinks nor smokes, stays between 127 and 135 Ibs. without dieting. By 11 a.m., bathed, manicured and combed out, she is ready to go. But her workday does not really start until dusk. "Call me before 5," she tells a reporter. "After that, I have to go to work."
In a ten-day period last month, Nicole gave a party for 300 to display Pierre Cardin's fall fashions, flew to San Francisco for a week-long "Festival of France," hurried back for dinner at the White House, had 30 ladies over for a "tryon" of Jean Barthet's fall hats, dined at the British embassy, then went to New York City for some shopping.
Last week, she complained, was "very dull." A dozen or so dinners, receptions and luncheons, and nothing to perk things up except a winning day at the races. On a tip from the owner of France's Misti, Nicole bet $5 on the U.S.'s Mongo in the International at Maryland's Laurel race track, collected $24 when he came home 1 1/2 lengths ahead of the favored Kelso. This week starts in a livelier fashion: in Manhattan she will attend a ball at the Hilton organized by the Kennedys to raise funds to combat mental retardation.
'Errveee! For the Alphands, and most other envoys as well, the change in administration in 1961 meant cultivating a whole new range of contacts. "When Eisenhower left," says Nicole, "it was like being sent to a new post. We had to start all over again." But as a friend of Jackie Kennedy's, she had a head start, soon was spending New Year's at Charles Wrightsman's Palm Beach villa with a slew of New Frontier insiders and sailing up the Potomac aboard the Navy yacht Sequoia with Bobby and Ethel and a bouncing group of friends. Says one Administration official: "She knows exactly where the power lies."
So does Herve, and one Washington hostess claims she can tell precisely where a lady stands with the clan just by the way he greets her. "If he kisses you on both cheeks," said she, "consider yourself in. If he kisses you on one cheek, you haven't been around lately. If he shakes your hand, you are out."
Occasionally all that New Frontier vigah is a strain on Herve, a conscientious nonexerciser whose only outdoor sport is a lackadaisical game of croquet. At a recent black-tie party, the vigorous wife of one official rushed up to him, ripped open his shirt and squealed, " 'Errveee, I thought everybody nice wore undershirts!" Herve managed a weak grin, slunk off to a corner to button up.
Tail Gates Up. Charles de Gaulle's icy attitude toward the Anglo-Saxons, his insistence on creating a nuclear force de dissuasion and his all-round obstructionism have made the Alphands' job more difficult. But during the autobahn crisis in Germany earlier this month, le grand Charles was momentarily forgotten as Herve conferred with Ormsby Gore and U.S. officials to hammer out a joint response to the Soviet blockade. "There we are together again," enthused Nicole while discussing the situation with a State Department man. "And we French, we nevair lower our tail gates."
In spite of De Gaulle, the Alphands still have one of the busiest numbers on the party line. They are as sought after as ever for the best parties. At the drop of an engraved invitation, Nicole still can draw what one official calls "the whole damned decision-making apparatus of the Government" to her table. One admiring Frenchman describes her as "our secret weapon." And if good food and wine and conversation count for anything in the realm of politics, she is a one-woman force de persuasion.
*Ambiance, as Nicole Alphand uses it, is the total atmosphere of a place, achieved by arranging everything around a central motif.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.