Night Life in D. C. Moves From Formal to Functional

One hundred Washington luminaries clad in tuxedos and shimmering evening gowns finished their supper. A marble-top table was cleared of flowers and candelabras, making room for the singing belly dancer.

The ambassador leaped up to join her, doffing his tie, unbuttoning his shirt to the waist, and soon he was leading a conga line of the nation’s elite through the embassy halls.

The scene took place about 15 years ago in the glory days of “dancing diplomat” Ardeshir Zahedi, the caviar-slinging Iranian ambassador to Washington.

Decline of a Decade

Decades of glamorous and competitive party-giving in Washington--where one wore the label hostess with pride--seemed to climax like a fireworks finale with the bashes thrown by Zahedi, who thought nothing of pinching the breast of a female journalist at one of his barbecues, saying, “Yum, yum!”

It had been an impressive run: Perle Mesta dueling Gwenn Cafritz in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, Marjorie Merriweather Post, Alice Longworth and Zahedi. But for a multitude of reasons, the art of glamorous, imaginative, enjoyable party-giving has been on the wane in Washington, tumbling in a steady decline for more than 10 years.

Parties are less formal, more functional and bigger--obese, in fact. Post-Watergate changes in campaign laws, limiting individual contributions, have made political fund-raisers as prolific as they are bland.

The Reagan Administration’s tilt toward greater private sector participation throughout society means that Washingtonians are increasingly receiving elaborately scripted party invitations from the Ford Motor Co., Philip Morris Tobacco Co., Stuart Pharmaceuticals or some other behemoth corporate concern out to improve its image by funding an art exhibit, a movie premiere, a press conference or a social event.

More Corporate Funding

J. Carter Brown, an A-list guest who is director of the National Gallery of Art, said that more and more social events are taking place at the gallery, funded by corporate sponsors.

“That is only because Congress has asked us to rely more and more upon the corporate sector for funding of exhibitions,” Brown said.

Author parties thrown by publishers to promote Washington books are also multiplying at a surprising rate.

World economic problems have brought cuts (or, perhaps sanity) to embassy entertainment budgets. A reception for 400, thrown possibly with some corporate sponsorship, is now much more common than a small, formal dinner party, a luxury indulged in by only a very few embassies.

Washington’s growing population has also found other places to go than to an embassy or private party. Washington has drastically expanded its menu of night life, adding theater and good restaurants to what had once been a rather small, culturally retarded town forever dwarfed by the unnamed city to the North, saved from terminal boredom only by the likes of Zahedi. (Since the fall of the Shah, Zahedi has been in exile and is now living outside Geneva, Switzerland.)

Even the runaway expansion of the congressional workload has been blamed, as party-givers have grown tired of having prominent congressmen and senators show up to dinner late or not at all as some floor debate drones on to the midnight hour.

Women Went to Work

But perhaps the death blow to wonderful Washington parties was finally leveled by the women’s movement, which hoisted even rich wives and widows out of the kitchen and into the workplace. Some of Washington’s loveliest, most intimate, formal dinners were planned by Mesta, Cafritz, Post, Longworth and their imitators, stay-at-home wives who made careers of party-giving.

Now only a precious few, such as Washington Post Chairman Katharine Graham, throw the kind of intimate dinner parties that everyone from President Reagan on down wouldn’t think of missing. Even these parties must reek of serious purpose, gathering poobahs of the moment or raising money for some worthy cause.

There are a few scattered Washington parties that have a certain charm. Dinners given by Lois Herrington, wife of the energy secretary, have been known to collapse happily into poker games. But there are no more star hostesses, devoting full attention to it.

“No one wants to be known as a hostess any more. There’s a stigma attached to it. It says you’re worthless, not a person,” long-time Washington journalist and social scene observer Sandra McElwaine said. “In the Perle Mesta days, there was a great cachet attached to it. Now you don’t want people to think that all you do is spend time at the hairdresser and arrange flowers.”

Joan Braden was working for the State Department and throwing parties along with her husband, columnist Tom Braden, in the 1970s.

Hated ‘Hostess’ Title

“I was working when I had that horrible title of Washington hostess and I hated it, because it didn’t make any difference how important a job I had,” said Braden, who has travelled in Washington’s inner social circles since she moved here in 1968.

“But I was certainly in the minority. Women didn’t work then. Now they do. People miss these parties now. This has been discussed among friends of mine at the very few parties given.”

One of the most highly regarded party-givers in town, Countess Ulla Wachtmeister, wife of the Swedish ambassador, said that embassy social events “are more serious now, more business. Ten or 15 years ago, there were lots of splashy parties and dances.”

Wachtmeister is famous for growing grass centerpieces on long trays with a 25-cent pack of seeds. She likes her parties to be colorful but not overly lavish, and to have a purpose.

“We want our parties to be functional and useful, not just a party,” she said.

That view was echoed by another prominent embassy hostess, Sondra Gotlieb, wife of the Canadian ambassador.

A Purpose to Parties

“When I hear about these glamorous embassy parties that happened before, I wonder about that,” Gotlieb said. “With embassies, it’s more and more an extension of work. When you ask people over, you want them to have a good time, but it’s always for some purpose, to gather information.”

One small dinner party held in recent months at the Canadian Embassy found Senate Iran-Contra committee chief counsel Arthur L. Liman dining with Reagan biography author Edmund Morris, New Yorker correspondent Elizabeth Drew, House Majority Leader Tom Foley (D-Wash.), House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wis.) and arms control negotiator Paul Nitze, the sort of powerful mix Gotlieb finds useful.

“This is a town of such diverse power, you don’t know where the decisions are being made,” Gotlieb said. “You have to diversify a lot--the Congress, the press, the Administration. People who are really interested in purely social entertaining get kind of left out, which is too bad.”

Embassies have also been drawn into charity and cultural events in a big way. The Gotliebs have had a party to benefit the Sasha Bruce Youth Work program for troubled children; the Wachtmeisters have helped out by hosting events for a hospice in Arizona and the Italian embassy, in just the last two months, has had a party for the National Rehabilitation Center and a reception for 200 people who were in town attending an international horse show.

“It generates an atmosphere of good will and gives me an opportunity to meet more people, extend my connections within American society, which is one of the reasons why I’m here,” Italian ambassador Rinaldo Petrignani said.

Down to 10 a Month

Bob Gray, one of Washington’s top public-relations and lobbying executives, remembers when he used to attend two or three embassy parties a night. Now he goes to about 10 a month, he said.

“Watergate cast a pall over things,” said Gray, a key figure in the 1980 Reagan campaign. “And then in the Carter years, Carter passed on the word that if you have time for social events you’re not spending enough time on your job.

“In the old days, you never talked business at a party. From 1977 to 1987, it has gone totally the other way around with embassies using their social entertaining to serve their national agenda. Really, from the time when Jacqueline Kennedy broke the White House dining room into tables of 10, embassies have done the same thing, and there has been a casualness to it.”

Gray also remembered that “10 or 15 years ago, you didn’t have corporate America in Washington. Not so today.”

Another big change he’s noticed in the social scene is the rise in social standing of journalists, a community that has multiplied to some 10,000 members. It used to be that only a few famous columnists were invited to top social affairs. Now all parties are littered with scads of journalists, and some prominent media figures such as Graham, Leslie Stahl and George Will, host parties that are as good as any currently taking place in town.

“There are more press people by far,” Gray said. “Finally foreign governments have realized we have a free government and a free press and they need to make use of both.” The American government is starting to realize this too.

Change for the Better

While many people say they miss the old days and the stimulating parties, others think the change is all for the better. Gray recalled the on-going efforts of Mesta and Cafritz to outdo one another, and how, when Mesta returned from an extended stay in Europe, a reporter asked Cafritz if she would be inviting Mesta to her home.

“She said, ‘I doubt that. We run with a younger group,’ ” Gray recalled. The reporter then went to Mesta with the same question, and Mesta replied, “I doubt we’ll be having anything that large.”

Said Gray: “That nonsense is happily past.”